NERD Game Scores for Friday, August 21, 2015

August 21, 2015

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

***

Most Highly Rated Game
San Francisco at Pittsburgh | 19:05 ET
Bumgarner (163.1 IP, 77 xFIP-) vs. Locke (129.1 IP, 104 xFIP-)
Writing about the implications of this series yesterday, the present author noted that, among all major-league clubs, the two considered here featured divisional-series playoff odds closest to 50% — which is to say, furthest from certainty. Not only does that remain the case today, but what else one finds is that, according to the numbers, this game itself is basically an exercise in uncertainty. Regard, by way of illustration, a lightly edited excerpt from today’s live scoreboard:

Afflicted by randomness, is how the Giants and Pirates currently find themselves. Afflicted by randomness, one notes, is also how any reasonably observant person describes his experience of the world. To suggest, then, that tonight’s contest represents a sort of morality play for existential angst — this would be accurate. Accurate but also overwrought. Overwrought, but not necessarily in an unpleasant way.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member

It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.

We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.

1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.

2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.

3. Dark mode and Classic mode!

4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.

5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.

6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)

7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.

8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.

9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.

10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!

We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Click Here To Become a Member

Another Brief Note
Today’s Free Game
Today’s free game features New York NL at Colorado, starts at 20:40 ET, and can be accessed by means of this hyperlinked text.

Complete Schedule
Here’s the complete and very sortable table for all of today’s games. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and also the rest of the internet. Note that the calculations both for team and game NERD scores have changed recently to better integrate playoff odds into same. Read more about those adjustments here and here.

Away		SP	Tm.	Gm.	Tm.	SP		Home	Time
Shelby Miller	ATL	7	2	6	8	7	CHN	Kyle Hendricks	16:05
Carlos Carrasco	CLE	10	4	7	8	7	NYA	Masahiro Tanaka	19:05
Jimmy Nelson	MIL	6	3	6	8	6	WAS	Gio Gonzalez	19:05
Tommy Milone	MIN	3	2	5	8	5	BAL	Wei-Yin Chen	19:05
M. Bumgarner	SF	9	10	9	9	5	PIT	Jeff Locke	19:05
Colby Lewis	TEX	4	5	4	3	4	DET	Justin Verlander	19:08
Rub. de la Rosa	AZ	7	4	4	3	0	CIN	David Holmberg	19:10
Johnny Cueto	KC	7	3	4	3	6	BOS	Henry Owens	19:10
Jerad Eickhoff*	PHI	7	2	4	4	6	MIA	Kendry Flores*	19:10
Brett Anderson	LAN	6	10	7	8	3	HOU	Mike Fiers	20:10
Bartolo Colon	NYN	6	7	6	3	8	COL	Jonathan Gray	20:40
Drew Smyly	TB	10	3	5	3	6	OAK	Chris Bassitt	22:05
David Price	TOR	7	9	7	8	3	LAA	Hector Santiago	22:05
Chris Sale	CHA	10	2	5	3	8	SEA	Felix Hernandez	22:10
John Lackey	STL	5	4	4	3	7	SD	Andrew Cashner	22:10

* = Fewer than 10 IP, NERD at discretion of very handsome author.