In the week leading up to Opening Day, we're asking and answering three questions about each team in a five-part series ordered by descending Playoff Pct from the Playoff Odds Report. Today, we continue with a look at the group of six teams with the worst odds of winning at least a Wild Card. As a reminder, you can find links to our preview podcasts for each team here.

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He finally signed. Kyle Lohse finally signed with someone, and I hope we all learned something in the process. No, not that his last name is not spelled L-O-S-H-E. There has to be a bigger moral to all of this, right? At the end of every long saga, there's a scene where the characters sit down together and rehash all that has happened, take stock of it, and generate some pithy phrase that encapsulates the whole story.

Baseball games come with built-in subtitles. Dwight Gooden vs. Roger Clemens in the 1986 World Series. Bob Gibson vs. Denny McClain in the 1968 World Series. Kyle Lohse vs. Ross Detwiler in Game 4 of the NLDS last year. It's one thing to see a game between the Yankees and Tigers, but it's an entirely different game if CC Sabathia is pitching against Justin Verlander. And no one ever subtitles the game A-Rod vs. Miguel Cabrera.

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Brandon McCarthy thinks that Brandon Inge is worth 10 wins or so to a team behind closed doors. Jonny Gomes, too. Participating in a player panel at the SABR Analytics Conference earlier this month, McCarthy posited that if Inge and Gomes had been removed from the 2012 Oakland A's, they might have fallen from a 94-win team to a 70-win team, purely by virtue of being deprived of the effect the two players had in the clubhouse. According to WARP, Gomes was worth 2.2 wins last year, while Inge was worth 0.6. So, assuming that if neither had been on the team, they would have been replaced by... well, replacement level players, that means that Inge and Gomes somehow combined for 21.2 wins just by being good guys in the clubhouse.

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It's the time of year when managers start thinking about games that will actually count. Positional battles are heating up, because decisions need to be made. Opening Day starters are being named. Variations in lineups are being considered, for facing righties, lefties, and Pat Venditte. Your favorite team has spent the spring trying to decide between two players, both of whom are relative unknowns. Due to the 50/50/90 rule (when you have a 50/50 chance of getting something right by chance, you will get it wrong 90 percent of the time), they will pick the wrong utility infielder and the other guy will become a decent starter for some other team.

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Well, this year's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has come and gone, and I wasn't able to attend. Worse, I couldn't go to the SABR Analytics Conference either. Of course, I've followed along as best as I could, but there's no substitute for actually being in the room.

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In the pages of yesterday’s Boston Globe, veteran sports reporter Bob Ryan declared war on WAR. We get that one a lot. But the unusual part of this particular declaration was that it was based on the belief that the “RP” in WARP—for “replacement player”—was a "judgment call" rather than the product of a mathematical formula. Ryan argued that the "replacement level" comparison, as currently constituted, is just a matter of opinion, and therefore arbitrary and unreliable. It's not often that we’re told that we’re not using enough math.

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My wife and I have been married for seven and a half years. We dated for four years before that. There are days when it's eerie how in sync we are. We've gotten to the point where someone will say something and we’ll both look up and smile knowingly at each other because we’re both aware that the other's mind just went to the same obscure song lyric from 15 years ago. Yeah, I think we have some chemistry going.

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A couple of weeks ago, I took on the "Verducci Effect". Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated has hypothesized that a pitcher who is under 25 years old and who had an increase in his workload of 30 innings or more in the previous season is at greater risk for injury or for a steep decline in performance. This is a great hypothesis, but for the fact that it is not actually true.

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This one is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, himself a biochemist. I once tried explaining baseball and sabermetrics to him (he was from Russia). He thought it was nice that I had such an interesting hobby. He will be missed.

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Last week, Sports Illustrated writer and Jason Parks man-crush Tom Verducci put out his annual column warning about a specific type of player: A young pitcher (25 or younger) who saw a significant increase in his workload in the previous season over the season before that (defined as an increase of at least 30 innings, including postseason and minor-league work). Verducci claims that this sort of pitcher is in danger of either a significant injury and/or a performance decline in 2013 because his 2012 was much busier than his 2011. It's a proposition that's become known as the Verducci Effect.

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