SBL Notebook, Week 1

First order of business: Don't nobody panic! Take a step back, breathe, and recognize that first-week results, as they might put it in Old Blighty, don't mean shite. A certain strain of SBL owner -- the more neurotic among our number, and they shall remain nameless here, but you/we know who you/we are -- tends to look at Week 1 numbers and let his imagination run wild, mentally extrapolating this small, isolated statistical sample into full-blown, ironclad, irreversible season-long trends -- like, if your 35-HR slugger from last year doesn't go yard at least once . . . or your star closer blows a save . . . or that staff ace you were counting on for 250 K's whiffs only five in seven innings . . . or, worst of all, if any or all of this results in an 0-6 or 1-5 start to the season -- well, that's it, then. It's over, you're doomed, all these clowns who underperformed in Week 1 are going to underperform to the exact same level in Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and every single godforsaken week all the way through Week 26, and a 100-loss season is now absolutely, positively guaranteed. And your friends in the commissioner's office are here to tell ya . . . it just ain't so. If your boys stumbled out of the gate -- as the Bammers and the Godfathers just did, going 0-6 -- take heart, all is not lost. If you roared off the starting line -- as the Moaners and the Inmates just did, going 6-0 -- don't get cocky, there are 25 weeks to go and a lot can change. For evidence, we need go back only one year and look at 2011's Week 1 standings. A year ago, the Bammers and the Whiteskins sat atop the American and National division standings after scintillating 6-0 starts. By season's end those teams sat in fourth and last place, respectively, a combined 22 games under .500. Down at or near the bottom of those 2011 first-week standings we found the Cherry Valley Bombers, at 0-6, and the Zero's, at 1-5. Do we need to remind anyone who wound up winning the division pennants and meeting in the SBL Series? The Z's and CVBs would finish a combined 207-117, with the Bombers winning a close battle in the championship tilt. So, there you are -- the baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint, so everyone just chill. . . . It's also worth noting that last season began with an expected burst of offense, despite a severely truncated 3 1/2-day schedule, but then hitting numbers soon regressed and stayed flat for several weeks thereafter. This year, again, brought some surprisingly robust hitting to kick off the season -- but, just as a warning, don't be surprised if the lumber cools off in the coming weeks. Our little scheme to tweak the schedule -- splitting the first 11-12 days of the MLB season into two somewhat-shortened SBL weeks so as to return us to our traditional format with (almost) every stat week ending on a Sunday -- worked out just fine, for one week, anyway. Although we had what amounted to only about five full days' worth of games, plate appearances weren't too far off what we'd see in a normal week -- all but a couple of teams made it into the 200s, and the league average of 208 was only about 30 or so short of a full load. That's a fair and representative sample, we'd say. The league average of 7.25 homers was better than we've seen in some full-length weeks, and while there weren't many eye-popping RBI numbers, a handful of clubs made it into the 30s in runs and/or TB. The Inmates enjoyed a 12-HR, 36-run, 34-BI bash-fest, numbers that would hold up as category-winners in many a seven-day week.