Jeff J. Snider's Blog

A couple days ago over at HardballTalk, Craig Calcaterra wrote about some controversy surrounding Joe Ricketts, the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs. Ricketts is apparently very anti-Obama and is using his wealth to spearhead some efforts to get a new president elected this fall. One of the tactics his group is [...]

Quick quiz: name 62 pitchers who were better than Sandy Koufax. What’s that you say? There aren’t 62 pitchers who were better than Sandy Koufax? Okay, then we’re all in agreement that career WAR (Wins Above Replacement) is not necessarily an accurate representation of how good someone was, especially someone who had a relatively short [...]

I was going to tweet a question to Rob Neyer, who happens to be one of the most respected (by me) baseball writers in the world. He clearly loves and is passionate about baseball, which will surprise people who think stats have taken all the fun out of the game, because Rob is also one [...]

Okay, so let’s say you have a vote in one of this year’s postseason awards. We’ll go with the AL MVP, because there are at least four realistic candidates, maybe more. I haven’t done any research on the candidates and I don’t really care about the American League, so this is purely hypothetical. Let’s say [...]

Two disclaimers: 1) I am a huge Dodger fan and Matt Kemp fan. I also happen to believe that, objectively speaking, Matt Kemp is the National League’s Most Valuable Player this year. 2) I also happen to REALLY like Ryan Braun, and I am happy about the Brewers’ great season (other than Nyjer Morgan, who [...]

Since the strike in 1994, there have been 54 instances of a pitcher winning 20 games in a season. In 37 of those seasons, the pitcher received between more than 5 and less than 7 runs of support per start, on average. Another 13 were between 4.5 and 5. So that leaves us with four [...]

So I got into a fight on the Internet today. Not really a fight, I guess. A spirited debate, we’ll say. It occurred in the comments of this blog post by Craig Calcaterra, about Nyjer Morgan starting a bench-clearing incident in the 9th inning of last night’s Brewers/Cardinals game. In the course of the debate, [...]

I’m not gonna lie to you: I love baseball statistics. I find them fascinating and sometimes extremely useful. I think that, in general, well-used statistics paint an accurate picture of history and can be reasonably useful predictors of the future. But in the wrong hands, they can be very dangerous. A few thoughts about the [...]

Yesterday evening, Roy Halladay threw a no-hitter in his first career postseason game. I turned the game on in the sixth inning, and when I saw that the Reds hadn’t scored yet, my first thought was, “I wonder if Halladay has given up any hits.” With Roy Halladay, that’s a logical thing to wonder. It [...]

In this blog entry about how the A’s blew it when they traded Andre Ethier for Milton Bradley, someone named “baseballgirl” says this: In contrast, Andre Ethier has been an absolute stud for the Dodgers the last four years; he is also the walk-off rival of Marco Scutaro, except with the career .294/.364/.495 line instead [...]