I was reading the Sweeney post which started talking about Rajai Davis and A's .300 hitters.  This got me looking at the numbers and wondering what Rajai could possibly hit by the end of the year.

At this moment, he has played in 106 games with 95 hits and has a .308 batting average in 308 at bats and 344 plate appearances.  If you go back to July 22nd (when Rajai started playing almost every day) he's hitting .340 in 191 AB and 213 PA over 50 games.  If he keeps up this pace, what will he hit at the end of the year?

In those last 50 A's games Rajai's started 45 of them and hit .340 in 213PA and 191AB.  He's had 4.26 PA/G and 3.82 AB/G. 

Let's say he sustains a .340 AVG, 4.26 PA/G and 3.82 AB/G over the next 19 games.  I don't think that's unreasonable (and it's my playground so I say it's ok).  That would be about 73 more ABs and 81 more PAs, giving him a total of 381 AB and 425 PA.  This would also give him about 25 more hits for 120 H on the year.  He would then hit about .315 AVG (120 H/381AB) for the year.  Pretty nice. 

Let's take this further. 

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I went to the game tonight, sans wife and 10 month old.  Bought a ticket for the bleachers and sat in the third row, all the way to the left in right field.  Instead of just sitting there and listening to the radio, I thought it might be neat if I took a small page from emperor nobody's book and wrote some thoughts down.  It looks partially like a play-by-play, but mostly it's just things I thought about.  Nowhere near as poetic as EN, but his is not my style.

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I follow a great NFL stats blog called Advanced NFL Stats, that uses live win-probability modeling to determine which of the two teams is most likely to win. This football off-season the author of that blog has started looking at other sports, hockey being one of them. The post on March 9th was his first about modeling hockey games. In the post, he describes the Poisson equation and how to determine the probability of a team scoring or allowing a certain amount of goals, and through that, the possibility of them winning games.  Go ahead and read his post. I'll wait..... OK! So I thought it might be neat to see what the Sharks numbers were...

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I originally posted this on my blog, but I figured I'd get better readership here.  Oh, and probably more people poking holes in my thoughts. ;) Be gentle! I am by no means close to the skills of grover or salb918 or the other Staturday folks!

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A recent post on the Beyond the Boxscore blog pointed me to another blog entry on Statspeak called Building a sabermatrician's workbench. And as the web will do, I was then pointed to Baseball-Databank.org.

I'm not new to MySQL databases or SQL queries, but the existence of a free baseball database was news to me, so I downloaded and imported the beast. It's quite an interesting blob of data and you can use it to analyize and discover tidbits about your favorite teams and players.

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I'm going to San Diego at the end of the month, and since the A's will be in Anaheim that week, I'm going to make the drive up there on Thursday (May 1st) to watch the game.  I have to be in Escondido for Friday night, however, and I don't want to drive back down there after the game. 

Anyone have any recommendations for places near the ballpark to stay?  How about places to stay away from?

There are a few near within walking distance.  I would probably prefer to be able to walk. Ayers, TownePlace Suites, Hilton and Doubletree.  Are those any good?  Bad?

Thanks in advance!