The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change.
—FDR

I finally watched Bob Costas's recorded live HBO special on the state of sports today as part of his semi-regular "Costas Now" sports talk series. The ninety-minute special consisted of five segments on different topics each with a Costas-intoned intro and a three-person panel interviewed by the host. Of the five topics, I found the one on the Internet mist intriguing.

Coincidentally, I finished Cormac McCarthy's latest master opus, The Road, this weekend as well. One was about two individuals trying to subsist in a world that had long since died, and the other was a novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Costas impaneled DeadSpin founder Will Leitch, Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, and Browns receiver Braylon Edwards for the discussion on the Internet. The topic was poorly framed from the get-go and quickly devolved into Costas and Bissinger tag-teaming Leitch while Costas from time to time extended a hand to the reticent Edwards to get his licks in.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
—Marshall McLuhan

Costas introduced the special with the words, "It used to be that this was how we followed sports," accompanied with a shot of Dandy Don Meredith on an outmoded TV and a few old covers of SI from its glory days. "Today, for many sports fans, this is how you do it," Costas continued as a disembodied laboriously typed "www.espn.com". As if the often openly inebriated Meredith and the monopolistic pre-Sport SI are the ideal exemplars of sports journalism, and as if anyone who typically uses the web would waste their time typing in a URL they frequent instead of just selecting a favorite. It is a minor point but it gets to the level of experience the people framing the piece actually have with the Internet.

Next, they cut to Michael Wilbon who asks, "Bloggers? What are their credentials? Where do their opinions come from, just sitting on the couch?" This is from one of the blowhards that host the execrable Pardon the Interruption, a near self parody of sports talk with two hosts attempting to shout the other down while spewing highly inaccurate, knee-jerk reactions to topics: sports talk reduced to entertaining pap for the masses.

They leave it to two usually controversial athletes to be the voice of reason: Curt Schilling ("There's a huge disconnect between the reporter and the player they are covering.") and Sir Charles Barkley ("It's become like gotcha—they want confrontation."). Disembodied Costas ends the intro with, "It is for better or for worse an entirely different sports media landscape," by which, the viewer soon finds out, he means worse.

After a segment on sports talk in which the person with the pro position, Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, states without any real challenge, "Do I go crazy on the negative? I'm not stupid. I go crazy on the negative sometimes," Disembodied Costas turns to what he calls, "The wild west of the internet, the Blogosphere."

Leitch accurately states, "If you are really waiting to read the game story in the newspaper to find out what happened in the Cardinals game last night, you're probably over fifty," even though this delineation is used continually against him in the panel segment. Mike Scherr of Fire Joe Morgan finishes the segment intro ideally with, "The more transparent the world is, the better off we are. It's the basis of like democracy." Costas then smarms, "And who's gonna take a position against democracy, right?" We learn quickly that he will.

Costas goes quickly to the offensive, "Sure, it's 100% right when you say you don't need credentials in journalism to say the Indians should pull Carmona in the eighth [actually, Scherr said it but to Costas they and everything they represent is part and parcel the same]. But these are not the reasonable criticisms of the worst of the sports Blogosphere. The reasonable criticism is of the tone of the gratuitous potshots and mean spirited abuse. That's the reasonable criticism." Costas gets ready to rumble.

While Leitch is responding with a reasonable comment on how people differ online as opposed to face-to-face, but before he can continue, Bissinger figuratively tags Costas and begins his pummeling, "I have to interject because I feel very strongly about this. I think you are full of [beep]…Because I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty. They are dedicated to journalistic dishonesty. They are dedicated to speed. I am over fifty." After some disjointed challenge/allusion to legendary sports writer W.C. Heinz, Bissinger pulls out a file and reads some comments from one of the DeadSpin writers, "I can't tell if this guy's name is Balls Deep or Big Daddy Drew Balls." After he is told it is Big Daddy, Bissinger continues seemingly forgetting he is a man well over fifty who refers to himself as Buzz, "Big Daddy. OK, so Balls Deep. I will read a bit. Here's, here's, here's, here's insight in blogging because it really p*sses the S out of me…Seriously, because it is the complete dumbing down of our society, the complete dumbing down."

After reading some inane comment about notoriously overweight pitcher Rich Garces and his breasts, which Bissinger peppers with exclamatory and often blue commentary, he demands, "How can you be proud of that stuff?" This is followed up Costas (virtual tag again) reading reader comments on Leitch's blog and demanding an explanation as to their base content. This is not that dissimilar to asking an author to defend comments written on his work in an annotated edition or, even more to the point, on notes scribbled in the margin in a library edition.

Costas then riles Bissinger up again by quoting the dire fate of newspapers. Bissinger bites: "Yeah, of course, and maybe that's why I am so heated and angry because this guy [gesticulating toward Leitch], whether we like it or not, is the future. I'm not the future. [And the future] is going yo be glib. It is going, generally, to be profane [this from the man with the four-letter intro]. It is going to be quick. It's often going to be inaccurate."

Tag back to Costas: "That is a generalization. It has a lot of truth to it [which is?], but it is not all."

Bissinger, tag again, "It is a generalization and there are some good blogs out there [a statement repeated often throughout but never backed up with actual names], but I think they are very few and far between [also, not backed up]. I think the quality of the writing generally in blogs is despicable and, I say this as a writer who has spent forty years of my life trying to perfect my craft."

Finally, during the summation, Bissinger takes one last potshot, which is quick (by which I assume he means facile), glib, and profane, all the things he accuses blogging, and I quote it with all its excesses here: "You are sort of a Jimmy Olsen on Percocet. I mean, you are sort of. It's sort of strikes me that you say you don't want to be in the press box because the press box will get in the way. Actually, the reason there is a press box is because you have a certain vantage point of the game. And what it seems to me you are saying is, 'I don't want facts to. I don't want facts to inhibit me, facts to get in my way. So I am going to sit in my little room, and I'm, I, I, I, I'm gonna give this nebulous fan's voice', and I just don't know where you are coming from [so true]. I think you are perpetuating the future, and I think the future is in the hands of guys like you is really going to dumb us down to a degree that I don't know if we can recover from."

Aside from improper uses of "perpetuating" and "really", ending on a dangling participle, and generally speaking like he claims a blogger writes—I guess they give Pulitzers to anybody nowadays—, Bissinger gets to the core of the issue. The established media do not understand how a point of view that is not gleaned from the same privileged point of view as theirs could have merit. How can it not be better to be in the press box? How can it not be better to be in close contact with the players? He needs a validation of his worldview, a worldview that is rapidly disappearing from the landscape of sports reporting.

They are disappearing so rapidly that most of the major sports publications have long since recognized this and feature blogs via their online doppelgangers, even the New York Times, the bastion of journalistic integrity that the interviewees were repeatedly championing. The doom-and-gloom future to which Bissinger incessantly refers is not just here, it has been here for some time, and the world seems to be surviving.

The seasons change their manners, as the year Had found some months asleep and leapt them over.
—William "Author" Shakespeare, Henry IV

It all reminds my of my old Sociology professor and the man who coined the term WASP (and champion of the excellent though now-defunct Pennsylvania Book Center), E. Digby Baltzell, who foresaw how an aristocratic caste can hold down the elite in his seminal analysis, "The Protestant Establishment". Baltzell was speaking of politics but it still holds true in culture of sports media.

Baltzell's central thesis is that no state (or here, industry) "can long endure without both the liberal democratic and the authoritative aristocratic processes." By democracy, Batltzell means the "process which assures that men of ability and ambition, regardless of background, are allowed to rise into the elite." By aristocracy, he refers to an upper-class community who "are born to positions of high prestige and assured dignity because their ancestors [or antecedents] have been leaders" and that they "are carriers of a set of traditional values which command authority because they represent the aspirations of the elite and the rest of the population."

The aristocracy in sports journalism is clearly the print media, mainly the newspapers. They seem themselves as the representing the traditional journalistic ideals. If sports media purport to be democratic in Baltzell's sense, then the best writers from each discipline—print, broadcasting, internet, etc.—would be allowed to rise into the sports media elite.

Baltzell goes on to say that the leaders will form an establishment, which is ideally "traditional and authoritative and not (italics his) coercive and authoritarian," that the establishment "must be constantly rejuvenated by new members of the elite" or it will instead become an impermeable caste. A caste for Baltzell "protects is privileges and prestige but does not continue (1) to contribute leadership or (2) to assimilate new elite members, primarily because of their…origins." That is, they now longer "stoop to conquer". Once the establishment becomes a caste, "the traditional authority of an establishment is in grave danger of disintegrating."

If this does not describe the current state of sports media, I will eat John Wetteland's salt-encrusted hat. The print media have now become the upper class caste that look down on other media types and refuse to allow them entrance into their inner circles, to the Hall of Fame and award voting, and to their executive washrooms (though did you notice Bill Conlin's personal hygiene? Eek!).

Today's journalism is obsessed with the kinds of things that tend to preoccupy thirteen-year-old boys: sports, sex, crime, and narcissism.... Moreover, if today's journalism has a driving principle, that principle centers on an obsession with hypocrisy…[R]eporters frame their stories by saying implicitly, "These people aren't what they say they are. Look, they lied to you." Although there is a cultural role for balloon deflators, journalism has brought this characteristic attitude of the early adolescent to the adult world and elevated it to the status of cultural religion.
—Steven Stark. "Where the Boys Are," Atlantic Monthly, September 1994.

Baltzell sees the Great Depression as the result of the aristocratic caste being out of touch with the needs of the country. "It is no wonder that a majority of American intellectuals felt that perhaps some kind of eternal justice had been done when the unquestioned rule of the country club-business establishment came to an end as of the stock market crash of 1929…wrote Edmund Wilson, 'One couldn't help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power.'"

Repeatedly, Costas and the rest turned to the golden age of sports reporting, an era in which reporters created the visions of many a fan, who was not lucky enough to be at the ballpark. Those were halcyon days, but they ended with the advent of sports on TV. By the early Nineties, sports reporting was an intractable morass of traditional game reporting and rudimental analysis conducted largely as it had been for decades. Meanwhile more substantive analysis was being done by a new sabermetrically-minded generation of analysts led by Bill James. At the same time, the mania that is fantasy—baseball, football, etc.—was just taking root.

Fans were looking for new ways to analyze the game, and the traditional outlets were not supplying them. Their greatest concession was perhaps the full page of baseball coverage in the Sunday paper, something that Peter Gammons helped to popularize, that and maybe displaying a fuller list of league leaders in Sunday editions. Until fairly recently newspapers failed to include more than basic game stats in box scores, no season averages or cumulatives.

So while the print sports media were still the standard-bearers from a great tradition, they failed to incorporate new ideas and new ways of reporting to meet fans' needs. They were ready to be toppled just as the internet took hold.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1908.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.
—Harold, Jan. 25, 1990

This isn't the Ohio State School of Journalism, this is the big time. — Reporter nonpareil Les Nessman on "WKRP in Cincinnati"

Baltzell concludes, "What is honored in a land is usually cultivated there. The traditional standards…are in danger of losing authority largely because the American upper class, whose…members may still be deferred to and envied because of their privileged status, is no longer honored in the land. For its standards of admission have gradually come to demand the dishonorable treatment of far too many distinguished Americans for it to continue, as a class, to fill its traditional function as moral leadership."

The more that the old-school newspaper journalists try to point to their past and their traditions, the less impact they will have. And while their inner circle may still sneer at the internet, their publishers have embraced it.

Though I cannot locate the quote, Baltzell would often advise that one can see that the establishment is losing its power when it had to exert it. A class in power has the luxury of not typically having to use its power. What can be said of Costas and Bissinger's bullying of Leitch other than it was the last dying spasms of the traditional sports media exerting its power over an upstart. The last bit of power they can muster is as a moral high road based on its past to bring the youngsters to heel.

As their numbers dwindle so shall their power. They remind me of those stories of Japanese soldiers who disconnected from their units supposedly continued to fight World War II.

Baltzell ends by saying that this struggle cannot end unless "a minority of established leaders, with the authority to fill the moral vacuum that now engulfs us all, steps forward above the conforming crowd and, like Moses in ancient Egypt, shows us the way." This could be done by letting experienced bloggers into the inner sanctum of the journalistic elite, i.e., the Hall of Fame and award voting. Whatever happens, I take it that Costas and Bissinger will not be leading that charge.

Those wacky young Diamondbacks, they have the best record in baseball (20-8), won their division last year, and yet no one seems to know who they are. Sure, there's Brandon Webb, who with six wins is the early NL Cy Young leader. But they have a potential MVP candidate in Conor Jackson who still gets carded this side of Tempe, and he is one of their veterans.

Last season, this team started transitioning to their seemingly endless supply of youth, and they still able to call up an unusual talent or two at will. They are like t he Montreal Expos of old except that they actually win with the talent.

The might have the next Babe Ruth—or at least the next Brooks Kieschnick—on their hands. They send Micah Owings to the mound tonight with a 4-0 record. His last appearance in a game was not as a pitcher but as a pinch-hitter, for the fourth time this season actually. He hit a game-tying home run Wednesday en route to an 8-7 Arizona win. He was pinch-hitting for the pitcher at the time.

Owings now has five career home runs in 84 plate appearances. That's about the same HR to plate appearance ratio as home run king Barry Bonds enjoyed in his apparently completed career (.060). However, it's not the best career HR/PA ratio for a pitcher. That honor falls to Frank O'Connor, who had one homer in his two career plate appearances in his one-year (1893) career.

If you look at just those pitchers who hit at least five career home runs, Owings still comes in second:

Note that three active "pitchers" make the list with notorious slugging pitcher Carlos Zambrano and converted pitcher Rick Ankiel, who still has more career games as a pitcher than at another pitcher, joining Owings. Also of note, Kieschnick is right behind Owings, and two legendary hard-hitting pitchers, Bob Lemon and Wes Ferrell, round out the list.

Meanwhile, prospect Max Scherzer makes his first career major-league start against the Phils Monday. It will just his second game in the majors. In his first, he relieved Edgar Gonzalez (the man he will replace in the rotation) trailing 6-2 and pitched 4.1 perfect innings while striking out 7. In his four and one-half year minor-league career, he averaged about 1.2 strikeouts per innings pitched (401 K in 336 innings).

Looking at pitchers with at three career innings pitched, he now ranks fourth in strikeouts to innings pitched:

You may notice that a fair number of these players are currently active. Ross Ohlendorf also made the list until I added in this year's stats. And that's the problem. As pitchers gather more innings pitched, their ratios tend to drop.

Given that Scherzer had a slightly lower K/IP ratio, I wouldn't be surprised if he trailed off a bit. Then again, who could keep pitching perfect innings forever? However, he still is a good bet to record at least as many strikeouts as inning pitched in his career, which is extremely rare this side of Brad Lidge and Billy Wagner.

Given the way Phils strike out and their tendency to be dominated by young pitchers the first time they face them, Monday could be a long night for Phils and a big one for Scherzer.

The Phils won again tonight on a late-inning comeback, but I never got to see it. It was blacked out in my area. Well, it was available through some sort of pay channel in the 770's on Comcast, those bastards! Even MLB.TV Mosiac, which is well worth th money—usually—,let me down as well, another blackout. Alas.

Anyways, I watched a bit of the Yankees-White Sox game and overheard the oddly unappealing Paul O'Neill mention that the Sox had out-homered their opponents 25-5. Of course, the Yankees went on to hit three dingers in the game, including a Bobby Abreu game-winning grand slam, to Chicago's one. That's still an impressive 26-8 ratio.

I wondered what team out-homered their opponents by the largest margin. Of course, the "record" was in the nineteenth century when home runs were rare, men were men, and presidential candidates didn't appear on the WWE. The 1872 Boston Red Stockings had seven home runs and allowed none for an infinite ratio.

Here are the most dominate home run teams of all time:

You'll note that the '27 Yankees are the leaders since the dead-ball era. Even without Ruth's 60, the Yankees were crushing the opponents.

The last team to hit at least twice as many taters as their opponents was the 1946 Yankees, 136-66. In the last fifty years, the only team that came close was the 1988 Mets:

So the odds are that Chisox are just experiencing some early-season, small-sample-size aberrations. Besides a few more nights like tonight and a few more commentators like Paul O'Neill kibitzing on their feat will do the trick.

Chase Utley homered again tonight, for the fifth game in a row, as the Phils rebound to beat the Rockies, 9-5, with five runs in the last two innings.

Utley's was one of three dingers in the game, including an inside-the-park jobber by Jason Werth and another by Pat Burrell, his seventh in his apparent career year (which coincidentally occurs as his monster contract expires. Utley also made a miraculous dive catch and shuffle throw to short to start an inning-ending double play with the bases loaded and the Rockies ready to break the game wide open.

Utley now leads the majors in home runs (9) and OPS (1.284). He projects to 73 home runs, meaning he is clearly a lock to tie Barry Bonds' record, at least by the end of the season.

It made me wonder what were the best years offensively for a second baseman and where Utley's 2008 project would put him. Here are the best years based on OPS for any starting second sacker (not necessarily a qualifier for the batting title). Note that Utley's performance so far bests them all. Also, note why Rogers Hornsby is the greatest second baseman of all time:

It's been over forty years since the baseball world witnessed three different teammates winning an MVP award (the Yankees' Elston Howard, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris in 1961-63—Maris also won in 1960). Three Yankees also did it in 1941-43 (DiMaggio, Gordon, and Changler) and Gashouse Gang members Marty Marion, Stan Musial, and Mort Cooper won MVPs in three consecutive years, 1942-44. But there were eight teams per league back then.

Chase Utley seems a great bet to make the Phils' Ryan Howard, Jimmie Rollins, and himself the first teammates to do it in the expansion era.

The Phillies are doing something that I never anticipated. They are making me sympathetic to the plight of Adam Eaton. After becoming the fifth starter by default (and because the Phils can ill afford swallow his massive contract), Eaton has been arguably their second best starter this season behind the stellar Cole Hamels, a dubious distinction on this staff, given.

However, Eaton has kept the team in all three of his starts and lasted six innings tonight, leaving with the Phils trailing 3-0 only to see them pull out a victory with a 4-run ninth. And how did the Phils expect to win with the anemic Carlos Ruiz batting second? I have to say that Charlie "I Need a Friggin'" Manuel has come up with some ugly lineups (Geoff Jenkins leading off anyone?) but that might be the worst: placing your worst hitter in the spot that many argue (and studies indicate) is the spot for your best hitter. You might notice that the Phils were scoreless until the 0-for-3 Ruiz was pulled for a pinch-hitter in the ninth, recently minted new Phil, Chris Snelling, who promptly homered to start the four-run rally.

But I digress. Eaton's had a respectable 4.12 ERA and though his first two starts were losses, they both came with 4-3 scores and in both cases the losing run was allowed by the bullpen after Eaton's departure. Hey, Walter Johnson he aint, but this isn't exactly the 1971 Orioles rotation either.

So Eaton's disappointment got me to thinking., which is a rarity, believe me: what is the record for most starts without a decision. Eaton is at three. Is that a lot or does it just seem to be?

Well, the answer is that it is quite a bit but it's not the "record". That distinction belongs to Chris Brock, 6 in his rookie year in Atlanta. However, there are just seven men who have accomplished the feat with at least as many starts and innings pitched (3 and 19-2/3, respectively) as Eaton:

Unfortunately, Eaton will not be stopped when he breaks the "record". He will most probably put in a full season given the dearth of talent on this staff, and somewhere along the line he will win and loss a game or two, and given his career performance, there will be more losses. Even so, he may still end up their second best starter.

I watched "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" the other day, and what made that movie great parody, besides the awesome presence of John C. Reilly, was that they played it straight through all of the ridiculousness from a random halving or two to Dewey's rendition of "Starman". Reilly even made me believe he was a fourteen-year old at one point. He played it straight, and that's what made the movie.

That's what makes the latest chapter in the Yankees-Red Sox so great: someone is actually taking this stuff seriously. Someone cared enough to plant a Red Sox jersey in the Yankees stadium, like bugs planted in foreign embassies as they are built. Someone cared enough to drill for five hours into the foundation of the new stadium to locate said jersey. And someone cared enough to donate the worthless piece of trivialness to a Boston-area charity. Sure, it had to be in Boston.

Boston-New York is not the greatest rivalry in the sport. For my money (and I did study this at some point), the Dodgers and Giants win this hands down. But those two have fallen on hard times of late. The Yankees and Red Sox are now the darlings of the baseball world. ESPN won't interrupt its 24-hour coverage of football unless the Sox and Yanks are playing. Heck, the networks don't get out of bed for anything less than a Sox-Yanks series.

Never mind that Brian Bannister and the Royals might be the most improbable success story since the 1914 Miracle Braves (or at least the 1969 Miracle Mets). Never mind that everyone's preseason pick to win the AL Central, the Tigers, us floundering, and the other pick, Cleveland, is just two games ahead of them. Never mind that the A's, O's, Cards, and Marlins are all leading their respective divisions and were all expected to be closer to last than first.

There are great stories throughout the majors, and yet we get the same old Yankees-Red Sox fabricated storyline. The jersey they planted was a David Ortiz's and given the way he was batting before it was resurrected, they should have kept it buried.

Has the erstwhile National Pastime become a farce? Have steroid scandals and congressional hearings and fantasy baseball and all the rest made the game into some sort of joke? Before we know it, it will be as lowly as the presidential election.

Baseball, take Dewey Cox's advice and walk hard.

Chase Utley was hit by a thrown ball four times in the Phils' 5-2 win over the Metsgoes today. That would be a major-league record for being hit by a pitch, but the last one was on a relay throw by Mets first sacker, Carlos Delgado, on a failed doubleplay attempt. That one gets scored as just a throwing error.

Utley did tie the record for times hit by a pitch in a nine-inning game. I tried to find a complete list of the players that preceded him, but there seems to be a dearth of data on the net.

The last NL player to do it was Houston's Richard Hidalgo on April 19, 2000. The last major-leaguer was the Twins' Corey Koskie on July 27, 2004. Before that it gets a bit murky.

My Ye Olde Tyme Record Books from the Seventies reports that there were 22 occurrences by 19 players in the AL, NL, and old Beer'N'Whiskey AA. It lists Tito Fuentes (SF) on 9/13/73, Bill Freeham (Det), 8/16/68 (consecutive). Ron Hunt (SF) also did it on 4/29/1969.

That's all I could find. Boy, that's annoying.

Stick a fork in the Tigers. They are done, at least from a historic perspective. No team that started the season with seven straight losses has ever qualified for the postseason.

None actually had a winning percentage better than .525. Just two had a winning record. The average record for 0-7 starters is 53-109. Oopha! Here the ten with the best overall records:

Brad Lidge picked up his first save as a Phillie today, and Cole Hamels turned in another stellar outing. The only blight on the Phils day was a couple of unearned runs stemming from another couple of Phils errors. Lidge allowed an unearned run in the ninth when So Taguchi, a defensive replacement for Pat Burrell (who had two homers on the day), nonchalanted a two-out fly ball. Greg Gross he aint.

The Phils now have nine errors in seven games. Keep in mind that no team has had more errors than games played since 1993, when the inaugural Rockies accomplished the feat with 167 errors in 162 games.

But the Phils don't even lead the majors in errors. That honor falls to the Pirates who had two errors today en route to a 10-8 loss to the Cubs in twelve innings. The Cubs were far from perfect collecting three errors of their own. Even odder, Jon Lieber won his first game since June 9 of last year with the Phils. What's Freddy Garcia up to?

The glory of small sample sizes is that five teams are on track to record 162 or more errors this year:

Now, before you chalk it up to cold April hands, keep in mind that even in the small collection of games so far this year, baseball continues its slow, inexorable, asymptotic approach toward perfection at least where errors are concerned. Fielding percentages are at .983 on average for MLB, exactly where they were last year.

So what does it mean? It means the same thing as So Taguchi's error, not a whole lot. Taguchi had three errors in 109 games in the outfield last year. He probably will end up with about the same number this year. Just as it is highly improbable that anyone, even the Pirates, will be able to keep up the error pace for an entire season.

Von Hayes was on track to hit 100 home runs early one April. That's the glory of small sample sizes.

(Kentucky Fried Movie)

That guy is kryptonite on a stick.
—From "The Cooler"

I have never seen a no-hitter. I have put the kibosh on every no-hitter in progress including Johan Santana's opener this year in which he lost his in the bottom of the fourth with two out on a Josh Willingham home run. I feel personally responsible for Steve Carlton never having thrown a no-no. I watched or listened to just about every one of his starts with the Phils.

But I never meant to screw up the Tigers by picking them to win the World Series. Detroit got blown out 13-2 tonight by the White Sox behind their number one starter, Justin Verlander (who, by the way, I picked to win the AL Cy Young, another mea culpa). They are now the only team in baseball to not yet own a win, and this was the team that was supposed to be a juggernaut. Their offense was supposed to be awe-inspiring and yet they have scored an average of 2.5 runs a game, four less than their opponents. And they have been swept by two division rivals that were supposed to be marginal teams at best.

So the Tigers are 0-6, but they have another 156 games to overcome that. An extra win every 26 games would nullify this deficit. It should not be that difficult, right?

Well, if history is any indication, the Tigers have a Herculean task ahead of them, something that just two teams out of 62 have ever been able to overcome. The average 0-6 team that ends up with what equates to a 57-105 record. Just seven had winning records over the full season, just two—the '95 Reds and '74 Pirates—have made the playoffs, and none have ever won their league's pennant, let alone a World Series.

Here are the teams with the best records that started 0-6:

And it's not like the Tigers are losing a lot of close ballgames. They have been outscored 15 to 39 or by four runs (2.5 to 6.5) per game. Their expected winning percentage is just .148, which translates into under one win (0.89) in six games. They deserve to be where they are, especially when they bat their catcher, Pudge Rodriguez, leading off. Pudge is a future Hall-of-Famer but he is 36, had a .294 OBP last year (just 13 higher than his batting average with just 9 walks in 515 plate appearances), and owns a less than fabulous .339 OBP for his career.

Oh well, Detroit please accept my apologies.