Will do, Fred. If you can give me until the end of today I'll be sending you a nice length email.

The song is "Freewill", from the Permanent Waves album.. The exact quote is "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice".. Close enough, right?

I'm in Salem but visit Eugene frequently (i spent 44 years there and Mom still lives there). Will probably be there today in fact.

abdoozy: if you decide to come today, pick a time for coffee@the nearest Starbucks...? (not if it will take away time from MOM--always #1 priority).

Hmm...

So I'm 0-fer-1 with DeVries. Still a big believer. What do we think of Kip Wells at home (SD) vs. Houston?

Park- SD is 26th so GO

The Pitcher

he's got a 2.5 ERA on the season over 3 starts so that's solid enough- GO

Heads-Up gave up 2 ER in 6IP in Houston so that's still a GO

At home wells has struggled with ERA over 4 but a small sample size- eh

O-Swing % is quite bad at 26.9%- Of course, this is the one I understand the least...is this a full stop? David Price, Y-Ga and CJ Wilson are under 26. Are they never starts? Help!!

Opponent
Houston on the road has an OPS rank of 30th- GO
Houston has the 19th ranked OPS vs. RH hitting- Yellow light

We've got a pretty bad opponent in a great part with a mediocre pitcher.

Interestingly I think I answered my on question by adding in SIERA. Wells' number is 6.59 when 4 is average. That's truly horrific. He's red light now..but I am gonna watch to see what happens.

Knighttown, congratulations you have moved up in rank. No longer a swab. Now a full-fledged mate.

You did exactly what I was about to check: what's the siera? And, came to the same conclusion. Watch. I am new to that cat as well.

Ideally, our finished model will have solved for the proper weight of all factors in our final model--the one that we are comfortable that id's our best shots at streaming. It should assign every pitcher a weighted number for ranking good to poor for streaming.

It will 'know' (from testing) that our pitcher's strengths warrant, say 40%, headsup 20%, oppenent 30%, park 10%, weather 5%. We shouldn't have to guess at those. Regression analysis is the tool that can solve for that (I've been away from that for awhile, so foggy).

It will have to recognize that we need enough players to stream, so it can't be so tight that it excludes everybody.

Nice analysis. We will have to be patient developing the model.

Alright. I was going to stream Wells, but now I'm second-guessing. Here are the FAs pitching tomorrow. Thoughts?

* Alvarez, Henderson SP TOR
* Arroyo, Bronson SP CIN
* Cobb, Alex SP TB
* Cook, Aaron SP BOS
* Floyd, Gavin SP CHW
* Francis, Jeff SP COL
* Happ, J.A. SP HOU
* Karstens, Jeff SP PIT
* McAllister, Zach SP CLE
* Porcello, Rick SP DET
* Sanchez, Jonathan SP KC
* Tillman, Chris SP BAL
* Wells, Kip SP SD

McAllister has been on the board (see top of post) as a STREAM for tomorrow for some time.

Wells MIGHT come out unscathed, but his whip has been high and that ugly siera. I'd drop for McAllister.

NOTE: check the top of the post daily for results and new STREAMers.

Just wanted to point out that Blackley's last appearance was 3.0 IP of relief. That wouldn't be a QS, so technically he's 4 QS in last 5 outings. Not that it changes his streaming status (he didn't give up any ER in those 3 innings), but thought it was worth mentioning.