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 […]
The baseball world hasn’t witnessed a home run race like this since the height of the steroid era. When Mets star Pete Alonso set the National League rookie home run record on Sunday, he joined Mike Trout, Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger in this season’s 40-homer club … in the middle of August. According to […]
If you believe many media stories about the present (and future) of baseball, the sport is doomed. The current crop of young players are ruining the game: They aren’t famous enough, strike out too much and hit too many home runs. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, indeed. This is, of course, mostly just nostalgia-tinted […]
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 […]
Now that the MLB All-Star Game is over — with hometown favorite Shane Bieber winning MVP (despite not even being the most valuable pitcher on his own team) — the baseball world can finally turn its attention toward the stretch run of the season, in games that actually count. 2019 has given us some interesting […]