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.

The $40 Million Man Vs. That Slugger From The World Series Champions

For this prop I looked at three things. The Poisson distribution for Ryan Zimmerman and Chase Utley based on their total bases from each game played this season and last season, their actual proportion of games with 'N' total bases from those seasons, and a Poisson distribution based on their career statistics against the opposing pitcher. Those results can be seen in the clickable image below.

The first two graphs show that neither player is much more likely to record a small number of total bases, and that Utley has around a 1 in 20 chance of having a big game with 5 total bases. Zimmerman really has no chance of recording 5 or more total bases. Interestingly, Zimmerman had a double, or two singles, in just over a quarter of his games in the past two seasons. Utley is a good home run hitter, however, with 4 total bases in over 10% of his games. The stats that make me lean towards Zimmerman are the batter vs. pitcher stats. For the third graph I looked at each players' slugging average against the opposing pitcher and multiplied that by 4, as 4 is a high estimate on the average number of at bats per game. This 'average' was used to generate the Poisson distributions. In these one can see that Zimmerman is more likely to hit big off of Myers than Utley is off of Olsen. One home run by either player should wrap it up, so I choose Zimmerman with strong reservations. Good luck!

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.

Youkilis and Jeter Probabilities From This Season

Above are cumulative probability distribution functions and probability mass distribution functions for Kevin Youkilis' and Derek Jeter's combined runs, hits, and RBIs. The functions were computed using the data available from the 17 games they have played already this season. Click on the image to see a closer view. Essentially Youkilis has recorded more hits, runs, and RBIs is a larger proportion of his games, but if each player records a lower number, such as 2 or fewer, then Jeter has a greater probability of recording the higher number. With Masterson and Pettite recording WHIPS over 1.90 last season against the opposition and the bats hitting heavy lately for both teams the high end numbers favoring Youkilis are more likely.