The Last Off Night Before The Offseason

First and foremost, huge congrats to a good friend of the blog, Craig Calcaterra.

After graduating from Blogspot to The Hardball Times and leveraging that into a part-time gig at NBC Sports, the Shyster is quitting his day job and moving to NBC Sports full-time. Like many others, I found Shysterball through Rob Neyer and have enjoyed his work for a long time. A while back, I used him as an example of the kind of blogger we would benefit by paying a small monthly fee to, in order free him from the legal world and make his content even better. Fortunately for us, NBC has agreed to foot that bill, so Craig gets the cash and we get the pleasure of reading a talented full-time writer for free.

So from one bald baseball blogger to another, well done, sir.

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Okay, back to our regularly scheduled linkaround.

Barring any sort of foul weather, this will be the last off night of the season. Of course, off nights will be in no short supply soon enough, but this is the last one where we are going to have anything immediate to look forward to for a very long time.

If the series goes 7 games, the Yankees will have played 16 games in 32 days since the end of the regular season. As Joel Sherman points out today, the Yankees didn't have their 16th day off during the regular season until after their 147th game. And that includes the All-Star break. It's obviously not the intention of Major League Baseball to ween us off our dependence on the game with the spacing of the schedule (that would be to make as much money as possible) but it's kind that it works out that way.

It's official, Andy Pettitte will start Game 6. That's not much of surprise but the fact that Joe Girardi is apparently toying with the idea of starting Jerry Hairston Jr. in RF certainly is.

Guess who disagrees with the decision to start Burnett on 3 days rest? I'm not going to print his name because he's an admitted compulsive self-Googler.

A list of World Series contributions measured in WPA. Could there possibly be a batter more valuable than Chase Utley? Yes and another Yankee isn't far behind. (via Joe P.)

Rob Neyer wonders if the Yankees' desire to get younger means we're seeing last of Hideki Matsui in Pinstripes. David Pinto speculates that the Yankees might let go of Matsui and Johnny Damon in favor of signing Matt Holliday.

Am I the only one fundamentally opposed to Matt Holliday? I was not high on his prospects at the beginning of this year, and if you'll recall, he wasn't all that great in 400 PAs in Oakland before getting dealt to St. Louis. Yankee Stadium is certainly a hitter's park but he has hit 77% of his career home runs between the left foul pole and center field. That's not where you're going find the easy taters in the Bronx. Oh and Scott Boras is his agent. No thanks.

Dan Levy at the Sporting Blog looks at Chase Utley's chances of winning the World Series MVP if the Phillies lose. Follow the discussion over here. Sean Forman (also of Baseball-Reference) writes a piece for the Bats Blog dissecting Utley's place in World Series history from several different angles.

It looks like Shane Victorino is going to start in Game 6 after his Paul Pierce moment last night. Props to commenter Steve who gave Shane a new nickname today "The cryin' Hawaiian." Jack Moore at FanGraphs tries to determine how much it would hurt (no pun intended!) the Phillies if he had to sit out.

Not an article, but just wanted to point out that Cliff Lee's postseason ERA is no longer lower than Mariano Rivera's and probably never will be again. Ha.

Brett Myers was totally joking with Cole Hamels about saying he quit. I, however, refuse to retract the response I wrote for Hamels earlier.

And finally, on the lighter side of things, Joe Posnanski continues his ABC series which I hope will go on as long as there are mindbendingly stupid advertisements for shitty light beer being shoved down our throats.