Thrown Out in the End

My column today on Baseball Prospectus focused on the unhappy circumstance of Erick Aybar being caught stealing to end two different games this season. It turns out that getting thrown out to end a game has happened 84 times since 1970 (excluding 1999) and so it's not as rare as at least I first thought. I then discuss the strategic calculation in these events from the general and specific Aybar cases.

The second half of the article deals with another demonstration of baseball's version of natural selection in how starting jobs are kept or lost piggy-backing on an article from two weeks ago chronicling the demise of Angel Berroa.