2009 Red Sox DiamondView

Back when the DiamondView was created over at Beyond the Boxscore, I was intrigued by the visual application of statistics. The Hardball Times is doing something similar in attempting to bring visuals to statistics. Essentially, DiamondView uses a ballpark to visually show people just how good (or bad) a player was at the four major aspects of the game: hitting, power, defense and baserunning. It can be a great point of comparison method for sabermetricians and a great way for non-sabermetricians to glean value from advanced statistics. Today, the Red Sox's DiamondView was released. I'm not putting any pictures in here, so you'll have to click to see them. But a couple thoughts:

• Wow, I didn't realize how amazing Kevin Youkilis was.
• Poor Mike Lowell really is a liability at this point, eh?
• And the cult bandwagon of actually appreciating J.D. Drew gets fuller.

All-Aughts Team of the Decade SP1: Pedro Martinez

Unsurprisingly, Pedro Martinez is the ace of the All-Aughts Team of the Decade. His 1999 and 2000 season were something to behold, and he is widely considered to be one of the top three Red Sox of all time. When Petey became a free agent following the World Series in 2004, I wrote an "Ode to Pedro" that I feel is an appropriate expression of what Pedro meant to myself and to Red Sox fans as a whole (although my writing could use a lot more polish). Rather then try to hack off a decent article on Pedro, I figured I would reprint part of the article -- the part that matters. After that, I'll wrap things up now that we have more perspective on Pedro. It is difficult to truly do Pedro justice in an article -- I don't think anyone will quite be able to capture how much he meant to the Red Sox Nation and how dominant he was on the field. It wasn't just his statistics. It was watching his pitches befuddle hitters. It was his strong attitude that batters took exception to. Pedro owned the park every time he took the mound. One might argue he still owns it: even if his stuff has disappeared, people still sit up and take notice when it's his turn to pitch.