NERD Game Scores for Thursday, August 13, 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
Washington at San Francisco | 22:15 ET
Strasburg (68.0 IP, 84 xFIP-) vs. Vogelsong (105.2 IP, 120 xFIP-)
Yesterday, for the first time, the author endeavored to participate in one of the daily fantasy contests such as those offered by DraftKings and FanDuel — a practice which, one notes, bears a strong and (welcome) resemblance to gambling. Gambling is not unlike drinking insofar as (a) it yields great pleasure in moderation but also (b) if you indulge in it to excess, your wife says to sleep on the couch. Impossible to ignore is how compelling a baseball game can become in proportion to the amount of one’s hard-earned he has wagered on the result of that game. It’s probably accurate to say, for example, that I watched Danny Salazar’s start last night with the sort of intensity typical of a terrier monitoring a backyard for squirrels or a pubescent heterosexual male monitoring any vaguely female human. Writing for RotoGraphs today, Brad Johnson suggests that Stephen Strasburg represents a strong investment in daily-fantasy play. The haphazardly derived algorithm which produces the NERD game scores here also appears to favor the Washington-San Francisco contest.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

Other Brief Note
Today’s Free Game
Today’s free game features Pittsburgh at St. Louis, starts at 19:15 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
Eddie Butler	COL	1	3	5	7	10	NYN	Noah Syndergaard	12:10
Sonny Gray	OAK	7	3	5	7	5	TOR	Mark Buehrle	12:37
Alex Gonzalez	TEX	2	3	3	3	3	MIN	Ervin Santana	13:10
Tyler Cravy	MIL	4	3	6	8	7	CHN	Jon Lester	14:20
Nathan Eovaldi	NYA	7	10	7	4	6	CLE	Trevor Bauer	19:10
Francisco Liriano	PIT	9	9	6	3	5	STL	Lance Lynn	19:15
Garrett Richards	LAA	7	8	5	3	3	KC	Jeremy Guthrie	20:10
Key. Sampson	CIN	3	3	5	8	6	LAN	Mat Latos	22:10
St. Strasburg	WAS	10	8	7	8	1	SF	Ryan Vogelsong	22:15

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