Thursday's Short and Sweet Mug

A quick summary of yesterday's games, minor league storylines, last night's game recap, and we're on to the daily news. There's not a whole lot of it today. I read through almost 500 stories from yesterday and overnight and only found these few worthy of links today.

McCalvy's story today points out that the starters need to work deeper into ballgames, because the bullpen is getting overworked. Grand National Championships points out that Mitch Stetter is coming through lately.

Haudricourt's Twitter tells us that Braun will likely not know if he can play tomorrow until before the game, because his back problems have been inconsistent. McCalvy says he's expected to return Friday. Haudricourt's other interesting observation is that the Brewers swept a 3 game series by outscoring the Indians 30-25, which I would think would be a pretty uncommon occurrence.

My new favorite poll of all time is now located in the left sidebar on the J-S Brewer pages. The question: "Who will finish the season with a higher batting average?" The options are Bill Hall and J.J. Hardy. Fortunately, 96% of those polled answered Hardy.

Rosenthal's latest was summarized by MLBTR. There's not  a whole lot of new information there.

Goat Riders is angry at Lou Piniella and the Cubs. They use a lot of the same arguments that I and others used against Ned Yost supporters, especially back in 2007.

Colin Weyers looks at FIP, xFIP, and tRA at THT. We've been discussing fielding independent metrics in regard to minor leaguers here lately, and it's a good summary if any of our readers are unfamiliar with each. It's telling that ERA does the poorest job of predicting future ERA.

Interesting interview with Paul DePodesta at The Baseball Analysts. Some good exchanges about the intangible things that we can't measure but do exist.

MLB is releasing Live At-Bat for the iPhone and iPod touch. Blackout restrictions are still in effect, which seems pretty stupid to me-- would someone really watch a phone when they could watch on a TV?

Raul Ibanez is on the 15-day DL, which will hurt the Phillies offense, and Erik Bedard is on the 15-day DL, which will hurt his trade chances. It seems as if a lot of major pitchers have been injured in the past few days-- Peavy, Bedard, and Peavy are all disabled. Speaking of the Phillies, TheJay points out this interesting note from Elias:

Jamie Moyer had a 1-2-3 inning last night in which he struck out the side. He's been in the majors for 23 years and thrown nearly 4000 innings, but that's only the 12th time he's struck out the side in order. Four of those came in 1987! I know he's not a strikeout pitcher but you'd think he'd pull it off against some free-swingers at least once a year.

NBC Sports pretty much copied the Jeter defense article I linked yesterday, and draws too many conclusions. You can say he's played better defense this year, but not that he has suddenly improved. Defensive stats can cause some pretty crazy outliers.

Tomorrow's game is in Detroit at 6:05 central, Looper vs. Gallaraga. Enjoy the off day.