This Team Makes Me Drink

As winter approaches, so does another yearly tradition: arguing about who should get voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame now that the ballots are out. The Hall of Fame electorate is entirely comprised of members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). Sadly, some of these voters are clearly very out of touch with the game or use the honor and privilege of having a ballot to make a spectacle of themselves. Consider, for example, the case of noted sabermetric-disbeleiver Murray Chass, who submitted a completely blank ballot in 2017 in part to (literally) to spare ceremony induction attendees the "horrible thought [of making] people sit through 10 speeches in the hot July Cooperstown sun." The man is literally the sports-writer equivalent of somebody who believes the earth is still flat. While I don't have an official ballot, I do write about baseball sometimes- I'd venture to say that I know more about the game than Mr. Chass and I'...

Hey A.J.- are you listening? There's an idea out there for how you can best utilize all of those starting pitching prospects you've been hoarding over the last three years. It might just change the game forever. Well, we'll see about forever. One thing is clear though: teams are now longer bound to the long-held conventional wisdom that has dictated how the game is played. Nowhere is this more evident that in how teams are managing their pitching staffs. The Tampa Bay Rays were at the forefront of the "opener" revolution, which involved starting games with a relief pitcher. The "opener" would simply pitch the first inning, and then hand the ball off to the actual starting pitcher. The logic behind this? Well, in equal parts due to fatigue and batters familiarizing themselves with the pitcher after multiple at-bats against them, pitchers appear to be markedly less effective after they pitch through an opposing team's lineup three times....