Baseball Purist
“For Love of the Game”
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Baseball’s Luxury Tax
In a recent headline that clearly highlighted the difference between the haves and the have nots was the news of the nine teams that paid a whopping $311 million in luxury tax. That tax also known as the Competitive Balance Tax assesses teams a “tax” when they go over the set thresholds set by the…
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The Curious Case of Lou Proctor
In a remote and distant corner of baseball history is the story of Lou Proctor, which was originally documented in The Baseball Encyclopedia. In the case of the latter, it is the story of a publication that no longer exists and in the person of Lou Proctor it is the tale of a ball player…
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The Easy Starting Pitching Solution
MLB is now considering more rules changes to “reemphasize” the stature to their starting pitchers and to prevent teams from going through a myriad of pitchers throughout a game. In many instances, MLB teams now employ an “opener” which is a strategy where a relief pitcher starts the game to face the toughest hitters in…
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A Uniform Win
We guess that the MLB hierarchy sometimes does hear the fans. There are not many topics that unite most baseball fans, but when it comes to the recent All-Star game uniforms, fans were pretty unified in their hate for these jerseys. MLB though has finally felt the fans pain and decided to revert to allowing…
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Cheer Up White Sox Fans
As most fans now know, the Chicago White Sox set the record for futility in 2024 with the most losses in a single season with 121. This mark “bested” the 1962 New York Mets, who previously held the record with 120 losses. Although this is a low point in White Sox history, they can in…
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Triple Crown Races Goes Down to the Wire!
By: Reed Weiser Stepping away a moment from our traditional examination of the baseball rules and the management of the game, it has been an exciting year in terms of individual achievements. During the course of the baseball season, I periodically scan over the League Leaders in what we used to consider traditional statistics as…
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Ugh! More Changes to the Game Contemplated
Evidently, the extreme measures of adding a pitch clock, assigning a designated runner to extra innings and limiting the number of throws to first base, among other rule changes, were not enough for the MLB hierarchy. MLB based all of those recent changes on the premise that the game was too slow for the average…
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Combined No-Hitters
For 90 years from 1876 through 1966, major league baseball only had one combined no-hitter meaning more than one pitcher was involved in the effort. Overall, there have been 20 combined no-hitters in major league history. Although a combined no-hitter was a rarity prior to 1970 (there were only two) it has become commonplace recently. …
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All Star Game Uniforms: Still Bland, Still Horrible
As we have written in the past, MLB seems insistent on having their finest players now wear the same custom-made uniforms for each and every all-star game. This year’s uniforms continued the trend of uniformity by trotting out the bland and boring in all-star wear once again. Not surprisingly, the fans are still not pleased…
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What Are We Supposed to be Watching?
On June 7th, in a game against the New York Yankees, Kike Hernandez of the Los Angeles Dodgers committed an error on a ground ball hit by Gleyber Torres. Then on June 28th, shortstop Jeremy Pena of the Houston Astros allowed a pop fly off the bat of Jeff McNeil of the New York Mets…
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Attendance Check In
We posted about the year over year (2022 vs 2023) attendance increase in our post, titled Mind Bending Attendance Logic from this past October. As a quick reminder, we noted in that post that MLB was celebrating the 6.2 million increase in fans from the prior year and attributing the increase to the implementation of…
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Innovation?
The strict dictionary definition of innovation defines it as 1: a new idea method or device, or 2: the introduction of something new. The other more detailed one defines innovation as the process of bringing about new ideas, methods, products, services, or solutions that have a significant positive impact and value. It involves transforming creative…
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