A box score’s value is greater than the sum of its roto points. Weather, crowd size, umpiring crew, pitcher abuse, baserunning blunders, ball/strike and groundball/flyball ratios, substitution patterns, clutch hitting, clutch pitching–with enough time and a high enough geek quotient, you could nearly recreate an entire game from a box score.
Last Thursday night Minnesota beat Detroit 3-0 in front of less than 9,000 customers, a quick, two-hour game that produced a nice line for Kyle Lohse but not much else for the highlight reels. It’s a box score you could scan in seconds if you were looking for roto events. But if you spent some time with it you could figure out nearly as much of what happened as if you had been there.
Keith Scherer kicks off the first in a weekly series looking at box scores from the past seven days. In his review of the boxes, he’ll scan for trends and tendencies, using the names and digits you see in agate type every day.
The Braves hit yet another setback on the mound, A.J. Burnett takes a step closer to returning, and the Angels experience the other side of “baseball luck.”
From Mark Prior to Greg Maddux to Rich Harden, Joe Sheehan discusses the
performances of stud starters–present, past and future.