Perhaps you noticed a douchey-looking gent behind home plate during NLCS Game 7, wearing a bright orange Marlins jersey and Marlins visor worn sideways. If not, you definitely saw him in the same seat tonight, still wearing the Marlins shirt though in a panda hat (that he later changed to a different panda hat).

On May 17, the last time Ozzie Guillén composed a tweet before his 3.5 month hiatus, the Marlins were celebrating a new stadium, a largely new team, a new manager, and new trippy home run celebration sculpture. So it seemed logical that Guillen would quit Twitter to focus on managing the Marlins. At the time, they were …

They are flipping the switch as we speak. Strasburg is 15-6 with a 3.14 ERA, and will finish with those numbers. Strasburg was hit pretty solidly by the Marlins last night (the Nationals lost 9-7 in 10 innings), and today, manager Davey Johnson told the media it would be Strasburg's final start of the season.

According to Baseball Prospectus, which is home to the wonderful Tater Trot Tracker, Marlins third baseman Hanley Ramirez—no stranger to taking his time on the diamond—took one of the longest home run trots in history on July 1st. It took Ramirez 30.3 seconds to make it around the bases, which is only the second…

Dontrelle Willis retired on Monday at the age of 30, bringing to an end one of the most baffling baseball careers of the past decade. The day before, Mark Prior, nursing an oblique strain, threw a bullpen session for the Pawtucket Red Sox. He hadn't pitched in a game since June 21, when he scuffled through an inning of …

The pitchers who wow us these days don't remind us of anything familiar. Most of MLB's sharpest aces—Justin Verlander, Jered Weaver, Roy Halladay, Clayton Kershaw, and C.C. Sabathia—were first-round picks, blessed with a freakish ability to throw much harder than their competitors, and groomed for many years by the…

Reader Adam sent us this photo of him and Hanley Ramirez. They met at a Filene's Basement in Washington, D.C. last year. This is, of course, a perk of being in this line of work. You get to see photos people took with athletes they bumped into at discount department stores a year ago. Awesome.

It dawns on me that we could play a game with two tentpoles of recent Chicago White Sox squads. We'll call the game "Guillen OR Pierzynski." Said the White Sox drink rally beer during games to get themselves going? (Pierzynski.) Went on a profane tirade after the White Sox lost to Bruce fucking Chen? (Guillen.) Got…

The Boston Globe story on the Red Sox's September collapse included a lot of semidamning revelations, among them that starters John Lackey, Josh Beckett, and Jon Lester ate fried chicken and drank beer while playing video games in the clubhouse during Sox games. Quelle dommage! Apparently Terry Francona lost control of …

The prevailing memory I have of the first major league baseball game I ever went to—a Sox game at Fenway in '94 or '95—is that our seats, which were not good seats at all, were in front of Boston's self-proclaimed "ex-wives club." This was exactly what it sounds like: a group of women who had formerly been married to…