Stats

Earlier in the week we took a look at ESPN's Keith Law's top five Blue Jays prospects. Today we'll have a look at the second half of Law's top 10 and what they need to do moving forward in 2011. As mentioned in the first half, this is purely a statistical analysis of each player and not a scouting/tools report.

Keith Law of ESPN recently put out his yearly organization ratings based purely on Minor League talent alone. Law rated the Jays' system as the fourth best in all of baseball. With those rankings also came his top 100 prospects list for all of baseball as well as each team's top ten prospects.

On Jan.

Last year, Manny Acta made a splash by dropping Grady Sizemore to second in the batting order.  This year, he's considering moving him back to leadoff.  Is either the right move?  And how should the rest of the lineup look?

With the off season of baseball, there is a lot of time for introspection, fact-finding and fooling around.

I chose the latter of these three and decided to delve into some of the more obscure MLB stats. Baseball is heavily centered around stats and so, without further ado, here they are:

Ounces of Coke per Nostril (OCN)

Luck.

Amongst the comments of an article I recently read, I encountered claims that Clay Buchholz’s 2010 season was a product of his burgeoning talent and completely luck-free. These claims were fueled by a belief that the sabermetric statistics that cause many to label Buchholz lucky are flawed and be extension useless.

Earlier this offseason, the statistical community rejoiced when the Hall of Fame finally voted Bert Blyleven into the Hall of Fame after 14 years on the ballot.  Blyleven's case is notable because, in his first few years on the ballot, he received less than 20% of the vote.  

Only after a thorough reevaluation of Blyleven's career — and a spirited internet campaign led by blogger Rich Lederer — did Blyleven finally garner the support needed to be inducted.

Late Thursday afternoon, after nearly an entire offseason of position-player inactivity, Yankee GM Brian Cashman inked the former Braves superstar to a one-year, $2 million contract, with another $1.2 million in additional performance-based incentives. After bolstering their bullpen with top-shelf relief arms, the Yankees' acquisition of Andruw Jones fills the hole left by the late (not so) great Marcus Thames.

For 10 consecutive seasons, fantasy baseball has had Albert Pujols dominate the first base position like no one else. However over the last couple of years, 27-year-old Miguel Cabrera has earned himself "Pujols-lite" status as he has gained the reputation of a high-average hitter with 35-home run power.

I am the first sports fan to admit that statistics spin tall tales as much as they inform.

While number-crunching has allowed us to distill fact from fiction when it comes to performance, stats have also cloaked deceptively bad players under the immunity blanket known as triple crown categories.

Stats are as damning to players as much as they immortalize (see Maris, Roger), and despite several encyclopedic volumes of evidence to the contrary, they are why Yuniesky Betancourt keeps finding work.