This Week's Links (2/18-2/22)

The St. Louis under won, 39-14 (74%). Arizona is up now; we're going alphabetically the rest of the way.

Baseball Prospectus 2008 comes out on Monday. Probably the best $13.17 you'll spend this year. Unless Xavier (80:1 at BetUS) wins it all.

Very old, but this Russell Westbrook dunk against Cal was absolutely filthy.

Baseball Musings predicts how many R/G each team will score in '08. A commenter alertly notes, "Looks like another long year for Matt Cain."

STF interviews SI's Luke Winn.

Ozzie Guillen, being awesome:

‘’Then if you’re a nice guy, they are going to treat you the same way. [Expletive] it, be an ####### then. I would rather be an ####### winning than be a nice guy [expletive] losing. Give me an ####### who can win, don’t give me a nice guy who can [expletive] lose.’"

ESPN jumped the gun on the UAB-Memphis game. How does that happen? Is it really so difficult to wait two minutes?

Silver adjusts PECOTA for strength of schedule. Seattle's prediction descends even lower. 85 wins. Right.

With Leather was on the foxnews.com front page. Also from WL:

"Seriously, if I said that Raul Ibanez could run down a routine fly ball, I'd punch myself in the face, because I'd be lying."

Derek Jeter: a below average fielder!? Man, what are they smoking down at Penn?

This Week's Links (2/4-2/8)

Bob Knight stepped down.

The FJM guys reveal their identities; Ken Tremendous is a writer for "The Office".

The Giants are not going to score many runs this year.

The Rays actually sent David Pinto a letter asking him to stop using "Devil", and fining him for doing so.

Sheehan's AL Spring Training previews; East (subscriber-only), Central (free), West (free). He is not optimistic about the Tribe.

Giants fans express their feelings towards Tiki.

Rafael Betancourt really was incredible last year.

"Massive Tie Scenario"

One of my favorite parts of the stretch run has been the enthusiasm about the potential for a multiple team tie. All of these brilliant baseball writers (the BP guys and Baseball Musings in particular) are absolutely giddy about the fact that it might take three extra days to decide the NL playoff participants. To his credit, David Pinto from Baseball Musings has been all over this from the beginning; his first "Massive Tie" post was all the way back on September 5th, and he's given an update pretty much every day since.

BP's Clay Davenport, creator of the Playoff Odds Report, has started giving live updates as games end. After last night, he calculated the odds of a four-team tie at 1 in 8, or 12.5%.

The thing about the Playoff Odds report is it doesn't take each day's starting pitchers into account. This doesn't matter at all over any significant period of time, but obviously plays a big role in our current situation. Because of this, I thought I'd look at the Vegas lines for each game, and see what number I get for the massive tie scenario.

FLA (Willis) @ NYM (Glavine, -210)
WAS (Bergmann) @ PHI (Moyer, -230)
SD (Tomko) @ MIL (Suppan, -111)
ARI (Petit) @ COL (Jimenez, -230)

All four necessary individual results are more likely than not, three of them significantly so. The translated percentage chances of each of these outcomes (after adjusting the line to take out the house advantage) are 67.7%, 69.7%, 52.6%, and 79.7%, respectively.

Multiply those four numbers together, and we get a 17.3% chance of a four-team tie, a little better than 1 in 6. If you parlayed these four events, the bet would be risking $10 to win $44.80.

Related: Should the Diamondbacks Lose?

Update: The Mets (Glavine in particular) are doing their best to ruin everything.