I know the crowd I'm writing for, and I know where 90 percent of my readers (if not more) are going to fall on the issue of whether or not Miguel Cabrera or Mike Trout deserves to be named the Most Valuable Player in the American League. And I know this has been discussed to death, but I do want to raise one little point—just raise it, nothing more or less.

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It would be an exaggeration, but not TOO great of one, to say that everything I’ve learned in life I’ve learned from the Christian Bible, The Book, Babylon 5 and the British sitcom Yes, Minister. In the last of those, cabinet minister Jim Hacker has to deal with the difficulty of balancing the demands of politics with the machinations of the civil servants supposedly serving him (and occasionally, with the notion of actually doing the right thing).

In one episode, the new leader of the fictional country of Buranda is visiting the UK in hopes of purchasing some oil rigs that the government is very keen to sell to them. Hacker has set up a visit between Buranda’s president and the queen as a way to deliver a state visit to some “marginal constituencies” (the equivalent of swing districts) immediately before an election. His brilliant plan seems to backfire, though, after the leader of Buranda gives them an advance copy of the speech he plans to make, where he urges the Scots and Irish to fight British oppression. A panicked Hacker sounds out his chief source of advice, Sir Humphrey Appleby:

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Tonight in New York is the “not” heard round the world: the game Stephen Strasburg would have been pitching if the Nationals hadn’t shut him down ahead of schedule, due to problems “mentally concentrating” that the Nationals blame on the level of media attention to the team’s plans to shut him down.

The Nationals have a strong lead in the NL East, so they are unlikely to miss his performance in one game, or for the rest of the regular season, very much. The larger issue surrounding Strasburg is the impact of losing him for the postseason. When the Nationals instituted their plan for Strasburg at the beginning of the season, it made a lot of sense for a young team with slim hopes of making the playoffs to protect one of their most valuable (and most fragile) players from injury. With the Nationals heavily favored to make the playoffs, though, some Nationals fans are likely to be disappointed if their team’s ace isn’t available for a single game of the postseason.

So, Ken Rosenthal laid down the gauntlet this morning:

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Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
To his great heart none other than a God!
I ask'd thee, "Give me immortality."
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
And tho' they could not end me left me maim'd
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was in ashes.
- “Tithonus,” by Alfred Tennyson

There is an uneasy overlap between sabermetric analysis and forecasting things to come. To be sure, not all prognostication (not even most of it, I would say) comes from sabermetricians, people who would call themselves sabermetricians, or even people who are well versed in the work of sabermetricians. At the same time, the sort of skillset and temperament required to do sabermetrics frequently leads one to the conclusion that predicting baseball is hard and that the sum of what we don’t know about the future often exceeds the sum of what we do know.

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Please, watch this highlight from last night's Marlins-Dodgers game. Don't worry, I'll wait.

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The subject of instant replay is once again in the hearts and minds and throats and fingers of our nation’s baseball commentators, spurred on by the existence of actual news on the subject:

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From the Twitters yesterday morning:

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If you're interested in working in baseball, there may be an opportunity for you with Trackman. Originally founded to use radar to track the flight of golf balls, Trackman has been extending that technology to batted balls, and some major league teams are using Trackman in their major and minor league parks. They're currently looking to hire a baseball developer, with a focus in .Net and C#. If that's a skillset you have, and you're interested (and frankly, I suspect at least a few of you will be), why not take a few minutes and apply?

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