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 […]
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. […]
This past season, Royals All-Star Bobby Witt, Jr. – AL batting champ, runner-up in league MVP voting, Silver Slugger, Gold Glover, producer of the second highest extra-base hit tally ever for a shortstop – also enjoyed a flirtation with hitting .400 … at home. The dalliance fell short, leaving the […]
September 19th, 2009 made for a doleful night to those of us whose eyes tend to get all whirligig-y at the sight of numerical outliers. In Atlanta that evening, the incomparable Pedro Martínez was but a meek version of the right-hander who had awed a decade earlier, surrendering three runs […]