Category Archives: Right Off the Bat Website

Predicting the 2013 Baseball Season

The 2013 baseball season, which opens on April Fools’ Day, promises to make a fool of all prognosticators. Nothing new in this. How could one imagine the Fall Classic when spring has barely sprung? To make things even a little … Continue reading

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Mariano Rivera Retires

Number 42 will be retired forever throughout Major League Baseball at the end of this season. It is the uniform number that Jackie Robinson wore: now on but one, with his own legacy. Mariano Rivera, who will be forty-four on … Continue reading

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(Im)probabilities

No one is going to confuse Martin and me with Theo Epstein or Bill James. Truthfully, the term Sabermetrics largely gets nary a nod in Right Off the Bat. Why? It all goes back to “leet” childhood. [“Feed-in”]…I remember practically flunking … Continue reading

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Baseball Meets Smectymnus

As the Hot Stove League season kicks into high gear, with the advent of some old-style winter weather thro much of North America, all coinciding with the Presidential Inauguration and the federal holiday commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I … Continue reading

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News for the Delphic Oracle and the Baseball Writers

We might add another Yeats line to our title: Speech after long silence. There has not been much action in this lackluster Hot-stove League Season—unless you are a follower of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, signers of troubled superstar … Continue reading

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Yankees Say YES to Rupert Murdoch

News Corp. is taking a 49-percent-equity share in the Yankees Entertainment and Sports (YES) Network. To say this is a significant development would be an understatement. It is impossible to know if the Steinbrenner family is in the process of … Continue reading

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Kung Fu Panda Mauls Tigers

Two big pieces of news come out of last night’s Game 1 of the World Series. First, the Giants’s Pablo Sandoval joins immortals Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson, and eventual immortal Albert Pujols, as a member of the three-home-run club … Continue reading

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How Sweet It Is

The Detroit Tigers demolished the New York Yankees to win the American League pennant for the eleventh time in their (the Tigers’s) storied history: the team of Ty Cobb and Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline among many other greats. The … Continue reading

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Tyger! Tyger!

I (Evander) continue this amorphous series of postseason blogs where I left off the other day: Expect the unexpected. As James Joyce might have said, yes, rain is general all over the Midwest. The Detroit Tigers, who lead the New … Continue reading

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Playoffs So Far: It Gets Weirder

This is truly one of the most bizarre postseasons I (Evander) have seen since playoffs-baseball was introduced in the major leagues in 1969. The idea was formulated after the so-called Year of the Pitcher in 1968, when interest due to … Continue reading

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