best of the baseball media 2011

Who is Stronger, A-Rod or Spider-man?

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=13878

A good article about off-field desegregation, posted on CNN of all places:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/14/white.baseball.desegregation/index.html?hpt=Sbin

should probably pick up White's book at some point.

Didn't we have a "use other words"/"baseball cliches" thread?

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=14033

http://images.napster.com/mp3s/3031/resources/320/222/files/320222660.jpg

http://music.napster.com/playlist.htm?id=10031290

(Wouldn't know a Bluetones fan put that together.)

http://meadowparty.com/blog/?p=1759

Interesting -- Quik sold a lot of records in/around Detroit from the beginning. All the West Coast stuff did well.

http://www.talkingchop.com/2011/9/22/2442116/who-says-the-next-moneyball-has-to-be-found-on-the-field#storyjump

Silver on the odds of... that....

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/bill-buckner-strikes-again/

Will's article is pretty much describing what Anthopolis has been doing with the J's. without mentioning him, of course.

well, there's a lot to look at in this piece on plate discipline and the strike zone:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15216

Oooh, scatterplots...I have to teach those every year--Baseball Prospectus, here we come.

Baseball Reference is ending its blog:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/blog/archives/16123

I only paid attention to it the past year or so--I've been using their stats for a while--but I liked Andy's posts. Sometimes, like his recent WPA posts about Pujols and Freese, the comments section was as contentious as it gets here.

If you missed this in the GG awards link... How a Tankee was overlooked! :o

http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/25170/gold-glove-voters-miss-on-brett-gardner

Chris Jaffe systematically ranks the greatest postseason series:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-top-ten-postseason-series-of-all-time/

Interesting that all but one of the top ten are from '75 or later.

May be nostalgic hue, but I remember the 7-game Series in '71/'72/'73 as all being pretty memorable. (I know there was one famously sloppy game in the '73 Series.)

This seems like one of those cases where objective stats are basically used weirdly to evaluate something that's largely subjective.

OTM. If it had been NY vs BOS in the 1997 ALCS (playing exactly the same games) then everyone would remember it, but instead nobody cares because it was CLE vs BAL. And that seems fair -- a CS should be memorable to be considered great, even if it's not always fair which games get remembered and which ones don't.

Wasn't that PHI vs HOU 1980 NLCS considered arguably the best series ever (certainly the best CS ever) until at least 1986 or so? On his list it ranks below the 1985 ALCS, which has probably been forgotten by everyone outside of KC and TOR (i.e. 99.9% of baseball fans).

those were the George Bell Jays, right? I remember that series, at least about as well as anything else that happened in 1985.

It was. But even Jays and Royals fans wouldn't say it was their team's best ever series.

Terrible loss. That series has collapsed into three memories for me (without checking--sometimes I get these things wrong): Sundberg's wind-aided hit in game 7, of course (HR or triple, I can't remember, even though a triple doesn't make sense); Bobby Cox starting Stieb three times in the series, rather than use...Luis Leal was the odd man out, I think; a big game-winning hit by Oliver.

Had to check. Oliver's game-winner was in game 2, a 6-5 Jays win; Sundberg's hit was a triple, not a home run; Stieb had three starts, but Leal may not have even been on the postseason roster--it was Clancy who was passed over for a start. (No second-guess: disagreed at the time.) And now that I've checked, I remember Brett's one monster game.