Overreacting to the first week of baseball. A tradition unlike any other. People come from distant lands just to overreact to baseball’s opening week. It’s quite remarkable.
Fans are going overanalyze 6 or 7 games because that’s the only way they can keep a baseball conversation going in the first week. I mean this would be pretty lame:
Fan 1: Dude, opening week was so exciting! The Dodgers look really good, looks like they’re the team to beat in the NL!
Fan 2: Actually it’s a really small sample size, so it doesn’t really mean anything.
Fan 1: Oh.
Fan 2: Yep.
Fan 1: You’re a snarky loser that will never make friends.
To be fair, I’m usually the snarky loser. So with hopes of avoiding conversations like these where fans make lame insults at one another, people overreact to the first week of the regular season, or in other words, 3.7 % of the season. In reality, the numbers accumulated by this week mean very little in the grand scheme of things. 3.7 %! A little quick math by yours truly notices that there’s still 96.3 % of the season remaining. There’s so much luck, and weird baseball like things that can happen during small stretches, that numbers are skewed. Teams can have easy or difficult schedules since they haven’t been able to play all the teams in the league yet. The point is, you can’t fully judge team or player performance until a good chunk of the season has gone by, so that lucky bounces here or there can be normalized.
Here are some storylines that fans are bound to freak out about:
1) Albert Pujols: .222/.300/.296 (Avg/Obp/Slg) 0 HR
Right now, Albert is on pace to have a career low in HRs. Don’t ask me how I got that so quickly. Before you start to go crazy over this, remember that Albert Pujols is not human. He eats screws and bolts for breakfast. I’ll have to try that one of these days.
2) Boston Red Sox 2-5, ERA 5.70, OPS .709
Remember when the Sox started last season 0-6, everybody in Boston thought the sky was falling and that the 2011 season would leave a bitter taste in Sox fans mouths. In reality… wait…. Never mind. The Red Sox did have one of the leagues best records in August, and in reality, the start of the season had little bearing on how it ended. I don’t remember what happened at the end, except for something about fried chicken playing left field while overdosing on prescription drugs. Might’ve got some facts mixed up.
3) Los Angeles Dodgers 7-1, 2.67 ERA
Clayton Kershaw and Matt Kemp are probably the best hitter and pitcher respectively in the NL. Magic Johnson is the owner. Yep, it’s easy to be optimistic iin Chavez Ravine. Then you remember, Mark Ellis, James Loney, Juan Rivera, Juan Uribe, A.J. Ellis and Dee Gordon (very raw) make up 7/9 of the lineup. Also, Aaron Harang is not going to strike out 9 straight hitters every start. That’s analysis right there.
4)
lololololololololololololol.
5) Josh Willingham: 4 HRs, On pace for 92 HRs
This one's probably true.
6) Roy Halladay 2-0, 0.60 ERA, 0.6 BB/9
I don’t even know who this guy is. No way he keeps this up.
So while you might be tempted socially to exaggerate the meaning of these early performances, always remember they really have no meaning. Unless you’re the Red Sox.
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