Thank you so much for publishing this article so early in the day! It gives me far better coffee break reading than some lame blog. Usually I have to wait until after lunch to get my daily BP in. :)

Will Carroll has been demoted to the sidebar? Oh no! I found his Mariano Rivera observation extremely interesting. Perhaps this can also explain why Rivera has not yet declined as he's aged. Can we use Pitch/fx to see if that cutter is getting more movement when he's not throwing as hard?

Congratulations, Jay, on such a thorough analysis of superb quality. I can't imagine that there's a significant angle that you didn't cover.

This may be the first time since maybe 2002 that the two best teams in each league have met in the World Series. I guess you could argue it happened in '07 as well, but I'm not so sure the Rockies were the best team in the NL that year.

Jay used the word "title", so my quarrel is not with him technically, but with baseball in general. I wish to point out how expansion has hurt baseball. 28 years without a championship seems like a long time. It is, but it is not a "drought"; it is a perfectly normal rainfall. There are 30 Major League teams. The Yankees alone are expected to win almost a quarter of the championships so that leaves about 23 championship titles for the other 30 teams over a 30 year period. You can expect half of them won't get one and the rest will likely get only one or two. Unless we have compression, the odds won't improve for the next 30 years, so several teams can be expected to go many generations without a championship. Is that good for baseball? (My biggest complaint against having so many teams is that one needs to be either a baseball professional or a hermit to have the time to satisfactorily know all the players.)

Whether so many teams is good for baseball or not, let's not imply 30 years without a championship is unusual, please.

Thanks for the '3-days-rest' data for starting pitchers, Jay. For anyone who thinks 86 starts is insufficient data for telling us anything, perhaps your local community college provides a 'Statistics 101' course.

So each squad is carrying 12 pitchers? No comment on the idiocy of that?

I frankly see the series as pretty simple. By team eqa the yankee's are the best offense of last 15 years. Its a huge gap between them and the phillies offensively and the phillies starting pitching edge isn't big enough to make up for their bullpen. Yankee's in 5.

Crap. Ben Francisco is batting seventh tonight, ahead of Feliz, just as Eric Seidman predicted. I meant to make the change, but it slipped my mind.

Also, FWIW, Posada will bat fifth tonight, Matsui sixth, contrary to what's above.

Yankees in 6. Too deep.

I like Charlie Manuel though. He's not a glory hound, and obviously is doing a good job in Philly. 2 NL titles can't be wrong.

All this numerical analysis is well and good, but you've forgooten that the Phillies have more swagger, and thus, must be expected to win.