#20 A spreadsheet for Pete's sake

Also: The Pope, and a Q&A coming up tonight

I don’t get out to the ballpark as much as I would like. Hey, it’s Hannah, and the baby complicates these things a little. But here’s a good reason to get out there for the media availabilities when I can: I got to witness Cubs manager Craig Counsell — baseball’s foremost midwesterner and a self-described Catholic — see a picture of the New Pope rooting for the White Sox in the 2005 World Series.

Counsell’s pregame scrum on Friday was a little light after getting through the Cade Horton call-up questions and so, naturally, talk turned to Pope Leo XIV, née Robert Francis Prevost, and his recently revealed White Sox fandom. The part where someone pulled up the photo from the World Series did not get caught on camera — but much of it did!

So, for your enjoyment and edification, here is Counsell fielding several pope questions (he invited them!) starting with me asking him: Where were you when you found out the pope is a White Sox fan, and not a Cubs fan?

If you don’t want to watch the video, he actually sidesteps the question to, instead, say this about the pope’s Chicago sports priorities: “I think the pope should be focusing on the Bulls, because they have the lottery, the first pick in the lottery, and getting Cooper Flagg.”

Joel Sherman, of the New York Post asks if it has shaken Counsell’s faith at all to know the pope is a White Sox fan. Important context: Counsell attended University of Notre Dame.

Again, Counsell deflects (suspicious? perhaps!). “The funniest thing I saw on that actually, is that he went to Villanova, and so that means that maybe Notre Dame did not let him in the university, and that we did not let the future pope into the university.”

Well hey, as you can hear me try to joke in the video, 24 teams passed on Mike Trout in the draft.

Designing baseball stat pages in 2025

It used to be the newspaper box score. Then it was the online box score. Then it was Baseball-Reference. Now there are leaderboards and stats everywhere. How, with an abundance of information, do you distill baseball’s many numbers into its best form for internet perusal?

Baseball Prospectus just went through the process of answering that question, with new leaderboards and new player pages. We thought it would be a great time to talk through the considerations that go into some of the fundamental experiences of online baseball fandom. BP managing editor Patrick Dubuque will be joining us in The Bandwagon chat tonight, Monday, at 7 p.m. ET to talk through those questions.

Submit a question and stop by tonight to join the chat live!

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What is the name of the game? A frivolous investigation

by Zach Crizer

This past weekend, the Cubs visited the Mets in a matchup of the NL’s best outside the West. At the center of both teams’ hot starts? Dudes named Pete. Returning Mets hero Pete Alonso is off to the best start of his career, while the Cubs have benefitted from the spark of Pete Crow-Armstrong, a one-time Mets first-round pick dealt to Chicago for Javy Baez.

I wrote about the nitty-gritty details of Crow-Armstrong’s action-packed (and tenuous) breakout for Opta Analyst on Friday, but I couldn’t stop wondering about something else.

Heading into Sunday’s action, the Petes ranked fifth and eighth in WAR at FanGraphs, and I wanted to know how weird it is for two of the best players in baseball to be named Pete, or to have the same name at all.

The Pete part seems odd on its face. With all due respect to the Alonso and Crow-Armstrong families, Peter is a classic name in decline. Per the Social Security Administration’s baby name data, it slipped from the 39th-most popular boys name in America in the 1950s to 89th in the ‘90s (when Alonso was born) and 158th in the 2000s (when Crow-Armstrong was born) — behind Dalton, Gage and multiple spellings of Caden.

The baseball part required some more work to discern what would constitute a newsworthy same-name duo. So, below the jump, a very silly investigation into a new thing to root for if you’re named Pete, know someone who is, or just want to see fun new players overshadow the discourse about that other baseball Pete.