Bryan is a regular contributor to Baseball Prospectus, one of the internet's most valued and respectable baseball writing outlets. In addition to leading the site's Transaction Analysis coverage, Bryan writes a column for the site and co-hosts BP's twice-weekly podcast.
You can visit Baseball Prospectus to read all of Bryan's recent work–and purchase a subscription there as well–but you can read some of Bryan's favorite / best articles through the links below.
"One of the lone players to hit lists like this before the advent of free agency, Bobo [Newsom] was traded five times, Rule 5 drafted twice, and purchased by teams five more times. Incredibly, Bobo didn’t even pitch in the majors for five seasons between the start and end of his career, which ran from 1929 to 1953. During that time he was a five-time All-Star and appeared on MVP ballots in six seasons, but never stuck with an MLB team for more than three seasons in a row."
"That $13 million that the Mets brought back will probably go into the pockets of the Wilpons’ creditors—it sounds like that money is not earmarked for a future season and reports are that the team’s payroll was higher than desired as the team “went for it” in 2017—and the relievers are as much of a cliffhanger as the last two minutes of an episode of Lost."
"By casting an analytical eye on what goes into player development, new avenues of success could open up. Finally cracking just a piece of the player development code—can we find a systematic way to improve player skills across a significant sample?—could be a very big thing, especially for the first team to find a way to make it work."
"In essence, the taxonomy breaks down the different types of learning that take place into three major domains: Cognitive, Psychomotor, and Affective. By breaking the types of learning into domains such as these—as well as their associated sub-domains—we can create objectives, learning events, and evaluations that actually target specific skills and ensure that the desired learning/training/improvement takes place."
"Perhaps [Trevor] Cahill is the linchpin to a bold strategy that could do just that: using a one- or two-inning relief pitcher to begin a game before turning it over to the 'starter.' For years, I’ve advocated for a team (or teams) to give this a try, dubbing the relief-pitcher-in-the-beginning-of-the-game role the 'opener,' a bookend to the end-of-game closer."
"McEwing Score–McE for short–is a representation of a player’s positional flexibility over the course of a regular season, turned into a number between 20 and 101. Named after fondly-remembered multi-positionalist (and current White Sox third base coach) Joe McEwing, McE is a simple count-and-add metric. It’s fun, but not all that deep, rather like a kiddie pool or a Reel Big Fish album."