Players

Rolen shoulders the load

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MLB – Yahoo! Sports

In Tout Wars NL Rolen went for $20, which made him either the most underpriced star or the most overpriced hurt guy. No one knows at this point, as this story makes clear, especially Rolen and the Cardinals. That makes Rolen a great pick up if you have bad freezes and may be playing for 2007, but a very risky play in a startup league. It’s tough to drop $20 on a guy, hoping to get $25 out of him, when you might get nothing.

Jason, Not Blanche

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Dubois makes bid with a better bat

He’s not a great baseball player, but he’s lurking out there with a trail of disappointments behind him. For a buck, or on reserve, or as a claim when someone gets hurt, if he gets a shot at some point he’s going to get hot. He seems to suggest in this story that his problem is performance anxiety, and now that he’s failed so miserably he’s going to relax and let his talent loose. Maybe. Call him a sleeper.

An Unsettling Feeling

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Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner – Remembering Kirby Puckett. By Jeremy Derfner

After hearing about Kirby Puckett’s death from a stroke earlier this week, I was struck by how torn I felt. He was a fun ballplayer to watch, but since his retirement we’d learned things about his life that made it hard not to end every praising statement with a great big “but.” Jeremy Derfner was a far bigger fan of Puckett than I ever was, and he doesn’t really nail the problem here, but his description of the 1991 World Series reminded me just how great it was (and how my regular poker game suspended for about an hour while we all sat on our host’s bed and watched transfixed as Jack Morris spun his magic that night) and how big a part of those years Puckett was. Well worth reading, in other words.

The Amazing Fan Graphs

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Baseball Stats, Graphs, Analysis | Fan Graphs

Have a month or two to do nothing but click on links on a website? Visit Fan Graphs. You’ll find stats here, but you’ll also find 70 charts for every player tracking daily and seasonal trends. Most immediately interesting to me were the daily graphs tracking AVG, OBP, SLG, K/9, BB/9, and on and on. Stats are compared to a ML average, so you can visually judge relative improvement or decline. Plus righty/lefty and home/away splits are also graphed. Simply awesome.