What a tough question. What are the top rivalries in baseball? I’m sure Yankees fans will claim it’s Yanks-Boston, but if you went out on the West Coast, I bet you’d hear plenty of fans saying Giants-Dodgers deserves more consideration. How exactly do you declare one rivalry “bigger” than another? How do you measure fan excitement, and compare one fanbase against another? Is it possible?

Probably not, but regardless, I’m going to take a stab at it anyway. My methodology is very simple: I’m ranking rivalries based on the amount of Google hits returned for the search “(Team name) (Team name) rivalry”.  I freely admit that I’ve stolen this idea from other people, notably Nate Silver who in the past has used Google hits as a proxy for voter awareness of presidential candidates.

Is this method perfect? No, of course not. It enters in certain biases, as the media undoubtedly shapes which rivalries are written about over others, but I think the results are nonetheless fascinating. Take them with a grain of salt if you will, but overall, I’d say these rankings come close to modeling reality.

This first chart ranks the top rivalries in the American League, separated out by division. The AL East is on the left, AL Central in the….center, and AL West on the right.

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We all know that Jose Bautista is destroying worlds this season: the Bautista (hat tip: Bradley Woodrum) has mashed 20 homeruns and posted a .513 wOBA, accumulated 5 WAR in only 61 games. To put that in some perspective, his .513 wOBA would rank 22nd all-time if the season ended today, and when you adjust for the scoring environment, it’d rank as the fourth best offensive season in major league history (trailing only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds). He’s having a season for the record books.

In thinking about this recently, I started pondering: how does Bautista’s homerun pace compare with other all-time great seasons? We’re all captivated by a homerun race, and while Bautista isn’t going to break any single-season homerun records, has his homerun pace been as impressive as the rest of his season? And so, I decided to compare his 2011 season against batters that hit 70+ homeruns (Bonds, 2001), 65 homeruns (McGwire, 1999), 60 homeruns (Ruth, 1927), and 54 homeruns (Bautista, 2010). Take a peek:

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Joe Pawl had an excellent piece on Adam Dunn’s continued slump earlier this week, discussing how Dunn’s slump has cost the White Sox a few wins off its record and projection so far this year. His article got me thinking: What exactly is wrong with Dunn this year? Dunn has normally been a model of offensive consistency, hitting at least 38 home runs each of the past seven years — but this year, his power has disappeared, he’s striking out at a higher rate and his balls in play aren’t falling for hits. What gives?

Since it’s so early in the season, it’s easy to say that this is just a slump and Dunn eventually will break out of it. He still only has 200 plate appearances this season — far from the 550 plate appearances needed before power rates stabilize — and as Jesse Wolfersberger talked about a month ago, Dunn had an early season appendectomy that likely threw off his start to the year. The larger sample of success trumps the smaller sample of struggles.

But as the sample gets larger, I can’t help but ask myself: What if that’s not the case? Are there reasons to think this struggle could be more than just a slump?

I think there is, based on two main reasons. But you can decide for yourself.

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Every season, without fail, the All-Star Ballot becomes an object of contention; like the Hall of Fame voting, the All-Star Game is simply a lightning rod for debate. Should this glorified exhibition game decide home field advantage in the World Series? Should we even care about the All-Star Game anymore, as interleague play and television have removed its mystique? And of course, which players deserve to make the game? So many people claim to not care about the game, but that doesn’t prevent copious amounts of digital ink being spilled each year on these same 0l’ questions.*

*Personally, I haven’t watched the game the last few years, but I still can’t help but care on who gets selected for the teams. A part of it is stubborn obstinance – someone is wrong on the internet! – and a part of it is you know the players themselves take pride in these things. It’s only natural to want players to get the recognition they deserve, right?

This year’s All-Star Game travesty – outside of the fact that the Yankees are leading the voting in six out of nine slots – is the fact that one of the game’s best young outfielders isn’t even within the top 15 vote receivers at the position. This is a player that is currently leading the major leagues in batting average (.370), has the best slugging percentage (.636) out of all players not named Bautista, and has the third-best on-base percentage in the AL (.430).

This player has posted a .457 wOBA and a 198 wRC+ this year, much higher than Curtis Granderson’s 171 wRC+, and, according to WAR, he’s been the third-most valuable player in the majors this year (3.1 WAR, trailing only Bautista and Halladay). And if you don’t want to consider the fielding aspect of WAR, he’s also been the second-most valuable hitter in the majors, contributing 20.4 offensive runs. Holy cow, why isn’t he getting more love?

Ah, that’s right – he plays in Tampa Bay. Matt Joyce, come on down.

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I’m a little bit late following up on this, but I absolutely loved this quote from Tom Tango during a recent Baseball Prospectus Q&A:

Q: I like to flatter myself that I’m an ‘early adopter’ to the sabermetric perspective on the game, even though it’s been so many years since its introduction and uptake by those like yourself. Is sabermetrics already ‘mainstream’ in your mind, or how long do you think it will be til it is? What was / will be the tipping point to #2?

Tango: Sabermetrics will always be on the leading edge. There’s no need for it to be in the mainstream. If the mainstream wants to adopt, they know where to find us. If they want to ignore us, they can. We’re there to make sure they don’t misuse numbers, that’s all.

I hope [the tipping point] never happens, actually. You look over to your left and right to make sure that whoever wants to be part of the movement has the tools and knowledge to join in. There’s no sense in looking over your shoulder to make sure everyone comes along. They aren’t in a burning building they are trying to escape. They are on the beach, and they can decide if they want to come surfing with us or not. But I don’t need them to tell me that I’m drowning people with numbers. We’re giving out surfboards, and they can decide if they want one. And then we’ll be happy to make sure they don’t drown.

I couldn’t agree more, but I realize that might seem counterintuitive for those that have followed my recent Saber-Tips series here. A large part of my writing and work here seems geared at making sabermetrics more mainstream – or at least, more widely used – but that’s not my intention. Let me explain.

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“Time waits for no man.” ~ Age-old aphorism or, alternatively, Jasper Fforde.

Getting old sucks. Regardless of what we do, we can’t stop our bodies from aging and slowing down. Muscles get weaker, it gets harder to get in shape, and our reflexes slowly fail us. Time cares nothing for our fond remembrances or youthful delusions; in the words of Joe Posnanski, age is undefeated.

It can be difficult enough to accept that we’re slowly getting older and losing our physical skills, but in some ways, it’s more painful to watch your favorite athletes age. These guys are supposed to be living gods: chiseled, millionaire athletes that are impervious to many of the daily cares and concerns that plague us. In my mind, that’s a large part of what gives sports their charm – they’re a form of escapism from the rest of the world. Athletes aren’t supposed to be like the rest of us; kids grow up believing that they exist in their own world, where their largest concern is the batting slump they’re in right now and their team’s position in the standings. We can watch the game at night and escape from our lives, being pulled into baseball’s universe instead.

Or at least, that’s what I think baseball starts out as when we’re young. When we grow up, we find out that this delusion isn’t true; baseball players are people, too, each with their own flaws, and some of them are jerks (or just plain stupid). And hey, baseball players get old, too… even the really, really good ones. But still, even though we realize this, I think everyone feels a punch in the gut when they watch one of their favorite player’s struggle toward the end of their career. We root for our favorites to stay eternally young, so that way we don’t have to be reminded that we’re getting old, too, and that we know what it feels like to fail.

But anyway, enough with that digression: I’m here to talk about the Yankees, and no, not Derek Jeter or Jorge Posada. While both players have dominated the tabloid headlines this year, there’s one player whose decline is hiding in the background: Alex Rodriguez.

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In case you missed the first article in this series — in which I talk about another way to look at BABIP — I’m trying to take a look at alternative ways to present sabermetric stats, in order to best represent them to an audience.

When you stop and think about it, despite the numerous baseball statistics out there, there are only a few limited ways of talking about a batter’s power. While there are a multitude of options when talking about plate discipline — On-Base Percentage, walk rate, outside swing rate, etc. — there are only a handful of widely available stats to use for power: the old standby, Slugging Percentage; a player’s raw total of homeruns or extra base hits; or the sabermetric alternative, Isolated Power.

So when you want to talk strictly about how powerful a player has been, which stat do you use? There are pluses and minuses to each of these stats, but do any of them necessarily stand out from the others? I’d argue no.

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Through some conversations with colleagues, I’ve recently had a bunch of thoughts floating around in my head about how to best present sabermetric stats to an audience. I posted some of these thoughts recently in an article, and I’m planning to continue listing tips every now and then. And of course, a bit thanks to Sky Kalkman’s old series at Beyond the Boxscore for the title inspiration.

Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) is one of the mainstays of sabermetric analysis. In fact, I’d suggest it’s one of the most commonly used saber-stats; it’s important whether you’re talking about batters or pitchers, and it’s useful in explaining why players aren’t performing as you’d otherwise expect. If you’re trying to analyze a player and talk about how they will perform going forward, how can you not talk about BABIP?

But despite being such an important statistic, many people are initially skeptical of BABIP. What do you mean to tell me that batters don’t have control over where they hit the ball? Why should I believe that there isn’t a large amount of skill involved in BABIP? To say that there’s a large amount of variation and luck involved in BABIP (and therefore, batting average) seems counterintuitive to people. After all, many baseball fans grew up with the idea that hitting for a high average is very much a skill, not the product of skill and some luck.

So recently, I’ve started trying something a little bit different: presenting BABIP as a percentage. And so far, I think it’s helping.

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It can be easy to forget that major-league baseball players are also human beings.  We watch them every night on television, read numerous articles about them on a daily basis, and treat them like commodities when discussing roster moves with fellow fans. We pay large sums of money for something as silly as their autograph, and we adorn our backs with their names and numbers. Many of these players we’ve idolized since childhood and put on a pedestal; they don’t seem to exist on the same plane as us everyday fans, but are something higher and greater.

But when you stop to think about it, this is a load of bollocks: ball players are regular people just like the rest of us. In fact, their lives aren’t necessarily all that great. Sure, they get loads of money if they reach the majors, but there are lots of costs to pursuing professional baseball as a career. Many of them aren’t as well educated, as they have to put so much time into baseball and are normally drafted before finishing college (and sometimes, before even starting college). Baseball is their career and life, but that means they have to kick around in the minors, spend half of their year traveling from place to place and living in hotels, and become mini-celebrities whether they want to or not. Ball players are watched by thousands of people while performing their job, and their success or failure is talked about and dissected by even more people. And if you want to have a family, talk about a stressful life; from mid-February to early October every year you become a vagabond and get to see your wife and kids infrequently. Being a baseball player ain’t all sunshine and lollipops, that’s for sure.

So when I heard John Lackey’s now infamous quote Thursday — “Everything in my life sucks right now” — my heart went out to him. Here’s a person whose world is crumbling all around him. Not only is he failing at his job at an epic level, but he’s had personal issues crop up over the last year: his wife is battling breast cancer at the moment, and the couple suffered a miscarriage only a little more than a year ago. And for all we know, Lackey could have even more on his plate; these are just the details of Lackey’s personal life that have been made public.

This is probably the most obvious statement in the world, but Red Sox — if you’re out there, you need to give Lackey a break. As someone that’s worked closely with cancer families, you simply can’t underestimate the stress that cancer can have on a family.

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