Daily Notes: Selected Wisdom of the Corey Kluber Society

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Selected Wisdom of the Corey Kluber Society
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Selected Wisdom of the Corey Kluber Society
The Purpose of This Post
The purpose of this post is to announce a meeting — in this case, at 7:05pm ET today (Monday) — of the Corey Kluber Society.

About the Society
The Corey Kluber Society (or, frequently just “the Society”) is composed of individuals all bound by their singular enthusiasm for the works and days of Cleveland right-hander Corey Kluber.

How to Attend a Meeting
To attend a meeting of the Society, one needs merely — while watching Corey Kluber pitch — one needs merely to ask, “How might I do spiritually what Corey Kluber does physically?”

Regarding Corey Kluber, A Statistical Update
Among the 102 pitchers with 100-plus innings thrown this season, Corey Kluber has recorded the 23rd-highest strikeout rate (23.2%), the 27th-lowest walk rate (5.5%), and the 47th-highest ground-ball rate (45.7%). Despite a precisely league-average park-adjusted ERA, he’s posted the 29th-best park-adjusted FIP (86 FIP-) and seventh-best park-adjusted xFIP (76 xFIP-) — a figure (that last one) better than those produced by, for example, the very talented Jose Fernandez (81) and Clayton Kershaw (78) and Anibal Sanchez (77).

A Brief Review of Kluber’s Last Start
In his most recent start, Kluber conceded three earned runs over 8.2 innings, was removed from the game after 95 pitches with the score tied 3-3, and witnessed — stoic as Epictetus himself, one imagines, if his (i.e. Kluber’s) mound presence is an indication — witnessed as reliever Cody Allen allowed three baserunners and two more runs.

Kluber likely kept on witnessing, as well, while the Clevelanders tied the game in the ninth inning and won it in the tenth by means of a Carlos Santana home run (box).

Corey Kluber’s Postgame Comments, Probably
Here are Kluber’s comments following Cleveland’s dramatic victory last Wednesday, probably, which comments might most rightly be classified as Wisdom:

This morning, as on all others, I said to myself, “I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me; not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.”

Action Footage: Kluber’s Slider
Here’s footage of Kluber’s slider — in this case, to strike out Paul Konerko for the second out in the ninth inning of Kluber’s most recent start:

Action Footage: Kluber’s Slider, More Differently
Here’s footage of that same exact pitch — except, in this case, as seen from behind home plate and even more slowly:

Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
Los Angeles NL at St. Louis | 19:05 ET
Zack Greinke (105.0 IP, 99 xFIP-, 1.0 WAR) faces Adam Wainwright (168.2 IP, 71 xFIP-, 5.1 WAR). The latter has the league’s lowest walk rate among 91 qualified starters and the sixth-largest differential between his strikeout and walk rates (19.9 percentage points) among that same population.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: St. Louis Radio.

Today’s Complete Schedule
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 6.0.

Note: the following table is entirely sortable.

Away		SP	Tm.	Gm.	Tm.	SP		Home	Time
Mike Minor	ATL	8	7	8	3	10	WAS	S. Strasburg	19:05
Anibal Sanchez	DET	9	8	9	7	10	CLE	Corey Kluber	19:05
Zack Greinke	LAN	5	3	6	4	9	STL	A. Wainwright	19:05
John Lackey	BOS	7	8	6	4	6	HOU	B. Oberholtzer*	20:10
Kevin Correia	MIN	2	3	3	6	2	KC	Jeremy Guthrie	20:10
Andy Pettitte	NYA	5	3	4	1	5	CHA	Jose Quintana	20:10
Martin Perez	TEX	7	3	6	8	4	LAA	Jerome Williams	22:05
R.A. Dickey	TOR	9	6	7	5	7	SEA	Hisashi Iwakuma	22:10
Tyler Thornburg*	MIL	6	4	5	5	4	SF	Chad Gaudin	22:15

To learn how Pitcher and Team NERD Scores are calculated, click here.
To learn how Game NERD Scores are calculated, click here.
* = Fewer than 20 IP, NERD at discretion of very handsome author.