Skibby tweeted about looking for baseball nicknames, so I ran a count of the nicknames at Baseball-Reference.com. 286 Leftys! Baseball Nicknames | Infographics

Baseball Reference has a free trial for their Play Index, so I’m giving it a whirl. Who are the worst hitting pitchers of all time? I’ve got no magic criteria, but it’s easy find some guys who were epic fails at the plate. Rob Herbel pitched in 332 games in the 60s and early 70s, [...]

An unscientific survey of Cardinals player apparel observed at the Cardinals game on Thursday August 9th. Most were name & number on a shirt/jersey. Player Fans David Freese 43 Yadier Molina 32 Matt Holliday 30 Albert Pujols 14 Stan Musial 8 Adam Wainwright 6 Chris Carpenter 6 Lance Berkman 6 Carlos Beltran 5 Lou Brock [...]

When a runner tries to advance after the ball gets away from the catcher, and it’s not ruled a Wild Pitch, two things can happen. If the runner advances safely, the catcher is charged with a Passed Ball. If the runner is thrown out it’s simply an out. You might think the second case is [...]

I never realized before that Busch the stadium came before Busch the beer. Here’s the timeline: 1953: The Cardinals are sold to Anheuser-Busch, brewers of Budweiser since 1876. Anheuser-Busch buys Sportsman’s Park from Bill Veeck, who moves the Browns to Baltimore. 1953: NL President Ford Frick denies August Busch’s request to name the stadium after [...]

01. Ernie Harwell’s Tribute 02. Bill Akers 03. Breaking In 04. Cantaloupes 05. 1921 Cleveland Series 06. 20-Win Season… NOT! 07. 1926 World Series Game 7 08. What Really Matters to a Pitcher 09. 300 Years From Now On this 1963 LP, Hall of Famer Waite Hoyt spins yarns during rain delays over his long [...]

The Cardinals’ championship made the papers in Gothenburg Sweden! St. Louis Story Ends with Victory “Left for dead in August. Setback after setback. Now the St. Louis Cardinals are American baseball’s most unlikely winners in living memory.” (Thanks, Anders.)

A caption writer fell asleep during Game Six. This appeared in Friday’s Alton Telegraph. (Thanks, Arnie.)

Finally found some info on MLB’s study of broken bats a few years ago. I would have never guessed that grain direction was a prime factor.

Commish & I were speculating about the amateur draft. How many guys make it to the big leagues? How much more likely is a first-round pick to reach the majors compared to, say, a tenth-round pick? I collected stats from the 2002-2005 June drafts, figuring that almost everyone from the 2005 draft that would ever [...]

How long do starters go, how many relievers, etc. Here’s the simplest measurement, one obtainable from Retrosheet game logs: the average number of pitchers used in one game by one team. The DH is certainly a factor from 1973 on, but it looks like it was falling anyway in the two seasons prior. I wonder [...]

Bud Weiser was from Shamokin. Played 41 games for the Phils in the teens and a couple of seasons with the Triplets in the 20s. The marketing possibilities boggle the mind.

Saw the Mets beat the Braves 3-0 at Tarp Field. [BOX] The former B-Mets did well. Ike Davis hit a 458-foot monster solo shot. Thole had a great, nine-pitch at-bat that culminated in a RBI single. Ruben Tejada went 1-for-three with a walk and made a nice play up the middle to get the last [...]

In Strat-O-Matic, outfielder errors result in the batter reaching second or third. What kind of errors do outfielders really make? I looked at the 2,386 errors made in MLB 2005-2009. (From Retrosheet, natch.) That’s about one every five games. I divided them into the five categories shown in the chart below. Only a quarter involve [...]

Joe West’s recent comments prompted me to look at some data I’ve always been curious about. We all know (or think we know) that games have gotten longer, but exactly how has game duration changed over the years? The Retrosheet Game Logs contain time-of-game data, but the data is very incomplete prior to 1956. (There [...]

I actually scored this one live. The whole damn thing. Got it all on one sheet, though! box score

With Breen and his buds. Box Score

The legend grows…

Post profile on the Cardinal shortstop

Pictures from the Sunday September 5, 2009 game against the Cubs. The exterior around the rotunda is attractive. The rest of the exterior looks like a generic college administration building. The seats in right field were not bad, considering they’re about the worst you can buy. The extra-baseball areas were nice, especially the food court [...]