Year: 2009

These are the games that give you nightmares. You are the better team and you lose. The Titans self-destructed. They…

A.J. Price was determined not to have another game like he did the other night in the win against West…

RED SOX NEWS FROM THE WEST Brad Mills, bench coach for the Red Sox grew up in the San Joaquin…

Men’s Hoops Hosts Auburn In SEC Opener Saturday Auburn (10-4) comes in having won seven consecutive games. Can Horn’s boys…

What Theo thinking signing Mark Kotsay? The idea that Kotsay improves this team is completely ridiculous.

I did not mean for the Saturday links to be up so late. I was hoping to have them up…

The Red Sox continue to add depth to their team; today it was the bullpen that got a boost with…

Ok, so Theo couldn’t deliver Mark Teixeria, but he is on top of bringing in the high-ceiling, low-cost players.

Following in the footsteps of John Smoltz, Brad Penny and Rocco Baldelli comes Takashi Saito. The replacement of Eric Gagne (when he could actually pitch) for the L.A. Dodgers, is now the set-up man for Jonathan Papelbon.

Despite what Josh Elliot or Jay Mariotti or even Barack Obama want to tell you, the NCAA season did not…

Is T-Jack a complete failure? Let’s not say so quite yet. I don’t care for the NBA, but the Wire…

Unfortunately, some things never change. Similiar to 2001, those darn Baltimore Ravens ended another potential Tennessee Titans’ Super Bowl trip…

Chris Gomez is a Pirate no more. Yaaaaaaaaaawn. I really like Nicolas’ idea to do a sort of Pirates’ “Futures…

Final Score: Raps 103, Grizz 82 Raps are on a streak! Raps are now winners of 4 of the last…

Current Arkansas secondary coach Lorenzo Ward…rumors are he is Ellis Johnson’s No. 1 choice for this job and has been…

Tony Barnhart at the Journal-Constitution has issued his College football’s Top 25 teams for 2009. This is just as the…

Here are the inactives for today’s Titans-Ravens playoff battle:   TENNESSEE TITANS INACTIVES #8 QB Chris Simms (3rd QB) #17 WR…

It’s game day for the UConn Huskies men’s basketball team and the women’s basketball team. The UConn men are in…

The Biz of Baseball sums up the joint report from MLB and the MLBPA about the results of drug testing…

Looking for a second chance….Mentioned yesterday was the surprise amongst Gamecock nation that Chris Smelley was going to transfer. Well…

USC Pulls Offer From Committed Player USC has withdrawn its scholarship offer to committed defensive back Jonathan Davis (5-9 205)…

Saturday, January 10 English Premier LeagueAston Villa vs. West Bromwich – Setanta Sports, 7:40 a.m.West Ham vs. Newcastle – Fox…

Per MLBTR, 1.5m with incentives for up to $7m if he turns into Okajima circa 2007, with an option for…

Looks like our best player on the team, DeMarcus Ware has won another award, this time its the Butkus Award….

Baseball has forever been a game of statistics and over the past few decades, sabermetrics have taken this passion way beyond batting average and on-base percentage. Growing up, my family always said all you needed to do to be successful was to “build a better mouse-trap,” meaning, if you can find a way to improve on existing information, to make something more efficient, you’ll find success follows. Statistics in baseball are the new mouse-trap; for the most part, the numbers being used haven’t changed for 100 years, they are just being manipulated in a way to provide a better benchmark to evaluate a player’s value and/or worth. The end goal never changes: a better mouse-trap still kills the mouse in the end, and a better statistic still just evaluates a player, but the means or accuracy of doing so makes it special.

The problem with the evolution of statistics in baseball has been the public acceptance of them. I’d be just as willing to bet that Woodrow Wilson and his friends talked about Babe Ruth’s batting average in 1915 as I would bet that Barack Obama won’t discuss the VORP of David Ortiz in 2009. Some statistics resonate through the general public and become part of the casual fan’s conversation, and some don’t. The “stickiness” of a stat depends on how complicated it is to understand, calculate, or relate to something the average fan can appreciate.

The numbers being thrown around by stat heads these days are often hard to grasp. Even an easy concept, such as Batting Average on Ball In Play, can be misunderstood and misused, as I demonstrated during my fourth outfielder series. Okay, so we all agree that batting average is a horrible statistic to base the value of a player on, but what metric can we all agree on that makes sense? Fortunately for us, Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs, has put together an eight part series on Win Values.

NFL.com has a very good article on Philadelphia’s zone blitz scheme. There are two words which define the article: BREAKING…

Minnesota Timberwolves (10-25) vs. Milwaukee Bucks (17-20) So I was all set to do a “Musings of a Wolves Fan”…

In light of the latest rant by Big Blue Shoe, and an utterly asinine question posed to Bill Polian, from…

Ok, I was about to do the megalinks this afternoon, but got called away to my home office where I…

I’m going to keep this week’s power ranks short and sweet, just in time for tomorrow’s games. The Colts elimination…