While looking for a little preview on tonight’s Red Sox - Angels game (which I’ll be heading to), I happened upon these blog posts about Why We Watch baseball and a neat statistic to help find the great matchups. I read them in reverse, but here they are in chronological order:
Tonight’s pitchers are Clay Buchholz (with bad year so far and a NERD of 0) and Jared Weaver (7), both of whom were scheduled to start Sunday but were pushed back a day for (unrelated?) illnesses. Both teams have a NERD of 4, which gives the game a NERD of 4. I’m hoping that Clay pitches like he did last year, and it could turn out to be more exciting game than the stat predicts.