Talkin' Baseball

Let’s do some baseball today. But first…

Reminder: If you have a Brilliant Reader question, send it along.

Reminder II: WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL comes out on Sept. 17, and if you preorder from Quail Ridge Books now, I’ll sign it and inscribe it any way you want. I’ll add to this that I think I’m going to take an online class on improving my cursive writing. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I admire great handwriting—our pal Ellen Adair probably has the best handwriting in the continental United States—and I’ve been thinking that it would be great, when I inscribe books, to be able to make it look nice rather than the hostage-note print that I have been going with for the last few years.

In other words, if I do this right, your inscription will not only be any words you want, it will have a new touch of elegance!

Reminder III: Well, technically this is not a reminder, but more of an announcement. I checked my email this morning, and it looks like I’ve been adopted.

No word if my new family will give me access to a company jet, but I’m optimistic.

Young Talent

Let’s begin with some fascinating stuff from Dan Szymborski over at FanGraphs from a couple days ago—he looked at the remarkable young positional talent gathering in Baltimore and wondered if the O’s have a chance to be among the best young teams in baseball history.

Dan looked at the teams with the highest total WAR for position players 26 and younger. If you go all the way back in history, the answer is actually… not all that interesting. The top two teams both played during World War—the 1943 Cardinals and 1942 Red Sox—and as you went on, the list featured a lot of Deadball Era teams, which was a very different game, particularly for young players.

But then he showed the top young teams from 1969 on, and that turned out to be fascinating to me.