POTG: C Michael Barrett (yet again) eh, nah. Though he’s got an argument.
POTG: P Greg Maddux (6 IP, 3 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 7K; QS, W [320, 4 behind Nolan Ryan and Don Sutton for 13th] – I just hope we’re getting more than 86 pitches from him this season)
Runner ups: C Michael Barrett (3 RBI), LF Juan Pierre (2 R, 2 SB)
Santo started to quietly rebel against the new attendance game today. He’s not alone. This new variation, where Pat & Ron work together to predict the attendance, is completely useless. If they’re within 2000 people either way, the caller wins, and the caller is going to win a whole lot this season. It’s not hard to look at a stadium, knowing it’s max capacity, and get the ‘correct’ attendance when you have a 4000 person buffer; I figure they’ll end up getting it at least right 66% right on the road and 90% for home games (it’s not going to vary that much.) The only tough games would be ones where a large portion of the paying audience doesn’t show up because of weather or apathy, but that’s the only measure of difficulty.
The problem with the old version is they wouldn’t give away the tickets; callers would inevitable pick Santo over Hughes (the smart pick) because they wanted Santo to win – and then he wouldn’t and no wins the tickets. The change to this year’s system probably happened because they wanted to give away more tickets, and they indeed will be, but the drama and fun of the Attendance Game is ripped out of this variation. If they just wanted to give away tickets, they should’ve just had two contestants for each game, assigned one to Pat and one to Ron, not this.
(They also played baseball today. Two double steals, even. This is going to be interesting.)