My first post over at The Hockey Writers, a hockey commentary site, considers what might be in the Predators’ best interest going forward through the rest of the regular season. If the Predators value Lord Stanley over the President they might want to sit goalie Pekka Rinne for much of the final month of regular season hockey.
The full post is available here.
My own Detroit Tigers series for the upcoming season– name to be revealed in due course, but let’s just say I wish Wallside Windows would sponsor it– will be underway at this site soon. In the meantime, I have collaborated with Mark Sands to produce an extensive preview of the 2015 Detroit Tigers for Banished to the Pen, which is available today.
The full post is available here.
One of the marks of a smart baseball writer is the ability to sense a trend, research its existence and nature, place her findings in context, and present her conclusions in a way that meaningfully educates readers. Inherent in this ability is the wherewithal to know when to stop researching a trend or pressing on a concept, realizing that the fruits of the work have been or soon will be exhausted. Sometimes a person who is not a “smart baseball writer” by the foregoing definition will noodle about on an idea for so long, he’ll end up with a small pile of research that no longer has any bearing on any meaningful conclusions.
Two years ago, I decided to investigate a hunch that the Detroit Tigers were having trouble scoring runs late in games. My initial research mostly seemed to support my hypothesis, and a follow-up look appeared to confirm it more strongly. More than merely interesting (and fleetingly self-satisfying), it also was informatively concerning, because it placed the team’s well-known bullpen problems in a more nuanced light: relief-pitching woes alone weren’t the problem, because the lack of late-game scoring was compounding the problem of surrendering leads during the final frames. As strange as it seemed, the Tigers had interrelated shortcomings on both sides of the plate.
One comment I received in the course of sharing those findings stuck with me: I needed to place this information in context. After all, there are plausible reasons to believe that all teams might, perhaps to varying extents, experience decreased run production in the late innings.
And so it was that, two years later, I finally discovered Retrosheet, a site that compiles inning-by-inning scoring data to a more useful degree than the resources I’d utilized back in 2013. What follows are two graphs of the inning-by-inning scoring of sixteen teams for the 2014 season. Continue reading
ESPN Radio’s national morning show, Mike & Mike, turns fifteen on Friday, and the guys were kind enough to send some of their fans a gift basket as a way to say thanks for tuning in. Fifteen years is a long time to hold down a national morning radio talk show, and it’s better to start out broadcasting from a supply closet than to end up in one. I can say this about Mike & Mike: you wouldn’t be reading this website without them. Would I write that if we hadn’t just received six pounds of apparel, signed photographs, flavored popcorn, and enough Notre Dame cookies to make me look like Golic? Sure would. Has our coverage of the Worldwide Leader been tainted by the free copies of ESPN The Magazine that started appearing outside our door a couple years ago? Sure hasn’t. (Judge for yourself.) More than cookies, clean laundry, and magazines, though, all I really want from ESPN is for them to bring back the original Mike & Mike theme song (I’ll mail you a cookie if you can find it online), and maybe be a little kinder to Detroit.
Spring is here, and with it baseball. My latest post at Banished to the Pen previews this afternoon’s spring training game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the University of Tampa Spartans.
The full post is available here.
Actor and cultural icon Leonard Nimoy died at the age of 83 on Friday. So in small celebration of the man and in keeping with our stated mission, let’s devote a few moments to the pitch Nimoy’s Dr. Spock inspired: the Vulcan changeup. … Read More
(via CBS Sports)
Travis Kvapil’s car for this weekend’s Sprint Cup Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway was stolen from outside Team Xtreme’s hotel early Friday morning, police said.
The rest of the story, including some truly enlightening comments from the Morrow Police Department, is available here.
Staff at ALDLAND’s Atlanta office are circulating the below picture of Kvapil’s vehicle, last seen at Daytona International Speedway last week, where Reed Sorenson drove it to a thirty-second-place finish at the Daytona 500.
Welcome to Atlanta, Travis. Next time maybe use the hotel valet service, and whatever you do, don’t blame Winter Storm Tupac.
UPDATE: Kvapil and Team Xtreme have withdrawn from this weekend’s race, promising to return for next week’s race at Las Vegas.
Over the last 10 years or so total offense in the NFL has been on the rise. Most of this increase has come from passing attacks. With this stat firmly in hand, people have pointed to a number of causes. A common example is the NFL’s attempt to increase player safety by penalizing dangerous hits. As a backlash to this, people argue (complain?) that rules like these make it harder and harder to play defense and that the NFL is increasingly becoming a passing league with the offense and, in particular, the quarterback, becoming of increasing importance to a team’s success at the expense of the other half of the game – the defense.
I hereby propose a rule change to give the defense a slight edge in their eternal battle to shut down the likes of Brady, Brees, Rodgers, Manning, and Stafford. Make the end zones farther away. Stretch out those chains a bit. Considering the increases in yardage, and the likelihood of future rule changes limiting the actions of defense, I suggest a 10% increase in field length (total offense has increased by about 10% in yards/game in the last ten years). Let’s change 100 yards for a TD -> 110 yards and 10 yards for a first down -> 11 yards.
Or how about 100 yards -> 109.4 yards and 10 yards -> 10.94 yards?
That’s what would happen if we began to correct a mistake this country has been squatting on since Europeans landed here. Let’s make football fields 100 meters between the endzones and make it 10 meters for a first down.
In the NBA, the apex of individual shooting is a 50-40-90 season — shooting 50 percent from the field, 40 percent on 3-pointers and 90 percent on free throws. Not many people can sustain that kind of accuracy from inside and out. Since the three-point line was adopted for the 1979-80 campaign, just six players (in 10 seasons overall) have hit 50-40-90 on their percentages.
Kyle Korver is doing his best to become the 11th. There are a handful of players within striking distance of 50-40-90, but only Korver, the Atlanta Hawks’ All-Star shooting guard, is on pace to achieve it. Korver is operating on a different plane of existence right now — shooting 51.2 percent from the field, 52.3 percent on 3-pointers and 91.1 percent from the free-throw line. He could have the first-ever 50-50-90 season. … Read More
(via FiveThirtyEight)
No surprise here: Anthony Davis is the Big Man.
ALDLAND 