Boston Red Sox Pitching Prospect Matt Spalding is Looking to Make His Mark

The more advanced prospects of the Boston Red Sox have received a lot of attention this spring. While it is certainly an impressive group, the team also has a lot of valuable young players in the lower levels of their minor league system. One of those rising players is right-handed pitcher Matt Spalding, who just […]

Bob Gibson’s 1968 Season Is Overrated

The 1968 MLB season featured the greatest pitching statistics in the live ball era (since 1920).  However, thanks to the Factor12 (F12) Rating on 60ft6in.com, baseball fans can delve deeper into the statistical minutia and uncover the real truth. Bob Gibson 1968 F12:   22-9 / 1.12 ERA/ 0.85 WHIP / 28 CG / 13 SHO / 304.67 IP […]

Factor12 Top12 Last12

Over the last twelve MLB seasons, there have been some legendary pitching performances.   The Factor12 Rating is able to quantify each successful season or failure.  Where does your favorite pitcher rate against the competition? Since 2000, there have been 7569 pitching seasons. Of these occurrences, only 12 times has a pitcher recorded an F12 Rating over 33.000. […]

Fenway Park’s 100th Anniversary: There’s Nothing Like Being at the Game

I’ve never considered myself religious by any means. Yet, I’m a believer that everyone has some place where they just feel at home, or safe. A sanctuary, of sorts. To some of the more religious types, a church. Baseball stadiums are my church. There is just something about passing through the gates and walking into […]

Deviating from the Past

Every baseball ranking—even those based on statistics—is biased in some way. It’s what makes practically every list debatable. For instance, take a list as fundamental as “hit leaders.” As a counting stat, a player’s hit total is impacted by his place in the batting order as well as his lineup’s offensive strength, two factors that […]

Measuring a Pitcher’s Ace Factor

Below is a statistical collection of the seasonal performances of every starting pitcher between 1950 and 2010. Each pitcher’s season, represented by a blue diamond, was measured by a calculation that didn’t consider any of the usual suspects typically used in measuring a pitcher’s effectiveness, such as ERA, strikeouts, WHIP, shutouts, or even ground ball percentages, contact […]

Is Andy Pettitte a Hall of Famer?

As things currently stand, the New York Yankees will go into the 2011 season without Andy Pettitte as part of their starting rotation. We’ve known for some time now that this could be a real possibility as he had stated at the end of the 2010 season the same sentiment he’s made at the end […]

The Best Pitcher Ever is?

Who is the best pitcher of all-time?  This is a difficult question to answer due to the vast changes in the game over the past century.  For the purpose of this exercise, relief pitchers, such as Mariano Rivera, have been eliminated from contention to increase the value of innings.  Meanwhile, qualifiers must have played for […]

Inspiration in Baseball

Ben Ulene started the Double Play Foundation in December of 2009 when he was going through his closet and noticed how many old baseball jerseys he had accrued over his adolescence and that he no longer had use for. “I thought that there had to be some way that these uniforms could be used again, as each one had been used for only one 3-month season and then put away, ” Ben told me. It was at that moment that he decided to pass-on his once prized possessions to others who may not be as fortunate as himself. He named his cause, The Double Play Foundation (DPF) and told me it was because “just like in a double play where one batted ball is used to get two outs, one baseball uniform is being used twice, doing double duty.”

Sorry Albert, It’s Votto’s Time

Ranking the 2010 NL MVP Candidates [Author’s note: Irony can be pretty ironic, I suppose. It’s not the first time that an MVP favorite tanked in the post-season, but Joey Votto did just that, going 1-for-10 against the Phillies as his Cincinnati Reds went three and out. It’s worthy to mention that the ballots from […]

Just How Good is Pedro Martinez?

It does appear at this point that Pedro Martinez is probably retired so this may be a good time to ask: Just how good was Pedro and does he have the numbers to justify induction into the Hall of Fame? Of course, this question is related to the broader question of whether there is an […]

Great What-If Matchups

One of most baseball historians’ favorite things to speculate about is how certain players would have done if their careers had happened in different times and places and against different opponents. How spectacular would Ozzie Smith have been on a dirt infield with a small glove instead of on Astroturf? Suppose Ted Williams had been […]