Back in Pinstripes

First of all, at least the Yankees were smart and are going to re-sign Derek Jeter. I'm glad to see it. Even though he is getting older and has not been as productive as he used to be, he is still the captain and he still deserves to be kept on the Yankees if for no other reason than his leadership qualities. Also, I know that his production has been down, but how many shortstops are there honestly that are very productive? There are some amazing ones, but generally speaking either shortstop or second base are relatively weak. There won't too many shortstops who are that much better than he is to offset the leadership that he brings to the Yankees and make it worth it to get rid of him. This issue kind of begs the question however if his paycheck will be way too much. The obvious answer is of course it will be. That is the nature of baseball today though. Players go to the highest bidder most of the time, so obviously that competition raises prices. It is unfortunate though because it makes a wide discrepancy between big and small market teams.
Photo by Rubenstein on Flickr

Lots Going On

Well, a lot certainly happened in the sports world yesterday. For one, Reggie Bush surrendered his 2005 Heisman. Unfortunately, even though his problems are off the field, his on the field accomplishments are being diminished. Not that any of his problems are excusable, but it is too bad because he was one of my favorite running backs at USC over the past few years. Another piece of big news was that thanks to Jorge Posada and the Yankees are now back in first place by one half of a game. Personally, I am a Rays fan, so not that I have anything against the Yankees, but I will not be rooting for them in this race. One more great piece of sports news was a Phillies victory combined with a Braves loss. That means that we now have a two-game lead in the East and is nice to see that Cole Hamels was able to deal a gem last night. The Phillies are going to need all three of the aces to come up huge because quite honestly I'm not too sure about Joe Blanton. He can be amazing, but he is much more sporadic than the other three. Once the Phillies are in the playoffs, I don't know who can stop them.
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Stacked Odds

Last night, CC Sabathia took a no-hitter into the eighth inning with two outs. This means that he survived 85% of the feat which is one of the rarest accomplishments in baseball. There have been 281 no-hitters which may sound like a lot but in theory there are 2430 games per season in Major League Baseball since they added the Diamondbacks and Rays in the 90s. Even in the small amount of time since then, over 20,000 games have been played, and the National League was founded in 1876. Granted, the schedule has been added to since then because of the American League as well as other expansion teams as well as natural expansion. However, we can still assume that there have been over 100,000 games played in the history of baseball and only 281 of them were no-hitters. This equates to .3% of games being no-hitters if there were indeed only 100,000 games which I think is definitely under shooting. Let's think about what this tiny probability means. If there were 1000 marbles in a jar and you had to pick one, there would only be three marbles that you could choose that would turn into no-hitters. Those are crazy odds, and every player who has never thrown a no-hitter needs to make that same lucky grab from the marbles. So don't feel too bad CC; there are immense odds against throwing a no-hitter that proportionally very few pitchers have ever done.
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