baseballs Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Why don’t more players bunt against the shift?
This era of Major League Baseball can be defined by a multitude of things: the increased usage of analytics, or perhaps the enormous surge in both home runs and strikeouts. However this era eventually gets defined, one thing is for certain, the bunt is a thing of the past....
I’ve got a problem with Trevor Bauer’s latest Twitter rant
I’ve almost always been a Trevor Bauer defender. I don’t approve of his online harassment of women. No one should. It’s awful. However, I have taken Bauer’s side in other moments of his career. Baseball old-heads bashed him when he threw a gameball over the center field fence in a fit of rage. I was...
Kris Bryant is Kris Bryant again, just in time to be shipped out
If you don’t live on the North Side of Chicago, or carry those emotions, then like most of the baseball world you’ve probably forgotten about Kris Bryant at some point in the last few years. Even a good portion of those who do pass through the Addison Red Line stop had written him off or made him so...
Albert Pujols’ career wasn’t supposed to end like this
Albert Pujols’ lifetime numbers are utterly staggering. He has 667 home runs, that’s more than Willie Mays. 3,253 hits, more than all but 14 players, more than hitting machines like Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn and George Brett. More than some guy named Napoleon Lajoie, who played 120 fucking years ago and...
Can’t anybody here hit in this league?
In the ninth inning at Wrigley Field on Thursday night, Kris Bryant led off with a single against Mets closer Edwin Diaz. After looking at a 99 mph fastball outside for ball one, Rizzo fouled off the next three pitches, falling behind in the count, 1-2....
The Cubs are allergic to hits again
Nine games into a season is generally a stupid time to declare any team has major problems. It’s just about five percent of a season. Barely a pimple on the nose of the body of the season. But if you’re the Chicago Cubs, and you’ve had the last couple of seasons they’ve had, and you’re doing/fucking...
For better or worse, Dustin Pedroia was Boston
There’s an easy-to-reach joke when someone really old dies. “Oh he died years ago, he just fell down yesterday.” That’s basically how it feels with Dustin Pedroia announcing his retirement today. He’s only played nine games in the past three seasons, so his retirement basically announced him. ...
MLB’s day of 'madness' an excellent showcase of 2020 baseball* (*not necessarily a compliment)
When the powers that be dreamed up this expanded playoff system/money hunt for baseball’s season-in-a-can, this was the day they were probably thinking of most. The full March Madness treatment in September, with playoff games from noon until past midnight with no break (hell, even the NCAA Tourname...
Rays Rock Red Sox with Historic Lineup
Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash is pushing all the right buttons this season, as his team is atop the AL East despite having the third-lowest payroll in baseball....
If You Can Hit a Grand Slam, Do It
Last week, The Associated Press ran a feature on Fernando Tatis Jr., the 21-year-old San Diego Padres shortstop who is living up to the hype as baseball’s best prospect....
Baseball Coronavirus Round-Up: Literally Everyone Will Become Infected at This Rate
On Tuesday, four weeks after testing positive for COVID-19, Phillies second baseman Scott Kingery talked to Jim Salisbury of NBC Sports Philadelphia. He wanted to let everyone know to take the virus seriously, that “it can creep up on you and get you pretty bad like it did with me.”...
MLB 'Dream Bracket' Would Be Better If Teams Were Set Up By Country, State. Here's How It Could Work
How About A World Baseball Classic-Style Sim?...
Baseball's Unwritten Rules Are A National Plague Unto Themselves
Since retaliation has always been allowed whenever one of baseball’s unwritten rules are broken, the Houston Astros should be bracing themselves for whatever punishment opposing teams decide to hand out this season....
A Modest Proposal For The World Series Baseballs
With the World Series upon us, and the magic of the Houston Colt .45s vs. the Montreal Expos preparing to unfold before our satanically red-rimmed eyes, we can sit back, forget the rest of the world its slowly advancing state of entropy and decay and ask ourselves the most existential of questions:...
We Are Drowning In Dingers
The home run that made baseball history was pretty workaday, as they go. Sure, it was a big moment in the game, breaking a seventh-inning tie to give the Orioles a 5-2 lead over the Dodgers. But this game didn’t really matter to either team, and Jonathan Villar’s homer—the 6,106th homer hit in MLB t...
How Concrete And Steel Built Baseball
The opening of Yankee Stadium on April 14, 1923, was a triumph for baseball....
Zack Wheeler Demolished The Phillies In A Variety Of Ways
Baseball’s reliance on increasingly advanced stats can be alienating for those who don’t spend a large chunk of their summers deep in FanGraphs databases and Statcast k-holes. But sometimes, all you need is to look at a box score and see one player going buckwild to understand what happened....
Pete Rose Says Baseball Sucks Now
Truly it is a sad day when Pete Rose bitching semi-coherently about juiced baseballs and lost fundamentals represents a pivot towards sanity in the discourse of ornery former ballplayers. Alas....
This Is The Golden Age Of Bad Pitchers Serving Up Home Runs<em></em>
No matter how much MLB and worthy physicists deny it, and no matter how sincere they are, the balls used in major-league games are, it says here, juiced one way or another. It could be that central baseball, worried that declining levels of offense would bore fans, hatched a fiendish conspiracy; it ...
The Cardinals' Hacking Scandal Stands Alone In The History Of Cheating In Baseball
The St. Louis Cardinals hacking scandal—in which then-scouting director Chris Correa used a former colleague’s password to access the Houston Astros’ player database over 50 times in 16 months—is unprecedented in baseball history. This must have made Commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision on how to pun...