Tuffy’s Refrigerator Logic

There’s 200 days or so of baseball to come this season and it can be quite intimidating to jump into the deep end of the baseball viewing pool.

To help, Refrigerator Logic is providing a list of reasons to watch every Major League Baseball team for the 2008 season. Anyone that’s read all the team lists should be able to pull up the MLB schedule on any day in early June and find reasons to enjoy any contest on the board that night.

Please join in the comments to add your own reasons. Tell everyone why your team is worth three and a half hours of their lives on any given day. Make us care and we’ll be there with a tasty beverage and an appreciation for what you feel each time your team takes the field.

Don’t Be Negative

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-Albert Einstein

Nate Silver at Baseball Prospectus continues to wrestle with the vaunted player PECOTA cards this winter, trying to get them up in time to keep the nerdy hordes at bay with their ASCII torches on their TI-89 Titaniums. (Full disclosure: it took me forever to get the flicker just right on mine.)

Unfortunately, he’s still working on them. He seems to have run into complications that are keeping him from publishing the cards quite yet. It’s still unknown what might be holding back the statistical goodness.

However, my spies have hacked into Nate Silver’s computing powerhouse and have found the offending PECOTA card preventing Silver from publishing all the cards in good conscience:

Johan Santana: 225.2 IP, 431 K, 17 BB, -0.74 ERA

That’s right; PECOTA predicts the move to the National League for Johan Santana will yield the first negative ERA in Major League Baseball history. Santana will embarrass the likes of the Washinton Nationals so badly that runs will have to be taken off the scoreboard. The cost to National League ballparks could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No pressure, big man. No pressure.
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