Author Archives: Jeff J. Snider

Infield Flies

I’m going to do something I don’t like to do — I’m going to disagree with two people I really like. Joe Posnanski is one of my favorite writers (and one of the only people in the world I actually believe loves baseball as much as I do). Dale Murphy was one of my favorite… Read More »

Race and literacy

A couple days ago over at HardballTalk, Craig Calcaterra wrote about some controversy surrounding Joe Ricketts, the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs. Ricketts is apparently very anti-Obama and is using his wealth to spearhead some efforts to get a new president elected this fall. One of the tactics his group is… Read More »

Baseball WARs

Quick quiz: name 62 pitchers who were better than Sandy Koufax. What’s that you say? There aren’t 62 pitchers who were better than Sandy Koufax? Okay, then we’re all in agreement that career WAR (Wins Above Replacement) is not necessarily an accurate representation of how good someone was, especially someone who had a relatively short… Read More »

K/BB ratio and its applicability

I was going to tweet a question to Rob Neyer, who happens to be one of the most respected (by me) baseball writers in the world. He clearly loves and is passionate about baseball, which will surprise people who think stats have taken all the fun out of the game, because Rob is also one… Read More »

Hypothetical award scenarios that will never happen, part II

Here’s my other question, and it’s not so much about eligibility as would-you-vote-for-this-guy?-ability. Let’s say a guy has a season that looks something like this: Batting average: .200 On-base percentage: .200 Slugging percentage: .375 Home runs: 35 RBIs: 105 Runs: 35 Doubles: 0 Triples: 0 Singles: 85 So this guy went 120-for-600 with 35 homers… Read More »

Award Voting ruminations

Okay, so let’s say you have a vote in one of this year’s postseason awards. We’ll go with the AL MVP, because there are at least four realistic candidates, maybe more. I haven’t done any research on the candidates and I don’t really care about the American League, so this is purely hypothetical. Let’s say… Read More »

Braun or Kemp

Two disclaimers: 1) I am a huge Dodger fan and Matt Kemp fan. I also happen to believe that, objectively speaking, Matt Kemp is the National League’s Most Valuable Player this year. 2) I also happen to REALLY like Ryan Braun, and I am happy about the Brewers’ great season (other than Nyjer Morgan, who… Read More »

Interesting note on run support and 20 wins

Since the strike in 1994, there have been 54 instances of a pitcher winning 20 games in a season. In 37 of those seasons, the pitcher received more than 5 and less than 7 runs of support per start, on average. Another 13 were between 4.5 and 5. So that leaves us with four other… Read More »

Fighting on the Internet

So I got into a fight on the Internet today. Not really a fight, I guess. A spirited debate, we’ll say. It occurred in the comments of this blog post by Craig Calcaterra, about Nyjer Morgan starting a bench-clearing incident in the 9th inning of last night’s Brewers/Cardinals game. In the course of the debate,… Read More »