Daily Notes: You’ll Watch the CWS, And You’ll Like It

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

1. The College World Series, Important Knowledge About
2. Notable MLB Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

The College World Series, Important Knowledge About
The Things That Happened on Friday
The College World Series — which you’ll watch this evening and like watching — began last (Friday) night. Northeastern upstarts Stony Brook lost to UCLA, 9-1 (box). In the second game, Arizona beat Florida State by a score of 4-3 in 12 innings (box).

What That All Means
What that means is, is UCLA and Arizona will now face each other on Sunday night as part of the “winners bracket” of the double-elimination tournament. Northeastern upstarts Stony Brook will play Florida State on Sunday, as well. The loser of that latter game will be eliminated.

How the Author Feels
The author feels like, despite their loss, Florida State still has a pretty good chance of making it to the championship finals.

What Makes Him Feel That Way
What makes him feel that way is a combo package of excellent center fielder James Ramsey and also wild speculation — with a decided emphasis on the latter.

Today’s Schedule
Here’s today’s schedule:

• Kent State vs. Arkansas, 5pm ET

• South Carolina vs. Florida, 9pm ET

Regarding Where One Might Read Captivating Notes on All These Teams
In this captivating post, written by You-Know-Who: link.

Regarding Where an Individual Might Watch Said Games
It appears as though both games are available on ESPN — and also online at Watch ESPN.

Notable MLB Games
Baltimore at Atlanta | 19:15 ET
Braves right-hander Brandon Beachy, who pitches tonight, is throwing almost precisely the same pitch mix — with roughly the same movement — as last year, but has seen a pretty large decline in his strikeout rate (28.6% in 2011, 20.5% now) and rise in his ground-ball rate (33.8%, 41.5%). He has, one finds, lost 1 mph on his fastball.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Atlanta Radio.

Boston at Chicago NL | 19:15 ET
Jeff Samardzija has been quite good (72.2 IP, 88 xFIP- 1.8 WAR) this season, but maybe less good over his last couple starts. To wit: 8.2 IP, 47 TBF, 14.9% K, 12.8% BB, 47.1% GB, 4.81 SIERA, 121 xFIP-, 0.2 WAR.

Broadcast: Boston or Chicago NL Radio.

Chicago AL at Los Angeles NL | 20:10 ET ***MLB.TV Free Game***
NL West Status Update: the Dodgers (41-24) are currently 4.0 games ahead of the Giants (37-28). By WAR record, it’s much closer, however. By WAR, the Dodgers have been 38.6-26.4; the Giants, 37.4-27.6.That’s just a bit more than a game separating them, in that case.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL.

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 5.3.

Note: the following Game Scores include the poorly conceived playoff-odds adjustment discussed in a recent edition of Daily Notes. Also note: the following table is entirely sortable.

Away   SP Tm. Gm. Tm. SP   Home Time
Andy Pettitte NYA 9 6 7 4 8 WAS Jor. Zimmermann 14:20
Cliff Lee PHI 10 5 7 6 3 TOR Ricky Romero 13:07
Michael Fiers* MIL 7 6 5 3 6 MIN Liam Hendriks* 14:10
Bruce Chen KC 4 5 6 10 8 STL Joe Kelly* 14:15
Christian Friedrich COL 9 10 6 4 6 DET Doug Fister 16:05
A.J. Burnett PIT 8 2 4 4 0 CLE Ubaldo Jimenez 16:05
Ross Ohlendorf* SD 5 6 3 3 2 OAK Tyson Ross 16:05
Jason Hammel BAL 7 4 7 6 4 ATL Brandon Beachy 19:15
Jon Lester BOS 6 5 7 2 10 CHN Jeff Samardzija 19:15
Homer Bailey CIN 5 4 6 2 7 NYN Jonathon Niese 19:15
Lucas Harrell HOU 4 5 5 10 8 TEX Justin Grimm* 19:15
Anibal Sanchez MIA 7 3 6 5 8 TB James Shields 19:15
Joe Saunders AZ 2 4 3 3 3 LAA Ervin Santana 20:05
Philip Humber CHA 3 6 4 5 5 LAN Chad Billingsley 22:10
Tim Lincecum SF 6 5 4 5 3 SEA Kevin Millwood 22:10

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





Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.

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Wilj
11 years ago

I know Beachy has spoken a lot about trying to “pitch to contact” more this season to help him go deeper into games and not waste pitches on simply getting strike outs. Whether its something he can actively control, I dont know but he is averaging 6.4 Ip this year over 5.7 IP last year. Though his pitch count per game has risen also, so it could be they are simply letting him throw more pitches per game, thus more innings. Also interesting is that he is basically on track to post the same WAR through 25 starts as last year and while is FB value is down, the value of all his secondary pitches has increased over last year, at least to this point in the season.