Jorge Posada is having a weird season so far.

After the Yankees' 11th game this year, Posada was hitting just .184. But he also had 5 homers and an .858 OPS.

Since then, though, he's fallen off the map and is at .130, 6 HR, and a .622 OPS.

So far this year, he's got those 6 HR, only 3 other hits (all singles) and 20 strikeouts.

I don't need to look up any of those numbers to tell you that are very unbalanced, strange, and ultimately pretty bad.

Through Friday's games, here are the 15 guys in MLB (minimum 8 IP) who have thrown at least 69% of their pitches for strikes.

For Roy Halladay, these numbers don't even count his CG effort today against the Mets where he threw 80 out of 107 pitches for strikes.

Thanks to reader Jim P. for pointing out Halladay's strike-throwing tendency. Actually Jim pointed out that Halladay didn't throw a single ball to any of the first 9 batters today.  All told, Halladay faced 33 batters today. He walked one of them, meaning he threw 23 balls to the other 32 batters...think about that for a minute.

The Dominican Republic has given us many great ballplayers over the years, far more than you might expect from a nation of its size. In fact, the tiny coastal town of San Pedro de Macorís alone has produced more MLB players per capita than any other municipality in the world. Baseball is so deeply ingrained in the culture of the D.R. that Pedro Gonzalez once said, "Every boy grows up with a bat and a ball—it’s the first present a male baby gets in his crib."

So, as a tribute to the fine baseball being played by its natives, here is the all-time Dominican all-star team according to Wins Above Replacement:

Since 1901, there are 196 pitchers who've hit at least 5 HR in their careers. These are guys who appeared in at least 50% of their games as a pitcher (so, no Babe Ruth or Brooks Kieschnick.)

I used a two-tier search to then find the career HR yielded by each of these guys, and then in Excel found those with the best ratios of HR hit to HR yielded.

Reb Russell	3.14
Ed Karger	0.50
Harry Howell	0.45
Clay Bryant	0.38
Dixie Howell	0.38
R Winegarner	0.38
Claude Hendrix	0.34
Garland Buckeye	0.33
Pete Schneider	0.31
Wes Ferrell	0.29

Now, Reb Russell really shouldn't count. According to his BR Bullpen article, he was a pitcher with the White Sox in the 1910's but came back as a full-time outfielder after blowing out his arm.

How many times, since 1901, has a team had two right-handed starters, age 36 or older, in the same season, make 25 starts or more?

Reader Neal W. writes in to ask:

"Has there ever been a doubleheader where the home team played two different teams?"

I don't know the answer--I'm hoping another reader will.

But it does remind me of looking at team schedules as a kid and often being fooled that there was a double-header against two different teams. Back in the days when there still were scheduled double-headers, it wasn't unusual to look at a Sunday on the calendar and see two games scheduled. Occasionally I saw two games where the opponents were different and got surprised. Eventually I realized that the calendars were actually showing two different Sundays for a month that ended on a Sunday or a Monday. They did this to save space rather than print an entire extra week at the bottom that would be mostly empty.

But back to the question at hand--does anybody know?

Keeping Score: The Most Important Skill for a Leadoff Hitter - NYTimes.com

Some basic sabermetric thoughts on leadoff hitters, with a little help from The Book.

Ben Zobrist has 8 RBI in today's Rays game.

Previous single-game leaders for the Rays:

Bartolo Colon has put together a great season so far for the Yankees. First he filled in on long relief of Phil Hughes, who got hammered thanks to his dead arm, and now he's got Hughes' spot in the rotation.

Yesterday, Colon became the first pitcher in 2011 who's at least 37 years old to pitch 8 innings while allowing no more than 1 run:

Interestingly, when Colon was in camp with the Yankees, the reports all along were that his stuff looked great but his conditioning was poor. It makes me wonder how many more effective outings Colon has in him. I wouldn't be surprised if he breaks down before the All-Star game.

Reader Steve T wrote in to ask:

"I see that many members often talk about the unimportance of the triple crown stats.  I was wondering if there was ever an instance of someone winning the triple crown and yet a reasonable argument could be made that he was not the best player in the league that given year"

Well let's take a look.
In 1967 Carl Yastrzemski won the triple crown in the AL. Yaz also led the AL in WAR by a huge margin. He registered a WAR of 12.2 while the next best player was Al Kaline with 7.3.

Here are other triple crown winners and their rank in WAR:

1966 AL, Frank Robinson, 1st in WAR (8.3) over Earl Wilson (6.8)

1956 AL, Mickey Mantle, 1st in WAR (12.9) over Early Wynn (8.5)

1947 AL Ted Williams, 1st in WAR (10.3) over Lou Boudreau (7.3)

1942 AL Ted Williams, 1st in WAR (11.0) over Joe Gordon (8.4)

1937 NL Joe Medwick, 1st in WAR (8.9) over Johnny Mize (6.9)

1934 AL Lou Gehrig, 1st in WAR (10.7) over Charlie Gehringer (9.5)

1933 AL Jimmie Foxx, 1st in WAR (9.0) over Lou Gehrig (7.9)

1933 NL Chuck Klein, 4th in WAR (6.9) behind Carl Hubbell (8.2) and second among all position players to Wally Berger (7.0)

1925 Rogers Hornsby, 1st in WAR (10.0) over Kiki Cuyler (6.9)

1922 Rogers Hornsby, 1st in WAR (10.7) over Wilbur Cooper (7.1)

1909 AL Ty Cobb, 1st in WAR (10.6) over Eddie Collins (9.8)

1901 AL Nap Lajoie, 2nd in WAR (9.4) behind Cy Young (11.2) but first among all position players

There were a couple more triple crown winners before 1901 but I'll stop there.

In all but a couple of cases, the winner put up the best WAR in his league and was probably the best player. Can we make good arguments against any of these guys? I guess I'd start with Chuck Klein.