Beat the Streak

Baseball season starts soon. More on that later. mlb.com has started a new (free) game called 'Beat the Streak'. The premise is that you pick a major league player for each day. If they get a hit, your counter is incremented. If not, you go back to zero. The first person to get to 57 'hits' wins $100,000. (If you don't know the signifigance, see the Hitting Streak wikipedia entry)

If I had no job, nothing to do, no responsibility, etc, this is what I would do: I would sign up for mlbTV, watch every game, pour over all the baseball stats I can find, look for starting pitcher vs. hitter matchups where the hitter in the past has tended to get hits off that pitcher, in the stadium, on days when the temperature is above 75, etc. Just spend all my time doing research into the next day or twos selection. I would do all that, get a good streak going, then when I got close, I would screw it up and end up at zero again. If you get close, then mess up, you only have 2 more chances like that before the season is over.

Fortunately, I do have stuff to do, and won't spend anywhere near that kind of time doing this. I subscribe to the audio broadcasts, which is only $15 a year, compared to the $90 for the television. The audio is nice to listen to at work all summer long. I plan to do the old "He sounds good, I'll pick him" type of selection. Teams that start doing horribly will get picked on. If I win, we are having a bar-b-que, everyone is invited. (Even if that means I have to get you here.)

Anyway, once in a while, I will update you here on how my streak is going. If you play, let me know how your streak is going.