Game of the Day (6/18/84)

Yankees 2, Tigers 1. Detroit's Milt Wilcox was in his last full season at age 34, and hadn't thrown 200 innings since 1978. (This is not entirely fair - he'd gone over 190 three times and would again in '84, and threw 166.1 in the abbreviated 1981 season - but it is technically correct.) New York's Phil Niekro was 11 years older than Wilcox, but was in the middle of his 17th consecutive 200-inning season (with the exception of '81), and would throw two more before the string ended. He had exceeded 300 innings more recently than Wilcox had thrown 200, and was more effective while on the mound to boot.

Stopping the madness: A better way to score NCAA tournament brackets

Bracket season is upon us once again, which means that millions of normally hardworking Americans will spend the next week carefully examining an ordered list of 64 basketball teams and trying to select the winners of the 63 games those teams will play. (Fine, it’s really 68 and 67, but let’s not pretend that most people care overmuch about the opening-round games, especially because most bracket pools ignore them.) Those picks will, for the most part, be entered into online contests which will compare the predicted brackets to the results of the games as they are played, and select the best one as the winner. This should come as news to exactly nobody.

But for all the care put into the individual brackets by the participants, the people running the contests generally put shockingly little thought into the actual method used to evaluate them.