Tampa Bay Rays news and links: Who plays baseball like Jackie Robinson?

Shane Tourtellotte did a fun historical exercise, matching the statistical contributions of Jackie Robinson to present day players to find who most closely matches.

I’m going to give you a little Rays spoiler. Lucas Duda, former Ray, is the player in all of baseball who plays least like Robinson.

Links

• In what will continue to be a story for some time yet, the Rays have severed ties on Tuesday with team doctor Michael Reilly, after a woman accused him of sexually abusing her when she was a minor. The latest update from the Tampa Bay Times is that the woman making the accusation issued a statement saying that she stands by her original accusations, but does not wish to comment further. For updates on and discussion of this story, go to the original post.
• There’s new netting in the Trop.
• Andrew Simon took a lighthearted look at what players you’d have to combine to get a player better than Mike Trout. Part of the answer is Kevin Kiermaier’s defense.
• Baseball Prospectus has been doing major updates to their pitch tunneling calculations.
• Zach Crizer, using tunneling as a jumping off point, dug engagingly into the question of “What do you do with this?” or more basically, “How does pitching work?”
• Lars Anderson continues to discover Australia.
• I think this is an absolutely awful idea, regarding distributing MLBAM money based on prior season winning percentage, and that the Premier League is not where anyone should look for parity. But it is an idea.