It’s Hall of Fame consideration season. For the rest of the calendar year, Connections will be looking at some of the names on the 2025 ballot. It’s July 21, 2004, and the Indians are hosting Mark Buehrle and the White Sox. Through six-and-a-half innings, Chicago has erupted […]
When he was all done menacing pitchers, Ty Cobb was the all-time leader in hits and runs, total bases, extra-base hits and times on base. A few years later, he would even get to claim pole position among the inaugural Hall of Fame class, with his 98.2% of the […]
In 1927, Lou Gehrig produced an 11.4 oWAR (this is bWAR, with the defensive element removed). This explosive display is the showcase of all showcases for first basemen, the unsurpassed mark for the position. And thus, Gehrig gets us started on a fun offensive dream team, one made up by […]
Following this opening, there’s a little more than a thousand words devoted to connecting the three AL MVP finalists from 2024 to the past. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig are going to be referenced, as will Honus Wagner and Rogers Hornsby. Ted Williams and Stan Musial are brought up, as […]
For his efforts during the 1999 season, Pedro Martínez was the unanimous winner of the AL Cy Young Award. “Efforts” is probably the most mundane, vanilla, blah descriptive ever for the right-hander’s season, for it was a supernova display, a realization of a magician and genius at the height of […]
Thanks to a pair of Triple Crown winners, the 2024 Cy Young Award races appear to hold little drama for the unveiling. Since the award has been bestowed on an ace or aces of the season (1956), a Triple Crown winner has now emerged to tilt the balance 16 times. […]
Rookies can be like Spring Training: opportunities for optimism and rosy considerations of what could be, magnets for raising ceilings rather than lowering floors. A rookie who is in his very first season and who is notably young can magnify this hope, personifying a launchpad for imagined awe and splendor. […]
This century, 89 rookies have splashed onto the scene with at least 50 extra-base hits. From the start, Orioles newcomers were conspicuously absent from the assemblage, failing to post a representative until Trey Mancini delivered 54 in 2017. This decade, Baltimore’s beginners have been more of a wave rather than […]
On October 27, 1991, before more than 55,000 fans in the Metrodome and another 50-plus million enthralled by their televisions, Jack Morris accomplished the unprecedented: an extra-inning shutout in a winner-take-all World Series game. As difficult as it would have been to predict such an exceptional and striking showcase, it’s […]
Of all the postseason home runs that have punctured a tense October (or November) air, 232 of them have resounded within a winner-take-all scenario. Across those singular swings and flights during the tension of a win-or-go-home affair, only two have ever occurred as late as the eighth inning and stunningly […]