We have a thing about this poem at BP, don't we: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15811

Yeah, I should have left my hunch out of it. Apologies for that one, too. While we're on this Strasburg subject, at base I thought it was just a team with a prize pony trying to protect its investment last year. They could have handled it better, I thought, by not calling attention to it the way they did, but I had no problem with them capping his innings. Above all, I *hope* we're done with it and that, going forward, what we get to pay attention to from here on out is nothing more or less than a great career for a rare talent.

Since this is a three-questions exercise, here are three more questions: 1) You're right, it is poorly worded. If I had written, "Had the Nats had the season they had in 2012 with a full season of Strasburg, no one would have complained," would that have been clearer? 2) Isn't PECOTA is wrong sometimes, too? 3) What book?

This morning, while I was out doing yard work (that's like a baseball season joke), the following occurred to me with regards to the Cardinals' quiet off-season. The Reds exceeded their win expectancy by six games last year, tied for second-best in baseball (with the 68-94 Indians, oddly). The Cardinals, meanwhile, undershot theirs by six games, tied for worst with Tampa Bay. Tighten up those deviations and St. Louis wins the division and we're talking about what great planners they are to have pretty much an entire playoff team under contract and returning for 2013, plus three potential impact prospects.

Sweet.

Whoops, thanks Salvomania. I *thought* that sample-size seemed too big for those numbers. My bad.

That is all true as far as it goes, but I was referring specifically to the two years when the bros. were BoSox teammates. Ramon missed most of 1999 recovering from surgery and made four starts; in 2000, he put up a 6.13 ERA (83 ERA+, 5.24 FIP, 6.70 FRA) over 27 starts and was basically finished as a ballplayer. In those same years, Pedro had two of the 10 greatest seasons in the history of pitching.

Shoulder labrum surgery last year.

Worth noting that Alex Colome's "strong performance in the International League" lasted just three starts until he was shut down for the year with a shoulder strain. He had missed time earlier in the season (while in Double-A) with an abdomen strain, as well. He's got a lot of miles on him for his age and durability is an issue--adding weight to the idea that he might be better suited to the bullpen. Keep a prospect eye on power righty Jeff Ames, too.

This calls to mind Edwar Ramirez's magnificent 19-pitch appearance on 7/20/07 vs. Tampa Bay. Seventeen of the pitches were balls. One of the two strikes was hit for a grand slam by Dioner Navarro. Ramirez walked the other four batters on 17 pitches. http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA200707200.shtml

Actually, he does go into some detail about Gardner's approach. One of the more interesting parts of the book, bc Long acknowledged that, while Gardner's selectivity at the plate was a good thing, he had to be more aggressive in order to succeed in the bigs. Long also thought Gardner could hit for more power and pull, and got him to do that.

I kept having to admonish myself that this was a baseball article and keep the name-checks in check. "She was a winner / Who became a doggie's dinner / She never meant that much to me / Poor Marie."

The 'Mats -- just ran out of room for them. "Unsatisfied"!

No, I just thought the tweet was funny.

Thanks -- And as for this 5-spot: No argument from me, although there are probably dozens of top-fives I wouldn't argue with. All of the above are great songs. One can quibble about the "best" Big Star song for eons, but September Gurls is up there. I lean toward Back of A Car, very slightly. And Daisy Glaze is the most hypnotic. If Todd wasn't so easily bored -- i.e. if he didn't basically abandon an approach as soon as he felt he'd mastered it (which took about two tries per genre) -- I think he could have made two or three albums' worth of great power pop. As it was, he was always onto the next before anyone could catch up with him.

Which at 270+ lbs. is truly remarkable.

Thanks for the correction. I should have double-checked the claim made in the article that was the source of what I wrote.

That's a very good point, and something like this was on my mind as I wrote but I lacked the math acumen to set a more precise methodology. Certainly the presence of Dempster at no. 27 suggests that somewhere around the number you suggest, 31.25, is close to correct. (No. 31, BTW, is Johnny Cueto, no. 32 Anibal Sanchez -- both are players you'd probably reason should get a QO.) One could make the argument that the QO amount should perhaps have been different for position players than for pitchers.

Oh, yes, of course. Thanks for the correction.

I should add that the error invalidates the paragraph that follows. The data suggests, rather, what should have been obvious: that the commonest results are the two closest, 4-2 and 4-3. This strikes me as something akin to nature-abhors-a-vacuum. A subject for further research, even if at the moment it's only cause for the correction of a careless mistake. Onward...

Told you I was bad at math.

Oh, duh, my very large bad. Thank you, pardner.

Luke Scott on line 1 for Turkenhopf.

A. J. Pierzynski was a candidate we bandied about but ultimately went unclaimed.

Thank you very much! I don't know what the problem is at milb.com. Some of this year's tweaks have actually made the site *less* user-friendly.

Regarding athletes on Twitter, I neglected to add that Rhymes is one of the few who does have an interesting presence there, and not only because of his accidental provocation in last year's postseason. In the wee hours of the morning before the game discussed in this article, he tweeted this line from a Bright Eyes song: "The sorrowful midwest... I did my best to keep my head." After the game, again in the small hours--almost exactly 24 hours after the first Bright Eyes tweet--Rhymes tweeted the line again. It was almost as if the agitating events of the game--played in the midwest, of course--had Rhymes revisiting the line with a sort of prescient-in-hindsight reflectiveness.

Ha! Good one. And Lehigh had the best player on the floor that night, C. J. McCollum.

My mistake! I trusted the wrong sources online. Thanks for the correction.

Well, "surgical" isn't really out of place in this context. Thanks for the feedback on the article!

I vote we start calling them "bam-bam plays at first base."

I almost chose Thon, but discovered that he played for nearly a decade past the orbital bone injury and actually had a couple of decent years.

I would have included them, but I'm pretty sure no one actually roots for the Orioles. In all seriousness, I probably should have mentioned them, given the Birds' success so far this year. It's just the kind of early-season spark of hope that gets fans of lowly franchises excited about a possible sea change. Kinda reminds me of the Royals' 2003 season, when they were leading the division for a while--or the Pirates of 2011, for that matter. And given the passionate rage that met my recent Lineup Card comments about Nolan Reimold as a leadoff hitter, I admit that the Orioles do indeed have fans -- especially since the comments, which were knowledgeable, seemed to assume that I was bashing Reimold. I wasn't, but a diehard fan might assume otherwise.

A perfectly sound way of defining these terms, and an example of how slippery they are.

And, in the spirit of naming the wrong guy, it would have been swell had I written "Bradley" instead of "Matt."

Yep, Matthew helped me out, explaining what I meant after I neglected to do so myself. Wieters is indeed not anything like a bust (and so far this year he sports a 1.215 OPS); it's just that it has taken him longer to develop than most people predicted. In any case, I probably should have zeroed in on an older example, such as Kelly Shoppach. As I recall, he was the prospect the Red Sox wouldn't trade for a good long while, as they fended off interest from plenty of other teams. To be fair, injuries have played a large part in muting Shoppach's career. He has had over 400 plate appearances in only one season (with a 128 OPS+ for Cleveland in 2008), and has turned into a Mendoza-line hitter over the last three years. Now back in Boston, he's a reserve catcher at age 31.

Matt Hague -- good one, but he doesn't qualify because he wasn't a free agent. He's one to watch, though. Ditto Mitchell, who was drafted by Oakland in '06. Those are some gaudy numbers, though, for sure.