After precious little sleep Thursday night, co-founder Matt Dennewitz and I pressed go on BeerGraphs Friday. Hoping to use big data to say big things about beer, we’re set to go on a statistical journey into the heart of suds. I feel like numbers don’t ruin our favorite adult sodas, they help us understand ourselves better. With leaderboards, a statistical, scientific and policy blog called BeerGraphs and a more writerly and celebratory blog called BarelyBeer, I’ll be plenty busy.
But I’ll also be writing about baseball, of course.
I took a long look at Matt Cain. With help from him and plenty of people around the park, I tried out each theory until I found a mechanical issue and a statistical issue that might be the cause of his struggles. I wouldn’t know how to fix it, but I think I can help spot it.
To celebrate BeerGraphs’ launch, I put beers to baseball players. Barry Bonds is *not* Pliny the Younger! Oh, and my pronunciation series continued….
I also broke down Nick Franklin, Yasiel Puig and Yovani Gallardo for the fantasy side. Like Franklin, want to see Puig’s contact rate, and am worried about Gallardo using his two-seamer so much.
And for Getting Blanked, I looked at ground ball rate changes, which just became stable. Not good news for Eric Hosmer.
enosarris.com 
This is off topic, but I don’t know who else to ask: why in the world does interleague play have to be all year long? I understand that with the reallignment there need to be a few more interleague games, but why can’t they just be squeezed into a slightly longer midseason interleague period, say, three weeks instead of two, or whatever it was? Everyone says it’s mathematically impossible without ever explaining why. Is this just a scheme by Selig to force the DH on the National League?
Because there are now fifteen teams in each league. If we had ‘interleague’ and ‘non-interleague’ play, a team would be forced to take a series off every series. Seven play seven and one sits for three days? Doesn’t work.
I must not be mathematical enough, because I still don’t get it. If all 15 NL teams play all 15 AL teams 2 games each, that is 30 interleague games per team, or 5 weeks of baseball. Anything less than 15×15 is arbitrary. If each team in one division plays each team in another division 3 games apiece, that is 15 games per team, or a little less than 3 weeks. If each NL team is paired with another AL team at the same time, how is anybody sitting? Two and a half weeks of interleague leading into the All-Star break would be charming- this is just lame.
I’m talking about non-interleague days. Let’s say the NL is playing the NL. There are 15 teams in the NL. So seven play seven and one NL team just has to sit for three days? That doesn’t work.
Got it, thanks. It always seems to get wrapped up with an argument about how unfair it is for AL pitchers to have to hit in September, which, of course, NL pitchers have to do every year.