Baseball Reference rolled out their annual "Most Similar (by age)" update sometime in the last couple weeks. Some quick comps:
- Javier Vazquez' top comp changed from Brad Radke to Livan Hernandez. Neither is very encouraging, considering Radke left baseball with a torn up shoulder at age 33 and Hernandez rapidly declined from above average to slop-throwing sub-replacement level vagabond after age 30.
- David Justice, Bobby Higginson and Tim Salmon are Carlos Quentin's top comps, which seems like a pretty good group.
- Nick Swisher's rough season moves Greg Vaughn to the top of his comps, which violates the unwritten Comparable Players Must Be of the Same Race rule--the second time we've broken that rule on the front page in the past 12 hours.
- Gavin Floyd's top comp is Jason Dickson, a flameout for the Angels in the late 90's. #2 is James Baldwin, which is familiar if uninspiring.
- John Danks doesn't have a comp whose debut came after I was born until #5 in Brad Penny. Numbers 1 and 2 made their debut in the '60s. But the career line of #3, John Keefe, who made his debut in '90--1890!--has to be seen to be believed. He lost 24 games, threw 36 complete games, walked 148 (28 more than he struck out), allowed 355 hits, and posted an ERA+ of 82. Keefe pitched 352.1 innings that season, and was never heard from again, unless you count the coincidentally named drummer of Boys Like Girls, who happens to turn up wearing a White Sox shirt on GIS.
- The Phillies offense through two World Series games against the Rays should bring back some not-so-pleasant memories. They have exactly ZERO hits w/ RISP through two games, and have only two non-homer runs.
- Baseball Graphs updated their team pages with lots of sortable data, so now you can find out things like the White Sox bullpen had the highest average fastball velocity of anyone in baseball.
