Weekend Rumblings - News for August 25, 2018

The Kansas City Star, as part of the Royals’ fiftieth season celebration are having fans vote for the best players in team history. Yesterday they did Designated Hitters and the results were not particularly close.

Around the league it looks like some Cubs fans are not particularly thrilled with the team’s acquisition of infielder Daniel Murphy. And things didn’t get better after his first press conference.

It looks like Billy Beane may still be ahead of the curve when it comes to identifying market inefficiencies. Even if it took him a while to get there.

While they have acquired fly-ball hitters like Jed Lowrie, Matt Joyce and Khris Davis, they have also developed anti-grounder sluggers in Matt Olson (2012 first-round pick) and Matt Chapman (2014 first-rounder). Lowrie told FiveThirtyEight that he never sat down with an A’s official to talk about his batted-ball profile, but the Stanford University product does use the technology available in the home batting cage for tracking his exit velocity and launch angle to fine-tune his swing.

People have been saying for a long that statisticians are sucking all the fun out of the game. So they came up with a statistic to measure exactly how much fun they’ve sucked. (WARNING: Satire)

The US women are doing pretty well in the Women’s Baseball World Cup. (If you want to know more about the team, SB Nation has a pretty good article introducing you to the players here.)

Michael Baumann of the Ringer is convinced that Clayton Kershaw is no longer the best pitcher in major league baseball.

Reading that article again, I realize that while it laid out a statistical case for Kershaw’s superiority, it was really more about coming to terms with Kershaw as a fixed point in the baseball universe. For years, he was the standard by which we judged all other pitchers, and for my money he’s the best I’ve seen in 25-odd years of watching baseball. (Turn-of-the-century Pedro Martínez has a case and no shortage of advocates, but that’s a debate for another time.)

It’s Player’s Weekend and MLB.com broke down the nickname choices, this year.

They also had some of the things they want fans to look forward to.

Todd Frazier has an offer for you on his cleats. You probably won’t want to refuse it.

There will be some fun bats, too.

Mike Oz at Yahoo Sports thinks there should be more than one Player’s Weekend.

Your song of the day is David Hasselhoff with True Survivor