Don Cooper's 'Joke of the Day'

Due to rain forcing a change in the College World Series schedule, sixth-ranked Georgia will now play seventh-ranked Stanford here Saturday at 2 p.m. ET [1 p.m. CT] (ESPN2).

The Bulldogs (43-23-1) were slated to play the Cardinal (41-23-2) Friday but showers in the Omaha area forced the postponement of the LSU-North Carolina elimination game Thursday. The Tigers and Tarheels will now play on Friday while the rest of the field will have an off day.

For Georgia, it will mark its fourth straight off day following its win over Stanford 4-3 on Monday. The Bulldogs are 2-0 in their bracket while the Cardinal eliminated top-ranked Miami on Wednesday. Georgia needs to win one more game to advance to the national championship best-of-three game series, which will still begin Monday. Meanwhile, the Cardinal would need to defeat Georgia on Saturday and Sunday to win the bracket.

Enter Out Of The Park Baseball

This is the ninth incarnation of Out of the Park, or OOTP as it is more commonly known. Programmed by Markus Heinsohn and backed by a knowledgeable community of supporters, OOTP has evolved into one of the best sims, if not the best, available.

One of the reasons OOTP is at the top of the sim pile is because it can be played just about any way you can imagine. You can begin a game and just sim until your heart is content. Or you can take over a real MLB team and pretend you’re Charlie Comiskey or George Steinbrenner with control over contracts, ticket prices and a final say over the rosters. Or you can name yourself a manager and call hit and runs and pitch outs in individual games. Or you can create an entire league from scratch with new cities and fictional players.

There seem to be thousands of ways you can play this game. And for the most part, all of them seem incredibly realistic. ...

Mark Mendicus, 26-year-old Staples employee and principal owner of the fantasy baseball team Beat With Uggla Stick, blasted his underperforming team in the media Monday, going so far as to single out individual players, criticize their recent play, and question their commitment to winning.

“They all suck,” a visibly frustrated Mendicus told reporters following Beat With Uggla Stick’s head-to-head 8-2 loss to division rivals The Mark Currys. “[Alex] Rios sucks, Delmon [Young] sucks, Pedro [Martinez] fucking sucks. Everybody on my team sucks.” ...

Back on December 20th, John Walsh wrote a very interesting article at The Hardball Times, taking everything recorded by the Pitch F/X system in 2007 and, amongst others, calculating the average velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement for the four major pitches: fastball, curveball, slider, and changeup. The results showed that the average fastball clocked in at 91 mph with -6.2 inches of horizontal movement and 8.9 inches of vertical movement. The author acknowledged that he did not differentiate between four-seamers, two-seamers, and cutters, but rather lumped them all together in determining the averages; two-seamers and cutters differ in velocity and movement components from four-seamers.

While I plan on calculating the averages for all different sub-groupings of pitches at some point, what recently piqued my interest was finding the averages for different velocity groupings. As in, what is the average horizontal movement for all 94 mph fastballs? Or, the BABIP for 98 mph fastballs?

With that knowledge we could effectively compare certain pitchers to the means of their velocity grouping rather than overall averages of every grouping. Instead of comparing, say, Edwin Jackson’s 94 mph fastball to a group including those who throw slower, we can compare him to his "peers." …

involving the word “orange’.

What the hell was that? That joke stopped being funny after 1st grade

You say “banana” three times, and then “orange.” “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?”

C’mon, Coop. You’re better than this.

Coop was jittery and talking like he was amped. It may have lead to the crappy joke selection as well.