A few things that caught my eye:
Jose Berrios was fantastic again Wednesday night, shutting out the Indians over seven innings. Unfortunately for him, Carlos Carrasco was equally superb, and both left after seven with a 0-0 tie. In fact, the game remained scoreless until the 14th inning, when both Edwin Encarnacion and Miguel Sano hit solo shots for their respective teams. The game was still going at the time of this writing, in the 15th 16th inning. Berrios allowed three hits and no walks, and now has a 1.63 ERA, 0.58 WHIP and an eye-popping 29:1 K:BB ratio over 27.2 innings.
In the latest installment of Recency Bias Theater, I posed the following question:
Typically I blurt out random observations during games on Twitter, and never end up putting it out there in one place. Moreover, those observations are often truncated because of the nature of the medium. There’s still value to me in going to Twitter first – it’s easier to generate a conversation, with immediate responses. For a handful of reasons, we don’t allow comments on the blog, so there’s less interaction.
However, the blog will allow me to formulate a few more thoughts on various topics that I might not dive into as much on Twitter. I can’t/won’t stop Tweeting (wow, that’s not a self-flattering statement, but … I love being on Twitter when live sports are on), but I’m going to try to write more here on a regular basis. Writing is a tool that can atrophy if you don’t keep using it, and I’ve definitely written less frequently than I used to. Some of that is due to having less time, but some of that is also a casualty of social media and even more is due to inertia.
Ok, that’s enough preamble. Here are some thoughts about tonight’s games:
Round One of the RotoWire/FanDuel Baseball Championship is in the books. Congratulations to those who had strong first qualifying rounds and set themselves up well to qualify for the Championship Round on June 27th. Congratulations in particular to wyldncrzygy524, who took home the Round One title with a score of 166.8. None of their picks were particularly “wyld” or “crzy”, as all of their players were owned by at least 19.6 percent of contest participants, but if you hit on all your picks you’re bound to do well, and this “gy” did just that. Each of their players scored at least nine points, with Jon Gray, Nolan Arenado and Dexter Fowler particularly standing out.
Meanwhile, the experts here at RotoWire are running our own parallel contest. Lead Prospect Analyst James Anderson is showing that he knows far more than just prospects, jumping out to an early lead after winning Round One and placing third in Round Two. He rode Jon Gray and Jed Lowrie to his Week One title and saw Javier Baez’s 56.6-point game power him to a bronze in the second week. (Did I have Baez in my lineup only to change him out at the last second? Yes, of course I did.) The full leaderboard for the expert tournament can be found here. Here’s the top 10:
