Whenever I'm down, I try to brighten up my day with a few fail-proof pick-me-ups. I think about my friends and loved ones; I go through a solid yoga flow; I put inappropriate tags in facebook photos of my brother; I destroy a feeble USA Today Crossword puzzle and I cheer the Twins.
Lately, cheering the Twins has not exactly brought joy into the Mudville of my heart. But as good fortune would have it there's a cure for that too! GRAPHS! The fine folks at fangraphs.com will break down pitch velocity, BABIP/inning with Runners on 1st and 2nd and the whole baseball genome. Meanwhile, here at Peanuts From Heaven, we break down much more irrelevant/irreverant things--here now, two graphs that encapsulate our season thus far.
First! Let's look at Runs/Game. Both the "runs" that count as points and help to win the games, and the "runs" people make to the refrigerator to get Ben & Jerry's ice cream to help dull the pain of a poor offense.
Clearly the Twins trail behind the MLB avg., they also trail behind the runs/game that Twins fans believe they would score if given the same opportunity. And while Twins fans have a very high "runs to Ben & Jerry's/game rate" (R2B&J/G), Prince Fielder has gamely contributed as much as possible to the R2B&J/G rate for MLB as a whole.
Next, let's look at the pitching, by measuring both the staff ERA in given innings and how that relates to the percent increase in Ron Gardenhire's blood pressure, and the cumulative amount of tears shed by Twins fans (measured in oz) over the same span of time.
I know it's early yet, but clearly when our pitchers' 4th innings average out to an ERA of 9...that's not good. Nor are plus 7 ERAs in the 9th and Extra innings. It's also interesting to note that while Gardy's blood pressure rises and falls with the team's pitching performance, fans seem to be all cried out by about the 7th inning. (Until we lose in extras when tears of sadness and tears of fury commingle in a bucket o' weepy).
Now, this might make our situation seem dire, but c'mon...if you spend a few minutes trying to graph Ice-cream consumed or Gardy's blood pressure then you realize that baseball is baseball, and however long you look at stats, it might as well be entertaining. Still we look forward to bringing graphs of happiness back just as soon as the team obliges. If you have ideas for graphs feel free to leave them in the comments below or tweet them at us (@heavenlypeanuts)...more will come...wether you want them or not.
Enjoy the game and remember happiness is just a silly graph away.
In your Runs/Game graph, you might have included "runs to the bathroom" by Morneau, Mauer, Delmon, and any other afflicted Twins.
ReplyDeleteOn second thought....too much information?