One Night Only! (Opening Day 2011 Edition)

Just as last year, I’ll be previewing the most notable games of the day, where notable means something like, “interesting, for one reason or another, for the smarter baseballing fan.”

The NERD scores that all of America has come to love will be available at the end of April, probably.

Milwaukee at Cincinnati | 2:10pm ET
Starting Pitchers
Brewers: Yovani Gallardo
159.7 IP, 9.92 K/9, 3.83 BB/9, .313 BABIP, 3.29 FIP, 117 ERA+ (ZiPS)

Reds: Edinson Volquez
108.1 IP, 9.56 K/9, 4.57 BB/9, .293 BABIP, 3.80 FIP, 115 ERA+ (ZiPS)

Some Notes on Those Guys
• Both of these starters will pleasure you — that’s a Carson Cistulli Guarantee*.
• Edinson Volquez, as you definitely heard via America’s most important media outlets, is an Offical Member of Team Joy Squad for 2011. His changeup is to the human psyche what the music of Al Green is also to the human psyche.
• Gallardo’s interesting for another reason. Or, er, two reasons, we’ll say.
• There’s his curveball, for one, which you can watch him use to metaphorically — and, in one case, actually — disembowel the Florida Marlins in this video from last September.
• There’s also this weird thing about how he goes about his business. While, typically, a pitcher’s swinging-strike rate (SwStrk%) correlates pretty highly with his strikeouts per nine innings (K/9), that’s not the case with Gallardo. Using merely SwStrk% to predict strikeouts, we’d have expected Gallardo to post a 7.04 K/9. In fact, he posted a 9.73 K/9. This doesn’t mean his K/9 will plummet, necessarily; it just means there’s another variable contributing to his K rates.

*Not a real thing.

Two Images Concerning Yovani Gallardo
Here are two images concerning Yovani Gallardo. Please use them for good and not evil.

Below is swinging-strike rate plotted against strikeouts per nine for the 90-something qualified starters from last season. Gallardo, as you can see, is a major outlier.

Here are the top-10 over- and underachieving pitchers in terms of actual K/9 relative to expected K/9 (xK/9) using the equation above to formulate the latter:

On a Player Who Might Appear in This Game
A player who might appear in this game is Juan Francisco, also a member of Team Joy Squad. If there were an epic poem about him, it’d be called The Epic of Juan Francisco. No, not very catchy, I agree. What do you want, though? It’s a frigging epic poem.

If I Had My Druthers
• There actually would be an epic poem about Juan Francisco.
• It actually would be called The Epic of Juan Francisco.
• All my children — legitimate or otherwise — would write book reports about it.

Two Other Games
Atlanta at Washington | 1:05pm ET
• Who’s svelter: Atlanta’s Jason Heyward or Washington’s Mike Morse? That’s the big question everybody’s asking.

San Francisco (NL) at Los Angeles (NL) | 8:00pm ET
• Albert Lyu has some information for you on the matchup between Tim Lincecum and Clayton Kershaw (read here). Also, Brandon Belt is making his debut today. Big whoop!