I don’t know what’s up with Keith Hernandez lately. I mean he’s always been kind of funny, provides great insights, is definitely entertaining and amusing, and he keeps each Mets broadcast light-hearted and serious all at the same time (when he’s there). The truth is that love him. I was crazy about him as a player, and I’ve felt as though we became buddies, through the magic of TV, when he joined Gary and Ron [...]

Baseball is a game of adjustments. The Mets under Dave Hudgens’ tutelage have adopted a doctrine of selectivity that emphasizes seeing lots of pitches, running up pitch-counts, zoning in on your pitch, and ultimately getting on base one way or another. There has been a lot of discussion on MMO about whether this approach is effective. The consensus, bolstered by a pile of data, seems to be that it is. Teams that take lots of [...]

Last Night’s Quick Scores Savannah (5-4) topped Rome, 8-6 St. Lucie (6-3) dropped to Palm Beach, 4-3 Binghamton (5-4) lost to New Hampshire, 6-1 Las Vegas (5-5) dropped slugfest to Fresno, 11-6 Prospect Pipeline I just learned that we have some exciting phone interviews lined up with T.J. Rivera, Travis d’Arnaud, Cory Mazzoni, Brandon Nimmo and Cam Maron coming up. April will be fun around here as we continue to bring you as much information [...]

Updated by HoJo at 2:15 PM According to Adam Rubin of ESPN New York, if Travis d’Arnaud is promoted at some point this season whenever the team deems him ready it will not affect John Buck’s playing time at all if he is still producing. Terry Collins said that both could possibly start in the same game with Buck potentially playing first base. Buck has never played a Major League game at first base. Now that is what I would call [...]

One of my favorite sci-fi flicks is Star Trek: First Contact. The first 20 minutes are some of the greatest deep-space action sequences I’ve ever seen, but what makes the movie great, of course, is the villainous Borg. The Borg function as a hive, they are profoundly creepy in an elemental way, they make us wonder about ourselves and our deterministic exceptionalist tendencies as a species. Maybe we’re doomed to be swallowed up by some sort [...]

There has long been a debate over the value of On-Base Percentage in baseball. The traditionalists say that On-Base Percentage has its place, but is not one of the main statistics front offices should be using when evaluating players. The fans that embrace advanced stats, however, argue that it is a very effective way of determining how well an offense performs. The popularity of the statistic among fans soared after Bill James and numerous others [...]

I probably wasn’t the only person frustrated last year watching Kirk Nieuwenhuis, or Lucas Duda, or Ike Davis appearing to take fat pitches down the middle of the plate only to see them swing at a breaking pitch in the dirt or a fastball at eye level. On several notable occasions Keith Hernandez himself went off on hitters taking 2-1 fastballs “right down the pike” as he’d say. There was a perception among many fans [...]

Kirk Nieuwenhuis came up last season after CF Andres Torres went down. Billed as an athletic and toolsy outfielder with some promise, Nieuwenhuis hit the ground running raking to the tune of a .325 batting average in March and April. Then came some strike outs, and more strike outs, and then came a whole lot of weak grounders and even more strikeouts, which led to his demotion in July when he batted .105  — deer [...]

Here is a tale of two players… Let’s start off with career averages in some key Categories:   Career Averages per Season G PA RS H BA OBP SLG Player A 108 471 81.3 107.8 0.279 0.401 0.419 Player B 116 537 81.6 144.4 0.290 0.336 0.432 Here is the thing about this comparison. Both are similar type players, Both had a history of hamstring issues causing them to lose playing time during their career [...]

Having explained more precisely what the central GOAL of Moneyball is (Save Money) I thought it might be good to talk about what it actually says it did and why it did what it did from the Statistical Analysis point of view. Moneyball, as was stated previously, used Statistical analysis to find an UNDERVALUED METRIC that was then used to hunt for and create a MASTER LIST of players who exhibited that quality for consideration [...]

I think it is time to talk about what Moneyball ACTUALLY means and to show some of those who claim to have read the book what the book is all about. Apparently, reading doesn’t always lead to UNDERSTANDING. I have read the book, it was interesting to learn about the little known “behind the scenes” process of team building and how a front office operates. It is for THAT reason the book sold so well not because [...]