When the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays renew their hostilities over the weekend, they’ll play the opening games of what will end up being 19 total contests between the two rivals this season. And if the past two years are any indication, those 19 games could determine the fate of the American League […]
Baseball returns this week for what we can all hope is a more normal season after last year’s abbreviated 60-game, expanded-playoffs pandemic campaign. Accordingly, we’ve launched our 2021 MLB forecast model, with win totals and playoff odds that look a little bit more regular than they did going into 2020. As always, we estimate each […]
Up two games to none on the Houston Astros in the American League Championship Series, the Tampa Bay Rays are proving with every contest that they are not to be underestimated. Although the franchise had the sixth-most wins in baseball during the 2010s, it also struggled to make the playoffs — and on the rare […]
When Major League Baseball finally starts its 2020 season on July 23, it will be a very different kind of campaign than any we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Not only will it be much shorter than usual (60 games per team instead of 162) and feature a strange mix of division and interleague matchups, but […]
No sport loves parsing out the “best player” vs. “most valuable” argument in MVP debates more than baseball. Sure, the NBA hasn’t given its MVP to a player on a nonplayoff team since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1976. But the best basketball players exert so much more influence on the game than their baseball counterparts that […]