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We said the Pirates would be interestingGuess who has the second-best record in baseball. No, really, go on. Maybe you watch a ton of baseball and you already know. But if you’ve been distracted by NHL and NBA playoffs, the answer may surprise you. It’s a certain team that a certain charming and handsome writer not so long ago said very w...

Is the Cubs hot start a mirage? Will the Astros remain under .500? Let's examineIt’s about 20 games into the MLB regular season. It’s a small sample size, but no longer so small that we can completely dismiss it. Just like every year, there are some teams that are over-performing and underperforming expectations, but which of these surprising records are actually telling the tr...

The best and worst TV broadcasts in MLB: Your guide to watching other baseballAs hard as MLB tries, baseball remains pretty parochial. That’s mostly due to the daily nature of it. If you’re a fan of a team, you basically spend every day from the beginning of April to the end of September watching your team and then going to bed, or maybe cramming in some sort of worthless soc...

Is there actually a reason to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates?

The Pittsburgh Pirates have been the prime symbol of everything wrong with MLB. They play in perhaps the league’s best ballpark. They have a passionate fanbase that is just screaming for a team worth their time, assuming they haven’t all been chased off (and they may need the Pirates soon given that...

The warm glow of MLB Hot Stove’s warming glow: NL Central

It’s officially the offseason now, as we’ve gotten Scott Boras’s Fozzy Bear-in-the-college-dorm act at the GM Meetings. So let’s keep this record spinning right round and move to the NL Central, which I don’t feel personally about at all....

Baseball is for lovers

The joke used to be that you were supposed to think of baseball to un-horny yourself. When you needed to prolong proceedings to a length of time that wouldn’t be embarrassing or possibly even to one acceptable to both (or more?) parties. Think of every third baseman in the National League in 1991 an...

Imagine having your parents issue a statement about your rape allegation — really imagine it

I rarely think about the parents when a player gets drafted or signed. We always see the tear-filled interviews, or the wild cheering after a first hit, and I genuinely believe that almost all parents are just genuinely filled with pride and joy and happiness when their children reach sport’s bigges...

Oh, wow, a sport obsessed with stats finally realizes numbers are marketable

If you’re reading a post about baseball to start your Thursday morning procrastinating there’s a good chance that at some point in your life you’ve been at a bar with one of those punching bag machines. You know what I’m talking about, it looks like a huge speed bag and you put in a dollar or whatev...