Tag Archive for ‘bill james’ rss

Yet More Comps for Nick Hundley

I’ve been thinking about Nick Hundley’s future again. It’s becoming a problem for me… thinking about Hundley’s future, not Hundley himself. If you’ve been following along, you know that my pet comps for Hundley are Ron Karkovice, Jason LaRue, and maybe Mike Macfarlane if I’m feeling extra confident. I recently ran more numbers and found [...]

On Local Kids and Calculated Gambles

With the Padres now playing in a part of the country where games are over by the time I get home from the day job, I can’t offer much in the way of meaningful commentary beyond maybe you want to fire up the offense before the seventh inning. Instead, I’ll just make a couple of [...]

Gardenhire’s Cat

As you may have surmised from the title of this blog, I’m a big fan of quirky baseball terminology. With that in mind, I’ve got an idea for a phrase we should start using. Physics has Schrodinger’s cat. Baseball should have Gardenhire’s cat. This term would be used to describe seemingly irrelevant details provided in [...]

Mailbag: On Lineup Construction

We had some good discussion about possible lineups for the 2011 Padres in last week’s open thread. Several suggestions were made regarding specific order, but a few “big picture” comments caught my attention.

Tony Phillips (Almost) Played for the Padres?

As someone once said (or should have said), Twitter is 99% crap and 1% gold. Every now and then, you are rewarded for your patience with a nice shiny bit of information: This date in #Rangers history: (1980) Texas trades 1B Willie Montanez to the #Padres in exchange for 3B Tucker Ashford & RHP Gaylord [...]

Padres Awards Dinner

The Padres held their annual awards dinner Wednesday night at the San Diego Hall of Champions. Thanks to their generosity, I had the pleasure of attending, along with folks from Friarhood, Gaslamp Ball, and RJ’s Fro. Corey Brock offers the facts; I offer impressions as a fan…

What’s a Few Million Dollars Among Friends?

Reader LynchMob points out that according to Forbes, the Padres had the fifth highest operating income in 2009. Well, color me surprised.

I Almost Prayed in Albuquerque: Isotope Stadium’s Cruel Glow

In Summer 2007, I drove from San Diego to Cooperstown for Tony Gwynn’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. This is the final installment of a nine-part series covering the first day of my journey. After weaving a path across the heart and several limbs of Albuquerque, I found the hotel around 9 p.m. [...]

Me, Elsewhere: Tossed in Translation

My latest at Hardball Times revisits an earlier article about a toy introduced by Bill James back in the ’80s that translates a hitter’s line into a pitching line. Why would you do this? Well, because it’s fun. The new article focuses on 2010 performances and features “matched pairs” of hitters and pitchers. Among these [...]

Tuesday Links (7 Dec 10)

You cannot stop links, you can only hope to contain them.