Month: September 2018

This is an ode to batting average. In many ways, this might be the most surprising Baseball 100 essay of them all, because I have spent roughly 13.6% of my time on earth bashing batting average as a somewhat preposterous and definitely inferior way to judge a hitter. I stand behind all of it. Don’t…

On Tuesday night in Washington (hat tip to brilliant reader Owen Ranger), the Miami Marlins and Nationals played a game that meant absolutely nothing. The Marlins are abysmal, and few people care (they are the first MLB team in more than a decade to draw fewer than a million). The Nationals are mediocre and utterly…

The whole thing falls apart without Who. Who keeps the infield together. Who makes the whole thing work. Think about this: What could What do without him? I don’t know that I Don’t Know could even stand up straight otherwise. Why do you think Why made the All-Star team? Who? Who. Who wrote “Who’s On…

Sixth installment of “Harry Potter Diet” series. We’re going to take an unscheduled detour in our HP Diet journey, so that I can tell you about the crazy, slightly scary thing that happened to me the other day. There’s no lesson in this, at least not one that I can fully form at the moment….

You could start anywhere in the Dazzy Vance story, and it would be every bit as wonderful, but I want to start with an obscure tale he told in 1955, the year that he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was one of four players elected that year — a group headlined…

There’s a Hilton Smith story that haunts me. Of all the incredible players in the Negro leagues, none fascinates me more than Smith. I tried for a time — with the help of Buck O’Neil — to write a book about him and Satchel Paige. We named our first dog Hilton. Somewhere in my files,…

Joel Sherman is one of the really good baseball guys out there. I readily admit that I disagree with him a lot — and, plainly, he disagrees with me a lot — but it’s fun to disagree with Joel, because I know he’s coming at every argument with passion and energy and honest intentions. He’s…

You probably already know this, but Brilliant Reader Ben Dilday is doing a statistical companion to the Baseball 100. It’s pretty awesome. I’ve been in touch with Ben, and my plan is to start giving him the Baseball 100 entry a couple of days early so that he can do his fun and detailed pieces…

Before we get to our choice — whose place here as 96th-best Major League Baseball player ever will probably thrill you, upset you or (most likely) infuriate you — we have to talk about one of baseball’s most basic concepts: counting. There’s more counting in baseball than there is in any other sport on earth….

Every year on Sept. 11, I’m like every other American. I think about that awful day. I think about the 2,980 people who died, and I think about the countless lives that were shattered, and I think about the ash and the smoke and the falling man. I make sure to take some time to…