I love Who’s Who in Baseball, the little red book that appears each spring with the player’s records.    I love it because it connects me to my childhood, and as soon as I see it every spring I buy two or three copies of it, one for me and one for my son(s).    It rests on the coffee table between the couch and the TV, and every time I pick it up I remember seeing in this book that Leon Wagner hit 51 homers and drove in 166 runs for Danville in 1956, that Jose Cardenal hit .355 with 35 homers and something like 70 stolen bases at El Paso in 1961, and that Bobby Tiefenauer went 17-5 with a 1.89 ERA for Toronto in 1958.

            But there must have been twenty times already this year when I went to look up a player, and discovered that he is not in the book.   Bryan Augenstein. . .not there.   Ivan Nova. . .not there.  Sam Fuld. . .not there.   Felix Doubrant. . .nope.   Kila Ka’aihue?   Doesn’t make the cut.    He hit eight homers and drove in 25 runs in the majors last year, in 206 plate appearances.   Kind of seems like he ought to be there.   Jarrod Saltalamacchia?   No salt.

            Look, I understand why they have to cut pages; it’s a $9.95 book and I’m sure it’s price-sensitive; you can’t let it go to 600 pages.    But I really disagree with the way they have chosen to cut pages, and I am afraid that they are cutting their own throat by cutting players.    Look at the Chad Durbin entry, page 233.   It takes up almost an entire page.  The entry tells us that Chad Durbin pitched 1 game, 1 2/3 innings for Omaha in 2002, that he pitched 3 games, 6 innings in the Gulf Coast League in 2002, that he pitched 3 games, 5 1/3 innings for Wichita in 2002, that he pitched 2 games for Mahoning Valley in NY-Penn league in 2003, that he pitched 2 games, 3 innings for Clearwater in 2009, that he pitched 1 game, 1 inning for Lehigh Valley in 2009, that he pitched 2 games, 3 innings for Clearwater again in 2010, that he was not offered a contract by the Royals on December 20, 2002, that he filed for free agency on October 11, 2004 and again on October 28, 2005, that he was not offered a contract on December 12, 2007, that he was on the disabled list for 2 ½ weeks in 2009, and that he was on the DL again for a little less than three weeks in 2010.

            It tells us this at a pace of one line each; Durbin’s entire entry runs 57 lines if you don’t count the lines that are just underlines, 61 lines if you do.   Is all of this really necessary?   OK, is it more necessary to tell us that Pedro Feliciano pitched 1 game, 2 innings for Vero Beach in 1997 than it is to include Ivan Nova in the book?

            Chad Durbin’s post-season pitching record—Division Series, Championship Series, World Series—runs through 14 lines.   Good, but he’s pitched a total of 10 innings in post-season play, with a 6.30 ERA.   Fourteen lines, you could include Kila Ka’aihue in the book.  Do you really think it is more critical to document Chad Durbin’s post-season performance in excruciating detail, rather than including in the book the young players that people like me might need to look up?

            Aaron Miles has 16 lines of transaction records.   No offense, but. . .it’s Aaron Miles.

            Let me make some suggestions for you of what I think might be some better ways to save space:

            1)  Eliminate from the book minor league records that

                        a)  were more than 3 years ago, and

                        b)  involve 3 or less games by a pitcher or 9 or less games by a position player.

            2)  (Alternatively)  Consolidate all minor league records for one season on one line.   Lastings Milledge’s minor league entry for 2007 is this

            That’s all fine—when you’re not being forced to cut Brandon Beachy from the book.   When you are being forced to cut Brandon Beachy from the book, don’t you think maybe it would be better to just do this:

            3)  Consolidate all post-season play to one line.

            4)  Consolidate all post-season play to one line per season.

            5)  Eliminate from the transaction lines stays on the disabled list of less than one month which were not in the most recent season.

            6)  Limit the number of "transaction" lines per player to five.

            7)  Limit the number of "transaction" lines to one:  How the player was acquired by his present team. 

            If you did just some of these things, I’m certain you could make room to include all the players in the book.   Think about it, guys.   I’m trying to help.

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            I was listening to Al Hrabosky describe Bryan Augenstein, St. Louis rookie reliever, and I would swear he said that Augenstein had "shown a lot of intesticle fortitude."

            Also, while I’m on the subject. ..I’ll probably go to jail for saying this, but. .. .Erin Andrews has this Mountain Dew commercial, and she says something that I think is supposed to be "My Dew Challenge", but which sounds like "My huge melons". . .visit My huge melons.com.   There probably IS a website called My huge melons.com, I don’t know; if there isn’t it’s a glitch in the market, but I don’t think that’s what she’s trying to say.   And.  .when I first heard this I had my back to the television, didn’t have any idea who was talking; that’s just what it sounds like she says.

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            Anger in a rational argument is like kissing during a boxing match.

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Can I make a political argument, just because it seems to me significant and the political analysts won’t seem to make it? 

            The constituency for political largesse. . .that is, benefits for the poor. . .is really two separate and two very different constituencies.   There is a constituency for benefits for the poor which is poor, and which expects to benefit from these programs, and there is a constituency for benefits for the poor which has little or no expectation to benefit from these social programs, but believes that we should do these things for the good of society.    These two constituencies are as different as night and day.   One group is poor; the other is, for the most part, well off.   One group is voting in their narrow self-interest; the other group is voting either against their own interests or only in their enlightened self-interest.

            These two groups, because they are very different in orientation, have very different other characteristics.    The "yellow" group—the group that hopes to draw benefits—is of a relatively fixed size.    It may grow over time; if it grows over time it must sometimes and in some conditions shrink over time, but it’s what it is; if it’s 22% of the voting public, it’s 22%.    People who don’t expect to benefit from government programs will NOT vote for government programs merely because the economy is bad.

            The "green" group, on the other hand, is—I would speculate—of a very flexible size, and extremely responsive to economic realities.   When the economy is good, this group swells; when the economy is weak, people feel less wealthy, and less inclined to support social programs.    This group of voters might be 30% in one election, and 15% in the next.

            This means that Republicans benefit from a down economy, and Democrats from a boom economy, in ways that political analysts seem curiously oblivious to.   The public voted conservative in 2010 because the Democrats were in charge and the Democrats were held responsible for the failures of the economy, yes, but they also voted Republican because the economy was in bad shape, and the "green" group of Democrats is always smaller and less energized when the economy is poor.    It was a double whammy—a Republican year because the Democrats were in charge and the economy was poor, and a Republican year simply because the economy was poor.

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            Sorry I’ve gotten side-tracked on the Omars and Ozzies project.   I’ll get back to it some time this week.

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            Let’s look at some pitcher’s records from 2010:

            Not a super-impressive group of 13 pitchers, right.. ..ERAs over 4.00, won-lost records 28 games under .500 as a group.

            Those 13 pitchers were all opening-day starters in 2010.   These are the names:

            Overall, opening day starters accounted for 18.2% of major league starts in 2010—886 of 4,860.   The other 17 were pretty good.

            This is the time of year when we hear a lot about opening-day pitchers matching up against one another on the same cycle and, while we have looked at this issue before, it occurred to me recently that there was another way to look at it that we haven’t tried before.   What if we looked at this not by the pitcher, but by the date?

            Opening day in 2010 was April 4 for a couple of teams, April 5 for 26 of the other 28.   Of course, the number of opening day starters on those days were 2 and 26:

            The normal expectation is 18.2%, or 4.7 out of 26, so 26 out of 26 is 21.3 Opening Day pitchers over random expectation:

            And, of course, on the following four days the numbers were, perforce, below expectation:

            By the way, in a 36-year writing career, that is the first time I have ever used the word "perforce".    Strange to think that that word was just sitting there in the back of my vocabulary all of these years, waiting to be called upon.   Its mama must be so proud.

            Anyway, then it is time for the opening day pitchers to pitch again:

            The question is, how long does this observable pattern persist?

            A lot longer than I would ever have guessed, it turns out.    This is the data for the entire 2010 season:

            The opening-day pattern persists at an observable level until June 3; June 2 and 3, more or less.    After that it is still kind of there, not really, until the All-Star break, but at the All-Star break the rotations re-organize themselves, and the pattern begins again at a low level.   Then, for a while in August, the opening day pitchers sort of get randomly re-aligned for a couple of weeks.

            I may owe John Dewan and Ben Jedlovec a salute about this.   About a year ago, I had a data dispute with John and Ben about this issue.   John and Ben studied the data and concluded that #1 starters do tend to stay matched up against each other to some extent after the first few days; I studied the data and concluded that they did not.

            This chart seems to demonstrate fairly conclusively that, in 2010 at least, they did—thus, that I was on the wrong side of that argument.