A song to play while reading about the Athletics: “A Theme for Oakland,” by the Phenomenauts. For 30 years, the Oakland Athletics had used Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” as their victory song. That’s fine… Read more »
Season Previews
Thank you for checking out Banished to the Pen’s 2019 Season Preview Series! In our fifth edition, we’re pairing shorter essays with some assorted miscellany to bring you a fun snapshot of every team heading… Read more »
With the regular season over, it’s the most exciting time of the year: we get to find out which predictions or projections from our preseason contestants were the most accurate. Apparently there are some playoffs… Read more »
Do you remember the face book? Not TheFacebook.com. We’re talking about its localized analog predecessor: an actual book schools printed and circulated to incoming students to help them get to know their new classmates. After… Read more »
One hundred and six million dollars. That’s how much the Colorado Rockies invested in free agent relievers this offseason. That’s over six times what they spent on position players. This extreme approach will, unavoidably, dominate… Read more »
The heel team of the 2018 offseason was definitely going to be the Pittsburgh Pirates. In January, they traded the top pick in the 2011 draft, pitcher Gerrit Cole, because he was likely to get… Read more »
Ah, the innocence of April. There I was, sitting on my couch, allowing myself to believe for even a moment that the 2017 New York Mets season would be free of the various issues that… Read more »
On the heels of last year’s wildly successful (and chaotic) Cubs preview, Brandon Lee, Dan Epstein, and Darius Austin brought back the Facebook chat preview to discuss the 2018 Seattle Mariners. Darius: I think the… Read more »
Jon Daniels is rolling the dice. At some point this offseason, he must have looked at his starting rotation and thought, huh. I have two starters. We should… I should do something about that. At… Read more »
A couple days ago, the esteemed editor/organizer/cat wrangler of this team preview series here at Banished to the Pen sent me a very kind email. It said “Were you going to have that Twins preview… Read more »
This time last year, optimism was in abundance in the Steel City. The NL was sharply divided between have and have nots, and the Pirates sat closer to the haves. With former MVP Andrew McCutchen… Read more »
It’s a beautiful Saturday night in April, and you can think of ten different places you would rather be. But propriety and parental obligation find you walking into your kid’s school spring fundraiser. You do… Read more »
The only thing that went right for the Giants in 2017 was that the Dodgers didn’t win the World Series. Even then, THEY CAME VERY, VERY CLOSE. Before the season, the Giants were unanimous favorites… Read more »
I haven’t been asked to produce a season preview for four years. My last effort, a team-by-team dissection of League One, English football’s third tier of professional soccer achieved a little notoriety owing to its… Read more »
Previously on “Nick Strangis previews the Arizona Diamondbacks”, I suggested that the 2016 Diamondbacks resembled a real life Shrodinger’s Cat – they were simultaneously a young-ish team with loads of untapped talent and incredible upside… Read more »
In a city with multiple professional teams and overlapping devotion, winning a championship elsewhere buys everyone a little more time. Congratulations to the Philadelphia Eagles for winning their first championship in the NFL’s post-merger era…. Read more »
I hope Mike Trout is happy. His Philadelphia Eagles, who play in a different state than the one he’s from even though two teams play in New Jersey because Eagles fandom makes no sense and… Read more »
The 2017 Braves were supposed to have been a tanking team, like the Phillies and Reds. But they spent only 15 days in the cellar, none after May 10. This is not to say that… Read more »
On May 20, 2017, Carlos Martinez was scheduled to get the ball against the visiting, scoring-challenged San Francisco Giants. It was good timing. After blanking the Cubs for seven-plus innings on Opening Night, Martinez hit… Read more »
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” — The Who, 1971 The 2018 edition of the Cincinnati Reds look a lot like the 2017 vintage. The same holes, the same questions that… Read more »
If the Boston Red sox were a car, it would be a Subaru. Pretty popular, good gas mileage, roomy, durable. Solid, above-average ride. Not sexy though. Reliable. But not sexy.
My friend Rob Mains already touched on the Orioles and Royals’ ability to confound sabermetric prediction models. The team was back at beating their projections for a sixth straight year, albeit by a measly two… Read more »
Of course the Yankees got Giancarlo Stanton. Retrospectively, there’s simply no other place he logically could’ve gone. The entirety of baseball reality has unfolded in exactly this way for 100 years. They pilfered Babe Ruth… Read more »
The Washington Nationals of the 2010s are a great baseball team. They have been a great baseball team since the beginning of the Bryce Harper Era in 2012. In four of the six seasons Harper… Read more »
The 2017 Padres are your middle school biology teacher, suspiciously overeager to dissect a frog. Everything about this is going to be awful and scarring, but you might learn something. There is neither pretense nor… Read more »
I present to you an audience-participation season preview, featuring the reigning World Champion (the entire city of Chicago entered a World Series hangover on November 3, 2016 and has not admitted that 2017 even happened)… Read more »
Towards the end of the fourth Die Hard movie, an aging John McClane faces off against an F-35 Lightning fighter jet whilst driving a cumbersome truck. Naturally, McClane wins this battle. While the movie was an… Read more »
A year after coming within a rain delay and a Jason Heyward motivational speech (price tag: $21 million) of winning the World Series, the Indians had a good 2017. They: 1) set the record for… Read more »
When previewing a team’s season, it’s important to envision the scenarios in which that team makes the postseason. The issue with doing that in this preview is that the Marlins have no realistic scenarios in… Read more »
Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to… Read more »
