Top 5 Hitters of the Past 30 Years

Last month, when Manny Ramirez shamefully made it back into the news, our Already Missing Manny blog post received a bunch of page views. It was mostly a quick tour of humorous photographic moments of Manny being Manny. The post included a rash statement that Manny was one of the Top 5 hitters I've ever seen, which got me thinking, and got me into a whole lot of trouble...

Curse of Theo Epstein?

Maybe the Red Sox are asking for "something real" because they are afraid of selling another team asset and falling into an 86-year title-less abyss.

Larry Lucchino, who is in charge of the negotiations, and was spoken of recently as "one of the most unreasonable people I have ever dealt with...", reportedly is asking for two of the Cubs' best prospects as compensation for Theo Epstein.

The Cubs really just want to give cash in exchange for Theo, speculating around $3-5 million dollars.

Unfortunately, the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankess, and that didn't work out so well.

Quick Look at the Final Four

Just a few weeks ago, it was a widely believed that baseball's Final Four would include the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies and a team the Phillies would defeat. After Chris Carpenter pitched himself into eastern Missouri and southern Illinois folklore last night, the Final Four is quite unexpected: Rangers, Tigers, Brewers, and Cardinals.

Contact and Power in the Postseason

There are four playoff games today, which should be great fun to follow. In anticipation of the excitement, we thought it would be fun to check in on the players in the postseason to see which batters have the lowest strikeout to extra base hit ratio.

Dissecting the raw data from Fangraphs, we find that only four players in this year's postseason average fewer than one strikeout per extra base hit: Adrian Beltre, Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, and Victor Martinez.

Let's Not Blame the Umpire Too Soon

Buster Olney, sent off a tweet a earlier today saying:

"Gerry Davis is the home plate umpire. In his career, Sabathia is 6-0 with a 2.19 ERA when Davis is the home plate ump."

Well, that is interesting and all, but what does it even mean? Sabathia is clearly a very good pitcher, but does a 2.19 ERA with a certain umpire behind the plate tell us anything, when an entire season's worth of ERA can be misleading?

As a quick illustration, using CC Sabathia and another fine, young pitcher, the Ray's Jeremy Hellickson...

MLB Division Series Sunday Recaps

Friends and visitors, let's try something a little different today.