The fifth annual Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online Experts' League is finishing up the regular season at about 11:30 CDT tonight.  Our articles are due the night before they are published so I write this not knowing how it turns out, and it will be published when I do know.  I could delay it and make our editors get up early, but they work too hard to do that. So, here goes.

After tearing up the league early on, I eventually fell back to earth.  At one point, I had a 13 game lead over the second best team in my division and a five game lead over the second best overall team.  I then lost eleven games in a row, followed up by a whole bunch of 1-for-2 series so one team owned by Matthew Beagle of Baseball HQ caught up to me.  We faced each other for the last time on Wednesday, and I went 2-for-1 and I've been holding him off.  We both went 2-for-1 last night.  I have a one game lead and due to a better head-to-head record, I will take the division in case of a tie.  The magic number is two.  I have a 12-9 record against my opponent tonight and my opponent has a 15-6 record against his.

With three games left, I have won 84 games.  There are five teams with 82 to 84 wins that are fighting for two division titles and one wild card spot.  Of those five teams, three are playing teams with losing records in the final series.  Looking at all the different scenarios and the head-to-head records of all the teams, I can't guess how it will work out.  Too many teams have split the series in head-to-head match ups.  I just have to log in tonight and see how it works out.  My three best starters are playing tonight.

I've given up 654 runs as a team, on target with what I was expecting.  That is good for first overall in pitching.  Surprisingly, my team was lead by Randy Bush who has gone 21-9 with a 3.66 ERA.  He is second in the Cy Young award with 92 votes.  When you invest in pitching your hitting suffers so you need to have a good setup man and closer.  J.J. Putz my closer has been exceptional closing 53 games while only blowing nine and loosing two.  He leads the Cy Young voting with 118 votes.  Surprisingly, my #1 and #2 starters, Johan Santana and John Lackey have loosing records and ERA's slightly over 4.00 (4.14 and 4.11 respectively).  Still, Fernando Rodney made up for it going 11-5.  My other bullpen guys have done well.  Will Ohman, Roberto Hernandez and Eddie Guardado all have ERA's below 3.40.

It is the hitting that is a problem.  My stadium is Miller Park, 1-10 for homeruns and 1-3 for batting average.  I expected lower batting averages for my team than their results last year, but we were much worse than expected.

Everything is give and take.  If I have speed, I give up something elsewhere.  As I wanted to do something different this year, I focused on clutch hitting.  I've never in my life focused on clutch hitting.  It happens so rarely that it is best ignored.  My experiments have shown that it happens on average 30 times a season.

When you write about this game, you need things to write about, so I decided to give it a try.  For clutch hitting to apply there must be two outs with a runner on second and or third.  If the clutch hit is rolled with someone good in the clutch then an out is turned into a Single**.  That means at least one run scores and possibly two.  Over the course of a season that would be 30 additional runs.  Well, I've given up 654 and scored 701.  That 30 extra runs made a difference.  My good friend, Trace Wood, had a team that led the league in stolen bases with 183.  He was caught 71 times.  Using linear weights, those stolen bases earned him 33.6 runs.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you if my strategy worked.  Too many of my players hit so poorly and the TSN version of the game does not provide clutch hit statistics like the regular game.

Ramon Hernandez hit 23 homeruns, but hit only .225, .050 points below his 2006 batting average.

Carlos Lee hit 37 homeruns, but hit only .257, .043 points below his 2006 batting average.

Craig Monroe hit 25 homeruns, but hit .209, .044 points below his 2006 batting average.

Michael Cuddyer hit 29 homeruns, but hit .221, .063 points below his 2006 batting average.

With four key players all hitting significantly below their expected mark, I didn't score as many runs as I expected.  Based up some tricky calculations, the difference between my park with 1-3 singles and a 1-10 stadium is .013 points in batting average.  Obviously, I didn't see that.

My goal was to increase my Run Scoring Efficiency, or the percentage of runners on base (BB+H) divided into runs scored.  There are many factors that go into that like stolen bases, power, flyball's vs. strikeouts and the like.  My efficiency was 39.9%, lower than expected.  If I got an efficiency rating of 43% like a good team, I would have scored 755 runs.

So, I can't say this strategy didn't work, but I can't say it did either.  What I can say that it is good enough for a winning record and a good chance at the playoffs for the fourth year in a row.  That is not too bad.

JP Kastner is the Commissioner of the Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online Experts’ League and plays in three other Strat-O-Matic leagues.  He is also a second year member of Tout Wars in the Mixed League.