Monday night marks the season opener for the Sonoma Stompers independent team, and we here at BttP are pretty excited – if not stoked – to see how things unfold this summer. In the meantime, check out what’s happened here during the past week.

Baseball

Stephen Shaw wrote about how the economics principle of “Creative Destruction” — where successful entities reinvent themselves to stay ahead in the game — could apply to the world of baseball, on a player level and a team level.

Stats

Julien Assouline took a closer look at the select group of players who saw Major League action the same year they were drafted, and how they went on to do later in their careers.

Eric Roseberry did a sabermetric double dip, first delving into how DIPS sees Clayton Kershaw’s 2015 thus far, then looking at a few pitchers with notable K-rate changes from 2014 to 2015.

Stephen Shaw did some in-depth analysis on the season so far for Angels pitcher Matt Shoemaker, who came out of nowhere to finish second in ROY voting last year.

Fandom

When the aforementioned Sonoma Stompers announced they were seeking sponsors, Banished to the Pen was able to gather up enough funds to buy some ad space in their program. Read more about what the Effectively Wild co-hosts have in store for the team this season.

Podcast

Our regular-flavor podcast took the holiday weekend off, but as it was the anniversary of Star Wars, some of us decided to chat about the sci-fi franchise for the latest entry in our (optional) off-topic spinoff series.

Flashback

Matt Jackson, now of SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score, started a series in December that looked into how the most recent teams to lose a World Series fared in the years that followed. The first entry was on the 2004 St Louis Cardinals.

In January, Ben Suissa examined how Fenway may actually have a second Green Monster of sorts, in right field.

If you’re new to the Effectively Wild podcast, why not listen to the first episode of our own podcast, which featured Ben Lindbergh himself?