Russell Eassom

If the Yankees are not evil anymore, what’s next?

May 10, 2021 Russell Eassom Baseball

I’ve partially watched and followed baseball since the early 2000s but it wasn’t until 2013 that I started watching MLB in earnest. Despite all that, I have known for decades that the Yankees were the dominant team of MLB. It

Yadier Molina is so good, he impacts games he isn’t playing in

April 22, 2021 Russell Eassom Baseball

Yadier Molina recently passed 2,000 games as a catcher which is a phenomenal milestone. He becomes only the sixth player to do this in MLB and was the first to do with just one team. He is a generational talent

Should Austin Jackson’s home run robbery have stood?

April 20, 2021 Russell Eassom Baseball

Many of you will already know which play I am describing; some may have seen it live and for others they may know it thanks to the ever-delightful replay videos that MLB.tv have shown us in the past. But here

The Unofficial MLB Player Championship

April 8, 2021 Russell Eassom Baseball

There are many ways to determine who is the best player in a sport right now, especially baseball, but most are fraught with debate on which methods and stats are better. There are a few major sports however which generally

Can we Bake in some more Luck?

February 26, 2021 Russell Eassom Analytics, Baseball

In the companion piece to this, I went through how I created a couple of metrics to show the cluster luck that can happen in a game. And armed with the Expected Runs (xRuns) and Run Luck (RL) we could

Wait, Did we just get really lucky?

February 25, 2021 Russell Eassom Analytics, Baseball

To me, one of the amazing things about baseball is that a team can get ten men on-base and, one day they could score zero runs and another day they could score all 10. Also, a team can score 20

How do we solve the ‘Plawecki-Mikolas-Flaherty Problem’?

February 15, 2021 Russell Eassom Baseball

I expect everyone who reads this article has no idea what the Plawecki-Mikolas-Flaherty Problem is and that is probably how it should be. It is a niche scoring/stats problem that I have created, and it is all down to how

The Psychology of the Infield Shift

February 3, 2021 Russell Eassom Baseball, Sabermetrics

Over the past 10 seasons, the shift has gone from a quirky defence against some pull-heavy left-handed hitters to being employed against over 50% of lefties and over 20% of righties. In that time multiple researchers have shown that the

Does the Madden Curse extend to MLB?

February 2, 2021 Russell Eassom Baseball, Sabermetrics

After rumours and blurred images made the rounds of the internet on Sunday night, Monday morning stateside came and we were all given clarity. It was officially released that Fernando Tatís Jr. will be the cover player in 2021 for

Seriously, the Pirates can win the NL Central in 2021

December 29, 2020 Russell Eassom Baseball

The final acts of some MLB teams in 2020 has been to confirm once again that owners have little or no care about winning the World Series or even getting to the playoffs if it costs them too much money.