Melog Rankings: Post-French Open 2015

And we're back. Apologies for the interruption; it turns out that the difficulty of compiling tennis rankings based on inordinately large spreadsheets increases exponentially when somebody steals your computer. But the computer has now been replaced, the spreadsheets re-accessed (thanks to the cloud-based version of Office), and we're up and running again.

So... did anything interesting happen while I was out of action?

Game of the Day (4/21/91)

Pirates 13, Cubs 12 (11). Chicago's Mike Harkey took on Pittsburgh's Randy Tomlin. Both of them were 24 years old at the time of the game, and neither would end up having a particularly noteworthy career; Harkey would have the best single season by either man - and it was his rookie season, which came in 1990 and was thus already behind him.

Game of the Fortnight (4/20/15)

In terms of producing exciting contests, the 2015 baseball season is off to a fine start. April 12 produced both a 14-inning affair between the Astros and Rangers and an 11-inning showdown between St. Louis and Cincinnati in which there were three lead changes, and the Reds left the go-ahead or winning run in scoring position for three straight innings before the Cardinals finished them off. Both of those were exceeded by Arizona and San Francisco's 12-inning battle on April 16, in which the Giants rallied to tie in both the ninth and tenth, gave up two in the twelfth, then got one of them back only to leave the tying run on second.

But all of those options were merely vying for second place behind Red Sox 6, Yankees 5 (19).

Melog Rankings: Post-Monte Carlo 2015

April is here, which means the weather is warming up, it's raining all the time, and the tennis season has shifted onto European clay. It's always been one of Rafael Nadal's best months; last year was the first time in a decade that he went without a title in April. Let's see how the first part of this year's fourth month has changed things.

Game of the Day (4/20/91)

Tigers 2, White Sox 1 (12). Detroit's Walt Terrell, a nearly-33-year-old right-hander winding down an almost-2000-inning career with his second stint as a Tiger, took on Chicago's Greg Hibbard, a 26-year-old lefty whose previous two seasons looked promising, but who would soon enter a pretty sharp decline largely due to an utter dearth of strikeouts.

Game of the Day (4/19/91)

Pirates 5, Cubs 4. Chicago started Danny Jackson, who is one of the more fortunate journeyman pitchers in baseball history; he pitched in the postseason five times, for five different teams, and came out of it with two rings. (In the '85 playoffs, Jackson's Royals trailed 3-1 in both the ALCS and the World Series; Jackson posted complete game victories in both Game 5's, and the Royals came back to win both series.) Pittsburgh's starter, Vicente Palacios, threw less than 20% as many major league innings as Jackson, but that was largely because much of his career was spent in the Mexican League. Baseball-Reference has a fairly interesting short bio of him here.

Game of the Day (4/18/91)

Brewers 4, Orioles 3 (11). Baltimore's Jeff Ballard was just 27 years old when this game was played, but had under 200 innings remaining in a big league career that had seen him join a rotation for the first time at 23. It wasn't an enviable fate - unless you were Milwaukee's Mark Knudson, who was 30 and had under 50 innings to go before the finish line.