Ryan Braun is no stranger to success, the fifth-year Brewer has thrived on and off the field in literally every chapter of his career. Given his uncanny ability to come through when it matters most for Milwaukee and his laughably impressive slash lines, it’s no surprise that the 27-year-old is a favorite to win the 2011 NL MVP award. We pulled him aside to ask how he does it.

It wasn’t that long ago that the media was spinning the baseball postseason. Not this season’s postseason, next year’s, when an extra team is added. It’s not much of a surprise why. At the beginning of the month, each of the races looked wrapped up. The AL West was the only place in baseball where […]

Charlie Morton isn’t going to win the Cy Young. That much, we know for sure. The numbers for the Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander are mediocre at best, and he’s the third-best pitcher on a team that’s more than 20-games out of first place. Even the most obscure of advanced metrics fail miserably to make a case […]

After trimming down his repertoire and sticking to only three pitches last year, St. Louis Cardinals reliever Jason Motte put together a breakout season in 2010, slicing his ERA in half from the year before. It was hard to imagine him improving even more in 2011, but that’s exactly what he’s done. Having already set […]

While most teams in late September are simply scratching and clawing for the chance to make the playoffs, a few teams have more breathing room; tweaking the finer details of their batting order, situational statistics, pitching matchups, and the minutia that may just make a big difference down the line. The Philadelphia Phillies are one […]

From July 26 to August 28, the Brewers put together a sparkling 27-6 record. They held a 10.5-game lead in a tough NL Central Division and looked virtually incapable of ever slowing down. Now, though, having lost nine of their last 15 games and with their division lead shrinking, the club sits firmly in the […]

Imagine your favorite baseball team decided to eschew both home run hitters and strikeout pitchers. There would probably be some kind of fan revolt, since dingers and punchouts are nearly synonymous with offense and defense in the modern game. It’s a near-universal assumption that if a team wants to win it all, they have to […]

Major League Baseball, more than any other sport, is a game of numbers, players consistently reduced to mere stat sheets and meticulously scrutinized over their slash lines or ERAs. Thousands of players are asked to produce tangible results in order to stick at the Major League level each year, but numbers hardly tell the whole […]

In addition to his contributions to The Good Point, Jesse Goldberg-Strassler is the full-time broadcaster of the Toronto Blue Jay-affiliate Lansing Lugnuts, of the Class A Midwest League. It is half an hour before first pitch, squarely situated amid the dog days of summer. I knock on the door of the clubhouse politely, receive an […]

In a late-August game at Target Field, Minnesota Twins catcher Drew Butera hit a foul pop-up to Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera. It was the Twins’ final out in a losing effort, and their deficit against division-leading Detroit grew to an insurmountable 18 games. Why is this game, a matchup between a playoff-bound Tigers […]