NERD Game Scores for Friday, June 10, 2016

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman 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
Boston at Minnesota | 20:10 ET
Wright (74.2 IP, 105 xFIP-) vs. Duffey (47.0 IP, 86 xFIP-)
The author’s dumb NERD metric is essentially the product of an attempt to reverse engineer, and reconstruct by way of objective measures, the tastes of those who’d read a site like FanGraphs. In most cases, the dumb NERD metric works sufficiently well. On Wednesday, for example, Noah Syndergaard faced Jameson Taillon in an encounter that represented the latter’s major-league debut. That game received the highest NERD score for the day by a reasonable margin. This would appear to represent an argument on behalf of the byzantine algorithm which produces NERD.

Conceiving of a scenario, however, in which this Boston-Minnesota contest facilitates more pleasure than the sort likely to be provided by the Dodgers-Giants game later in the evening — a game which features Clayton Kershaw, for example — poses greater challenges. Fortunately for everyone involved, the consequences of such a thing are basically non-extant.

In any case, the reasons for the relative optimism concerning the Red Sox-Twins game are twofold. First, one finds in the Red Sox a club that has produced the best adjusted batting line since the 1931 Yankees. Regression is bound to temper their achievement over a full season. Still, the point remains: few clubs hit at this level as a collective group. Also of some interest is Tyler Duffey, a former fifth-rounder with below-average arm speed who’s nevertheless recorded fielding-independent numbers about 15% better than average.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Boston.

Two Other Brief Notes
Today’s Free Game
Today’s free game features Texas at Seattle, starts at 22:10 ET, and can be accessed by means of this hyperlinked text.

Broadcaster Rankings
Recently, the present author facilitated a crowdsourcing effort to reproduce the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The results from that effort — for television broadcasts, at least — are available 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 calculations both for team and game NERD scores feature adjustment for postseason odds that increases as season progresses. Read more about those adjustments here and here.

NERD Scores for June 10, 2016

Away		SP	TM	GM	TM	SP		Home	Time
Mike Pelfrey	DET	1	4	3	4	2	NYA	CC Sabathia	19:05
Jeremy Hellickson	PHI	6	2	6	7	10	WAS	Stephen Strasburg	19:05
Michael Wacha	STL	7	6	6	5	7	PIT	Gerrit Cole	19:05
Kevin Gausman	BAL	8	7	6	4	4	TOR	Marco Estrada	19:07
Lance McCullers	HOU	10	6	7	7	5	TB	Matt Andriese	19:10
Sonny Gray	OAK	4	4	4	3	6	CIN	Anthony DeSclafani*	19:10
Jason Hammel	CHN	4	7	3	1	1	ATL	Bud Norris	19:35
Steven Wright	BOS	8	8	8	6	8	MIN	Tyler Duffey	20:10
Ian Kennedy	KC	4	4	5	3	7	CHA	Chris Sale	20:10
Matt Harvey	NYN	7	6	6	5	5	MIL	Junior Guerra	20:10
Andrew Cashner	SD	2	5	5	4	10	COL	Jon Gray	20:40
Justin Nicolino	MIA	1	5	4	6	5	AZ	Patrick Corbin	21:40
Corey Kluber	CLE	8	7	6	3	4	LAA	Hector Santiago	22:05
Derek Holland	TEX	1	5	4	6	4	SEA	Hisashi Iwakuma	22:10
Clayton Kershaw	LAN	10	6	7	5	6	SF	Johnny Cueto	22:15