Here's to the Next 17 Years!

As most of you probably already know, the Pirates clinched their record 17th consecutive losing season on Monday following a 4-2 loss to the Cubs. It seems nothing's gone right for the Pirates since that devastating loss in Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS, and Pittsburgh's season-long fire sale suggests that the streak could hit 20 unless some young Pirates develop quickly and simultaneously in the next couple years.

So how do small-market franchises like the Pirates, Royals, and Nationals compete? Joe Posnanski has some ideas. As always, Joe P's piece is a damned good read, but with apologies to Joe, I think my favorite part of his article this time 'round is actually a link: "How David Beats Goliath" is one of the most enjoyable New Yorker essays I've read in a long while (which is saying something), and it's food for thought for a beleaguered small-budget ball club. And as Justin Bopp's recent BtB post illustrates, a small-market club can get a lot of bang for its bucks if it makes smart (and lucky) investments or manages to exploit inefficiencies in the market (as Sabermetricians have attempted to do since time immemorial).

#17 is all but in the books now, Pittsburgh front office. It's time to do something gutsy and innovative. Hire Bill James. Bat your best hitter second. Scout soft-tossing control artists. Put together a team of banjo-hitting defenders that makes the Mariners outfield look like Little Leaguers trying to shag flies in a 30 mph crosswind. Sign a golden retriever. But don't simply stay the course and doom your fans to 17 more years of "rebuilding."

I Shin-Soo Choo Choo Choose You

That's right, I went there.

Just when non-Zach-Greinke things couldn't get any worse for the Royals...well, you know the rest of that cliché. Shin-Soo Choo won the game for the Indians on Thursday with a walk off single against Royals reliever Kyle "Professor" Farnsworth—and off a particularly well- (or, depending on your perspective, poorly-) placed seagull.

The ridiculous end to Thursday's game prompted a particularly entertaining post from Joe Posnanski (I'm reminded of the mostly-wonderful Royals by Mail).

Choo's seagull shot also puts him in second place on my all-time gullball list, which now reads as follows:

1.) Randy Johnson
2.) Shin-Soo Choo
3.) Randy Johnson
4.) Randy Johnson
5.) Randy Johnson
6.) Randy Johnson
7.) Randy Johnson
8.) Randy Johnson
9.) Randy Johnson
10.) Randy Johnson

Talkin' 'bout Walkin'

Apostrophes!

Joe Posnanski has been writing about the base on balls quite a bit of late, first on his blog, and more recently in a combined effort with Bill James on SI.com. Between the two articles, Posnanski and James make numerous claims, some anecdotal and some statistical, concerning the benefits of the "free pass" (as well as, indirectly, why calling a base on balls a "free pass" is a misnomer), all while correctly assuming that the walk is and always has been underappreciated.

But it's worth noting that, even during the early days of the game, there were proponents of the base on balls. Posnanski and James tell some wonderful stories about players and managers who fall into this category, but their only examples of off-field opinions on the walk are negative: the lack of a BB column on baseball cards back in the day, the ridiculous (for those of us who, like James and Posnanski, dig OBP) caveat issued in the first MLB statistical guide to include walk totals for hitters, and so on. Yet as early as 1917, F.C. Lane, then editor of Baseball Magazine, wrote this article, in which he extolls the benefits of the walk and claims that "ignoring the base on balls puts a decided premium on sheer blind slugging and discourages brainy inside baseball." It was 1917, and Lane was already attempting to quantify the benefits of each method of reaching base and, in doing so, was seeing past a hopelessly incomplete (and frustratingly elevated, then as now) batting average statistic that elided walks entirely. It's a wonderful piece, and is made all the better for its syntactical similarities to a certain late night television host's take on old time baseball.

Joe Posnanski is a Better Baseball Analyst Than Steve Phillips

It amazes me that, with everything Carlos Beltran has accomplished in a major market, he still manages to be underrated. Fortunately, Joe Posnanski is there.