ashbury

Also the moon has been quite a bit fuller this year.

It's been a wet spring. Royce Lewis will hit better once conditions dry out a bit.

You're too young to remember him, aren't you?

Chicken dinner. Sat on the grill too long. Still edible.

I was thinking The Trevor Maalox Experience.

A reference to a prior post.

You had a prop bet with a sports book somewhere, that the Twins would never trail after 7 at home? Or just against the Mariners? Hopefully you were offered such long odds that you didn't suffer a very large outlay of cash. I'd hate for you to lose your house because of this game.

Dis-concurs: http://sites.psu.edu/fortherecord/wp-content/uploads/sites/5752/2013/10/animalhouse-620x331.jpg

TWINS HAVE GONE ICE COLD, WITH NO WIN TODAY, I CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE LAST TIME THEY WON - SOMETIME IN 2017 MAYBE?

I try.

Moderator's note: One person brings up prayer, another immediately shoots down the thought. The tangent stops here.

I've run across pet owners who feel that way too.

Probably he's had to develop a thicker skin than most of us.

How about OPS-against, though?

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They would look at you funny and ask you why you didn't choose Fernando.

It's the same as when Ted Williams was playing. Opponents would mutter, "it's like he was sent down, from a higher league." I thought maybe they would do like with kids (niño, niña) and change the a to an o. But I just checked Google Translate for a different species, and ended up with "empty cow" as my translation back to English.

Louisville Slugger did make him a braille baseball bat. That could make the difference. Stevie would probably tell you himself that he could also do some damage as an umpire.

Same here. In fact, I'm probably an even worse pitcher than you.

Matt Magill has a very scrunched down Wins Above Replacement.

Among the many possible Vulgaris replies to that post, this was among the milder I could have expected.

Cognitive dissonance is difficult to capture with a lens. This representation may give an idea.

I dated a girl named Christine Stewart. The cognitive dissonance of watching a Tigers team is disorienting.

I usually like advanced stats and can find a use for most, but IMO FIP (the X variety or otherwise) does not achieve its aim. There is nothing in FIP that, for example, depends on whether Buxton or Cave is in CF. Simply put, it doesn't eliminate defense, it eliminates from consideration the part of the game that makes it baseball and substitutes average performance in its place. Much simpler for me is to look at OPS-against. League-wide, you can draw a rough comparison of OPS to the ERA that you could usually expect. Pineda for instance has an OPS-against of .809, and over the years that has worked out to an ERA somewhere a little north of 5.00. Not good, which we already know. Gibson's OPS is .750, and ordinarily that should result in an ERA like 4.35. Perez, .700, for an ERA equivalent around 3.75. Berrios, .666, which I'd expect an ERA around 3.20 or so. Odorizzi? Batters have a BA against him of .181 coming into this game, built on an unusually low BABIP of .243. The OPS is a minuscule .511, so low that I'm not even confident what ERA it translates to on a league-wide basis, but let's safely say it would be under 2.00. Which is where he is. Really, all our starters are giving up runs about in line with the underlying hitting stats against them. xFIP says that a certain percentage of flyballs go out, and Odorizzi hasn't given up his fair share so xFIP reflects skepticism. BABIP usually doesn't stay as low as .243, so there is another reason to expect more hits to fall in. But he's leading the league in ERA right now. Simple "regression to mean" logic would point toward not keeping up the pace for the rest of the season. xFIP doesn't win any points from me for merely predicting that. Meanwhile Jake has logged another very good 6 innings today. We keep expecting regression, but so far, he just keeps chugging along.