Boston Sports Insider

We read a blogger once marvelling, "Ichiro's going to get 4,000 hits."  A snarky reply followed instantly in the comments:  "I wasn't aware AAA stats counted" (referring to the Japanese major leagues). Read more

Joe Morgan -- Crown King of MLB (TM) Pride -- opined, before DiceK took the mound against Roy Oswalt, that (1) Oswalt would win, (2) DiceK would start walking people, because intimidated by MLB (TM) hitters, and (3) that the only reason the MLB (TM) guys weren't winning was because it was "a tournament atmosphere" (in which accidents could happen).

Later in the game, after DiceK and Team Japan crushed Oswalt and America, a more subdued Morgan marvelled at DiceK's ability to make great pitches in deep counts, and recommended he stop pitching as though he were "intimidated" by the names he grew Read more

As far as I can tell, Jon Papelbon came into the 8th inning in 11 games in the 2008 season.  The Red Sox' record in those games:  11-0.

That's no big hurkin' deal.  As James once put it, suppose you had a racehorse that was 15-41, but 14-1 when leading Read more

Q.  Can you prove that it's OK to bring Jon in, in the 8th?  Do you know it's safe?

A. No.  I doubt anybody knows.

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Q.  Look, blast it, no matter how you look at it, it's better to be safe than sorry.

A. I think that DiceK should throw only 60 pitches once every two weeks.  Can you prove it's OK for Dice to pitch more than 30 pitches a week?  Well, then, it's better to be safe than sorry, right?

If "better safe than sorry" is a law of baseball gravity, then everybody throws one pitch a year, right?

……… Read more

DiceK's RESULTS, not stats, the last two years:

2008 - 15-12, 4.40

2009 - 18-3, 2.80

After the first year, 2007, longtime readers of D-O-V asked us if we'd lowered our BUY recommendations on DiceK.  They weren't panicking.  Readers had respect for DiceK because of the K's and their understanding of how he works, and all that stuff.  But they wanted to know, after 2008, if DiceK were a bit less of a pitcher Read more

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Fangraphs had an interesting article http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/dice-bb which illustrates, very well, the difference between the varied points of view in baseball cyber-space.  In this paradigm, we simply adjust Matsuzaka's "luck stats" (strand rate, BABIP, HR/F*, etc) so that they are equal to the league average, and boom.  We realize that you can't walk 5 men a game and be a good pitcher, ergo, Matsuzaka isn't a good pit Read more

Here's the video of the June '08 fight between Shields, Crisp, and friends.  :- )

Give Shields credit for *enthusiasm* on that opening right hand, but I doubt that Angelo Dundee is going to give much credit for the overhand, bottom-of-the-knuckles "paw" strike.  LOL.   Doesn't anybody ever think to drop the brow, put the left arm up and throw one really hard at the midsection?  Wouldn't break your pitching hand if you happened to connect, either...  and ESPN would probably put the ensuing nausea-fest on its top 10 plays... Read more

James was asked one time -- now we forget where --

Q: In light of the Red Sox World Series victory this year, I thought it was interesting that you wrote in the 1981 Abstract "the lion's share of championships have been won by teams which play in pitcher's parks." Do you think that still holds true today?

The Founding Father of Sabermetrics quoth:

I think it is true. I think there are special challenges to winning a championship playing in a hitter's park.

If you look at the last few years, I'm not sure. Read more

Bill James called former Red Sox Darrell Evans "absolutely" the most underrated player in all of baseball history, pointing out that he hit almost all of the criteria on the below list.Here's that James list of criteria that cause players to be under- and over-rated, with a few more recent player examples...

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1. Specialists (Omar Vizquel) are overrated; players who do many things well (Randy Winn, Mark McLemore) are underrated.

2. AVG (Sean Casey) is overrated; BB, 2B, etc (Brian Giles) are underrated.

3. Read more

Did you ever count it up?  How many GREAT catchers were associated with GREAT clubs? 

Just off the top of our heads here, just kinda thinking out loud … we remember who the Two Best are in baseball history:

1. Bench … ok, Big Red Machine
2. Berra … what was it, 13 rings?

So the two best C’s are associated Read more