The second “half”

I don’t know about everyone else, but nothing makes me want to watch baseball more than a four-day break. I’m downright mildly excited about the second half starting tonight at PNC Park. Mostly, that’s because if anyone needed a break it was the guys wearing black and gold after the way that first half ended. After a nice 5-2 week against the Cubs and Phillies, they fell apart in Houston and lost some absolute heart-breakers in Milwaukee to skid into the break on a six-game losing streak.

But that’s all behind us now. Pedro Alvarez and Neil Walker and Jose Tabata have some wind under their sails. Andrew McCutchen has had four days to rest up and figure out what he’s doing wrong. Most importantly, perhaps, everyone can just pretend like a new season is starting now that the All-Star break is over and try to salvage something from the flaming wreckage that was the first half of this season.

At the very least, the Pirates get to kick this leg of the season off at PNC Park against the Astros. The Pirates haven’t beaten the Astros even once in six tries this year, which means that their either far worse than we feared or something’s about to break in their favor. Zach Duke makes his return from elbow soreness tonight, but he’ll likely be on a tight pitch count so it’s nice to have a fully-rested bullpen ready to back him up. Baby steps start here.

The first pitch tonight is at 7:05. The second half Clemente/Cangelosi relaunch is after the jump.

First off, congratulations to first half champ Don_Madden! He really cleaned everyone’s clocks. I’m re-launching things for the second half for two reasons. One is to make it more accessible to people interested in playing that were intimidated by the massive scoreboard. The other is so that I can clean up how I keep track of it.

Let’s start with a rehash of the rules. Clemente/Cangelosi is a simple prediction game based on WPA. Before the first pitch, submit the Pirate you think will have the highest WPA (Clemente) and the Pirate that will have the lowest (Cangelosi) in that night’s game. WPA is “Win Percentage Added.” As the game progresses, the win percentage is the chance that a given team will win based on the situation. When the game begins, the odds are close to 50/50 for each team (with a slight home field advantage), but each play pushes the needle in one direction or the other. A key RBI, for example, will be worth big positive WPA while a strikeout with the bases loaded in the ninth inning of a tie game will be worth negative WPA.

I’m using the WPA from FanGraphs‘ scoreboard for Clemente/Cangelosi, so you can always follow along there. It’s not always a perfect indicator of the night’s best performers (sometimes a reliever that comes in and gets one high-leverage out, for example, will have a huge WPA while guys that get key hits that came early in the game won’t), but it’s a good one and it’s unbiased.

This time around, I’m going to track the results in a spreadsheet to make it easier to ensure that I add scores up right. As always, all you have to do is put your picks in the comments. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.

Good luck, everyone!