Ephemera...

My wife is having a slow day at work, so she's come up with a couple of the following...well, sports oddities and/or random bits of trivia...

The following was ganked from Wikipedia...

Kurt Russell is an FAA licensed private pilot holding single/multi-engine and instrument ratings. He is a New England Patriots football fan, attending Super Bowl XLII and sitting in a skybox with Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots team.

I suppose this means we can forgive him Tango & Cash for this.

Coach abuse

The official scoring was a 9-0 loss for Kawamoto Technical High School in Japan, but reality was far different. According to this Reuters report, the Kawamoto coach threw in the towel with one out in the bottom of the second inning with only one out while trailing 66-0.

You read that right. 66-0.

He was worried about the health of his pitcher who had already thrown roughly 250 pitches. His statement - "At that pace the pitcher would have thrown around 500 pitches in four innings. ..There was a danger he could get injured."

Nice to see he was so concerned.

Two things to consider here...

One - why didn't the coach bring in a reliever...particularly if he was so concerned.

Two - the kid gave up 26 runs in the first. In the second he gave up 40, and got only one out. He thinks if he left this kid in that he would only have thrown 500 pitches? Was he relying on the opponents tiring out? Assuming for 250 in only an inning and a third, the kid was actually on a pace to throw 940 pitches over five innings.

And for anyone wondering - that's an ERA of 446.62.

The return of my obscure statistic...

Through the first one-tenth of the Red Sox 2008 season, David "Big Papi" Ortiz has been a virtual black hole in the line-up. He has barely hit, and when he has there has been little to no power.

Last year as Julio Lugo had a season that was a complete statistical anomaly, scoring and driving in a fair number of runs in spite of struggling at the plate through most of the season, I chose to look at batter production from a different angle. My thought, presented in a blog post at the end of last June, went as follows...

In light of Baseball's predilection towards the mathematic, production is gaged often in arcane ways - Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched (WHIP), On Base Percentage combined with Slugging Percentage (OPS).

I present another way. Something a little less arcane, and maybe a little more accurate in regards to a player's production - Runs Scored and Runs Batted In Per Game, or as I call it; RSBIG. Yes, it does cause for a "production overlap," but it also gives a sense of how much of the scoring the player has been involved in.

While I don't think it's going to reflect well on Big Papi through the end of the Yankees series like it did for Lugo last year, I find it a curious stat and it tells me who manages to cross the plate, or help others cross the plate the most.

All players below have played a minimum of ten games...

1. JD Drew - 1.85
2. M. Ramirez - 1.82
3. K. Youkilis - 1.56
4. S. Casey - 1.00
5. J. Ellsbury - 0.93
6. D. Pedroia - 0.76
7. D. Ortiz - 0.75
8. J. Varitek - 0.63
9. C. Crisp - 0.54
10. J. Lugo - 0.44

Take what you will from this. I just feel it's an interesting way to look at offensive production.

Land of the Rising Sun

It is a great public relations gimmick.

Send at least one of the league's premier teams from the previous season overseas, or to another country on the same continent to help cultivate the game in a country that's already baseball crazy.

It will be the fifth time since 1999 that Major League Baseball will start its season on foreign soil. In 1999 it was the the 1998 pennant winning Padres taking on the Rockies in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2000 the 1999 NL wild-card Mets, winners of 97 games, played the bottom of the NL Central barrel Cubs in Tokyo. Four years later, the capital of Nippon hosted the AL Champion Yankees against the bottom feeding Devil Rays. In 2001 it was the bottom scrubbing Rangers playing a Blue Jays team that missed the AL East title by a mere four and a half games.

This season it's the World Champion Red Sox opening against an Athletics squad that finished only a game out of last place in the AL West and 20 wins behind the Red Sox. Not exactly a marquee match-up.

But this is less about the match-up than about the impact of opening in a different country.

What does it really mean? Is it difficult for the team's involved to recover from the requisite travel? Or is the impact dependent on the team make-up, the manager, and any number of other factors? The numbers are less than telling.

The Yankees in 2004 got off to a horrible start, struggling in April and May, but recovered to win 101 games.

On the other hand are the 1999 Padres, just a season earlier with 98 wins and an appearance in the World Series, dropped to fourth place and 74 wins when starting the season in Mexico. Their opponents, the Rockies dropped from 77 to 72 wins.

In 2000 the Cubs slipped by two games from 67 to 65 wins, while the Mets still qualified for the wild card with 94 wins, down from their 1999 total of 97 after taking their first at-bats of the season in Tokyo. That same year the Rangers and Blue Jays won 71 and 83 games respectively. The following season, kicking off the season in (I know, technically American soil) Puerto Rico, those Rangers and Jays finished 2001 with 73 and 80 games respectively. An increase for the Rangers, but a drop-off for the Jays.

In 2004 the Yankees matched their previous season's win total, while the Rays increased their win total from 63 to 70 after starting it all in Tokyo.

Eight teams, a variety of results. Nothing telling. One team broke even. Two teams increased their win total by an average of 4.5 games, and five teams slipped a combined total of 37 games. Realistically, the Padres skew that number with a 24 game drop-off. Sixty-two-and-a-half percent of the teams experienced a drop in performance reflected in their win-loss record. The average drop, not including the Padres, is 3.25 games per team.

Assuming this is actually indicative of this season's performance, there's a 62.5 percent chance that the Sox will drop to 93 wins from last season's 96-win showing. Last year that would have put the team a game behind the Yankees in the final standings, and given the Red Sox the wild card.

What any statistician will tell you is that eight teams, eight results in over a century's worth of seasons is not a sampling that is indicative of anything.