The baseball statistic on-base + slugging percentage, or OPS, as it is more commonly called, has come to the forefront in evaluating a hitter’s ability to positively impact an offense. It is not a complex statistic by any means. The official definition is: OPS adds on-base percentage and slugging percentage to get one number that…
The 2019 Major League Baseball postseason will highlight two teams entrenched at the bottom of the yearly payroll rankings. Resources for the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays tend to be scarce in comparison to the juggernauts that perch at the top of the payroll rankings. Baseball does not have a set salary cap, meaning…
Something is different with the baseballs being hit in 2019. Commissioner Rob Manfred has vehemently denied this. Claiming that no changes were made in order to benefit the offensive player. The players say differently. Many pitchers have come out and stated the ball clearly benefits offense. They cite pitches normally “safe” as balls that are…
On June 25th, Stu Sternberg the principal owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, announced the revolutionary idea of a shared team concept with the city of Montreal. The idea is to split home games early in the season in Tampa Bay then later in the season with Montreal. The Rays owner thinks that the volume…
Does modern day infatuation with “pitch counts” really help to prevent arm injuries? The question mentioned above opens up many new questions to ponder. To quickly answer it, I will say that preserving a player’s arm goes much deeper than tracking and monitoring their pitch count. Any casual baseball fan will tell you that if…
Hitting a baseball is not easy. In fact, it is one of the hardest tasks to do in all of sports. In this art, you can fail 70 percent of the time and still be considered a quality hitter. Historically speaking, quite a few of these hitters were built upon pulling the baseball and made…
Continue reading There Will Never be a Dominant Pull Hitter Again
The casual baseball fan has to be let down by the lack of movement during Major League Baseball’s offseason. The hot stove, as it is commonly referred to, was expected to be scorching in 2018-2019. Two of the best players of this generation are free agents entering their prime years. The offseason represented a time…
Based on the eye test, Bryce Harper is a generational talent entering his prime and set to be a free agent at the age of 26. This situation creates a perfect storm for what will be a record breaking pay day for the exuberant star. Whichever team wins the Harper sweepstakes will struggle to justify…
Believe it or not, the 2018 World Series Championship boiled down to the overlooked ability of a lineup to put the baseball in play. The game today is defined by launch angles, sabermetrics and computer baseball but, to reach the games pinnacle, the difference is clear and it is old school. The Boston Red Sox are…
Continue reading Built to Win: Old-Fashioned Baseball Wins Out
Prior to the 2018 season, the organization of the Tampa Bay Rays endured a lot of heat for questionable moves in the construction of their roster. To many around the league it seemed as if the team finally developed a good core of hitters and if the rotation performed slightly above average, then the team…