Pitching is such a vital part of the game, as far as winning is concerned.

On most teams the set up man has become more valuable, on others not so valuable.

Something to keep in mind — it’s raining lightly. The infield could be very wet on ground balls.

What is a drop and drive pitcher? He is a guy who drops and drives. Very simple.

So by guessing right you might have guessed wrong.

Giambi walks too much. He’s always clogging up the bases with all that walking.

As a new day begins in New York, the sun sets in Hawaii.

If football is a game of inches then baseball is a game of inch.

If that ball had more elevation, it would have been a home run.

If the double play is a pitcher’s best friend, what is a fielder’s choice? An acquaintance?

It’s better to have a fast runner on base than a slow one.

One thing about ground balls. They don’t go out of the ball park.

The reason we call that pitch up and in is because the arms are attached to the shoulder.

He wears his hat like a left hander!

Any ball that goes down is much heavier than any ball that stays on the same plane.

The blood on his sock looks exactly like Oklahoma!

You don’t want to use too many statistics. The ones that apply to a July or August game won’t be relevant on Saturday.

American McCarver

Kershaw Chowder

Two months is a long time. A lot can happen. Your favorite ball club, for instance, can be humiliated in the playoffs by a team that would barely go on to win — if the term can be used — the most error-prone and quickly-forgotten World Series in living memory. Your much ballyhooed bullpen can fall on its collective face. Your spectacularly inaccurate predictions can be forgotten.

Thank God for Twitter.

Clayton Kershaw, of the sad-sack Los Angeles Dodgers, is the National League Cy Young winner for 2011, receiving 27 of 32 first-place votes, and scoring 74 more points in the balloting than an also-ran named Roy Halladay from some mascot-driven novelty franchise back East.

In fact, you could combine Halladay’s score with the third-place finisher (Cliff Lee — didn’t he used to pitch baseball?) and they’d just barely edge out Kershaw.

A lot of hype has been directed at various strutting bullpens this past season, but in the end the guy who got it done was a 23-year-old from a barely-.500 team that nobody was paying attention to. He beat Tim Lincecum four for four, pitched a perfect All-Star inning, and won 12 of his last 14 starts. But you could mention his name to some random blow-hard and they’d fire back, “Who’s that?”

Really looking forward to that Super Bowl win, once we get a football team.

Baseball

C o m m e n t s

How long until the Yankees sign him?

“mascot-driven novelty franchise”

You win American McCarver.

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