Worthwhile Weekend Reading

For your enjoyment:

The good writing entry

Jonah Keri’s A Not-So-Brief History of Pitching Injuries

Easily one of the finest pieces of baseball writing and reporting produced this year. The plethora of quality here left me feeling jaded as I decided which paragraph to display in order to entice your click-through. In the end, I think this quote by Barry Zito exemplifies that he is more aware than expected:

“Baseball has always been the good old boys sport,” said Zito, whose father Joe was such a big believer in long-toss that he insisted on a clause in Barry’s first contract guaranteeing that the A’s wouldn’t interfere with his son’s regimen. “You’ve got a lot of old-school guys with old-school methods. It seems other sports will adjust and change with technology, whereas baseball has always been slow to adjust to the times, and to new technologies.”

The hardcore statistics entry

Kincaid’s ZiPS ROS Projections as Estimates of True Talent

This is FanGraphs-related. There is a lot of math there that supports what can be intuitive. The smaller the sample size, the more volatile the results can be. There is a tendency to ignore what exactly the projected numbers stand for. Maybe that is unavoidable, so an occasional reminder like this requires my appreciation.

The Joe Posnanski entry

Amazing Baseball Stuff

A collection of worthwhile baseball writing without Posnanski is like the best of soul music without any Marvin Gaye. Much like the aforementioned Keri piece, this much quality spread throughout this much quantity produces an insane overload that we should be more thankful for than we already are. What I’m saying is that Posnanski is a robot.