It warms this writer’s baseball-loving heart to see the MLB standings finally beginning to fill in anew this spring. Yes, that’s with an emphasis on “beginning” — we’re only a week into the season, after all. The temptation is always to overanalyze these super-early results, since it’s all we’ve seen of the fun new rules, […]
As we look ahead to Opening Day on Thursday, plenty of usual suspects lead the World Series odds in our 2023 MLB forecast interactive. But what you can’t see is how much variance there was around each team’s prediction, between the different component forecasts that go into our preseason model. And surprisingly, no contender comes […]
2022 brought baseball fans a handful of gifts, headlined by Aaron Judge’s all-around excellence and Shohei Ohtani continuing to be Shohei Ohtani. But a few months of Albert Pujols’s farewell season were just as historic. Serving as designated hitter for his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals, Pujols put up one of the great old-guy […]
For the past two weeks, the passion of the World Baseball Classic has been on full display. There was the indefatigable cheer squad for Chinese Taipei; Joey Meneses’s epic bat toss after homering for Mexico; Italy pitcher Joe LaSorsa’s ear-splitting paroxysm after getting a clutch out; and dueling Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican street bands in […]
On top of all those strange new rules, there’s another twist to baseball this March: the return of the World Baseball Classic, the always-entertaining tournament that is essentially baseball’s equivalent of the World Cup. (The rules are similar, too, with a 20-team group stage followed by an eight-team knockout round.) Thanks to the pandemic, it […]