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Bill Buckner Strikes Again
The Boston Red Sox’s odds of reaching the playoffs peaked on Sept. 3. Following a 12-7 win against the Texas Rangers, they held a 9-game lead over the Tampa Bay Rays with 24 games to play, giving them...
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The ‘Big Five’ in North American Pro Sports
Yesterday, Ritchie King and I ran the numbers on the most popular teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball and the English Premier League, according to the number of Google searches they...
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Is the DH Rule Slowing the Game Down?
When I wrote last week about the slowdown of MLB games in recent years, I noted that the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox were the two slowest teams. Both are in the American League, and maybe...
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Has the AL East Just Been Unlucky?
The weakest division of the American League so far this season is the one that has been the most dominant in recent years: the AL East — featuring the Yankees and Red Sox, the two winningest AL teams...
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Red Sox GM Ben Cherington Isn’t Completely Delusional
A season after the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, there’s no getting around how lousy the team has been. With a record of 43 wins and 52 losses, the Red Sox entered the All-Star break in last...
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Billion-Dollar Billy Beane
The film version of “Moneyball” depicts many establishment baseball types as ignorant of where wins in baseball come from and clueless about how to properly value talent.Take, for example, the scene...
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That Weird Jon Lester Trade Wasn’t That Weird
This year’s Major League Baseball trade-deadline fire sale mostly went to script, headlined by the Jon Lester/Yoenis Cespedes mega deal where the Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox helped each other out in...
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The Red Sox Are On The Wildest Roller-Coaster Ride In Modern MLB History
Before the 2015 season started last week, the Boston Red Sox were projected by both Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus to win nearly 90 games this season, with the best expected record in the American...
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Big Papi Needs More Time To Think
At the beginning of this season, Major League Baseball instituted a new set of rules to make the games go faster. The idea was to limit how often batters can step out of the box during at-bats, thereby...
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Everyone’s Still Chasing The Yankees And Red Sox On Facebook And Twitter
The Kansas City Royals beat the New York Mets on Twitter as well as in the World Series.The Royals had about 479,000 followers on Twitter as of this morning, 15,000 more than the Mets had — even though...
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Even The Orioles Have A Shot In The AL East
In honor of the 2016 Major League Baseball season, which starts Sunday, FiveThirtyEight is assembling some of our favorite baseball writers to chat about the year to come. Today, we focus on the...
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Don’t Leave, Big Papi
At age 40, David Ortiz is off to the second-best offensive season of his long and distinguished MLB career. He’s also set to retire at the end of the year, no matter how well his 2016 season with the...
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Another Ride On The Red Sox Roller Coaster
Last April, we previewed the Boston Red Sox’s 2015 season by focusing on the franchise’s wild ups and downs in recent years. Although they posted only 71 wins in 2014, advanced-stats outlets such as...
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MLB Teams Should Go For Talent, Not Balance, At The Trade Deadline
One school of thinking about the MLB trade deadline, which passes at 4 p.m. Eastern time, is that teams should address their weaknesses and become more balanced in preparation for the stretch run. The...
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What The Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry Can Teach Us About Political Polarization
A few weeks ago, FiveThirtyEight fielded a SurveyMonkey poll to baseball fans in the Northeast. In the survey,1 I asked 1,071 people which baseball team they supported (if any), how strongly they...
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Why The Red Sox Might Be Even Better Than They Seem
On opening day in 2016, the Texas Rangers defeated the Seattle Mariners 3-2 despite recording only a single hit, a fifth-inning single by Prince Fielder. That win helped set the tone for a charmed...
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Why Baseball Revived A 60-Year-Old Strategy Designed To Stop Ted Williams
Around the middle of the 20th century, there was no more fearsome hitter in baseball than Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox. Williams could do it all at the plate: hitting for contact — his .406...
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The AL East Won’t Be About The Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry This Year
In honor of the 2017 Major League Baseball season, which starts April 2, FiveThirtyEight is assembling some of our favorite baseball writers to chat about what’s ahead. Today, we focus on the American...
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We Rated Every Rotation In MLB. How Does Your Team’s Stack Up?
The baseball season is so long that it can’t help but be filled with endless debate. Is Mike Trout going to be the greatest player of all time? Is the defensive shift good for the game? Are the...
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Chris Sale Still Has Nothing On Pedro
Chris Sale is drawing comparisons this season to the most dominant strikeout pitchers in baseball history as he threatens to supplant Pedro Martinez in the Boston Red Sox record book. Earlier this...
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