TwitterThe run-up to the trade deadline brings the guys to life. In these two shows, Effectively Wild turns its first corner, of many. Episode 9: Homer and Marge It’s Monday, and Ben is back after… Read more »
Posts by Matthew Trueblood
Amid that wild, wacky flurry of activity that turned over baseball in early and mid-December, the Los Angeles Dodgers remade their infield, swapping out Dee Gordon for Howie Kendrick at second base and trading for… Read more »
I’m always a little bit behind the crowd when it comes to the early pair of annual publications that brighten baseball’s offseason, because I wait and ask for them as Christmas gifts. This year, I… Read more »
I haven’t posted here at Banished to the Pen in, wow, it’s been nearly three weeks. This is a short post about my absence, my return, and the stray thoughts reentering the work flow here has… Read more »
Twenty-seven signifies completion in baseball, and the wild week that began with the Winter Meetings included 27 notable transactions among Major League Baseball’s 30 clubs. That’s a funny little coincidence. It means nothing, especially because the… Read more »
Hot takes on the hurlers with the game’s hottest heaters! Hoorah! Episode 7: Duck The Style: Again, hardly anything. The Substance: Sam’s topic is the A’s, and specifically, the seemingly rebuild-oriented trades they made prior to the… Read more »
The Chicago White Sox have had an active winter so far. It’s hard to say, and much too trivial to bother sussing out, whether they’ve had the most impactful, most interesting or best winter of… Read more »
These two episodes were the first where the show turned particularly newsy. That was, perhaps, inevitable, as they were recorded in the run-up to the 2012 trade deadline. Episode 5: Foghorn The Style: Ben notes… Read more »
If you’re a Los Angeles Dodgers fan—Hell, if you’re a baseball fan, or a sports fan, or even a ceiling fan—the last 24 hours have been bedlam. When Jon Lester agreed to sign with the… Read more »
Welcome back. I’m scrapping the format I used for the first post in this series. You’ll see one of several reasons soon. No big, long introduction needed here. Let’s just recap some baseball talk. Episode… Read more »
After a flurry of rumors Monday night, the Chicago Cubs and Arizona Diamondbacks completed a trade on Tuesday. Catcher Miguel Montero, 31, became a Cub, and Chicago sent minor-league pitchers Jeferson Mejia and Zach Godley… Read more »
In 2008, the Chicago Cubs won their second straight division title. It wasn’t like its predecessor, though. That 2008 title was a matter of course. That Cubs team was dominant. They won 97 games, led… Read more »
“I’m not sure when it began—maybe the picture I saw was the very first—but I saw visual evidence of cement being poured in the Chicago Cubs’ off-season bleacher reconstruction project on Monday. After weeks of striking pictures of the stadium’s long-time horizon line being demolished, and a fair few pictures where nothing seemed to be happening, and nothing was left, Monday was the first concrete reminder that there will be bleachers there again, and soon, at least for me.”
There’s never this much buzz around the MLB Winter Meetings. As much as everyone wants it to, because it sure was nice back when half the winter’s player movement packed itself into three or four… Read more »
“Welcome to EW Rewind. This is going to be a regular feature here. Our intention is to go back through the full catalogue of old episodes of Effectively Wild, and recap them for you. We’ll run through the episode a little bit, highlight any of the show’s meta elements that hit a high note or appear for the first time in a given episode, and (there will be some content here) refresh the topic or topics to some extent.”
An introduction.
“Since Major League Baseball began expanding, in 1961, only one player has hit between 10 and 23 home runs in each of his first nine seasons, according to the Baseball-Reference Play Index. That player, Nick Markakis, agreed to a four-year, $44-million deal with the Atlanta Braves Wednesday. “
“I don’t have an overarching deep-dive in me tonight. A bunch of small moves with very low potential impact happened on Tuesday, driven by the deadline at which teams had to decide whether they would tender contracts to their pre-arbitration and arbitration-eligible players or release them into free agency. Nothing big happened. It would be a disservice for me to write two or three thousand words for you about anything that happened. I’ll just run through the three moves that stood out, offering up the analysis I think each move deserves.”
“Monday was an interesting day in Major League Baseball, with a handful of very small moves and one big one that stood apart. Beyond the actual moves, though, there was an unusual abundance of interesting speculation, tidbits and non-transactions. A couple of those stood out to me, as well, so I’ll quickly run through my thoughts on them here.”
“The Toronto Blue Jays acquired Josh Donaldson from the Oakland Athletics for Brett Lawrie, Sean Nolin, Kendall Graveman and Franklin Barreto Friday, leaving the baseball world a bit baffled. The most common thesis I saw from the pundits, as I scrolled through my Twitter feed late that night, was ‘I don’t get it.'”
Pablo Sandoval signed a five-year, $95-million contract with the Boston Red Sox Monday, making him, in all likelihood, the highest-paid free-agent position player of the winter. He’s a solid player, but given his body type,… Read more »
You’re going to be talking to your brother-in-law about Jon Lester on Thursday. I might be wrong about that, but if you’re reading this, odds are you’re a baseball fan, and if you’re a baseball… Read more »
Note: Beginning sometime early in December, my new home will be banishedtothepen.com. It’s a collective of listeners to Effectively Wild: The Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast, who want to put our own thoughts out there for… Read more »
Note: Beginning sometime early in December, my new home will be banishedtothepen.com. It’s a collective of listeners to Effectively Wild: The Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast, who want to put our own thoughts out there for… Read more »
Note: Beginning sometime early in December, my new home will be banishedtothepen.com. It’s a collective of listeners to Effectively Wild: The Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast, who want to put our own thoughts out there for… Read more »
Francisco Liriano has fanned 24.7 percent of all the batters he has faced since the start of 2012. In none of the three seasons did he strike out fewer than 24 percent, and in none… Read more »
Catchers, second basemen, shortstops and center fielders are hitting better than they have in at least 50 years, relative to the total offensive production in Major League Baseball, according to Baseball-Reference.com and its Play Index…. Read more »
The Atlanta Braves had a .305 team on-base percentage in 2014. They badly needed to find and add some players this winter who would ameliorate that issue, and in particular, they needed left-handed batters, guys… Read more »
Russell Martin agreed a five-year, $82-million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays Monday, putting a neat bow on a very quick foray into free agency for Martin. The runners-up for his services (and, by unsubstantiated… Read more »
Occasionally, MLB teams make moves that not even I feel like analyzing in 1,000-plus words. A few moves over the past several days have caught my eye, but haven’t grown into ideas so grand that I wanted… Read more »
