Saturday, July 31, 2010

Curveballs for Jobu

Curveballs for Jobu is Off Base Percentage's daily trip around the ballparks.

Today's honorary bat boy is Ken Phelps















Tigers 6, Redsox 5. Jhonny Peralta is OPSing 3.050 with Detroit, making him insanely more valuable than the Jhonny Peralta Cleveland traded. True, he put that stat line up after just one game, but Peralta did hit two home runs in his Tigers' debut. Before putting together today's Jobu, I strolled through a few cbssports.com message boards and one poster said David Ortiz's grand slam in the bottom of the ninth that cut the lead to 1 and sent the tying run to the plate was meaningless. He's right: a guy hitting a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth that brings the tying run to the plate is the definition of meaningless. That's OK, I'm pretty sure that poster was a Cubs fan through September, 2004. Danny Worth: 0-2 in stolen base attempts.

Braves 6, Reds 4 (10)
. Outfielder Brent Clevlen: sent to minors.

Whitesox 6, Athletics 1. Lucas Harrell just wins baseball games. The right-hander allowed an earned run in six innings to win his big league debut and Chicago just keeps on dominating at home (12 straight and 19 of its last 20 at US Cellular). Gordon Beckham (2 hits, 2 RBIs Friday) has had a good July, hitting safely in all but five games this month, and has put 39 points on his batting average. Meanwhile, his OPS is up 100 points to .663 and safely past Balboni territory.

Rockies 17, Cubs 2. A new low for the Chicago Cubs! This is their 11th new low of the season, passing the 2000 Pirates for 23rd-most new lows in a season in the modern era. Colorado had a 5-2 lead and was down to its last strike in the eighth inning when Sean Marshall and Andrew Cashner happened. MTD already handled those two losers in the SOTN, but it's worth mentioning again: the pair allowed 11 runs on 40 pitches. That's a run every 3.6 pitches.

5 comments:

  1. A run every 3.6 pitches is Pickle-esque!

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  2. I find it interesting that all you had was a one line comment on what would be the most important series of the weekend if they were playing pennant race rather than wild card baseball.

    In the pennant race league CIN and ATL are tied for 1st in the East. Just goes to show you what combining divisions can do for you...a strength that shows the superiority of pennant races for long baseball seasons.

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  3. Cliff

    Thanks for stopping by an commenting. And I do agree with you. But we keep Jobu pretty light and full of one-liners or nonsense. I have no problem discussing some nerdy stat based stuff in the comments if you're game though.

    Frank

    We might be stealing pickle-esque from you.

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  4. MTD

    I have 0 problems with one line comments or nerdy stats. Just found it interesting that details on wild card and division races are not that compelling.

    Glad we can agree.

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  5. There are still 8 weeks of baseball so there's plenty of time to cover playoff races. We probably still won't cover them in depth in this segment.

    Am I missing your point though?

    ReplyDelete