Jay Bruce “pranked” the finalists for the MLB Fan Cave by setting up a faulty table to hold his “Silver Slugger Award.” Then, when the finalists were “in a hurry” to ask him rapid-fire questions, one guy “knocked it over.” Awkward!

Truly, it is “hilarious.”

Just in time for spring training, The Redleg Annual is a collection of many insightful (and just one, provided by yours truly, goofy) columns about this upcoming season and team.

This time of year when everyone’s starving for some good baseball content to download to their mobile device, $4 is a real steal for 78 pages of nutritious Redlegs goodness.

You can buy yours at http://www.redlegannual.com.

For just $4 you can download all three of the formats–PDF, ePub, and Mobi (Kindle). You can pay with your PayPal account or with a major credit card, and then you will receive an email with instructions on how to download your file.

Don’t be the only one on your block who doesn’t know what the season holds for the starting rotation or who can’t explain why Joey Votto is like Frank Robinson! Buy it today!

Not so much “remembering” actually, as this particular gut punch of the Cubs occurred in 1958. More like, “honoring.” It was 20,000 days ago today.

Chris Jaffe at the Hardball Times has a story up today that features the Cincinnati Reds (or the Redlegs, as he mentions they were called at the time) in a ninth inning come-from-behind victory. Not just any come-from-behind victory: they went in to their ninth inning at-bat behind 2-8 and finished it up 10-8.

Of course, since the game was being played in Chicago, there was still the bottom of the inning to go, and the Reds had gone through some machinations to get their lead. The defense was a shambles:

Still, the Cubs had one thing going for them. By using three pinch hitters and a pinch runner in a game where he’d already used a double switch and gone through part of his bench, Reds manager Birdie Tebbetts was unable to fill the defensive positions competently.

Exactly half of the position players found themselves in places they’d never fielded before. Three of them were in the infield—outfielders Whisenant and Robinson were at second and third respectively, while third baseman Don Hoak shifted to short. Meanwhile, veteran first baseman Dee Fondy stationed himself in left. Only two players were in the same places on the diamond from before the rally—first baseman George Crowe and center fielder Gus Bell.

Heh. I’d like to see Dusty Baker try something like that sometime. Jay Bruce is willing to move to center, but how would he feel about third?

You should check out the whole story on The Hardball Times. It’s like baseball-water in a baseball-drought stricken world.

John Fay of the Cincinnati Enquirer is reporting that the All-Star Game will be coming to Cincinnati in 2015. It’s about damn time.

Back when Great American Ball Park opened in 2003, it seemed like the Reds would be hosting an All-Star Game at any moment. But then, what with one thing and another, three years passed.

Then comes the new ownership, and surely Major League Baseball wouldn’t still be holding the Schott years against Bob-o and friends, but alas, no All-Star Game was forthcoming.

Then Yankee Stadium was going to close after all those years, so of course you had to have one more romp there before you lost the chance. And hell, Angel Stadium and Kauffman Stadium are pretty old too…might want to take another tour of those.

But the most irksome one, the one that is the cause of the bitter, hateful tone of this post, was when the damn Cardinals got the All-Star Game in 2009. Their stadium opened three years AFTER Great American Ball Park, and (having been to both myself) looks pretty much exactly the same, just with more expensive beer.

They had a better-looking team, of course, but if that’s what counted, we wouldn’t have been visiting Kansas City a couple years ago. It’s irrelevant now, in any event. At this rate, the Reds might not only be hosting the All-Star Game in 2015, but also managing the team. That’d show those damn Cardinals.

It was something other than excellent list segmentation that caused Major League Baseball to send me an announcement of the SABR Analytics Conference that is coming to Phoenix in March, but I was glad to get the email anyway. It’s nice to know that people attending the Cactus League in the second week of March also have the option to drop in at the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown for $595 worth of stat-crunching fun.

Or if you don’t want to shell out the registration fee, you could just hang around in the lobby and try for autographs from front office types, such as Derrick Hall (President and CEO of the Arizona Diamondbacks), Jon Daniels (General Manager of the Texas Rangers), or Rick Hahn (General Manager of the Chicago White Sox).

According to the conference website, some topics that will be covered include:

• General Managers Panel on how analytics shapes front-office decisions (with Jon Daniels, Rick Hahn and Jed Hoyer)
• Measuring Player Performance
• New innovations in baseball analytics
• Player Agents — their view of analytics
• Advances in medical information and its impact on decisions
• New applications of PITCHf/x data
• The use of analytics in scouting
• Player panel — the impact of data and information on performance
• The International Game — the next hot spot for talent development

If you can’t make it in person, you can follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #SABRanalytics. See pictures of how much fun they had last year in the daily photo galleries at SABR.org/analytics/photos/2012.