This Week's Pitching Probables (Sept. 17-22)

Pedro Cerrano was Cuban, wasn’t he?

You could say this about any deficiency, really. Most people only follow one team closely, so a broader perspective cannot realistically be expected. I know I overreact to trivial things sometimes.

When you reply to a comment, it’s important to read and understand the entire comment first. I shouldn’t really have to elaborate on this since I already anticipated the point in my earlier comment, but I’ll do it anyway.

It is standard human behavior in all pursuits to set one’s goals at a difficult but realistic level. When one is in school, one typically does not visualize getting a 4.0 for the next semester, even though on some level that is always one’s goal every semester. Rather, normally, one only visualizes a 4.0 where the courses are manageable enough for that to be a reasonable expectation. By the same token, if, say, one is a 3.3 student, one does not visualize getting a 3.3 in the next semester either. Instead, you visualize something better and more difficult to achieve than your median outcome (a 3.5 or 3.7 or what have you).

Does visualizing and setting expectations in this manner actually help you to achieve the goals you set? Maybe, maybe not – who knows? But (1) this is what people usually do, and (2) there is certainly nothing wrong with doing it that way. So, if you’re going to be doing this anyway, you might as well base your goals on the right factual predicates.

A baseball player tries to win every game he plays, just as he tries to get on base every time he comes up to bat. So on some level, yes every player “goes for a sweep” in every series, just as every batter “goes for a 1.000 batting average” in every game. But that doesn’t mean these are goals that one consciously visualizes. Doing so would be abnormal because those goals are unrealistic. People generally do not visualize goals that they know they are going to fail to achieve 95+ percent of the time.

But occasionally, you do consciously visualize those more difficult goals, because the circumstances are such that they are more achievable than usual. When the Phillies have a series coming up against a team with a losing record, they surely visualize different goals than they do when they have a series against a team with a winning record.

The Braves are not the Pirates – they are a good team even when Jair Jurrjens is on the mound. But because of the pitching matchups, a sweep is more achievable in this series than it would normally be against a team with a .565 winning percentage. Therefore, a sweep should leave the realm of hypothetical wishes and should instead be considered a very achievable goal that’s right in our grasp, just as it is when we go up against a lesser team without the Big Three. Again, whether that attitude will actually help achieve anything is unknowable. Regardless, it is the attitude that the team would normally have in a series with odds like what they are here.