Daily Links - 7/24/08

Every day when it is dinner time I have the same conversation with my wife, which Joe Posnanski (TBSWIA) goes into detail about in his latest post (it's amazing how much he knows about my wife and I when we've never met).

Do you know why some pitchers get better run support from their team than other pitchers? Yes, that's correct, it is a random confluence events that actually has very little to do with the pitchers themselves. Unfortunately, many people in baseball want to attribute the difference in run support between pitchers to magic and other nonsense. Luckily we have the Fire Joe Morgan guys around to make fun of the people that think these things. The link at the end of the post goes to a classic FJM post from about two years ago.

It seems self-evident that experience is a valuable commodity for teams in a playoff race - baseball announcers certainly tell us that often enough. But is it really true?

This note from Rob Neyer about an instance of cherry-picked stats underscores the old adage that 'you can make statistics say whatever you want.'

Jon Heyman has an update on the rumors swirling around the trade deadline.