A friend of mine’s — co-worker’s — friend’s — son is Micah Owings. This was a shocking revelation to me. I’m only 4 degrees of separation from THE Micah Owings who made his big-league debut yesterday. More importantly, he picked up the win, throwing 5 innings of 1 hit ball while striking out 6 and walking 3. That’s a pretty good start for the rookie who pitched against the Nationals; possibly the worst team in recent history.

It’s only his first start, but his control was definitely off since he hit 2 batters, and threw 1 wild pitch. The 3 walks weren’t so wonderful either. He hasn’t exactly been a control master in the minors either, walking 34 batters in 88 innings (BB/9 of 3.60) in AAA. It’ll be interesting to see how he pitches next time against Cincinnati.

– The great Albert Pujols has just 1 hit in 13 at-bats this season. He’s still walking a healthy 19% of the time, so there’s still 43 Major League regulars who have a worse OBP than he does at this point in the season. Don’t fret Cardinals fans, Pujols went 1-13 between July 4th and July 7th just last season. After that, he went on an 11 game hitting streak where he went 20-46 with 4 home runs. If anyone in any of my fantasy leagues would like to jump ship on Pujols at this time, please let me know.

– Speaking of Pujols, Miguel Cabrera (or as I call him: Pujols-lite) has been on an absolute tear to start the season. He already has 6.98 Batting Runs Above Average (BRAA) which just happens to be tops in the majors by more than half-a-run. He’s on pace to have 282 BRAA, which I’m sure would easily be the best season ever. At this rate, I’ll have to start calling Pujols, Cabera-lite.

– The other day in Daisuke Matsuzaka major league debut, he struck out 10 in 7 innings of work. He also gave up 6 hits, 1 solo-shot and only walked 1. This is just the obligatory mention, since you can read about this nearly anywhere else.

– Oliver Perez struck out 6 in 7 innings against the Braves. More importantly, he walked zero. This is definitely a guy to keep an extremely close eye on. He was lights out in 2004 so there’s no question that he has the ability to be a dominant pitcher, the only question is can he do it consistently. He’s off to an excellent start following his solid spring. Between Perez and John Maine, there could potentially be much less doom and gloom surrounding the Mets rotation.

– After being banished to the minors last season in favor of Brandon Watson, Ryan Church is showing why he should have always been on the Nationals roster. He’s batting just under .300 with 2 home runs and an OPS of 1.224. He’s always been an intriguing player and should continue to be one of the bright spots in the Nationals offense.

– Finally, in the land of Win Probability, B.J. Ryan blew his first save of the season giving the Devil Rays a fairly improbable comeback for the second time this year. Who had the winning hit? None other than B.J. Upton. The Devil Rays now find themselves in first place.

The Nationals just had a great comeback against the Marlins this afternoon. The final game graph (unofficially) looks like this:

The Marlins newly acquired Jorge Julio pretty much blew the entire game for them with a WPA of -.903 wins. The Nationals low point in the game was in the bottom of the 6th with 2 outs when they had a mere 3.7% chance of winning the game.

But let’s draw our attention to one very specific play at the end of the game: the sacrifice bunt when the score was 6-5 in the bottom of the 9th. Before the sacrifice bunt there was a runner on first with no outs. The Nationals at the time had a 34.4% chance of winning. Manny Acta, the Nationals new manager, had Felipe Lopez hit a sacrifice bunt. It was successful, but it didn’t improve their chances of winning the game. Instead of increasing their chances, it actually decreased it by 6% to give the Nationals a 28.8% chance of winning.

If you were watching the game on FanGraphs, you got to see exactly why the following is true:

To quote The Book: “With a non-pitcher at the plate, and a runner on first and no outs, advancing the runner in exchange for an out is a terrible strategy. It significantly reduces the RE in almost any run environment. It also reduces the WE in almost any run environment, even late in a close game.”

Fortunately for Nationals fans (while unfortunate my hopes and dreams), they ended up winning anyway.

It’s only the fifth inning and the Nationals have already worked there way into a mere 9% chance of winning (according to Live Win Probability). As a Nats season ticket holder, I honestly couldn’t be more excited about this season. I am not a particularly huge Nationals fan, but since they’re the only viable option in the D.C. area, I suppose I feel some sort of affinity to them. Yet what makes me so excited you ask?

The Nationals this year could be a truly historic team, as in historically awful. Will they approach the 134 loss season of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders? Probably not. However, the Mets’ 120 loss season of 1962 may be within reach.

In the past 25 years, there have been 25 100-plus loss teams. But the 2004 Diamondbacks with their 111 losses, and the 2003 Tigers with their 119 were the only teams to eclipse the 110 loss mark during that time period.

If the Nationals can muster up at least 110 wins, it will at least be a season to remember, instead of just another “typical” losing season. So this season, instead of rooting for the Nationals, I’ll be rooting against them. It won’t be out of hate (like Yankees haters), but it’ll stem from my hopeful awe of witnessing one of the greatest train wrecks of a team in baseball history.

Just a quick reminder that we will have Live Win Probability all season long.

Some Quick Notes:

– Nightly loads have resumed as usual. They will typically start sometime between 3 and 5 am EST and last about 20 minutes. If you’re using FanGraphs during this 20 minute window, you may notice some slowdown. Our loads this year are quite CPU intensive.

– Minor League stats will be loaded nightly starting April 5th.

– We’re considering live stats “unofficial” as far as Win Probability goes. The nightly loads will be the “official” ones. They should be very similar.

– We’ll be leaving the projections in the stats pages up by default for at least another week along with the spring training stats. They will both be hidden eventually, but will always be able to be un-hidden using the “Show Projections” or “Show Spring Training” buttons.

Debuting Today:

–Joseph Michael Smith made his major league debut today. He struck out one and walked one, in one-thirds innings.

Way back in December (I think), I got tickets to the Phillies/Red Sox exhibition series. Little did I know at the time of purchase, Daisuke Matsuzaka would be pitching the second exhibition game. I was able to snap some photos, which I think turned out especially well, considering my photography skills are severely lacking.

Here’s Dice-K working his way through a warm-up pitch:

And here he is throwing to Chase Utley:

His control was pretty off early in the game, especially with his breaking pitches, but he seemed to settle in as things progressed. For his past two starts, the only person who could really beat Dice-K has been Dice-K himself.

Despite last night’s lack of live win probability, the Yankees-Tigers game is now up and running. No need to refresh the page, live stats will just keep coming.

Don’t forget we’ll have every single game live this season starting opening night. If you have any feedback, please let us know!

Update: It still hasn’t showed up, and I’m assuming it won’t. There may be two live spring training games tomorrow.

Update: So, we were supposed to be getting live data for this game, but obviously it’s not being delivered. I’m hoping it will start to show up, even if it’s late.

We should have the Dodgers-Angels game live tonight. There’s been a number of improvements since yesterday and you should no longer need to refresh the page since it should update by itself.

Overall we’re still getting our feet wet with the live data. I’m sure our live data displays will evolve significantly over time. If you do get a chance to check out the game tonight, we’d certainly like to hear your feedback, positive and negative.

If anyone wants to take a peek at some our Live Win Probability stuff in the extremely early stages. You can check out the remainder of the Mets-Braves spring training game.

I’m not sure if there will be any other live games today, but there should be various games running for the 4 or so days left of spring training.

Please remember this is really an “alpha” product right now, and will hopefully be “beta” worthy by the time the season starts. It’s also only the scoreboard as there will be the usual big graph, play-by-play and box scores for each game. We’ll probably have live pitch counts too.

You will have to refresh the page to get the graph to update for the time being. The F5 key is probably the easiest method of doing this.

Time for me to get back to work!

I was browsing a used bookstore this past weekend and stumbled upon a graphic novel by James Sturm titled: The Golem’s Mighty Swing. I’ve been on a graphic novel kick lately and I couldn’t believe my luck in finding one that was actually about baseball.

Set in the 1920’s, it tells the tale of an all Jewish barnstorming team called the Stars of David Baseball Club. Their fictional leader, Noah Strauss, was for a short time a member of the Boston Red Sox, playing behind Tris Speaker, Duffy Lewis, and Harry Hooper. Barnstorming in the 20’s was far from a lucrative profession, so when a sports agent approaches the team about dressing up one of their players as a golem, (a mythical Jewish protector/destroyer) they have little choice but to say yes. Unfortunately, the golem only heightens the already prevalent anti-semitism that existed in the small towns they played in.

The story is beautifully illustrated in black and white and when the Stars of David take the field, Sturm has a knack for bringing the game of baseball to life. Within each comic frame, players are perfectly suspended in mid-motion, making that slide into second, or a pitchers windup seem all the more real.

It’s a quick read, but if you’re a fan of baseball or graphic novels, it’s definitely worth your time.

Box Scores have been added to potentially make your life just a bit easier. They contain all the usual goodies including the position the player played and the order the player hit in the lineup.

If you see anything missing that you feel is essential, just let us know and we’ll try and cram it in, assuming we have readily accessible in our database.