Shafted.

Demarcus Ramirez knows he's good. But he also knows that, in 2008, Chad Nelligan was better.

"I think I robbed Nelly a bit," said Ramirez, 28, after hearing he'd won his second straight Adams League Outstanding Pitcher Award Sunday night. "I had a pretty good year, but he was better, no doubt about that."

Both Ramirez and Nelligan, who both came up in the Saskatoon system and were teammates before Nelligan was traded to Hickory in 2005, had stellar 2008 campaigns. Ramirez went 20-5 with a 2.38 ERA, striking out 251 while walking only 30.

Nelligan, 29, went 17-8, struck out 242, and posted a minuscule ERA of 1.60 - the lowest ever in AL history. But even that figure couldn't sway voters' minds.

"I don't want to say anything bad against the D-Man," said Nelligan. "I mean, when we were in Double-A we shared hotel rooms together. Had some crazy times out on the desolate Canadian prairie."

"Maybe if I won 20 - who knows," he added.

Nelligan still could walk away with some hardware, however - he's a leading candidate for an as-of-yet unnamed award given out to the best pitcher by owners of the 12 Adams and Zotti league franchaises. That award should be given out in the next few weeks.

League Pages Updated

Now that 2008 is in the books, several league pages have been updated:

The League Owner directory was updated by Aaron, the Awards History page was updated by Mack and I updated the Team History page. I want to extend a hearty "thank you" to Mack and Aaron for helping out with maintaining the league site.

If anyone wants to update any existing pages, or create new ones, please feel free.

Zev

Wheeler, Bullpen Shut Out Seattle To Capture Cecil Cup!

Sherman Wheeler threw seven shutout innings and the rest of the rest of the bullpen was able to keep Seattle off the board, allowing River Cities to capture the 2008 Cecil Cup. Congratulations, Nate!

Box Score
Game Log

There will one more sim tomorrow (Monday) night for teams to make final offers to free-agents to be. After that, we will move forward to the 2009 season.

(P.S. Nate, if you have a different square logo that you'd like to use, please let me know. For now, I used the one that Brent created.)

Zev

Four In First, Four In Seventh Down Monarchs.

River Cities Leads Series 3-1.

Box Score
Game Log

Game 5: Sunday night.

Pitching in the Playoffs

Has anyone noticed the subpar pitching out of starters in the Series so far? Here's the game scores from each starter through Game Three:

Pitcher Game Score Game
Garcia (SEA) 56 1
Okane (RIV) 54 2
Bird (SEA) 44 2
Wheeler (RIV) 35 1
Icenhour (SEA) 31 3
Orozco (RIV) 29 3

Oofah, not a stellar start in the bunch. Garcia and Okane rate an 'acceptable' with a 56 and 54, respectively, but it's not Roger Clemens by any means.

So far the run differential slightly favors River Cities at 21-18. That's an average score of 7-6 over the three games.

Truly, a battle of offense so far. Who's going to get that one great performance out of a starting pitcher? Only the future will tell.

Game 3 to River Cities in Squeaker

Two hits by Gary Giles and Timothy Palacio in the bottom of the ninth sinks Seattle.

Box Score
Game Log

Game 4 on Saturday night

Random fact of the day

Most people are familiar with the so-called Pythagorean theorum for baseball - that winning percentage will be roughly equal to runs squared divided by the sum of runs squared and runs allowed squared. The game even automatically tracks of Pythagorean records and includes them in the standings report. (Incidentally, River Cities' Pythagorean record this year of 110-52 is the highest in SDMB OOTP history. One more reason I'm destined to experience heartbreak again.)

Anyway, using my handy dandy Excel spreadsheet, I found that using 2 as the exponent in the formula is not as accurate as it could be. For our game, the most accurate exponent to use is 1.62. In other words, the most accurate formula is runs to the power of 1.62 divided by the sum of runs to the power of 1.62 and runs allowed to the power of 1.62. This reduces the cumulative "error" between Pythagorean records and actual records by about 17%.

As the title indicates, this is purely a random fact. But, using the traditional Pythagorean formula has, on the whole, overestimated the quality of good teams and underestimated the quality of bad teams.

By the way, the team that most underperformed compared to this standard is 2005 Austin/Covington, who lost 11.5 games more than they should have, and the team that most overperformed is the 2005 Seattle team, who won 10 more games than they should have.