Steroids, "Other Drugs," and Baseball: a Voice of Scepticism on the Impact of Steroids on Major League Baseball. Eric Walker suggests a "juiced" ball made much more of an effect than PEDs.
posted on Jan 28, 2008 - View this thread

What's the fewest number of pitches pitched in a complete game? How many times has a relieving pitcher been awarded a win without even facing a batter? How many different pitchers has Julio Franco faced? What's the greatest number of hits in a game where all of them are home runs? Who's hit the most grand slams in the ninth or extra innings? These questions and many (many) more at Baseball-reference.com's fantastic Stat of the Day blog.
posted on Aug 2, 2007 - View this thread

The Harvard University Worklife Wizard , created by an international team of journalists, economists, and statisticians, is Barbara Ehrenreich's wet dream. It's also a fantastic resource that has flown pretty much under everyone's radar. The Worklife Survey drives the constantly-revised, constantly-refined Salary Comparison Tool, which is always hungry for more data about employment from around the world. And when they say they want data from everyone, they mean it-- there's even a VIP Salary Checker that pits the wages of the Yankees against those of the Red Sox. (Plus if you take the survey, you can apparently earn a chance to win a trip to South Africa). Personally, I love the Workplace Horror Stories (and there's a competition there too). I can't look at a nail clipper the same way now.
posted on Nov 20, 2006 - View this thread

Baseball nerd fun: Type in which team's at bat, how many outs, which inning, how many on base, and the Win Expectancy Finder will spit out the likelihood the team wins, based on actual game data from the periods 2000-2004, 1991-1998, and 1979-1990.
posted on Oct 26, 2006 - View this thread

In case you forgot here's the lineup for the St. Louis Wolves: 1b:Who; 2b:What; 3b:I Don't Know; ss:I Don't Give a Damn; lf:Why; cf:Because; rf:Yesterday; p:Tomorrrow; c:Today
posted on Apr 3, 2006 - View this thread

(As any Mets geek might say when talking to Mike & the Mad Dog: First time [MeFi] poster, long time reader)
Underestimating the Fog...No, not crochety ol' McNamara's take on the situation in Iraq. Rather, it's an astonishing (if only partial) recanting [.pdf] by the patron saint of statheads, seamheads, and rotogeeks everywhere, Bill James. Like his namesake, James is a radical empiricist, the Jedi master who defined sabermetrics (his coinage) as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Over the past several decades, James' influence has been enormous. After Michael Lewis famously detailed the saber-success of Billy Beane's Oakland A's, Sabermetric-leaning analysts have made their way into the scouting ranks and GM's offices of a growing number of major league ballclubs. From the halls of academia [.pdf] to newspapers and Cable personalities, even the NFL and NBA are on board!
posted on May 27, 2005 - View this thread