sabermetrics Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Jayson Werth Has Me Feeling Nostalgic For The Sabermetric Wars
After 15 seasons as a big leaguer, Jayson Werth is out of baseball this year, which has given the 39-year-old an opportunity to pick up a couple of age-appropriate hobbies: reliving past glories in pick-up games, and hating on the newly powerful generation directly behind his. In Werth’s case, his q...

This Quirk Of Baseball Strategy Is Infuriating
A consistently reliable rule of baseball is that the closer your runners are to home plate, the better chance you have of scoring in a given inning. But what if this isn’t always true? Bear with me on this one....

Major League Baseball's Statcast Can Break Sabermetrics
“On a historical basis, a decade from now, we’ll be looking back saying, ‘That was the highest route efficiency that’s ever been captured in baseball.’”...

Blue Jays Assistant Offers The Hottest Advanced Stats Take Of All
Are you seated? Are you prepared to hear the rawest, truest sabermetrics take of all time from Blue Jays scout Steve Springer?...

How Two Online Baseball Writers Won An Indie-League Draft By Finding Talent And Stealing It
The following is excerpted from The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, the wonderful new book in which two sabermetrically-inclined baseball writers—Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus and Ben Lindbergh of ESPN—recount their experience running baseball operations for the Sonoma Stompers, an actual, real-lif...


The Rock-Critic Hive Mind: Data-Mining The "Best Albums of 2014" Lists
Used to be, you could count on just a few Best Albums of the Year lists to slice through the chaos of the previous 12 months. Pick up a December issue of Rolling Stone or SPIN, clip out your local newspaper critic's personal Top 10, and you had a ready-made guide for how to spend the Best Buy gi...

Two Unrecognized Hall Of Fame Shortstops
This article is dedicated to the memory of the late Clem Comly, who did more than anyone to put together the Retrosheet.org public database of baseball statistics that made this article and all Internet baseball encyclopedias possible....

MLB Managers Are Playing Less Small Ball Than Ever
It's well documented we're in an era of dominant pitching, with declines in home runs and batting averages coinciding with the highest strikeout rates in MLB history. But there are also other, less prominent stats gravitating toward record rates that have slipped by most fans. ...

Chart: How Sabermetric MLB Forecasts Stacked Up Against Vegas
From Skidmore College statistics professor Michael Lopez comes the handy chart you see above, plotting the 2014 win totals of all 30 MLB teams against preseason predictions from Vegas and what Lopez calls his "Statsheads Prediction."...

New Baseball Cards Visualize Advanced Stats
The image above comes from a new line of sabermetric-inspired baseball cards. According to SportTechie, the cards are a partnership between Bloomberg Sports and Topps. The cards feature home run spray charts for hitters and strikeout pitch location for pitchers. ...

Hey, You: Help Prove That Average Fans Are The Best Scouts In Baseball
Whether or not you know it, if you're a baseball fan, you probably appreciate or enjoy the game a little bit more because of Tom Tango. The pseudonymous saberist, currently a consultant for the Chicago Cubs, has had a hand—often the most important one—in developing many of the most interesting and u...

What If A Baseball Player Were As Dominant As LeBron?
I'd like to pretend that I'm above paying attention to the LeBron James circus, but like everyone else, I spent a lot of today just sitting around waiting on some revelatory Adrian Wojnarowski tweet, so that a question like What if someone was just as dominant as LeBron James, but he played baseball...

Watch How MLB's Crazy Tracking System Saw Yasiel Puig's Diving Catch
When MLB Advanced Media showed off its new fielding-tracking system at Sloan, it looked pretty great. But now that we're seeing it in action, this is just fantastic. Here are the numbers on Yasiel Puig's diving catch at Citi Field last month. ...

Why A Great General Manager Might Be Worth More Than Mike Trout
Baseball is a strange market, forever correcting itself in strange ways. For a long time, the most obviously central ability for a hitter—getting on base—was overlooked, until suddenly it wasn't, and it occurred to teams that there were probably all sorts of other valuable skills they were neglectin...

This Is The Best Fake Law Firm Name We've Ever Seen
We're obviously fond of Parks & Recreation around here—what with FJM's Ken Tremendous being executive producer and all—and tonight's easter egg of a law office name, undoubtedly the work of our pal who goes by Michael Schur these days, was fantastic....

Kill #killthewin: The Fight Over Stats In Baseball Has Gotten Stupid
Television is the worst. Look at what's happened to the MLB Network's house numbers guy, Brian Kenny, who's spent the season preaching to the choir by beating horses to death right in front of them. It's fucking awful....


Mariners Manager Says Sabermetrics Made Dustin Ackley Suck
The Seattle Mariners optioned once-promising second baseman Dustin Ackley to Triple A yesterday because Ackley has been having a miserable season at the plate. But what's to blame for Ackley's .205 average and .266 on-base percentage? Mariners coach Eric Wedge has a theory, and it has to do with all...