Tristan Cockcroft, ESPN.com

Though he has been accused by his readers on many occasions of being a “$&#@* Yankee hater,” Tristan H. Cockcroft is, indeed, a Yankees fan.

 

Such things happen when you grow up nine miles away from Yankee Stadium. The lure of the green grass, the bleacher creatures and the numerous Tim Leary stinkers he attended in 1991 … all of them proved too much to resist.

 

So, too, did the pastime of analyzing baseball statistics. Since childhood, in some form or another, Tristan has been crunching numbers, from board- and computer-game simulations to fantasy baseball. Earl Weaver Baseball was a particular obsession in the late 1980s; where else could one simulate seasons with righty/lefty splits?

 

Tristan joined ESPN.com in the fall of 2004, and since that time has been a FSWA Baseball Writer of the Year finalist in both 2007 and 2008. (Insert cruel “always a bridesmaid” joke here.) But he was the champion of USA Today Sports Weekly’s League of Alternative Baseball Reality (LABR) in both his rookie season of 2002 and most recently in 2008.

 

His aim: To bring home a Tout Wars championship in 2009. Tristan is honored to be returning to Tout after a four-year absence, having previously competed in the National League in both 2001 (his first-ever national experts competition) and 2005.