The only time a baseball team based in Washington, D.C. won the World Series, the great Senators pitcher Walter Johnson was on the mound. Johnson — who would go on to be part of the first Hall of Fame class — was still effective at age 36, winning 23 games in 1924, and would be […]
On the 161st Street subway platform, and massed in and around Yankee Stadium for Games 3 and 4 of the American League Championship Series, plenty of fans were adorned in Yankee jerseys bearing No. 2, the number of franchise icon Derek Jeter. But there was also a new number emblazoned on many jerseys and T-shirts: […]
Bullpens have eroded the workload of starting pitchers for years. By keeping a close watch on pitch counts and increasingly specializing their pitching staffs, teams have consistently reduced how long starting pitchers work into games. This regular season, bullpens accounted for the greatest share of workload in MLB history: 42.1 percent of innings pitched, up […]
MLB’s 2019 postseason has had more than its share of surprises, from Washington’s amazing comebacks — and the Dodgers’ meltdowns — to St. Louis’s 10-run first inning in a do-or-die game against Atlanta. Even the Tampa Bay Rays extended their plucky season by pushing the Houston Astros to the brink of elimination, before losing Game […]
Gerrit Cole was always supposed to make hitters swing and miss. But there was a time when the No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 draft, with a 100 mph fastball in his arsenal, failed to meet expectations. In his five years with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cole hovered around average in strikeout performance. By FanGraphs’ […]