Baseball Value
What is a baseball player actually worth, and who decides?
Contracts, WAR, park effects and payroll: the arithmetic underneath every roster decision, and where that arithmetic quietly breaks.
35 stories in this cluster.
35 stories
A championship determines a winner. Evaluating money, management and pressure requires a different test—and evidence beyond the final out.
Leadership deserves scrutiny beyond the manager’s office, but research on coordination and player support is not a license to invent a winning-culture score.
A championship is not guaranteed by spending. That does not make financial advantage imaginary—or make low spending a competitive virtue.
Chicago’s championship teams offer a better argument than imaginary standings: money and organizational judgment belong in the same conversation, not opposite corners.
Research on MLB audiences supports a serious pressure discussion, but its star-batter finding complicates the story about highly paid players choking.
Payroll can improve a baseball team’s prospects without guaranteeing October baseball—or a championship once it gets there.
MLB's published payroll-ranking table shows a substantial regular-season divide. Understanding what that average can—and cannot—tell us is the real story.
The reported spending contrast is striking, but an honest comparison needs consistent accounting and evidence about how each roster produced its results.
The useful argument is not money against competence, but whether a front office turns its resources into a roster that can survive its weaknesses.
The Brewers swept the Dodgers. The Rays eliminated the Yankees. And anyone who's survived decades of Chicago baseball knows that spending money and knowing how to build a winning team are two entirely different accomplishments.
The city claimed a 47 percent fall in dangerous crashes. The independent number was smaller, and partly canceled by rear-end collisions.
Baseball learned to measure offense with extraordinary precision. But every offensive event begins with someone else choosing the pitch. We tested whether MLB analytics measure value without fully measuring control.
Summed player value tracks a season's standings closely in aggregate and misses individual clubs by several games. The gap is the interesting part.
A free-agent win currently costs roughly $8–12 million, but the useful answer is a range — and it is a market price, not the intrinsic value of winning.
The "Mariana Great Falls Film" refers to a 16mm film purportedly shot by Nicholas Mariana, manager of the Great Falls, Montana, minor league baseball team. The film allegedly captured two unidentified bright objects flying over Great Falls on August 15, 1950. This event, alongsid
The "GO FAST" incident refers to a United States Navy encounter with an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) off the Atlantic coast of the United States. This event, captured on video by a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet's AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR)
During World War II, Allied pilots, primarily in the European and Pacific theaters of operation, frequently reported encountering unexplained aerial phenomena, colloquially termed "Foo Fighters." These were described as metallic-looking spheres, disks, or lights that exhibited un
On November 7, 2006, at approximately 4:30 PM CST, air traffic control and United Airlines personnel at Chicago O'Hare International Airport became aware of an unidentified, disc-shaped object reportedly hovering over Gate C17 of Terminal 1. The incident caused a brief closure of
The "Gimbal" incident refers to a U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) video recording of an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) encountered off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, in January 2015. The video, depicting an object moving against the wind
A game played by people not spreadsheets
Baseball built a statistic to measure individual value. Somewhere along the way we started asking it to explain winning, greatness and championships. Those may not be the same thing.
Is Chicago watching the beginning of the greatest center-field career baseball has ever seen?
The Bears’ Indiana threat isn’t just a stadium story. It exposes a bigger problem in professional sports: franchise values are exploding, taxpayers are pushing back on subsidies, and private equity may become the inevitable answer.
Real hardware is getting better at fixing its own errors, but the gap between a lab milestone and a machine that outperforms your laptop at anything useful remains wide and contested.
The White Sox can slug their way off the ropes. Now baseball’s most surprising Chicago revival has to learn how to stop taking punches.
Every time humans send hardware somewhere new, the prevailing model survives about as long as the first data downlink.
Elite athletes don't just see well; they process visual information differently, unlocking performance advantages that challenge conventional ideas about innate talent.
Unpacking the science behind reducing sports injuries, from sophisticated screening to intelligent workload management and targeted muscular strengthening.
Understanding advanced analytical tools like EPA, xG, and WAR is critical for discerning what truly drives on-field success and separates meaningful data from statistical noise.
Unpacking the physics of athletic motion reveals the precise interplay of forces, leverage, and timing that underpins peak performance and injury resilience.
Beyond choreographed maneuvers, professional wrestling leverages acute biomechanics, psychological storytelling, and rigorous athletic conditioning to forge a captivating hybrid of sport and spectacle.
The job description changes when the seat gets warm. The evidence is on the tape and in the decisions.
Pre-snap motion is the cheapest yardage in football. The math, the tape, and the coverages that break.
Computer vision now grades every rep of every game. Here is what it sees well — and what it still misses.
RFID chips generate 200 data points per second per player. The coaches who use it best are winning the margins.