If I could get Dylan allusions mixed into my baseball bloggage every day, my life would be complete.

Re: email alerts: No idea. They never tell me anything.

Put differently: It ain’t me, babe.

I’m embarrassed to have to ask this, but does anyone know when the double-switch became a standard tactic? I’ve been looking through my old scorecards from the pre-DH AL, and it doesn’t seem to have been common at all—-and I can’t recall the term being used then, either. It looks like there wasn’t quite the reluctance to let pitchers bat that there is now, for one thing, and there were more pinch-hitting “specialists.”

APBA: unemployment in Ohio is 10.8, plus we have humidity, no oceans, no skiing to speak of, no decent produce in the winter, people who say “pop” instead of “soda,” casseroles with potato chips on top of them, and we don’t get to see the west coast scores until the next morning.

I’ve been there enough and have enough friends and family to know that California is no paradise, but man, it has to beat Ohio.

Re: errors

As I understand it, a lot of the new fielding metrics take into account fielding zones, where players at a given position are expected to make a play, vs plays out of zone, and all of that jazz.  Has anyone done any work on retroactively applying these sort of rules to games after the fact, rating “errors” as plays that should have been made but were not, as opposed to just plays where a fielder dropped a ball out of his glove or threw one into the stands?  If we could fix that, and then somehow fix the unearned run rule in a way that made sense, we might be able to approach something a little closer to what the ERA is actually trying to get at.  Because as Craig points out, it’s a pretty goofy system as it stands today.

Jack,
A group of us had this same discussion over the weekend.
Our conclusion was that it had to do with the utilization of pitchers in that era, i.e, unless they truly sucked, they were in the game until the 8th or 9th.
A starter going 6 innings, 2 setup men, and a closer? Continual Left hander-right hander matchups? 
Don’t remember it in the 60’s and early 70’s but I could be getting senile.
Overutilization of pitchers was somewhat the norm too…just look at 1964 Phillies season ending pennant race. It still kills those of us originally from Philly.

I love this comment:

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Maybe so, but I believe the Yankees have the best record in the majors for come from behind wins in the later innings. I can’t remember the exact stat at the moment… but I believe I’m right, and if so, it skews your “probability” argument.
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