This is Strangely Comforting

At least I no longer have to stress out about CC dying of congestive heart failure on the mound, and I can sit back and enjoy it.

This would also be a good time to point out that I am under strict orders from the doctor to lose weight, exercise and eat better, or my liver is going to stop working. FAT! At least I wasn't ordered to stop drinking.

GREEN Bay, the Yanks and OJSFA

I checked out UW v. UWGB on the Big10 network last night. Pretty entertaining game, and a much more impressive win for UW that you probably think. Anyway, there were two important things that stuck out about the game for me. First, it still bothers me that UWGB insists on being referred to as "Green Bay" instead of "Wisconsin-Green Bay". Who do they think they are? Fucking Memphis State? But what was more bothersome was that the announcer was obviously not from the Midwest, and kept saying GREEN Bay by putting the emphasis on GREEN, when the emphasis should be on BAY. GREEEEEEN Bay instead of Green BAYY It drove me fucking crazy.

I hate the New York Yankees. I always have and always will. They exist on the same list as the Cubs in baseball, the Cowboys, Bears, Vikings and Lions in football, Duke, North Carolina, Michigan St., and Kentucky in college basketball and Michigan and Ohio St. in college football. Teams that when they lose, it brings me great joy. The shit is just getting ridiculous. They have already spent so much on payroll this year (and there are rumors they are after Texiera and Man-Ram too...) that they are dwarfing a number of other teams entire payrolls. And that is JUST on CC and Burnett. That doesn't even take the contracts of Jeter and A-Rod into consideration. Both of them make well over $20mil a year too. While this is the biggest splurge they have had in awhile, keep in mind how well it has gone for them in the past (Carl Pavano). The baseball world will likely be righted again with the Yankees in the playoffs for me to root against, and the Brewers out. But how great would it be to see the Yanks struggle and fail? Pretty fucking great. We are two bad years away from the Yankees requesting their own bailout package.

OJSFA playoffs on tap today. I am taking on Richard. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on the game because $100 are on the line. Winner is guaranteed that much, loser has to win next week to get $50. Richard beat me like red-headed step child last week. But I think I generally like my player's matchups a little better this week. I still have the lingering Marion Barber problem. I have no clue if he is going to start, and he plays Sunday night meaning if I take the chance to start him and find out he's not, I am stuck with Tashard Choice. It could be worse, but I would rather not be put in that position. The Giants D is pretty tough too, so neither is a great matchup. In that alternative, I could start Steve Breaston (who only scores when I don't play him) or Leon Washington (reach play). Santonio Holmes and Jerricho Cotchery are also on my roster, but are dead to me. I don't know what the fuck to do. Finally, I have made the decision to start Phil Rivers (v. KC) over Tony Romo (v. NYG) this week. Rivers has been tremendously inconsistent this year, but has had really, really big games this year. Romo has struggled a bit lately, and I don't really like what is happening in Dallas this year. This is probably a really dumb move on my part, since it has been Romo that has gotten me here. But fuck it. Go me.

Packers 31, Jags 30. (really I have no confidence that the Pack has any chance in this one). Greg Jennings has 0 catches, Ryan Grant runs for -8 yds and has no catches, Mojo Drew has 128 yds rushing, 11 catches for 67 yds and 4 TDs.

My personal opinion of the Gagne situation

I'm actually glad that Gagne is back in the closer position. I hear a lot of non-sense about the "committee" being 2-0 and gagne having 5 blown saves on the year. I know Gagne isn't pitching as well as we'd like our closer to do, but he's also appeared in half of our games this year already (That's 19 games out of 39 for the non-math endowed people). Since the NL has expanded to 16 teams, the average number of saves for a team has been pretty steadily around 40. The league average for save percentage for the last few years was around 67%, that's 2/3. So I can safely assume an average team will see around 60 save attempts per year. The Brewers are less than one fourth of the way into the season and yet Gagne has appeared 19 times already. That's a lot of work for a closer, especially when you consider that not all of those 60 potential save attempts are going to the same guy. The Brewers blew 20 saves in total last year, we are one quarter of the way through the year and Gagne has blown 5, the team total this year is 7. That seems to be slight ahead of the average, but the league average last year was 20 blown saves. As I've mentioned before we are ahead of the league average on save opportunities for the year as well. Only two teams had less than 14 blown save opportunities last year. Does that make it ok that Gagne has blown these saves? No. However I do think it helps to put things into perspective. Give the averages time to even themselves out and get Gagne a normal work flow. Popping into games 5 nights in a row is going to put a strain on any closer, not just our popular quebecois scapegoat.

Take this into account as well, for every team in the major leagues, only two have a reliever that has been their closer since earlier than 2004, the Yankees with Rivera and the Padres with Hoffman (the latter of which is probably soon to end). The closer position is so damn volatile and so closely scrutinized that sometimes fans forget to take a step back and realize, that's just the way the game is sometimes, no closer is going to be perfect. Granted Gagne is quite far from perfect, but I think before people continue to jump down his throat they should consider this, I don't think there's a better answer than him to be the closer in our bullpen right now. There's a lot of pressure when you are put into that situation and it's not really a spot where you want to be doing trial and error testing on pitchers that are unproven in the closer role.

Also just a little food for thought in contradiction to what I said here, the only team this year without a blown save? The Reds. Of course they've only had 7 save opportunities, so once again take that number with a grain of salt.

Sports Illustrated's Stadium Rankings

Recently Sports Illustrated released a fan voting based ranking of all major league ballparks.





Now I'm not going to complain too much about the rankings because they put Miller Park at second, but I found that to be a little ridiculous. I could see Miller being in the top ten, but second seems to be a bit much.

The first category is affordability which was given to the Kansas City Royals. This seems plausible, the Royals have been terrible for quite some time and their stadium is over 30 years old, so they probably have to give those tickets away. Surprise surprise the Red Sox and Yankees were ranked last for affordability, I guess dropping 300 million a year on salaries requires you to generate higher revenue from your ticket sales.

The next category is food, the Brewers were ranked first because everyone loves brats! It seems a lot of comments about the food also revolved around the stadium's "secret special sauce". If a sauce has the words secret or special in it, I tend to be wary. For some reason the Yankees and Mets are in last place, which might be impossible seeing as how they are in New York.

Team quality places the Tigers as number one. I guess that's a tough vote to call, there's actually been a decent amount of parity in the MLB for the last few years.

Tradition's top four teams are the Red Sox, the Yankees, the Cubs and the Dodgers. That seems about right, all of those teams have been around for over a century.

Atmosphere can be a tough call. The rankings have the Mariners ranked first and the Marlins last. I think what it really boils down to with atmosphere is when the team's stadium was built. Case in point, they put the Twins down at 29th. I've been to a few games at the big inflatable toilet, it's really not that bad. I think the fans have made it out to be worse than it is because of the dome's age and the fact that they have a new stadium waiting for them in two years.

The Cardinals of St Louis have been voted the fans with the highest "IQ". I've seen people from Missoura, I'm not that impressed with their intelligence. How do you even quantify this? The fans here really seem to know what they're talking about when they are sitting in the stands? What if you're just really unlucky and always get stuck next to the same drunken asshole that can barely even form words, let alone coherent thoughts? If you've been to a weekend game you know there's a very realistic chance of this happening. The picture I used in the collage is of apparently "famous" fans of the Cardinals...

Once again the Cards get the nod for hospitality. What I found fishy about this ranking is that the Royals were number two. I don't know what goes on down in Missoura during baseball games, but apparently its the greatest experience for a visiting fan in the history of the known world.

The Brewers are first for promotions. I credit this 1000% to the sausage races. After Randall Simon gave the sausage runners national media stardom, they haven't had time to look back. Everyone loves it, and the fact that they are sausages just speaks volumes about what we rank as important in the state of Wisconsin. The Red Sox rank dead last in promotions, I'm assuming the used Manny Ramirez batting helmet give away night didn't go over as well as the execs had planned.

Traffic? The White Sox got some love for this, but I really have no opinion about traffic for these games. I'm assuming the shittier your team is, the less fans go there and the better the traffic is around your stadium. While the White Sox aren't that shitty, they are definitely the Eli Manning to the Cubs Peyton in Chicago.

Finally we have the category of neighborhood, which surprisingly enough the Padres won! Gee, I wonder who would complain about an area that's always 75 degrees and has beautiful beaches all along the city. I'm sure the Marlins are dead last because either A)Their fans just checked poor for all the answers in the survey because they hate the way the Marlins are run or B) Hurricanes are not conducive to happy tailgating.

The accuracy of this fan poll is probably directly related to the demographic base of the people who actually bothered to fill it out, so I would take it with a grain of salt. However for the next year, Brewers fans can say that Miller Park is the second best stadium in all of baseball!