MLB History

The major league closer is a position that is hard to fill for many teams. Pitchers are often given opportunities to be the guy in the late innings, but rarely do we find closers that can truly be considered "dominant."

Trevor Hoffman has to be considered in discussions of the best closer of all time. His 601 career saves rank first all time, and his 1,035 games pitched are an attribute to his longevity.

As we honor the spectacular career one of baseball's all time greats, let's take a look at the elite list of dominating closers that Hoffman finds himself in.

Now that we've had time to digest the latest results of the Baseball Hall of Fame voting which welcomed two new members, Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyeven, we examine the possible solutions to fixing the voting system.

Last week, controversy surrounded the steroid users or suspected users and therefore they got in some cases surprisingly low percentages, like Jeff Bagwell's 40 percent and Rafael Palmeiro's 11 percent. 

You want the Cliff’s Notes to Jack Morris’s pitching career? I’ll give them to you, boiled down to two games. And that’s out of 562—it doesn’t get more pared down than that.

It’s a cool Saturday in early April, 1984 in Chicago. The Tigers are off to a 3-0 start to their season. Maybe they could keep it up and get out of the gate fast; who knows?

Earlier today, three overqualified Hall of Fame caliber first basemen were denied entry into Cooperstown. 

The first two, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, committed their steroid sins and, right or wrong, are serving their time as the first official martyrs of Bud Selig’s “Steroid Era.”

The third player, Jeff Bagwell, committed an egregious crime of his own.  

He had the audacity to be born in 1968.

Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven were voted into the Hall of Fame today, while Jeff Bagwell fell just short with only 41.7 percent of the vote.

Players rarely make it into the Hall of Fame their first time on the ballot, some needing up to all 15 years of eligibility to get in (like Jim Rice). But that doesn't mean they are any less deserving of the honor.

On Wednesday, the Baseball Writers Association of America will announce the National Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 2011. There's no telling how the results will shake out, but after seeing how the voters have gone the last few years, one thing's for sure: they'll get it wrong.

The MLB has benefited greatly off of imported talent.  A recent wave of Japanese and South American players have taken the game by storm.  

Today, about 27% of MLB consists of foreign-born players.  Great talents like Hideki Matsui and Ichiro were established already in Japan.  They still were able to make an even bigger name for themselves here in the States.  Many others from South American countries as well have "made it big" in America.  Collectively, these foreign-born plays add another dimension to the game.  

Thought we were going to leave you hanging, huh? No such luck—let's tune in.

Mutt Munson: "Hello everyone, I'm Mutt Munson and I'm here with my great friend and longtime broadcast partner Jock Johnson, and today from Fenway Park we bring you the final game of what has been a thrilling match up so far between loaded contingent from New York and Boston.

To a certain extent this is excerpted from a recent write up on a battle between All Time Yankee's & All Time Red Sox, though while writing about Roger Clemens and all of his recent travails it certainly felt like an interesting enough, or topical subject onto itself.

So we fleshed it out a bit with remarks about particular periods of seemingly extraordinary performance and we hope you'll find it a worthwhile, conversational read.

That's it for the preamble, DR. 

Let’s take a walk down memory lane. Not many people are aware of the deep history of the Atlanta Braves. This is a team whose roots go all the way back to 1869, in Cincinnati, where they were the first established baseball team in the history of the game, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. After trips to Boston—complete with a name change to the Braves in 1912—and Milwaukee in 1953, they moved to Atlanta in 1966 and settled into their new home where they would stay.