So, who thought that Sean Burroughs would hit his first homer before drawing his first walk in the big leagues? Yeah, me neither.
The Padres need Wiki Gonzalez back. Or Ben Davis. Tom Lampkin and Javier Cardona are 2-for-44 on the year.
Tag Bozied saw his first action at third base last night at Bakersfield. No errors.
Anyone notice Matt Clement’s second straight 12-strikeout game for the Cubs yesterday? He’s now fanned 30 batters in just over 19 innings. Oh, and he’s issued only three walks. Nice to see him finally harnessing his stuff. I’m sure glad the Padres have Mark Kotsay to show for him, and not Julian Tavarez.
Clearing the ol’ desk…
Check out some coverage of the recent Mark Prior/Jake Peavy matchup (courtesy of al.com):
Ah, youth. Here’s a guy petitioning to get the MLB Amateur Draft televised. Don’t get me wrong, this is a noble cause, and it’d be great if something came of it. But let’s face it, most folks just don’t give a damn.
The other day I received the following e-mail from a reader:
This is one of those real off beat questions, but I figured you ought to know.
The other day I was out at the ol’ ball park and some of the fans in the stands were playing a game called mound ball. What is mound ball? It’s got something to do with where the ball ends up after an inning. Thanks.
God bless the Internet. If you need to know something and you look long enough, eventually you’ll find it. Here’s what I uncovered:
What made the afternon interesting was we played “mound ball.” Here is how we played: everybody put in a buck; and everybody drew a number to determine what order we would follow; then at the end of the inning if the person returning the ball to the pitcher mound put the ball on the mound (defined by being on the dirt and not touching any grass) the person who was “up”
would win the pot; if not then it would role to the next guy. After that every body would put in another buck and it would continue to roll. Well we got down to the 8th inning and I won! Makes a slow game a lot more interesting.
For the curious among you, and in the interest of giving credit where it’s due, this comes from Ideas, etc., Kevin Holtsberry’s entertaining blog.
Shifting gears yet again, I’m playing around with some graphical representations of the minor-league pitching logs I’m keeping this year. Have a look.
- Style 1 — Simple lines with trends. Advantage here is that it’s clean and simple; disadvantage is that if two sets of values happen to be identical, one of them essentially disappears.
- Style 2 — Three-dimensional with data tables. Main advantage is that all values are easily distinguishable. Main drawback is that the perspective can be a bit disorienting.
- Style 3 — Bar graphs with trends. Advantage is that each individual value is easily discernable; disadvantage is that, well, it’s kinda ugly.
Whaddya think? Just for reference, the three values charted are Shandler’s PQS (scale of 0-5, 5 being best), and BBBA’s Qmax stuff (S) and control (C) axes (scale of 1-7, 1 being best). Let me know what works for you, or if you think I’m clinically insane for even doing this.
It’s a beautiful day today, so I think I’m gonna go catch the SDSU/BYU game. Vance Law is the BYU coach. I think I had him on one of my Roto teams back in the mid-80s…
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