Meaningless stats
Did you know Baseball-Reference is now updating every night? The greatest site of all time just got even better. You can forget hunting through ESPN or Yahoo for splits. Now you can just stroll over to the greatness that is B-R and get a guys current line right next to his career statistics.
Fun things learned while strolling through B-R this morning:
Turbo is tied with Dioner Navarro and Adam Kennedy for the most double plays grounded into so far. Shocking.
Felix Hernanez’s ERA+ is “infinity”.
The Mariners averaged 31,369 fans per game for the first three games of the year. The Royals averaged 31,803 fans per game. The M’s attendance per game is the lowest of any AL team during the first series.
The average age of the Mariners batter is 30.1 years old, and the average age of the pitchers is 29.0.
Travis Hafner has drawn four walks in two games. The Mariners offense has drawn four walks in three games.
Shea Hillenbrand has been caught stealing twice. Does he not know that he’s Shea Hillenbrand?
Yes! I wrote that up in CGB: 60-something in Anaheim is not at all the same as using something a little tacky in the World Series in Detroit, where it’s cold and nasty.
You know, I didn’t think the buzzsaw of hype could spin any faster, but after Kaibutsu’s* performance today the Dice-K dynamo may start altering the earth’s magnetic field in the Boston area. Does everybody realize the frenzied maelstorm the M’s are walking into for Matsusaka’s home debut on the 11th? And if that wasn’t enough, his first pitch will be to Ichiro. Red Sox Nation. The nation of Japan. And, bobbing along like a cork in a hurricane, the good ship Mariner. At least we get to watch on TV. This is going to be nuts.
(And I hope the M’s light him up like a bag of reservation fireworks)
* “Monster” — see here (and 333 pitches in one 90 minute bullpen session? Really? Yikes.)
Any Red Sox game within 2000 miles of Boston will attract 20,000 Red Sox fans. Roughly half of them will have travelled from Boston.
The reason, as the other poster enquired, is that it is very difficult and expensive to attend a Red Sox games. I can see it being cheaper to fly to Seatte to watch the game, especially this year.
Steve T:
Yeah, it would change baseball’s landscape/demographic numbers a bit if the Cuban players could be signed. However, Chavez has been making noises about nationalizing Venezuelan baseball, as the players are often signed for dirt-cheap. If so, that’d really piss off MLS who has established a LOT of academies there. And would change that demographic landscape yet again.
Don’t these people have jobs? LOL.
Their job is to drink until their livers give out.
Before 2004, they were romantic, snakebit, lovable drunks. After 2004, they’re just drunks.
Give me Yankees fans any day over Bosox fans. Yeah, Yanks fans are arrogant and full of themselves, but they’re hardcore fans and decent people.
Last year this drunk Yankees fan gets up and starts swearing at the ump at the top of his lungs in his NY accent. Then he looks down, sees my two year old, and apologizes profusely for using profanity in front of her. (I hadn’t said a thing, he just saw her there.) Then he offers to buy me a beer. We ended up talking for about an hour about baseball.
Meanwhile, every time I go to an M’s-Bosox game it’s the same smell of stale beer and vomit flowing from the most arrogant, priggish drunks on the planet. Yeah, I know it’s the way it used to be (having grown up in Texas League parks), but even then, the drunks generally weren’t all this asinine, or combative. And they’re always really young, like they’re in Seattle on Daddy’s trust fund.
Damn, I want their jobs 😛
Wait, no I don’t! I value my internal organs and my intelligence.