Manny, Matt... I am your Padre.

Here I made a couple of graphs, one for Ramirez and Kemp's total bases and one for the Padres' runs scored. I looked at their average total bases and runs scored over the past 182 games to build a Poisson distribution. The Poisson distribution does a good job at predicting the probabilities near the average but underestimates low-scoring/low-hitting games and high-scoring/high-hitting games. So I also looked at the actual proportion of games with 'N' total bases or 'N' runs being scored. The results are below.

Looking first at Ramirez and Kemp's total bases one can see that in nearly 75% of games Ramirez and Kemp get 3 or fewer total bases. Looking at the Padres' runs scored one can see that they score 6 runs or fewer in over 80% of their games. Overall this slightly favors the Padres' runs scored since they score 0 to 2 runs in under 40% of their games while Ramirez and Kemp combine for 0 to 2 total bases in just over 50% of their games. The Dodgers' bullpen is tough with Broxton, Ohman, and Troncoso, but if the Padres can score just 4 runs off of McDonald I think they have a good chance of winning this.

Will Billingsley Get More Strikeouts Than The Giants Get Hits?

Above is a graph showing the probability of Chad Billingsley recording a specific number of strikeouts, of giving up a certain number of hits, and of the Giants recording an exact number of total hits. If it were strikeouts versus the number of hits the Giants got off of Billingsley then Billingsley would be a good pick, but the Giants will get at least 1 and probably 2 or 3 innings to add on to their total hits. The Dodgers have a strong bullpen with a combined WHIP this season of 1.14, but that is still enough to allow two or three more hits for the Giants at the end of the game.