Top Play (WPA): Jake Arrieta doesn’t exactly lose his cool with the bases loaded. In fact, coming into play tonight, he’d retired the last 13 batters he’d faced with the bases juiced. And after tonight’s action, you can make it 14. In the top of the seventh inning, with the score still tied at zero and his pitch […]
Category: Articles
Jake Arrieta Is Full of the Ghosts of Poets Past
“Pitchers are obviously not human.”i Mid-century California poet Jack Spicer wrote this, referring more to poets themselves—who he conceived of as catchers, receiving dictation from an otherworldly muse—than to pitchers, in any kind of baseball sense. As a poet of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1950s and ’60s, Spicer developed some idiosyncratic theories about poetry […]
Pedro Strop, Satchel Paige, and Being on Baseball’s Bleeding Edge
Pedro Strop is a really fun player. He’s the only relief pitcher in baseball who runs out walk-off home runs like the third member of The Bushwackers. He reacts to putting a cheeseburger in Jorge Soler’s Chinese food container like it was Chris Rock’s closer from Bring the Pain. And he celebrates a strikeout like […]
Game 49 Recap: Cubs 2 Dodgers 0
The following things are always important to keep in mind when watching MLB baseball on Memorial Day: Whatever the announcers might say, Memorial Day does not mark a milestone at which numbers and the standings begin to mean something. Rany Jazayerli did once find that in-season performance starts to predict future performance at a team level […]
Series Preview: Cubs vs. Dodgers, May 30-June 2
Dear reader, this is where I say “I told you so.” The Los Angeles Dodgers roll into Wrigley Field on Monday with a middling 26-24 record, good for second place in the NL West, but 4 1/2 games behind the Giants. Meanwhile, their starting pitching—behind Clayton Kershaw and the currently-injured Kenta Maeda—has been predictably suspect. […]
Game 48 Recap: Cubs 7 Phillies 2
This game–and this whole series, really–went about as expected, given what we think we know about the Phillies and Cubs. The former were projected to be quite bad, and while they’ve won more than half their games thus far, they’re still bad. The latter were projected to be quite good, and they’ve been very, very […]
Game 47 Recap: Cubs 4 Phillies 1
You know how every so often, some random Twitter meatball will post that Kyle Hendricks is the second coming of Greg Maddux because he gets guys out with a fastball around 90? And we feel compelled to let them know that while Hendricks is very good, rationally that comp makes no sense? You can tell […]
Game 46 Recap: Cubs 6, Phillies 2
The Cubs are back in town again, after a long, trying road trip, and they came away with a soggy victory on Friday. The skies opened up in the first inning of this one, pouring down rain on the Cubs, Phillies, and fans indiscriminately, and a delay looked probable. The wind shifted several times, alternately […]
The Only Direction Ben Zobrist Sees is Up
Is that blistering heat coming from Ben Zobrist’s bat or the imposing collection of candles atop his birthday cake? This week, it’s definitely both. He is officially thirty-five, and in the abbreviated life span of a professional athlete, he has supposedly arrived at the waning. Well beyond his commonly understood peak, Zobrist has just transitioned, in […]
Series Preview: Cubs vs. Phillies, May 27-29
The Phillies have been perhaps one of the National League’s biggest surprises so far in 2016, and while they might be just a testament to the weirdness of baseball (their run differential doesn’t quite line up with their spot in the standings) many Cubs fans are still getting over the last series between these two […]