SBL Notebook, Week 15

This was All-Star week, the "short" week, and in its honor we will attempt (though, knowing us, most likely fail) to keep this (relatively) short. Frankly we've never liked this week, and the less said about it the better. The statistical sample is pint-sized, about half the numbers you'd see in a normal week, a situation exacerbated by the recent phenomenon of MLB's conducting a severely abbreviated schedule on the Thursday after the Midsummer Classic. Used to be we'd at least get four full days of stats out of this week; now it's not even 3½ . Yet we treat the week as we would any other, the small price we pay for our lovely, symmetrical, 26-week, 162-game schedule -- a half-week statistically, but a full, six-game week in the standings. Thus that shrunken sample can yield some outsized swings on the leaderboard -- which is exactly what happened in the American division, where Paulo's Zero's got a couple of bad pitching outings, the BGoff Bammers got a couple of good ones, and just like that the Zero's lost almost half of what had been an 11-game lead, their 1-5 fade coupling with the Bams' 6-0 surge to lift Brian within six games of the top. For the Bammers this represented a sudden reawakening after an uncharacteristically long and pronounced slide -- six weeks in, they were 32-6 and in first place; over the next eight weeks they went 15-34 and from six games ahead of the Zero's to 11 games back, a 17-game whiplash. . . . That the Bammers accomplished their revival on the strength of their pitching was not unusual within the context of this one week. Common SBL wisdom has long held that the fewer innings you get from your pitchers, the better off you are likely to be, and this week lent considerable support to that belief. Coming out of the break, most MLB teams led with their aces, and since the majority of teams played only three games, most never got to the troublesome back end of their rotations. Thus, an SBL double whammy this week -- fewer innings, and most of those innings logged by higher-quality pitchers. The numbers that combo produced were for the most part outrageous -- two-thirds of the SBL's ERAs were 3.05 or better, seven of those were under 2.8 and five were under 1.75. The Patton Inmates logged a 1.74 ERA, only to see it trumped by two teams in their own division; the Mental Defectives went 2-4 but deserved much better. There were also three BR stats under 1.00, a rarely-seen feat; in fact all three were under .90, including the Inmates' .87 -- which again was beaten by a division rival, in this case Vic's Godfathers' .75. Oddly, however, the team with the shoddiest pitching -- Dan's Cherry Valley Bombers, crafters of a bloated 5.21 ERA and 1.74 BR stat, both league worsts -- actually had one of the better weeks, going 4-2 and adding two games to their National division lead, now six games over JP's Whiteskins.