I know, it feels like forever since I posted something here. And I guess a week isn't a short period of time or anything. But, I'm happy to report, it's not like I've been doing nothing in the meantime.

On Sunday, Bill and the Common Man from the always excellent Platoon Advantage joined me for a podcast to discuss this offseason's Hot Stove on the eve of the Winter Meetings. We talked Derek Jeter, Cliff Lee, Adrian Gonzalez, zombies, and a lot more. Go check out the podcast (and be sure to subscribe on iTunes!) or click "Read More" to listen to it here. We had a great time with it.

The other piece keeping me busy recently went up this morning over at The Hardball Times. In light of cranky sportswriter Bill Conlin receiving the Spink Award yesterday (and, effectively, becoming a Hall of Fame writer), I thought it was important to remember that he wasn't always so, shall we say, comfortable. He used to write interesting and inventive pieces for the Philadelphia Daily News, like when he wrote the game story for the game that Mike Schmidt hit his 493rd career home run as if it were a report being filed by a space alien forced to observe the sport from above:

A visitor from another planet, beamed into the giant saucer of Veterans Stadium for a Close Encounter of the Four Base Kind last night, may have returned to his civilization with a report that went something like this:
...
It seems their god of night is Baze-Baal, a deity who could be connected to the Baal worshipped by some of the early Semitic tribes discovered during the Earth-probe in Epoch 12 of the 23rd Millennium.”

That's a real article from 1986! Go check it out and tell me if I'm wrong for even attempting to give Conlin the benefit of the doubt. (Oh, and I'll be writing at least one piece a week over at THT. Look for them every Wednesday morning.)

(Click "Read More" to listen to the podcast.)

I didn't really expect to be talking about the Hall of Fame so much this week, but, after doing this post earlier today, I just couldn't help myself.

As you can see from today's earlier post and last year's Hall of Fame ballot, I tend to think of the Hall of Fame ballot in groups - the no-brainers, the close-calls, the nice guys, and so on. And I doubt I'm alone on this. Ask anyone what he thinks of a few of the eligible players, and you're bound to hear this same sort of categorization in some form.

With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to redraw the Hall of Fame ballot in such a way that allowed the voter to clearly define what category each player falls under. And since these categories hardly, if ever, change from year-to-year, the basic layout of the ballot wouldn't need to change. You can see a glimpse of the ballot below. Click on the image to see the full ballot.

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

Sorry for the big delay in posting, everyone. The Thanksgiving holiday really messes with timelines sometimes - not that I didn't have fun. I'll try to make up for it in the coming weeks.

Whenever the Hall of Fame ballot comes out (like it did last week), the conversation predictably becomes about the top names on the ballot: who are the shoo-ins (Alomar, Larkin), who should  be a shoo-in (Raines, Trammell), who are the borderline cases (Morris, McGriff), who are the underrated/forgotten stars who really deserve the votes but probably aren’t going to get them (Brown, Olerud) and so on.

Rarely does the conversation turn to those at or near the bottom of the ballot. Sure, there’s the occasional mention of “the other guys”, but it’s almost always in the “How cute! The dog thinks he’s people!” kind of way. Which is perfectly understandable, of course - we are talking about electing members to the National Baseball Hall of Fame after all.

But it always seems unfair to me to completely dismiss the bottom of the ballot out-of-hand. True, these guys may not be Hall of Famers, but many of them had nice, long careers or had big peaks before injury or age or any of a million other circumstances took it all away. There’s a good chance that these bottom-of-the-ballot guys were someone’s favorite player at some point in time.

Last year, the bottom-of-the-ballot featured the likes of Robin Ventura, Eric Karros, Pat Hentgen, David Segui, Ray Lankford, Ellis Burks, Kevin Appier, Michael Jackson, Shane Reynolds, and Todd Zeile. A few of those guys (like Lankford, Ventura, Appier) definitely deserved a few more votes than they got, but, overall, it’s a pretty representative list. None of those players deserve the dismissive hand-wave towards their career that we tend to give the bottom of the ballot.

This year, the bottom of the ballot looks to be fairly similar. A few of the names, though, jump out at me - for personal reasons - more than others. Here they are, along with arguably their single best performance in a game.

Raul Mondesi - April 5, 1999 - 1.055 WPA
I've mentioned this before, but Mondesi is the author of the single best moment I ever witnessed at a ballgame: a two-out, ninth-inning, game-tying home run followed immediately by the game-winning, eleventh-inning home run on Opening Day in Dodger Stadium in a game started by the two huge free-agent acquisitions of the winter, Randy Johnson and Kevin Brown. There's no way I won't be retelling that story for the rest of my life. Mondesi may not be a Hall of Famer, but that moment reminds me he wasn't exactly peanuts either.

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

Just wanted to take a quick moment here to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. I was hoping to have a nice little post before the holiday got here, but my travel plans (that find me out here in Massachusetts for a full week) got in the way. I'll try to get something done over the weekend.

But to everyone out there, have a great holiday. Enjoy your turkey, your football, your family and everything else that makes the day/weekend special to you. No matter what, we all have a lot to be thankful for and it's wonderful to be reminded of it every now and then.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

It's been a few weeks since the last MLB Predictions contest update - the last update was right after the Giants beat the Phillies in the LCS - and quite a few things have happened since then. Let's take a look at what's happened - and how someone managed to win it all already! As always, here are the details about the contest.

To see the leaderboard and everybody's full predictions, side-by-side, click here.

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

One of the best of the annual baseball books (and the only one to come out in time for Christmas) - The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2011 - is available and now shipping. If you've never read the Annual before, it's a terrific mix of statistics (both fun and in-depth) and commentary from some of the best writers on the web.

This year, for example, the Annual features articles by Rob Neyer, John Dewan, Craig Calcaterra, Sean Smith, Dave Cameron, Tom Tango, and more to go alongside the articles from regular THT contributors like Chris Jaffe, Steve Treder, and Dave Studenmund. You should really order it as soon as you can.

Order The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2011 from Acta Sports today

To top it off, I've contributed two different articles to the Annual. The first is "The Year in Taters", a look at home runs (and home run trots) across the league:

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

I've said it in the comments and on Twitter, but I just want to say it again: thanks, everyone, for all the positive comments on the Periodic Table of Hall of Famers. I'm glad everyone seems to be enjoying it so much (and, yes, there have been some great suggestions that I might want to incorporate in the future).

Good friends Bill and The Common Man from the Platoon Advantage - you know, from our (generally) bi-weekly podcast - asked me to write a guest post this week, and my post is now online. You may not remember, but thirteen years ago today was one quite active day for the Hot Stove. Not only was the Expansion Draft for the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays that day, but it also saw some significant wheeling-and-dealing involving Pedro Martinez going to Boston and a few other near-Hall of Famers switching teams.

It was definitely an interesting day. Go check out my guest post at the Platoon Advantage and let us know what you think.

Click the image to see the full chart.

There are few charts in the world as well-known and recognizable as the Periodic Table of the Elements. On charts and folders and schoolbooks everywhere, the periodic table has been around for almost 150 years. It has been in use for so long thanks in large part to its ability to tell a complex and sophisticated story about the known elements in the world in a simple layout.

With 118 elements known on the current chart, and 109 players elected to the Hall of Fame by either the BBWAA or via special election (no Veteran's Committee here!), it seemed like a fun exercise to try and arrange the Hall of Famers into a periodic table structure. Well, maybe "fun" is a bit relative.

I took up the challenge anyway. You can view the full results by clicking on the image above or checking out the Periodic Table of Hall of Famers right here. Click "Read More" below to read more about the table's structure.

Last year, to celebrate Veteran's Day, I took some space here on the blog to tell some baseball-related stories about the veteran closest to my life, my older brother. He was, at the time, beginning his second tour of duty in Iraq. Well, it's now a year later and Casey is safely returned home and retired from the Army. He started his first non-military job just last month, and we are all quite pleased with that.

Just because he's safe at home, though, doesn't mean Veteran's Day is any less important or worth honoring. With that in mind, I have reproduced that Veteran's Day post below. It's personal to me, of course, but I think it's a story worth sharing. We are thankful everyday that Casey is home safe and no longer in harm's way. But that isn't the case for everyone. So, please, take the time today to honor or thank the veterans that you know in some way. They make a difference, and so does your appreciation.

My formative years, in terms of my love for baseball at least, spanned ages 8 through 11. At that time, my family (with five kids) was quite poor, and we lived in apartments. I don't know the exact reasons - I would guess the annual rent increases - but we would move from one apartment complex to another about every two years. In fact, until I was 15 or 16, I don't think I ever celebrated more than two Christmases in a row in the same home. Not that I'm complaining. I knew we were poor, of course, but I rarely felt it. Which, for a kid, is great.

My two older brothers and I had plenty to keep us busy, but what we came back to most often was baseball and baseball cards. This was the late '80s, so packs of cards were still only 50 cents, affordable(ish) even to a bunch of poor kids. We'd make the trek to the Payless Drug Store around the corner every chance we could to pick up a pack or two of the beautifully blue-bordered 1988 Donruss, with it's Warren Spahn puzzle pieces and wonderfully illustrated Diamond Kings (Kal Daniels! Scott Fletcher! Tommy John!), or the still-classic 1988 and 1989 Topps (how many Gregg Jefferies' "Future Stars" cards could a kid get?!). Of course, "every chance we could" to us was maybe twice a month. Fifty cents wasn't a lot of money, but it's not like quarters were falling out of the sky either.

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

Man, didn't I just write a post about the passing of a baseball legend? How depressing.

I say that, of course, because word came out this evening that Seattle Mariner broadcasting legend Dave Niehaus passed away at age 75. Outside of the Pacific Northwest, Niehaus was never quite the household name that, say, Vin Scully or Bob Uecker are, or Harry Caray or Ernie Harwell were. But people who care about the game and appreciate a great broadcaster have known about Niehaus for years. In 2008, he was given the Ford C. Frick Award by the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Last April, I created a graphic that highlighted some of the game's longest-tenured, most popular broadcasters called "Your Childhood Has Been Brought to You By..." I received a few complaints from fans of different franchises that felt that I wrongfully left off their guy. I'm very pleased to say that I did not make that mistake with Dave Niehaus.

Niehaus was the voice of the Mariners from the beginning, having been selected as the team's lead play-by-play guy in December 1976. Over the next 34 years, he called nearly every game the Mariners ever played. At the start of the 2009 season, for example, he had called 4,971 of the team's 5,061 career games.

Who would've known back then, in the year of the bicentennial, that Niehaus would be calling games in Seattle for the next 34 years until his death? From the December 24, 1976, edition of the Seattle Daily Times:

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)