With news yesterday that the Rays have finalized – but not announced – their roster, we know the answer to our winter-long speculation about the 2011 Rays bullpen.  Friday night, Jake McGee will carry a Dora backpack full of candy to the bullpen to share with Andy Sonnanstine, Kyle Farnsworth, Joel Peralta, Adam Russell, Juan  [ Read More ]

In conjunction with ESPN.com’s season previews, my colleagues in The Sweet Spot Network have all posted X-Factors for their respective teams.  Go check them out. Here are the X-Factors for the teams we are going to see the most this summer: New York: It Is About the Money Stupid Boston: Firebrand of the American League  [ Read More ]

When ESPN.com asked me to pick the x-factor for the 2011 Rays, it would have been easy to pick the re-built bullpen, or Johnny Damon’s bat, or Manny Ramirez’s attention span, or the empty lockers of Carl Crawford, Carlos Pena, Matt Garza, Grant Balfour, and Rafael Soriano.  After all, those are the things we have  [ Read More ]

Sweet Spot economics expert Larry (from IIATMS) shot me a quick email this afternoon passing along Forbes Magazine’s recently released team valuations for Major League Baseball.  Larry has written extensively about the Rays and the economic conditions MLB has created that limit the Rays’ ability to succeed.  Go read his stuff at IIATMS, it’s awesome.  [ Read More ]

Yesterday, Joe Maddon announced, to no one’s surprise, that David Price would take the ball in Game 1.  In the grand scheme of things, starting the first game is pretty insignificant.  All five starting pitchers that start the season in the rotation are of equal importance and, through a 162-game season, Game 1 isn’t any  [ Read More ]

As I explained on Monday, I was blessed with an opportunity to review Toby Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim’s book Scorecasting but was incapable of leaving the review to one post.  On Monday, I took a quick look at the Rays’ 2010 attendance numbers that seemed to confirm that the Rays, like most other Major League  [ Read More ]

There were a lot of cool perks that came with my 8 seasons on the Devil Rays’ PR staff.  My favorite, however, was the opportunity to observe Major League players and managers in their native environment. One of my primary duties during many of those 8 seasons was to assist the visiting PR staff (only  [ Read More ]

It has been a while since my last post.  The delay was caused partly by my busy work schedule, partly by the boredom of early spring training baseball, and partly by my desire to finish Toby Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim’s incredible book Scorecasting. I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical when the publisher was  [ Read More ]