Via my friend Brian, Doug Glanville has a column in the NY Times writing about the value of a good leadoff hitter.

Am I the only one who finds this ironic, given Glanville's career .315 OBP? At least his leadoff OBP was .326.

From The Hardball Times, a pretty interesting piece by Nick Steiner on the differences in pitch distribution (location-wise, at least) between Albert Pujols and Juan Pierre, and how much of a bump you might guess Pujols' HR rate would receive if pitchers weren't as worried about him jacking the ball 450 feet out of the park. Obviously, this kind of thing is overly simplistic (it doesn't even factor in the distribution of pitch types, which would also be radically different), but that's on purpose -- the point is to see how much more a feared slugger like Albert is pitched around than a slap-n-dash singles hitter like Pierre.

Today's MLB Oriole's Game Notes has a paragraph chronicling all the doubles lists that Brian Roberts is climbing this season. Here is a closer look courtesy of the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index:

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If you're a long-time reader of this blog, then you know how much I love the search box on B-R.com. You can find all kinds of interesting things.

Here are player pages that come up when using some sort of synonym for the word "good" in the search box. See how many you can name before clicking on them.

Amazing
Incredible
Marvelous
Perfect
Phenomenal
Splendid
Terrific
Wonderful

I even skipped a bunch of adjectives that result in more than one page, such as "super". Which other adjectives can you come up with?

Time for another Sporcle quiz... Can you name the all-time wins leaders with last names starting with the letters from A-Z?

On September 18, 2009, Ichiro Suzuki joined Marco Scutaro, Bill Mueller, and Bill Selby as the only batters to hit a regular season, bottom of the 9th inning, walk-off homerun off against Mo Rivera.

Vernon Wells also hit a walk-off homer against Rivera – but it was in the 11th inning of a tie game. Suzuki, Scutaro, Mueller and Selby all did it in the ninth, with their team trailing.

Suzuki, Scutaro, and Selby all did it after two-outs. Mueller did it after one out.

How do I know this? Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitcher Events Finder for Mariano Rivera - looking at all "Homerun" events for Rivera and setting the filter for "Away Games", and "as last play of game." Here's the results - showing the batters to do it before Ichiro:

Again, Suzuki, Scutaro, and Selby all did it after two-outs. How's that for a trivia question: Name the only three batters to hit a regular season 2-out walk-off homer against Mo Rivera...whose last names all start with "S."

1970 Minor League Batting Leaders - Baseball-Reference.com

Got a little bit of time today to add league pitching leaders and yearly leaders (across all levels). To get to a year, go to the front page of the minors select a year and then select the leaders. To get a league leader, go to the league page and then select the leaders. Here is a pitching leaderboard.

A couple things are still missing.
1) Leaderboards by level (A, AA, etc.)
2) Speed, this is really slow, so I may have to cache results or something

BTW, a 20-year old SS in AAA with a .340/.389/.522 line?! We'd be going crazy over that now.

Check out Raul Ibanez's splits before and after the All-Star break this year:

So the guy's power and productivity have been largely diminished in the second half. It's also interesting to look at his career splits before and after the break:

It's interesting just how similar his numbers are before and after, especially his OPS being identical. His lopsided performance this season actually brought those numbers in line to each other for his career.

In case you missed this on Wednesday, the guys from Fire Joe Morgan, the epically funny media-criticism blog that permanently closed up shop in November '08, came out of retirement for a day at Deadspin. So if you've been sorely missing Ken Tremendous, Dak, Junior, Food Metaphors, and potshots at Bill Plaschke, David Eckstein, & everyone in between, then head over get your much-needed FJM fix.

For the 4th tutorial video here at Baseball-Reference, I show you how to use our amazing Player Linking Tool: