Thursday, August 30, 2007 |
Pickoff Moves, Lunchtime Edition
That Other Sweep: Dodgers 10, Nationals 9
I have managed to keep quiet through this entire series against the Nats on the general ground that I'm not really that certain it proves a whole lot, though it does fall neatly in line with the axiom that good teams have to beat the bad ones. Unfortunately, the entire series conflicted with the Angels run, and so I missed all but Shea Hillenbrand's shocking and heroic sac fly, breaking up four straight zero frames for both sides since Matt Kemp's seventh inning solo homer. But Hillenbrand hitting a homer? Mmph. For all but one of the team's RBIs to come from the 6-7-8 part of the lineup is odd, to say the least.As for Penny... no comment.
And Speaking Of Sweeps...: Padres 3, Diamondbacks 1
Three straight wins mean the Pad people get the chance for the sweep tonight at the place where the pets go. Maddux was characteristically effective, getting seven innings out of 88 pitches.With all those losses and the Dodgers' sweep, suddenly the NL West is back to being a horse race, with the boys in blue only 3.5 games back of division leading San Diego, ahead of the Snakes by percentage points. Incidentally, I stumbled across an interesting wrinkle on division standings and elimination numbers this weekend at Wikipedia, wherein the section on "Subtlety" comes up with this bit:
Sometimes a team can appear to have a mathematical chance to win even though they have actually been eliminated already, due to scheduling. In this major league baseball scenario, there are three games remaining in the season. Teams "A", "B" and "C" are assumed to be eligible only for the division championship; another team with a better record in another division has already clinched the one available "wild card" spot:
Team Wins Losses "A" 97 62 "B" 97 62 "C" 95 64 If Team "C" were to win all three remaining games, it would finish at 98-64, and if both Teams "A" and "B" were to lose their three remaining games, they would finish at 97-65, which would make Team "C" the division winner. However if Teams "A" and "B" are playing against each other in the final weekend (in a 3 or 4 game series), one of them will necessarily have to win at least two games and thereby clinch the division title with a record of either 100-62 or 99-63. The more direct consequence of this situation is that it is also not possible for Teams "A" and "B" to finish in a tie with each other.
Drew, Hoo, Hoo
Huh. J.D. Drew, a platoon player for $14M/year. I was right, I was right, I was right, etc. (Gotta make up for all those times I've been wrong.)Labels: diamondbacks, dodgers, nationals, padres, recaps
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