It was eighteen years ago that baseball officially entered the decade of the ’90s. The A’s were fresh off their third consecutive trip to the World Series (and a Series sweep by the hands of the Reds), and the Yankees had just lost 95 games to finish at the bottom of the cellar. In the […]

Updated: While working on the Gray-Ink Test numbers, I noticed that the Innings Pitched and Games Played leaderboards weren’t quite accurate, and that this caused some of the Black-Ink Test scores to change. The changes can be seen here. The biggest changes can be seen at the top of the list, where a number of […]

Playing around on the internet over this long holiday weekend, I came across a few items that were related to past posts here on wezen-ball. It seemed like a good idea to share these pieces in a “follow-up” manner… On the Pitcher of the ’80s:In the original post, I discussed an article in the 1990 […]

Was Jim Rice truly “feared” in his time? In recent years, it has become very much in vogue to discuss the merits of Jim Rice’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame. Similar to Jack Morris, proponents of Rice’s candidacy cite two key areas as their basis for support: his traditional batting statistics, specifically average, home […]

For people who know me well, there are few things that are more obvious to them about me and my personality than my love for the comic strip Peanuts and my kinship with Charlie Brown himself. I realize that this is a fairly geeky thing to admit to, to say the least, but I’m not […]

It’s pretty hard to believe sometimes, but with the 2009 season upcoming that means that the 1996 season was 13 years ago. Thirteen. To put that into perspective, by the time the 1991 season rolled around – the first season that I remember really well, as it was the year I turned 11 – both […]

Thanks to some great discussion over at Baseball Think Factory, I felt it was important to take at least one more look at my post on Top Talent-Producing Universities. As I said in that post, I was only playing around with the numbers, so I didn’t do much beyond a couple of simple calculations. But […]

Well, it’s a snow day here in Milwaukee – twelve inches of snow in the overnight and early-morning hours will do that – so I didn’t do much this morning except sleep in, watch 30 Rock, and goof off on the computer (there was a new iPod thrown in there too, so that kept me […]

This past weekend marked the anniversary of a major day in Tampa Bay Devil Rays history and, sadly, the world seemed to let it pass without mention. I can’t say why that is exactly, but I can guess that most Rays fans are hoping to focus more on their recent stunning success and less on […]

For someone like me, who grew up with the baseball played in the late-’80s and early-’90s (from Gibson’s home run to the strike-year and on), looking back through preview guides from the 1970s can seem a little foreign. I know the names and strengths of the players listed, but I don’t know them the same […]

A couple of weeks back, the Baseball Writer’s released the official ballot for the 2009 Hall of Fame class. The ballots are never a surprise, because we know that once a player retires he’ll be placed on the ballot five years later. Still, the unveiling of the ballot is news because it marks “Hall of […]

Just a couple of quick notes about the blog here… I’ve added a list of categories on the side so that posts can be found by their topic/category. I’ve also added an area for “Useful Pages”. These are pages that I think might be useful or informative to people, and this makes it much easier […]

In recent years, December brings a few certainties to the baseball world. There’s the intrigue over the wheeling-and-dealing at the Winter Meetings (see: this last week); there’s the debate over the true definition of “valuable”; and, more certain than anything else, there’s the debate over the Hall of Fame merits of Jim Rice and Jack […]

A quick note that I discovered earlier today: As part of their Book Search service, Google is now offering full text searching of certain magazines. They haven’t released a full listing of what magazines are available, but the examples they cite include Popular Science and Ebony. Poking around it myself, I’ve discovered that the full […]

As I’ve said before, one of my favorite reasons for owning and reading these preview guides is reading through the old previews and seeing what contemporary writers had to say about players at the time. Not only can this be entertaining (for a number of reasons), but it can also be quite insightful: it can […]