No great players on today's Birthday Team, but quite a few good players.

C: Ed Kirkpatrick
1B: Olmedo Saenz
2B/Manager: Danny Murtaugh
3B: Enos Cabell
SS: Donie Bush
LF: Ping Bodie
CF: Catfish Metkovich
RF: Wally Moses

SP: Paul Splittorff
SP: Doc Crandall
SP: Johnny Lush
SP: Mike Morgan
SP: Jim Conway
RP: Jerry Reed

Fun Name: Charlie Manlove
Not that one: Bernie Williams
Never trust a man with two first names: Mike Chris

Elsewhere, Grantland Rice writes that this series could go to the limit and require all seven games.

He wasn't dreaming big enough.

Postseason excitement update: Both Wild Card games end up right around the median. The two LDS games on Saturday were a little duller, but not much. And then... yesterday.

Reds-Giants Game 2 is in the bottom 40 all time (out of 1356 postseason and end-of-season playoff games), but the other three were all varying degrees of very good. Yanks-O's was 76th percentile, Nats-Cards was 89th, and A's-Tigers was 95th. In fact, the Oakland-Detroit game grades out as the 5th-best 9-inning postseason game ever, which I find credible enough from having listened to it on Gameday Audio - it didn't let up at any time in the last three innings.

So one of the guys I coach little league with decided he wanted to figure out a way to get kids playing a bit in the fall. We can't get the town to authorize a fall league (yet) but we decided to run some free mini-clinics the next few weeks on fundamentals starting with throwing this past Saturday. Just a one hour thing, invite the kids and walk them through proper warm up and then focus on technique.

He sends out the e-mail, gets 6 or 7 of us coaches to help out and we got about 35-40 kids which was a pretty good turnout on a Saturday afternoon with football and soccer. The funny part though was an email that one of the kids' grandfather sent us beforehand. You'd think the response would be "hey, thanks for giving up your time and working with my kid" would be the default position (and it was in pretty much every other case) but there is one in every crowd. This guy goes into a big long thing about what our qualifications are and how Bobby Feller (he called him Bobby), Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan had great mechanics and kids today don't throw like that and what gave us the right to teach the kids.

Fortunately the guy running the thing is more diplomatic than I am and simply explained that his qualifications were quite good for the price (free!) and if he was working with his grandson that was great but a lot of kids don't work with their parents on this stuff.

As noted up at THT, today is 15,000 days since Cleveland's walk-a-thon where they walk more batters in one game by any team since at least 1918. To be fair, it was a 20 inning game.

Also, I have an article up at THT on 2012's most exciting and incredible games. I did my own version of daily game tracking in 2012, noting things like comebacks, late drama and so forth, and so here is your chance to find out things like the only game to feature multiple comebacks in extra innings, or the games with the most lead changes, or the only games to feature both teams coming from behind in the ninth to take the lead. And so on. The article worked better than I expected it to.

the only game to feature multiple comebacks in extra innings

You missed one of these.

Still a fun article, though, and I say that as someone who was already familiar with quite a few of these games.

Edit: Best thing about the Nats-Mets game linked above is the fact that Ian Desmond came up three times in the eighth inning or later with his team down by a run, and produced the tying run each time (RBI single in the eighth, run-scoring ROE in the tenth, RBI double in the twelfth). That's a WPA of .990; I'd be surprised if any hitter beat that in a game this year. And of course, because Bryce Harper got the walkoff hit, nobody noticed Desmond.

For comparison's sake, my system puts the best day of the year smack in between Dag's top two: May 4, featuring four games of at least 11 innings, two of which had final scores of 9-8, five other one-run games in regulation, and no real blowouts (largest margin of victory was 5). 11 of the 15 games were 60th percentile or better, and all four extra-inning contests make the top 100 for the year; no other day has more than three of those (7/22 and 8/5).

Also for comparison's sake, on the team rankings: Dag's #1 team (the Brewers) are my #2, and we agree on the Braves as least-exciting. But I have the Royals on top of the list, and he has them ranked 23rd; that puts them behind, among other teams, the Angels, who I have in the #29 spot.

Fortunately the guy running the thing is more diplomatic than I am and simply explained that his qualifications were quite good for the price (free!) and if he was working with his grandson that was great but a lot of kids don't work with their parents on this stuff.

Wow. That guy is more diplomatic than I would be, I would've told maybe I wasn't Leo Mazzone for teaching mechanics, but I could perfectly illustrate how he could kiss my ass.

Was there ever a time with Primer Dugout when the article linked was actually discussed?

Sure, lots of times.

Finally watched Buster Keaton's The Cameraman yesterday, which features him pantomiming as a pitcher and hitter-runner at Yankee Stadium.
In it, He runs the bases in 16.3 seconds
1) in a suit,
2) throwing in a little prance around second for entertainment value,
3) and sliding into home.

Dude was pretty fast.

Great article on Keaton's love of baseball by Rob Edelman.

A day in the life of an older bb fan: I wrote a check today and dated it 10/8/56 ... nuff said.

A day in the life of an older bb fan: I wrote a check today and dated it 10/8/56 ... nuff said.

Did the bank teller leap into your arms?