Walk-off wins are usually remembered for the swing that ended them, a single frozen image, bat connecting with ball, that gets replayed on highlight shows and referenced for years afterward. Thursday night at Wrigley Field produced a walk-off win with no such image at its center. The Cubs beat the Blue Jays without…
There is a particular kind of baseball achievement that used to define entire eras and now shows up so rarely that most fans under forty have never watched one happen in real time. A Triple Crown season, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and RBIs simultaneously, is not just difficult. It requires a…
Individual hot streaks are easy to spot and easy to write about. A player who homers twice in a game or strings together a ten-game tear generates an obvious, self-evident story that requires little digging to notice. League-wide shifts in how the game is being played are a different kind of story entirely, harder…
Earned run average is the number that gets printed in the headline, the one that ends up in the highlight graphic and the one casual fans use to size up how a pitcher’s month went at a glance. It’s also, despite its prominence, not always the number that explains the most about what actually happened on the mound….
Career strikeout milestones tend to arrive quietly for most pitchers, a round number that shows up in a broadcast graphic mid-game without much fanfare beyond the moment itself. For a pitcher of Tarik Skubal’s current standing in the sport, even a routine milestone carries a bit more weight, if only because his…
Franchise home run records tend to belong to sluggers, the players built specifically to hit the ball over the fence as often as possible, often at some real cost to their defensive value or their durability behind the plate. Salvador Perez has spent his career complicating that assumption, catching at an elite…
The All-Star Game occupies a strange place in the baseball calendar. It’s an exhibition in the most literal sense, a game that carries no standings weight and asks its participants to perform for an audience rather than to win at any real cost. That context usually strips some of the analytical value out of what…
