Table of Contents

Here’s the table of contents for next September 20th’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Matt Harvey: Can’t He Decide On That Surgery Already?
2. The Story of Luke Hochevar’s 63rd Save
3. Derek Jeter’s MVP Comeback Season Continues
4. The iPhone 6, and how you can not only watch the MLB.TV Free Game on it, you can also play center field.
5. Today’s Complete Schedule, except for the Dodgers and Diamondbacks, still stuck in Australia, waiting to get out since April.

Alternatively, here’s the table of contents for today’s partially crowdsourced edition of the Daily Notes.

1. An Introduction
2. Hot Bruce Chen GIF
3. Mike Trout Slash Lines
4. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
5. Today’s Complete Schedule

An Introduction

I am graph-impaired, and far more comfortable writing poems about anti-semitic urine collectors, scripts for the new NBC comedy, “Park Factors and Recreation,” and fake fantasy mailbags than actual non-fictional content about current issues on the baseball diamond.

Thus, in preparation for filling Carson’s shoes this morning, I begged the loyal NotGraphs readers to help me fill these notes. They responded by requesting hot Bruce Chen GIFs, Mike Trout’s slash line, and daily drink selections to help you cope with watching the Astros on the MLB.TV free game of the day, which is perhaps MLB’s punishment for not upgrading to a more expensive app.

I will try to fulfill these requests, and also provide you with a chart of today’s starting pitchers. Carson will be back on Monday, and all will be better.

Hot Bruce Chen GIF

Commenter Samy Dangerfield requested a hot Bruce Chen GIF. This is the best I can do.

Mike Trout Slash Lines

Commenter ettin wanted Mike Trout slash lines. According to this 2011 Baseball Prospectus piece by Emma Span, which you probably do not want to read at work, slash fiction refers to stories about people (and cartoon characters?) having, uh, very graphic extracurricular lives. Thus, I assume that ettin was asking for lines like this:

“…and then Trout gently stroked his bat…”

“…and with the final poker hand decided, Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and the Rally Monkey were the only ones with any clothes still left on….”

“…and Trout said to Josh Hamilton, ‘I know exactly how we can bust that slump….'”

Or maybe he just wanted to know that Trout’s at a ridiculous .330/.435/.570, topping last year, with an even more ridiculous second-half line of .346/.496/.581, with 53 walks in 56 games. No walks since Sunday though… Monday ended a 9-games-with-a-walk streak.

Today’s MLB.TV Free Game

Houston at Cleveland | 19:05 ET Brett Oberholtzer (60.1 IP, 107 xFIP-, 1.0 WAR) faces Zach McAllister (125 IP, 113 xFIP-, 1.5 WAR) in the day’s longest-combined-last-names-of-starting-pitchers matchup. Also, the Indians should probably try and win this thing for the sake of their wild-card hopes.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Vin Scully, three hours later, broadcasting an entirely different game.

Today’s Complete Schedule

Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with beer and non-beer pairings, courtesy of prolific and helpful NotGraphs commenter Well-Beered Englishmen, whom you can also find on Twitter. Ah, Twitter. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and a random guess as to who will be pitching for the Yankees, since, as of this writing, it’s TBD*.

*Okay, I checked again and it’s CC Sabathia. But why change a whole chart?!