[ad_1] In baseball’s Age of Collaboration, the hot seat for managers should be viewed more as an oversized sofa, with front-office executives and statistical analysts all squeezing in. Firing the manager when others bear responsibility for shaping rosters and influencing decisions often amounts to blatant scapegoating. Perhaps that is one reason early dismissals are becoming…
[ad_1] I actually have the NL Manager of the Year ballot this year, an award on which I think I’ve only voted once previously in my 15ish years in the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), and certainly my least favorite one to vote on, because I don’t think there’s a good way to evaluate…
[ad_1] In the story Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara initially told to ESPN, the two men logged into Ohtani’s bank account together on eight or nine occasions in 2023 and wired increments of $500,000 to Mathew Bowyer, an alleged illegal bookmaker under federal investigation. In the story Ohtani told the public days after Mizuhara recanted his…
[ad_1] The Athletic’s MLB offseason grades 1.0. By Tim Britton, Grant Brisbee and Aaron Gleeman According to a report by an economics professor at Yale University, roughly 80 percent of all grades handed out to undergraduate students last year were As. Too bad for major-league executives, then, that they don’t attend Yale (at least not anymore, in several…
[ad_1] TEMPE, Ariz. — Every morning for the past six years, no matter how early Angels players and staff got to Tempe Diablo Stadium, they saw a throng of Japanese media standing on the Tempe Butte mountain overlooking the team’s spring training complex. This wasn’t a recreational sunrise hike. Every camera was zoomed in, waiting…
[ad_1] As Jonah Heim squeezed the final strike of the 2023 postseason and Josh Sborz spiked his mitt on the mound to celebrate the Texas Rangers’ first World Series title, a thought crossed my mind: How will this change the franchise rankings? See, the Wild-Card Era (1995 to present) franchise rankings are not a creation…
[ad_1] As the February sunshine beams down on all of baseball, and the standings say that everyone is undefeated, it’s easy to melt into a zen state of spring training nirvana. But there’s one question in our annual spring survey that jolts us back to life. That’s the part where we ask our voters —…
[ad_1] Welcome to this year’s ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball. I’ve been compiling and writing such rankings for 17 years now, and those of you who’ve read them before will find the format here similar to those from the recent past. My farm reports covering at least 20 prospects in each team’s…
[ad_1] Allegiant Stadium can host up to 72,000 fans for special events like Super Bowl LVIII. If every player in the history of Major League Baseball got a ticket, there would still be almost 50,000 available for Sunday’s game in Las Vegas. Pat Mahomes, whose son Patrick is the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs,…
[ad_1] COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — There were Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer. This was their first Hall of Fame election. They won’t need a second. On Tuesday, they became baseball’s newest first-ballot Hall of Famers. And that stamps them as baseball royalty, connected forever to this special stamp of greatness. Beltré reeled in 95.1 percent of…
