For years, the narrative around the Los Angeles Angels has been this: Mike Trout good, teammates bad. Trout has consistently been the best player in baseball according to wins above replacement — a metric that has always been Trout’s steadfast ally in MVP debates and all-time rankings — but he’s never had the supporting cast […]
Spurned by the consensus top free agent in MLB’s 2020 class — pitcher Gerrit Cole, who signed with the Yankees late Tuesday — the Los Angeles Angels set their sights on the second-best free agent, and with better success. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported late Wednesday that third baseman Anthony Rendon had agreed to terms with […]
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 […]
Graphics by Gus Wezerek The God of WAR does not spend much time thinking about analytics. Outside the cafeteria in the visiting clubhouse in the depths of Cleveland’s Progressive Field, Mike Trout, the best player of baseball’s information age, said he employed little of the data or tech available to him as he passed Ty […]
Welcome to our two-part guide to the 2019 MLB season through the lens of our MLB prediction model. In each division, we’ll outline the key teams in the division race, discuss the incoming players who will make the biggest difference and classify the tanking teams you should ignore on principle. Here is our preview of […]