Almost exactly one year ago, 27-year-old Tarik Skubal opened the Tigers’ season with six innings of three-hit, no-run ball. The 1-0 final in Detroit’s favor was, in a way, the initial abracadabra in what turned out to be a magical, fantastical year for both pitcher and team. Now, Skubal – […]
To anyone equipped with access to Baseball Reference and a healthy combination of curiosity and affection for the numbers, rabbit holes can appear with a time-destroying frequency and head-spinning expansiveness. Recently, one came a-calling in a most – seemingly – benign form: Bernie Williams’ headshot on BR’s homepage. The image […]
When Barry Bonds drew 232 walks in 2004 to annihilate the previous single-season record and set a standard which feels unbreakable, he didn’t exactly erupt from the outset. On Opening Day, he drew one free pass and then in the following contest, collected another (this one of the intentional variety). […]
Since 1901, no Dodgers starting pitcher has accumulated more Opening Day wins than Don Drysdale and his five. The Hall of Fame right-hander owed some of that success to the Cubs, whom he bested in both 1960 and 1963. Drysdale went the distance in both of the victories, with the […]
Naturally and appropriately, Hideo Nomo carries a banner for introducing a “first” to the magic of season openers. The historic event occurred on April 3, 2000, when the right-hander became the first Japanese-born hurler to make an Opening Day start. Nomo allowed three runs over seven innings that Monday in […]
The very first Opening Day home run in the modern era came from an unlikely source: the bat of pitcher Jack Powell. On April 19, 1901, in front of the home crowd in St. Louis, the hurler helped his cause in what was ultimately an 8-7 loss to Chicago (on […]
Today’s guest writer, James Potocki, spent 25 years creating content for Major League Baseball as a cinematographer, editor and producer. If you’ve been a baseball fan over that time, you might have seen some of his work – This Week in Baseball, Prime 9, The World Series Film and the […]
Of the 30 current franchises in MLB’s galaxy, just five can claim a player who produced at least 250 home runs and 250 stolen bases for it: the Astros, Brewers, Cubs, Yankees and Giants (who, unlike the others, have two such well dug-in performers). Before reading further, any appetite to […]
This past season, Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran became the ninth player in AL history to pace that league in both doubles and triples – a feat that had last coronated a campaign in 1970, when Twins outfielder César Tovar did it (the others, going backward: Zoilo Versalles in 1965, […]
Recently, I was skipping through the Major League leaderboards on Baseball Reference, just passing the time while the coffee brewed on the stove, when an enormously cool occurrence jumped off the screen: in 1955, the top 10 in position player bWAR was made up of 10 future Hall of Famers. […]