Prior to last night’s decisive ALDS game, Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland remarked of that Yankees left fielder Brett Gardner “had been really pesky” at the plate. I am not sure exactly what Leyland meant, but I have my own idea about what it means to be “pesky” at the plate. Usually, people mean that a “pesky” hitter is hard to strike out. That is part of it for me. However, when I think of Brett Gardner plate appearances, I think of not only a lot of contact, but a lot of pitches seen in general, both because of contact and simply taking pitches. So, let us say farewell to the Yankees by looking at the five most Gardner-esque, “pesky” hitters of 2011. To the junk stat laboratory!

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If heteroscedasticity lasts longer than three hours, consult your physician immediately.

“Honey, I think I’ve got heteroscedasticity,” I said to my wife when she walked in the door. As a writer who works at home, I spend the majority of my time locked away in my windowless home office, concocting ways to frighten my dear wife who works all day.

“And it’s ruining my spreadsheets,” I finally added, after she had stood wide-eyed and wordless for a few moments.

On Tuesday, we examined the fantastic and bizarre case of rookie right-hander Jeremy Hellickson, whose high swinging-strike rate has not translated into an equally high strikeout rate (K%). Today, let’s expand the scope of that investigation.

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The Boston Red Sox are ready to start making changes. Following one of the biggest collapses in recent memory, Manager Terry Francona was the first casualty of a potential front office purge. Some of Francona’s comments on the situation seemed to indicate that he had lost the clubhouse during the collapse. If Francona had already lost the team, how could the Red Sox put their faith in him to regain the clubhouse going forward? Thankfully, this isn’t the first time a team has squandered a large lead with their playoff hopes on the line. Looking back at some of baseball’s more recent collapses, we can get a better idea of how teams deal with their managers in similar situations.
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Ray Knight, seen here mocking Red Sox fans.

Assorted Headlines
Dodgers Decline Options on Blake, Garland
The Dodgers declined to exercise 2012 options on pitcher Jon Garland and infielder Casey Blake, according to MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick. Garland would have received $8 million in 2012; Blake, $6 million. While the former has been roughly replacement level for the past couple years, Blake posted a 1.1 WAR this season despite making only 239 plate appearances.

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The release of Baseball America’s South Atlantic League top-20 list is essentially Christmas for me, as much of my time is spent scouting the league. This season, I had the opportunity to see 11 of the top-20 prospects featured in person, which is actually a down year for me. Fortunately, the Greenville Drive, the Boston Red Sox “Sally” affiliate was well represented, with four players in the top-20, including two of the highest ceiling prospects in the system in outfielder Brandon Jacobs and shortstop Xander Bogaerts.

As two of the best hitting prospects in the league this past season, both Jacobs and Bogaerts deserve to be ranked highly on the list, and they check in 8th and 10th respectively. However, I was pretty surprised to see Jacobs edge out his teammate for a higher position on the list.

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Episode Eighty-Seven
In which accounts and descriptions abound.

Headlines
The Story of the Rays’ Game 162 — Told by People Who Were There!

Featuring
Mike Axisa, FanGraphs and River Ave Blues
Tommy Rancel, FanGraphs and ESPN 1040 Tampa

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 30 min. play time.)

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Episode Eighty-Six
In which baseball sells itself.

Headlines
The Events of September 28th — Recapitulated!
The Saddest Story Ever — Told Briefly!
The 2011 Playoffs — Super-Previewed!

Featuring
Dave Cameron, Full-Time Employee

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 45 min. play time.)

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From Dirk Hayhurst’s Twitter:

“You know what would be really cool…”

~Baseball Gods, right before THIS all happened.

They’re calling it “Wild Wednesday,” and it was, but it was also Wild Twenty-Aught-Eleven. The Tampa Bay Rays closed the books on their 2011 campaign with one of the craziest nights in baseball history and one of the most absurd paths to the postseason ever.

At 12:03 a.m. ET this morning, Robert Andino hit a sinking line drive to left field off Jonathon Papelbon. Carl Crawford charged the ball, but it popped off his glove and Nolan Reimold dove onto home plate, giving the Orioles a 4-3 win. The first Orioles player to reach Andino chest-bumped him to the ground — maybe knocking the wind out of him — as the cameras watched the Baltimore bench fall onto his seemingly-frightened and breathless face.

At 12:05 a.m., Evan Longoria reached out — almost into the other batter’s box — to foul off a slider from New York Yankees pitcher Scott Proctor, holding the count at two balls, two strikes. Longoria exhaled deeply, puffing his cheeks like a trombone player, as Scott Proctor wound for the next pitch. It was a fastball away that got lost and asked Longo for directions.

“Two-two and line SHOT! DOWN THE LEFT FIELD LIIIIINE! THAT BALL IS GONE!!!” Rays television announcer Dewayne Staats called, presumably leaning out of the booth to watch as Longoria’s 31st homer ricocheted around behind the Crawford Cutout — a low wall added so then-Ray Carl Crawford could rob a few extra home runs.

Last night’s (and this morning’s) Rays game was beyond spectacular (for non-Red Sox fans, that is; my condolences to the northeast). It was parts Spring Training game (with the parade of Yankees pitchers), parts Little League World Series (with the Rays using nearly the entirety of their bench in key roles), and all parts unbelievable.

The 2011 Rays season has shown that though baseball is about probabilities, it is probabilities with replacement — truly any event can occur with the very next pitch, even if it happened just a few innings ago — or if it has never happened before.
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Below, you will find a graph detailing the probabilities that the Rays or the Red Sox would represent the American League as the Wild Card as the wild night of September 28th, 2011 progressed, based on Win Probability. Although we could never truly quantify whatever it was that happened yesterday, let these numbers be a handy guide as we highlight 16 of the key moments (with video links when possible) that ultimately resulted in the craziest night — and the craziest five minutes — in my baseball life and probably in baseball history.

Odds are calculated assuming a 50% win probability in a one-game playoff.

Click to embiggen as we dive into the night that was.

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I, John, take you Krista, to be my wife, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward until death do us part.

The traditional Christian wedding vow has to be one of the most powerful sentences ever constructed in the English language. It’s concise, clear, and direct, and almost chillingly packed full of meaning. For better or for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. ‘Til death do us part. There’s no room left in there for ambiguity, and it’s enough to immediately make even the most love-struck individual turn somber and thoughtful. That’s a sentence that say, “This is for real, kiddo. Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

But that’s an unfair question; no matter how long and hard you think about it, you can never truly know the answer. Are you ready to spend your entire life with this person? Will you be willing and able to cope together with all the obstacles life throws at you? You can hope so, sure, but nobody out there can foresee all the difficulties they will have to deal with in life, or how they will cope in every single case. When you say that vow, you’re making a solemn pledge and a promise… but you’re also hoping like hell that you’re up to the task.

It’s so easy to judge others based on what we can see from the outside. That fact was painfully on display than this morning, when news broke that John Lackey and his wife were divorcing, a mere six months after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and went through a double mastectomy. The headline writes itself, doesn’t it? What sort of person leaves his seriously ill wife just at her time of need? For those that wanted to judge, it was all too easy to react negatively to the news and to cast Lackey as a villain.

But the underlying assumption hidden in that criticism — that serious illnesses strengthen relationships and reduce divorce rates — sounds backwards to me. Illnesses like cancer put a stress on a marriage unlike anything those people have had to deal with before; if anything, wouldn’t illness promote discord and stress, and increase the couple’s odds of divorcing? Let’s see what the stats say.

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