Articles

97% non-baseball, Part 2 is 97% baseball. (Originally written last November, as made clear in graf #1 where I emerge from a movie theater, something I haven't done in quite a while)

Estimates

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 06, 2020)

Thoughts while bicycling back home

3kk59f94f passwords 2108484fijvnr8vi8m

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 31, 2020)

This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but was not, for reasons contained below.

Noli Mi Tangere

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 16, 2020)

"For Caesar's I am"--a review of Joan Ryan's INTANGIBLES

The Case Against Ralph Terry

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 11, 2020)

a counter-historical hypothetical

Formed on this Continent

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 22, 2020)

Or, in the end, NOT formed on this continent

followup to "Derring-Do"

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 20, 2020)

a tracer on an unimpeachably reliable source

Ball Four Revisited

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 14, 2020)

A retrospective look at a book we've all read and re-read (plus a bonus trivia quiz)

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 02, 2020)

A tracer of a more personal nature than most

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 01, 2020)

Followup to Joe Pos’s followup on Hosmer’s dash home

The Thing With Feathers

By Steven Goldleaf (May 29, 2020)

See the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University press for the literary reference.

By Steven Goldleaf (May 26, 2020)

conclusion and changes to the system

By Steven Goldleaf (May 25, 2020)

The project, drawing close to the end of its natural life-span

By Steven Goldleaf (May 24, 2020)

Resuming the process of finding the three-year OPS+ champ

Little Lefties

By Steven Goldleaf (May 19, 2020)

A peculiar sub-set of players

Instead of a “comment” on my review of THEY BLED BLUE

By Steven Goldleaf (May 15, 2020)

A reviewing of my reviewing principles

BOUTON: a book review

By Steven Goldleaf (May 11, 2020)

A timely review, for a change.

By Steven Goldleaf (May 06, 2020)

A sort of book review, career review, personal essay, confession, appreciation, memoir, homage, query and about eight other genres combined—and all for the same low, low price!

By Steven Goldleaf (May 01, 2020)

More of the same, Piled Higher and Deeper

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 27, 2020)

Re-zooming the series

My Heart Bleeds Blue Borscht

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 19, 2020)

A heartfelt review

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 19, 2020)

with a prefatory look at my methodology, and certain of its flaws

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 17, 2020)

More of the Same

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 15, 2020)

After the war

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 11, 2020)

You could look it up: another Joe D. tracer that cropped up in the midst of long, historical project

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 08, 2020)

Wart Ime

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 05, 2020)

Through the late 1930s

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 03, 2020)

An intro to looking at MLB historically if it had been organized more along the lines of boxing

A Pair of Recent Books

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 14, 2020)

I just caught up on my baseball reading this past week

Sisters and Resisters

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 21, 2020)

Review of THE RESISTERS by Gish Jen. Knopf, $26.95

Gerrit Cole's recent comps

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 13, 2020)

What do similar pitchers' performances have to say about Cole going forward?

Small Tracer, Big Tracer

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 27, 2020)

Only the first 1000 words concern baseball in the strictest sense. After that, the subject ranges from the New Testament to jury duty to Hamlet to Al Sharpton to a poet Bill just Tweet-quoted today

Ripping Pos a New One

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 17, 2020)

Still no computer, but I can't stop having thoughts.

Brief Leave of Absence

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 08, 2019)

an explanation

How I Almost Flunked Out of Grad School

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 28, 2019)

A chapter from a long book (550 pp. and counting) that responds to a minor point raised in the Skip Lockwood "Comments" section. Literally 0 to do with baseball, of no interest to most BJOL readers.

Skip Lockwood

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 25, 2019)

A review of INSIGHT PITCH: MY LIFE AS A MAJOR LEAGUE CLOSER, by Skip Lockwood. Sports Publishing, 2018. $19.99

The GOAT Contest

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 08, 2019)

An Open Competition

Whither the Triple?

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 26, 2019)

Why has it withered?

The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 22, 2019)

A review

My last tracer?

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 04, 2019)

For a while, at least

Living is Easy

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 06, 2019)

Predicting is hard. A retrospective look at predictions of the future.

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 27, 2019)

A lively story of a pitcher’s dead spouse reanimating and advising him about his pitch-selection.

Long Division

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 17, 2019)

Taking on issues of geography, quality of play, shortening the post-season, unequal chances of winning the playoffs, long BYEs, the reality of rust, and your future occupation of “Science Fiction writ

Testing HoF Polling for Recency Bias

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 30, 2019)

Testes, one, two, one, two….

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 26, 2019)

And there was grammar. And there was grammar issues. And they was bad.

Correcting Bias (Bill's June 9th Poll)

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 25, 2019)

Totally not about race.

Cosmic Debris

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 21, 2019)

Re-reading some favorites from the 1980s

Only To You

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 06, 2019)

A confession, of sorts

By Steven Goldleaf (May 22, 2019)

Conclusions about how to expand leagues in the future

By Steven Goldleaf (May 20, 2019)

The Second Division

By Steven Goldleaf (May 19, 2019)

Revisiting October 10, 1963

Back-of-the-Envelope Thinking

By Steven Goldleaf (May 10, 2019)

Some notes, preliminary to actually studying the subject (note split infinitive)

English As She Is Spoke

By Steven Goldleaf (May 05, 2019)

A dissenting opinion

A Piece of Piffle

By Steven Goldleaf (May 02, 2019)

A Failed Tracer

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 17, 2019)

Or at least a butterfly? The butterfly effect

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 15, 2019)

A Little Alternate History

Couple of News Items

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 11, 2019)

In today's headlines

Shoe Polish Followup

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 06, 2019)

a very brief footnote to my article of March 12th

The Ernie Banks Principle

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 04, 2019)

Taking an argument over from Bill's article to mine, not that anyone has asked me to.

Tracing the Tracer-master

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 12, 2019)

another hole poked in another baseball anecdote

A most impressive league

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 11, 2019)

Applying a little retrospective vision to the NL of the 1960s

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 03, 2019)

Now it’s time for—NEW RULES!

Screwballs and Experts

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 15, 2019)

Part One of a possible two-part article

Distinguishing the SHEEP from the GOAT

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 04, 2019)

Separating Stars and Super-stars

The Recency Error

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 25, 2019)

...which came between The Georgian Error and the Victorian Error in the UK

Infra Dig

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 07, 2019)

Sympathy for O'Malley: "Please, allow me to introduce myself...."

Displaced Persons follow-up

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 02, 2019)

ten days afterwards, some thoughts

Displaced Persons

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 22, 2018)

or Directors of Photography or Decimal Places or Dave Parker or Diastolic Pressure….

POWER BALL by Rob Neyer

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 09, 2018)

I told the author that I wanted two copies and a power scrotum to hold them in. So far only the one copy has arrived.

Leavy Rhymes With Heavy

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 03, 2018)

a review of THE BIG FELLA: BABE RUTH AND THE WORLD HE CREATED

Margaret, Are You Grieving?

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 07, 2018)

Over Golden Glove Unleaving?

IMPOSING A NARRATIVE

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 24, 2018)

And I do mean “imposing,” in both senses: What TV announcers persist in doing, and should not do

.300 revisited

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 01, 2018)

a look backwards, and a little bit forward

The Way We Wertz

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 15, 2018)

And the way we wertzen’t: some tracers on Bill’s Guide to Managers

Olympic baseball

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 02, 2018)

One way to get me to watch the Olympics

Fra Lippo Lippi

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 31, 2018)

Not the Browning Version

Munson, Nettles, and Rickey

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 09, 2018)

A few memories I thought I'd share

Even More Willies?

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 05, 2018)

An attempt to see if the identical twins might be triplets

Tru Value

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 28, 2018)

More software than hardware

The 33% Solution

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 15, 2018)

A Mental Construct, using made-up numbers. Bonus points for catching the allusions to Denis Leary or Martin Short..

My Best Imitation of Branch Rickey

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 01, 2018)

developing a 17-year-old notion from the Historical Abstract

The New World Order

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 26, 2018)

With reference to how the Old World monkeys used to do it

Getting Out of a Hole

By Steven Goldleaf (May 29, 2018)

Is there an objective trading policy that bad teams should stick to?

By Steven Goldleaf (May 21, 2018)

Critiquing WAR by a sample size of one

The Animal Farmization of Win Shares

By Steven Goldleaf (May 11, 2018)

Thoughts on Loss Shares

An Application of My Theory

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 25, 2018)

Trying to see how shocking my time-line bias theory would look in practice

Is There a Draft in Here?

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 03, 2018)

A brief interruption of my series on small, big, and bigger improvements in baseball and, ultimately, human society

A couple of bigger things

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 18, 2018)

A wider look at those two little things I was discussing last time

A Couple of Little Things

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 10, 2018)

Intro to a more complex and controversial article

.300

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 02, 2018)

Or technically .299500

Baseball I Don’t Care About

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 03, 2018)

"Baseball in the Garden of Eden: the secret history of the early game" by John Thorn

Jim Creighton for Hall of Fame?

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 29, 2017)

Why Not? I'll Tell You Why Not.

Debut Tracers

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 06, 2017)

Featuring some tall tales, a glimpse of Marilyn Monroe, and a circumcision.

The Time I Almost Batted Against Tom Seaver

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 30, 2017)

True story, bro

How Sabermetrics Has Ruined Baseball

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 28, 2017)

OK, non-clickbait title: How Sabermetrics Is Capable of Ruining Baseball

A Visit With MLB's Historian

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 26, 2017)

Resulting in a thorny literary discussion

HBP tracers

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 15, 2017)

Vivid memories of being struck (or striking someone) with a baseball

How Much You'd Like to Bet

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 27, 2017)

A fictional look at where the 1919 Sox might have gone wrong

A Quality Start in 1965

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 15, 2017)

...wasn't worth all that much, apparently. A very tightly focused variation on Bill’s Deserved Wins Thesis.

A Review

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 23, 2017)

.... of Baseball’s Peerless Semi-Pros: The Brooklyn Bushwicks of Dexter Park by Thomas Barthel

Tracers

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 18, 2017)

One small tracer, and a discussion of tracers in the larger sense

You and I Have Memories

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 09, 2017)

Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.....

From the Rejected Pile

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 31, 2017)

A rejected article from the spring, published late this summer

The Someday Knuckleball

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 04, 2017)

Fiction, but much more of historical and argumentative value than literary merit.

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 25, 2017)

Smart or Dumb?

Victory and the Paternity Test Results

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 17, 2017)

With nary a mention of the Panda

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 12, 2017)

A continuation of my prior article, containing allusions to the movie "Chinatown," a John Lennon tune, the ‘90s TV sit-com “Martin,” Batman and my former scoutmaster.

Victory Versus Vitality: NUMBERS DON’T GIVE A CRAP

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 03, 2017)

How Sabermetrics Could Reduce Excitement About Baseball

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 10, 2017)

Seven thousand words about Halberstam’s OCTOBER 1964, the first six thousand a statistically oriented close reading, and the last thousand a discursive personal essay.

Nail Clippings

By Steven Goldleaf (May 28, 2017)

leftover observations, with some Jim Bunning (R.I.P.) remarks

For Want Of A Nail

By Steven Goldleaf (May 25, 2017)

The Pitch That Determined The 1964 NL Pennant, sort of, and The Guy Who Threw It

The Hall of Super-Stars

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 23, 2017)

“An impressive person: Rick is a hoss because he won the championships.”—from Onlineslangdictionary.com

Player Biographies

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 16, 2017)

Another group project

Lineups

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 10, 2017)

How a Poet Fills Out a Lineup Card

It was thirty years ago today

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 17, 2017)

that Bill James taught us how to play

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 12, 2017)

An article whose prefatory example takes up 5/6ths of the piece. Kids, don’t try this at home.

Voting

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 08, 2017)

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Huh. Say it again.

Itsy-Bitsy HoF voting results

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 28, 2017)

All the votes are in! Well, 18 of them.

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 23, 2017)

Where Have You Gone, Jean-Louis Vergez?

The Death of the Gate-Keeper

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 06, 2017)

Re-thinking the binary nature of the Hall-of-Fame

More Etymology and Less Baseball

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 14, 2017)

In which I follow through on my threat to examine closely twelve words from “My Mother, Drunk or Sober”

Bob Turley, Stan Lopata, Ed Charles

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 10, 2017)

More about etymology than baseball

My Mother, Drunk or Sober

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 07, 2017)

A polemic against loyalty

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 31, 2016)

Conclusion (I hope).

The Case Against Tough

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 25, 2016)

The virtues of tenderness, a subject that most people who know me consider me eminently unqualified to write about at length, which is precisely what I have done here.

Dryfax and Kousdale

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 20, 2016)

The dry facts? More like soaking-wet speculation.

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 14, 2016)

Further confirming my thesis (with a snag along the way)

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 26, 2016)

I forgot to goof around with the players’ names last time.

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 11, 2016)

The 1976 iteration

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 10, 2016)

You didn’t know there’d been a Part One, did you? The 1986 installment.

The Cubs are arguing with the Mets.

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 07, 2016)

An argument without words.

All of Yaz, why not play all of Yaz?

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 18, 2016)

What to do when your Hall of Famer doesn’t play like a Hall of Famer against every opponent, and you have a very clear idea of who those opponents are?

All of Yaz, why not play all of Yaz?

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 18, 2016)

Abstract: What to do when your Hall of Famer doesn’t play like a Hall of Famer against every opponent, and you have a very clear idea of who those opponents are?

Great Scott!

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 04, 2016)

A thousand words of tracer

Beyond Monthlies

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 07, 2016)

In the never-ending search for greater meaning, a further exploration of Baseball-reference.com's splits categories.

Monthlies

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 04, 2016)

An excellent way NOT to look to stats for significance.

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 28, 2016)

And where “Baseball” figures into all of that….

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 10, 2016)

A Variation on the Ontiveri

Par une Bizarre Coincidence

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 08, 2016)

As Tyrone Slothrop liked to say…

Give Me More Willies

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 25, 2016)

Far more information about Stargell and McCovey than you can use in three lifetimes.

Six and Seven

By Steven Goldleaf (Jul 04, 2016)

Another in a series of short stories, the first of which seemed to go over well on BJOL.

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 25, 2016)

I’m cleaning up these ancient manuscript chapters as fast I can….

What if?

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 21, 2016)

What would the game be like if we did balls and strikes differently, really differently?

By Steven Goldleaf (Jun 08, 2016)

In compensation for my last column, which was free from sabermetic analysis, here is a glut of stats.

My Newest Friend

By Steven Goldleaf (May 27, 2016)

An afternoon with Ted in March of 1944

Two Brief Questions For You

By Steven Goldleaf (May 16, 2016)

One on ballcaps, the other on bullcrap

Your Lucky Day

By Steven Goldleaf (Apr 16, 2016)

It finally arrived!

Underrated is Overrated

By Steven Goldleaf (Mar 12, 2016)

Do we have any followers of the American League here? Excellent!

The Laughing Devil's Final Tag

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 12, 2016)

A short piece of fiction (not all that short) taken from an anecdote that Bill once told.

By Steven Goldleaf (Feb 04, 2016)

Small Sample-Size Theater: Part One of a Look at Families of Pitchers

God Is Not Great

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 20, 2016)

(apologies to Christopher Hitchens)

Good Luck!

By Steven Goldleaf (Jan 01, 2016)

All's Well That Ends Well

Veeck as in Dreck

By Steven Goldleaf (Dec 26, 2015)

In which we strap a beloved baseball autobiography to a polygraph machine for Christmas.

Followup to "Eddie Gaedel v. MLB"

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 30, 2015)

A short tale fleshing out my previous piece about little people in MLB

“Who Created All the Stars?” (part 3)

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 24, 2015)

Finally, the long-awaited conclusion to the series!

“Who Created All The Stars?” (part 2)

By Steven Goldleaf (Nov 10, 2015)

A somewhat more objective and systematic approach to All-Star game selections and mis-selections than Part 1 took

By Steven Goldleaf (Oct 09, 2015)

Inquiries into how All-Star teams have been chosen and mis-chosen, how that process might be improved, and how the Game itself could be made more watchable.

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 19, 2015)

A proposal so reasonable that maybe Maui Mike will keep his finger off the ejector-seat button until I finish making it.

Musical Chairs Playoffs

By Steven Goldleaf (Sep 10, 2015)

All the tension of the kindergartners’ game combined with all the dignity of professional baseball.

Willfulness At Work

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 28, 2015)

A twenty-five-year-old book review, requested by many BJOL subscribers (well, two), with a little note about how it came to get written.

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 23, 2015)

A brief digression, before we turn to other ludicrous scenarios, on the long and short of some issues raised by my last column

Midgets' Class-Action Suit vs. MLB

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 14, 2015)

A legal grievance against MLB, pending for 64 years this week, and larger issues (though nearly any issue is bound to be larger than Eddie Gaedel) regarding roster size.

Midgets' Class-Action Suit vs. MLB

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 14, 2015)

A pending legal challenge unexplored for 64 years this week, and the larger issue (well, almost any issue is going to be larger than Eddie Gaedel) of optimal MLB roster sizes.

Thrown From a Moving Vehicle

By Steven Goldleaf (Aug 06, 2015)

This is the first in a series of articles about radical changes to MLB guaranteed to get the traditionalist fan's blood boiling and other fans' blood merely simmering.

Username:	Password:

Welcome