Dorks And Losers

With Saturday’s 3–1 win against the Col­orado Rock­ies, Greg Mad­dux earned his 12th win of the sea­son. Dat­ing back to August 8, Greg Mad­dux is 5–1 with 21 strike­outs and NO walks.

Span­ning 38 innings and seven starts, Mad­dux has allowed two or less runs in six of those starts and low­ered his ERA from 4.15 to 3.68. If it wasn’t for the great San Diego bullpen, the fact that Mad­dux has only pitched in the 7th inning twice would hurt most pitch­ers (because of the low run sup­port) and most teams (because of the overuse of relief pitchers).

But sur­pris­ingly, Mad­dux is still on pace of reach­ing 200 IP, mak­ing it the 20th of his 21 sea­sons (not includ­ing his rookie 1986 sea­son). And the 2002 sea­son where Mad­dux didn’t pitch 200 innings, he only missed it by two outs.

The future Hall Of Famer is the model pitcher of con­sis­tency and con­trol. On the year, Mad­dux is still sport­ing an almost 5:1 K/BB ratio.
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Bad news for Rilo Kiley fans. In the Sep­tem­ber 2007 issue of Spin, writer Straw­berry Saroyan (grand-daughter to writer William Saroyan whose short story “The Human Com­edy” is a per­sonal favorite) notes in her arti­cle “Solid Gold” about Rilo Kiley’s pos­si­ble immi­nent break-up.

It’s not hard to do the math: Lewis needs the album to break through to ratio­nal­ize stay­ing with the group despite a bur­geon­ing solo career, while Sen­nett needs the suc­cess to com­pen­sate for the increas­ingly smaller role he has in the band he founded.

For the record, I like both side projects that Jenny Lewis (solo album) and Blake Sen­nett (The Elected)did. Let’s not for­get that Pierre de Reeder is even doing a solo project. Hope­fully Jason Boe­sel starts a side-project him­self so that he doesn’t feel too left out.
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Oh yeah. And Roger Fed­erer won his 12th Grand Slam title by win­ning his fourth con­sec­u­tive U.S. Open cham­pi­onship with his 7–6, 7–6, 6–4 vic­tory over Novak Djokovic.

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