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I was shocked that as bad as June was for the Braves they could actually still get 100 wins this season. I’m sure it won’t happen but if they win all 45 remaining games they could get there. I’d just like to see them get to .500, for that they’d need to win 58% or 26 of 45 which seems doable.

Speaking of baseball, a great stats book came out last year called The Numbers Game. In it Alan Schwartz describes the evolution of the various numbers that we take for granted as well as new Sabermetric convolutions. There’s also a long chapter about the history of the various baseball encyclopedias describing all the corrections that have been made to records. Amazingly there have been three totally separate movements to research each major league game in history from newspaper accounts. One of those, Retrosheet, puts all of their research on the web. They have play-by-play descriptions of every game since the 1960s and a bunch before then.

One of my favorite memories is in there. Look at the fifth inning of this 1995 game. I had awesome seats in the first row right on first base to watch a Greg Maddox gem. There was a popup to first so McGriff is positioning to handle it and Belliard comes in behind to back him up and I was cracking up. McGriff was 6′3″ and Belliard a little over 5′ and tiny and it looked hilarious.

If you still want to get excited about our team, their rookie Danville Braves are in first place in the Appalachian League Eastern division. Go Braves!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Looking Toward the Future, Looking at the Past. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.