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April 16, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
April 15, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
I saw very little baseball over the weekend, taking off early Friday with my wife to celebrate our sixth wedding anniversary. Even though it was only a few days, I feel like I missed a lot. I guess that's one of the great things about baseball: so much happens every single day.
by Joe Sheehan
April 12, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
The Yankees and Red Sox play a four-game wraparound series this weekend, ending with the traditional 11 a.m. start on Patriot's Day. The teams are nominally the contenders in the American League East, but as Chris Kahrl put it a few weeks ago, the AL East is really the Yankees, and the two pairs behind them: the Sox and Blue Jays, and the the Orioles and Devil Rays.
by Joe Sheehan
April 11, 2002
by Derek Zumsteg
There's a new meta-argument I've been seeing a lot in my e-mail lately: if all franchises were run by Billy Beane, or those of his ilk, wouldn't market inequities resurface and make success solely about revenue? The case is made with a resigned air, almost to suggest that maybe it's best if we give up pushing the idea that smart, low-revenue franchises can hold their cards close and still compete with mega-funded teams like the Dodgers. If you look at what the future of enlightened baseball might hold, though, you'll see it's a pretty cool place.
by Derek Zumsteg
April 10, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
There are a couple of stretches during the year when doing this column can be a bit difficult. One of them is right now. We're about ten days into the season, which is too late to be making any predictions about how things are going to go--although I do wish Dave Pease hadn't nixed my line about Eli Marrero's shot to hit .400--and too early to draw conclusions about what we've seen so far. Oh, we can throw some numbers out, and I stand by what I said the other day about the strike zone, but for the most part, the first couple weeks of the season are about watching and waiting.
by Joe Sheehan
April 9, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
One of the points we've been pounding for years is the concept of sunk costs. In baseball, it refers to the amount of a guaranteed contract yet to be paid. The money is committed, and must be paid to a player regardless of whether he's playing or not.
by Joe Sheehan
April 8, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
Take this with a grain of salt, but it certainly appears to me that the changes to the strike zone that we saw last year have disappeared. I watched a ridiculous amount of baseball in the first week of the season, and I routinely saw the pitch between the belt and the letters--a strike by rule--called a ball.
by Joe Sheehan
April 4, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
Over the past three seasons, the National League West has been a royal pain to project. The teams with the best individual players have had incomplete lineups and rosters; the teams with the best pitching have had lousy offenses; the teams spending the most money have put on the worst performances.
by Joe Sheehan
April 3, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
I don't mean to defend the actions of certain fans, which went well past the rules of decorum, but the emotion displayed by those people struck me as a large one-finger salute to those who want to say that the Montreal Expos can be eliminated and no one will care. Many people will care; perhaps not enough to make this destroyed franchise viable again, but certainly enough to make the point that the Expos didn't die: they were killed by an ownership group content to collect welfare rather than compete.
by Joe Sheehan
April 1, 2002
by Derek Zumsteg
My recent articles about competitive balance generated a ton of e-mail in which many people made reasoned, passionate, and most of all intelligent arguments about why competitive balance is so important to them as fans of baseball.
I've been convinced. Baseball is entertainment, and what's more entertaining than parity?
So I solicited the other authors and with their help (particularly Keith Woolner's), I've assembled this list of sweeping reforms that will guarantee the competitive balance I think we all can agree would be best for the game. Now, some of them run into each other a little, but we're putting these out in the hopes that they'll generate new ideas and elevate the level of discussion.
by Derek Zumsteg
March 31, 2002
by Joe Sheehan
The AL kicks off its 102nd season tonight in Anaheim, where the Angels host the Cleveland Indians in a battle of two teams whose seasons will end on September 29. Who will play beyond that point?
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