Author: Nick Ashbourne

People often posit that baseball or unpredictable, or, less eloquently perhaps, that you “can’t predict ball.” At face value this statement is unequivocally true. You cannot predict baseball. Despite the advanced projection systems and good, old-fashioned intuition, we still find accurately forecasting baseball troublesome at best. However, the sport itself is not the problem. Human […]

In fits of nostalgia, human beings, especially pretentious ones, sometimes like to declare that they were “born too late.” This statement, on the surface, is usually completely and utterly idiotic. People tend to romanticize past eras because what survived of them is the best they have to offer. In reality they are clinging to particular […]

Just over one percent of pitches thrown in the major leagues are splitters. It’s not as rare as the knuckleball, but it’s closer to being a knuckler than a cutter in its rarity. There are very few teams whose fates this season rest on their ability to either throw it or hit it. The pitch pokes […]

You’ve likely heard by now that the baseball world has scourge on it’s hands. Specifically a strikeout scourge. The word “scourge” seems like an odd choice to describe a trend of one event occurring more frequently in an inconsequential game for children, but for some reason that’s what we’ve landed on. Ultimately, as a society of baseball […]

Baseball Prospectus has traditionally been about the evaluation of baseball players more than anything else. In February, Rian Watt eloquently laid out his vision of how intersectionalist writing could be the way forward, but the nuts and bolts of the game will not be ignored, especially by places like BP. What the “nut and bolts” tend […]

Technically speaking, baseball is a business like any other. Practically speaking, it’s a surreal slice of life far removed from the everyday experiences of the vast majority of humanity. Because of the way we’ve agreed to organize our society, an industry can spring up where men are paid millions and millions of dollars to hit […]

Baseball, seemingly more than any other major North American sport, is known for its unpredictability. Pitchers learn a new grip and appear out of nowhere, batters change their stance to find untapped power and when the playoffs come anything can happen. Baseball fans, unlike basketball fans, don’t have to wait a couple of rounds before a […]

As spring training marches on and we get anxious for regular-season baseball, the search for meaning in meaningless games reaches a fever pitch. Most lineups and rotations around baseball are more or less set. The positional battles still underway are largely of the inconsequential variety, and making a baseball team on Opening Day is overrated […]

When the New York Yankees acquired Aroldis Chapman in December it was clear they’d built something extraordinary in the back end of their bullpen. The trio of Chapman, Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances is downright bogus. It’s the bullpen equivalent of having Bryce Harper, Mike Trout and Giancarlo Stanton in the lineup, with all their at-bats […]

Rich “Goose” Gossage is many things. He’s a Hall of Famer, a guy who used to throw baseball really fast and a former New York Yankee. He’s an also old white guy from Colorado. On Thursday he sounded far more like the latter than the former. Gossage took the “kids today don’t know what’s what” […]