I've been reading the "Mediots" thread at the Nomaas discussion board and DAMN..those people are mean as hell and say terrible things about Pete Abraham. As much as they comment about his weight, I sure hope they're all olympic athletes.

In hitters parks, a ball to the wall is essentially an automatic double, with no real need to make an extra effort to cut the ball off in the gap or make a quick throw back in. The game just appears so much more static.

But I admit that this is my own biased and impressionistic view.

Meanwhile, the Sox go up by two, which is an insurmountable lead. Then again, one was probably insurmountable.

Even sadder? Cairo (61 OPS+) is not really a worse choice than their starting DH Jose Vidro (60 G at DH, 60 OPS+) OR his primary backup Jeff Clement (14 G at DH, 64 OPS+).

That's bad. Real, real bad.

By the time the game came on Drew's homer was already in the books and Seattle's losing fate sealed.

He came up young and looked to improve steadily for his first few years (73, 101, 114 OPS+), then he regressed badly (91, 97, 88 OPS+). Then he had a freakishly good season at age 25 (163 OPS+)... because he had an injury, according to your information.

Then he had a bad season (93 OPS+) before settling into three seasons of somewhat above average during his peak athletic years (105, 112, 111 OPS+).

No steady improvement, no steady decline, no typical statistical arc, no rapid decline or fluke bad season linked to injury (but instead a fluke good season because of injury)

It's like he's had four careers all by the age of 29.