Or that the tiebreaker is made to decide playoff mathcups and has nothing to do with final regular season standings.

MLB has specific rules to determine the Division Champion. If you posit that this is for nothing more than post-season seeding, then we have nothing more to argue about. I posit it's to determine Division Champions, with the side effect of determining post-season seeding.

Excerpts from Major League Rule 33 and Major League Rule 34

Scenario #1: If there is a tie for a Division Championship and the winning percentage of the two Clubs tied for first place is higher than the winning percentage of each of the second-place Clubs in the same League, the Division Champion shall be:

The Club with the higher winning percentage in head-to-head competition between the two tied Clubs during the championship season; or

[...]

lol @ Rivera

Warriors :(

Warriors :(

Jazz! I love Boozer and Williams so much, and I get to see them in person Wednesday!

What about Spurs vs. Suns?

Suns are massive outsiders after winning game 1??

Good win by the Jazz in Game 1.

Any hockey tips, as well??

Al Leiter said on the Yankee pregame show that Clemens will be more effective in the AL than he was in the NL, because in the NL, your pitch count goes up by pitching around parts of lineups, which lead to shorter outings. But in the AL, he'll just "go after them".

This is counterintuitive. If Leiter had this opinion before, YES should have dispatched a researcher to find out what he could - were Roger's pitches per inning higher in the NL than in the AL a few years ago? Do NL starters in general suffer from higher pitch counts than their counterparts?

My guess is "no" and "no". Leiter's marvelous on TV, but I think in this situation he was looking for a positive of a 45-year old pitcher coming to the AL East from the NL and he came up with that one.

I think Clemens is going to be successful (though not world-beating) despite the league difference, not because of it.

This is counterintuitive. If Leiter had this opinion before, YES should have dispatched a researcher to find out what he could - were Roger's pitches per inning higher in the NL than in the AL a few years ago? Do NL starters in general suffer from higher pitch counts than their counterparts?

Looking at the awesome pitch count information on bb-ref, in his last three years with the Yankees Clemens averaged 3.91, 3.91, and 3.91 pitches per plate appearance. In his last three years with Houston, he averaged 3.91, 3.82, and 4.02 pitches per plate appearance.

Four consecutive years at the exact same number, rounded to the hundredths? That's unbelieveably consistent.

But a pitcher who gives up hits and walks will face more batters than a pitcher who doesn't. I would expect that pitches per inning are more illustrative for this purpose than pitches per plate appearance.

I gather that Leiter was referring to pitching around (if not outright walking) the #8 hitter in the NL in order to face the pitcher. I could see how "pitching around" a batter two or three times a game could increase pitch count, but I would think this would be more than offset by the "Good morning, Good afternoon, Good night" at-bat of an NL pitcher as opposed to the far more intricate art of pitching to David Ortiz in that spot.

Al Leiter said on the Yankee pregame show that Clemens will be more effective in the AL than he was in the NL, because in the NL, your pitch count goes up by pitching around parts of lineups, which lead to shorter outings. But in the AL, he'll just "go after them".

Avg IP/GS in the 2007 AL: 5.84 IP/GS
Avg IP/GS in the 2007 NL: 5.82 IP/GS

Leiter's reasoning was also that Clemens could "go after them" because of his assurance of greater run support than he had in Houston. Whether this actually translates into lower pitch counts is another story, of course, because even if true, that would be offset by the overall better hitting in the AL, and the need to work carefully on a higher percentage of the lineup. And the point Kevin brings up in #611 is true as well---pitch counts in and of themselves don't always tell you everything.

I had a class with Boozer back in college. He's even bigger up close than you'd think.

Define significance.

I know it what it isn't when I see it. Having all the right names but simply putting them in the wrong order, as you suggest, is not significant.

And why did the second report back off from the association of the "inaccuracies" with the redacted names?

Just because the two posts were made in a certain order here, that doesn't mean that that's the order that the articles were actually written in. It appears to me that the second post is a reprint from the Tuesday, October 3 edition of the Washington Post on page E02. In other words, it appeared on the morning of the 3rd and went to press the night before. The ESPN story in the first post was updated at 8:45 pm on the 3rd. In other words, it's difficult to claim that the second article backs off the first when it appeared before it. If anything, the question should be why did the first article add the information about the names? It should be noted that both stories quote the prosecutor as stating that the inaccuracies were signficant.

Does anyone here have the capacity for critical or analytical thought at all?

Some of us.

b, tell me. Before you answer any other question. How do you suppose that those 6 names were typed onto an affidavit if those names were not associated with the investigation? Clemens, Tejada, Segui, Roberts, Petitte and Gibbons. Why those 6 names? How did those 6 names get on that report that was leaked to the press?

We are talking about a partially non-redacted version from an unknown source that was apparently shown to the LA Times but that they were not allowed to keep. Based on the prosecutor's statement that what the Times reported (and therefore saw) had significant inaccuracies and the fact that they themselves can't produce it, I'm sorry if that doesn't instill me with the utmost confidence in said unnamed source.

I'm just curious. How do you rationalize a mistake like that? Give me an alternative scenario. Any scenario.

I already tried. An example of a significant inaccuracy in the Times report could be that some of the names actually were in the real affidavit and some were not.

And how do you rationalize that, if the names were inaccurate, the US attorney's office didn't claim the names was false, that they just left the cryptic "inaccuracies" statement for everyone to ponder, refusing to elaborate? Why did they do that? Don't answer any other questions. Just give me a rational explanation for those two questions. Any rational counter-explanation will do.

Because if only some of the names in the report are wrong, if the prosecutor goes so far as to specifically clear just those individuals, he is essentially stating as fact that the other names are in the affidavit, and that is something he can't do. We also don't know what else might have been wrong. I'm not saying that this is what happened, but it is an entirely plausible and rational explanation.