Daily Baseball Data

I haven't done a substantial post in about a week. Whenever I go that long without writing anything, it's telling me something...my heart isn't in it. I've been really busy with a variety of projects, and The Waiver Wire has kind of gotten pushed to the side. Rather than force myself to write mediocre posts here every day, I'm going to do my posting at my other site (Daily Baseball Data. You can expect one good, substantial post per week (approximately) as well as shorter daily blurbs...and lots of great data and tools such as the MLB Weather Dashboard and our new MLB Lineup Dashboard.

MLB Lineup Dashboard

A new MLB Lineup Dashboard tool is now available at Daily Baseball Data. Just go to the 'Other Tools' menu to access it.

Tommy Hanson Called Up

The Atlanta Braves are calling up Tommy Hanson to start a game this weekend. Hanson should be effective immediately, and is a potential future star. He dominated the Arizona Fall League, and has continued that dominance at AAA this year, with an incredible 90 strikeouts and 17 walks in 66.1 innings pitched. I expect him to strike out close to a batter per inning in the majors. He will probably have mediocre control initially, but the strikeouts will more than make up for that.

Livan Hernandez

Over the past five years, Livan Hernandez has been so bad that he's become almost a joke. Good players in salary cap games knew to look for batters opposing him whenever possible. However, something has changed this year. A combination of improved control and an improved groundball rate has him doing better than he has since 2004. If he keeps up his current rates of 5.2 strikeouts per game, 2.4 walks per game, and a 46.6% groundball rate, he's going to be a solid, average major league starting pitcher. Those numbers are pretty similar to a guy like Braden Looper...not at all like the Livan we've all come to know and love targeting.