SABRcast with Rob Neyer: Bill Ripken (Episode #47)
Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a new weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer. SABRcast will feature insights and analysis of what’s happening in modern baseball on and off the field, plus compelling interviews with figures from around the game — and music from The Baseball Project.
Subscribe to SABRcast on your favorite podcast networks, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play, and listen to each episode as soon as it’s released.
Neyer is a longtime baseball writer and editor for ESPN.com, SB Nation, and FoxSports.com. He began his career as a research assistant for groundbreaking baseball author Bill James and later worked for STATS, Inc. He has also written or co-written seven baseball books, including The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (with Bill James), winner of the Sporting News/SABR Baseball Research Award, and most recently Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game, winner of this year’s CASEY Award.
Episode #47: February 17, 2020
This week’s guest is Bill Ripken, an Emmy Award-winning analyst on MLB Network, former major-league infielder, and author of the new book, State of Play: The Old School Guide to New School Baseball. He began his MLB career in 1987 with the Baltimore Orioles, where he played second base alongside his brother, Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr., and their father, Orioles manager Cal Ripken Sr. He later played for the Texas Rangers, Cleveland Indians, and Detroit Tigers. He and Cal also run Ripken Baseball, which owns and operates youth baseball complexes and the Aberdeen IronBirds minor-league team in Maryland.
Click here or press play below to listen to Episode #47:
What’s Rob reading this week?
“Rob Manfred basically admits MLB can’t be trusted to police cheating”
By Hannah Keyser, Yahoo! Sports
Perhaps the most significant revelation among the deluge of rumor and reporting that has emerged about the Houston Astros since the commissioner’s office released its official report is that other teams suspected them of illegal sign stealing long before Mike Fiers spoke to The Athletic. And that they didn’t keep those suspicions to themselves. A number of teams have said both on and off the record that they complained to the league about the Astros. This begs two questions. First: How could anyone in Houston (looking at you, Jim Crane) credibly claim that they had not even an inkling of anything nefarious until last November? (They’re lying, probably.) And even more importantly: Why didn’t Major League Baseball figure out what was happening and put a stop to it sooner? Did they even bother to look into the Astros’ then-alleged cheating prior to this offseason?
- Also reading: Daniel Kelley: “Gary Carter’s best cards” (Kelley Black Book)
- Read more: Click here to check out Rob’s full list of book recommendations on Goodreads.com
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