Sarcastic

What an overplayed cliche :roll: I mean... I beat you to it :) Crud, I missed that. Good job Theriot, should have taken 3rd, though.

Obligatory comment: Izturis driving in more runs with his glove.

He was shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head. It looked like he might have just been saying it got away from him, a pretty standard response.

The way he is pitching, that would be a damned waste of a start. I want him to throw 7-8 shutout innings.

Lee's suspension won't start right away, correct? So we won't necessarily have to see a lineup without Lee or Aram for a week?

Lee, goddamned it, we need you with Aramis out, your the best hitter on the team. He needs to keep a clear head when this kind of thing happens. Also, Young threw some punches, and he had better be tossed, there is no excuse not to.

That and the ump is calling pitches a little bit off the corners on both sides of the plate.

He would have been lucky to foul it off.

Why did he flip his bat like that on a shallow pop fly?

Followed by a retaliatory plunking and an early ejection of Zambrano.

I saw that also. How could that be? Well, Vegas thinks the Cubs are likely to win the series because they have Z as a -135 favorite today. Why that is, I have no idea.

You have found here 3 examples of players who have been bad or good over their careers in terms of "clutch" hitting. Their numbers with runners on aren't exactly consistent. You can't really predict their numbers next year with runners on, just that those numbers will be better (or worse) than the batter's numbers with the bases empty. But yes, Casey has been bad in clutch situations for several years in a row, and the others have been good for several years in a row. Is it possible that a rare few hitters really are better or worse in these ABs? Maybe. But this is anecdotal evidence, and really doesn't prove that clutch hitting is a major factor in baseball, something that affects many players. It definitely proves nothing about Alfonso, though I know that wasn't what you were directly aiming for.

Where are these sudden bursts of votes coming from after midnight?

It'll be a struggle to get up early enough to see the beginning, though. Have to consider the tradeoffs.

No, I should congratulate you. You're trying to awake a sleeping giant (me). I know what I'm talking about. Don't mistake me for an ESPN telecaster. Everyone here knows that you know what you are talking about. No need to get in the face of a new poster for not respecting your might. Can we talk about Soriano, here? Alright, then, but no punching below the belt. :lol:

No, I should congratulate you. You're trying to awake a sleeping giant (me). I know what I'm talking about. Don't mistake me for an ESPN telecaster. Everyone here knows that you know what you are talking about. No need to get in the face of a new poster for not respecting your might. Can we talk about Soriano, here?

I'd bet you could find it at baseball-reference.com.

The "other factors" have never been reasonably substantiated to my satisfaction. The answer may sometimes be no, it doesn't predict the future, but there are players that it more often does, like Casey Blake. To a lesser degree this applies to Soriano. Soriano has been playing too long to reasonably expect this to change. I don't know many hitters who fit this situation, but when there's many years of this kind of situational hitting happening, I think it doesn't make sense to ignore it. Let's look at a year to year breakdown of his numbers with runners on base: 2002: .328/.353/.543/.896 2003: .263/.320/.444/.764 2004: .300/.345/.488/.833 2005: .240/.273/.469/.742 2006: .274/.396/.566/.962 2007: .250/.344/.363/.707 As we can see, his numbers jump around quite a bit from year to year, and his overall numbers don't seem to be especially predictive of performance with runners on base. His numbers with runners on do seem, unsurprisingly, to be somewhat related to how well he batted overall in each particular year. Below average career numbers with runners on do not convince me that he isn't capable of handling a spot in the middle of the order. I think his career numbers may be skewed slightly towards the negative by the fact that in his best years, he typically had his fewest ABs with runners on (in 2006, for example, because he was leading off). The problem with the Soriano-isn't-clutch theory is that it reverses the normal causal relationships of baseball, saying that his best years came because he had fewer ABs with runners on. That doesn't hold for his career year in 2006, though, since his OPS with runners on was better than his OPS for the whole season. The argument would make sense if his runners on base numbers were consistently poor, but they sure don't look consistent to me.

A bad performance wouldn't suprise me after 130 pitches last time out Actually, I'm only posting that for reverse jinx. I posted it the last two games, and the pitchers proved me wrong, so I hope your guess is wrong, too. If you post that something is a reverse jinx, doesn't that reverse the reverse and make it a jinx?

That makes 31 runs that the Cardinals have allowed in the last two games. Ouch.

You may want to chose an avatar that doesn't slow down some of the posters' browsing here. The poster with that particular .gif has already been told to remove it by some people with that problem.

No, the argument would be that the differences in player's stats with RISP, close and late, etc., are generally more influenced by other factors, and therefore not predictive from year to year. Clearly some players have batted better in "clutch" situations than others. The question is, is that predictive of their future performance in such cases? Most of the time, the answer is no.

While we do face some strong pitchers, we also face some weak and average pitchers. Let's also not forget that we will be facing some weak hitting teams. Teams with rankings in OPS in their respective leagues: Padres 14/16 Rangers 9/14 White Sox 14/14 Rockies 8/16 Brewers 2/16 Nationals 16/16 Pirates 15/16 We face one team that has hit well, two teams that have been near average in their leagues, and four of the absolute worst hitting teams in major league baseball. More than the pitching matchups, it is the hitting matchups that benefit us. If the Cubs get a few breaks (we all know how likely this is) they could put together a little run before the All-Star break.

The syllable count of your haiku is way off.

What's his pitch count?