Red Sox

Jacoby Ellsbury, Mr. September

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This year, until recently, Red Sox fans have been a bit let down by the performance of Jacoby Ellsbury, who gave the Red Sox such a huge boost in September and October of last year.  He started the year pretty well, but didn’t produce offensively through the middle of the season with anywhere near what we knew to be his potential.

September has been a different story this year.  He finished out the month of September with an 18-game hitting streak.  It was his best month overall of the year.  He hit .340 in September – and that’s his only month hitting above .300 this year.  His 20 runs are about equal to his totals in each of the first two months of this year.

And all of this sounds strangely familar.

Why?  Last year, as a late-season callup, Jacoby had an outstanding September as well, actually performing better at the major league level than he had been to that point in the year in the minors.  He carried that consistently high level of performance through October, and the World Series, right up to the final victorious game.  It seemed that in every game, he did something to help the team win.

So we seem to have a pattern emerging here.  It’s quite a common thing for players to have their “time of year”.  Johan Santana, for example, though good before the All-Star break, each year is close to unbeatable in the second half of the season.  So I don’t think it’s a stretch, based on just the last two seasons of performance, to give Jacoby Ellsbury the moniker “Mr. September”.

Though, as a Red Sox fan, I can hope that he can start to find that hot streak a little earlier in the season, and still keep it through October.  🙂

The Will of the Baseball Gods – a postseason prediction

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Here is a prediction for the postseason in 2008:

I believe the Baseball Gods will make their feelings about the ending of Yankee Stadium known this autumn by sending the Red Sox and the Cubs to the World Series.

That would mean that this year, the World Series would be played in the only two parks in baseball that are older than Yankee Stadium, and the only other parks built before 1961.  These three are the only remaining parks to have seen the likes of Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe Dimaggio and Ted Williams.

There is a place for these older parks in this game.  They are our most tangible connection to the years gone by when the game of baseball was made great.  The Baseball Gods will want us to know that a move to the newer is not necessarily a move to the better.

Elimination numbers can be misleading

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Here is a post I put on my MySpace blog earlier this evening, before the Monday, September 15 games were final.

Sometimes in baseball, a team’s chances aren’t as good as they look.

The Yankees and Toronto are right now tied at 80 and 70.  The Red Sox and Rays are ahead of these two teams, in the same division each with 88 wins (that’ll change by the time you read this, though).  This means that, even though their elimation numbers are 5, at least one of the Yankees and the Blue Jays will do no better than a tie for the division’s best record.

If you don’t know what an elimination number is, it’s the number of losses by a team in their remaining games that will eliminate them from being able to win the division.  In fact, if the sum of wins by the division leader in their remaining games, and losses by trailing team in their remaining games, adds up to at least this number, the trailing team is eliminated.  This number is calculated by subtracting from 163 both the number of wins the division leader already has, and the number of losses the trailing team has.

So if both the Yankees and Blue Jays have elimination numbers of 5, shouldn’t they both be able to pass the current division leader?  Interestingly, they can’t.  Why?  Well, they play each other three times more, so one must lose at least 2 more games, and thus will finish with at least 72 losses.  With at least 72 losses, they can have at most 90 wins.  And the Sox and Rays play 3 more against each other, so one must win at least 2 more games, and so will finish with at least 90 wins.  Hence, at least one of the Yankees and Blue Jays can do no better than tie one of the two current division leaders.

Of course we all know that neither of them will actually make it.  😛