First of all, everyone needs to take some time today and vote for the Braves obvious All-Stars, Brian McCann and Chipper Jones. These guys need to be voted in, not just selected.
Click here to vote for the All-Star game
(There is a link to vote for the game just below the video on that page.)
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Secondly, one of our SBN writers, Matt Swartz, for the Phillies blog, The Good Phight, is a finalist for the Baseball Prospectus Idol contest. This week he wrote a wonderful sabermetrically-inclined article about win expectency for every game of the 1991 World Series.
A great way to experience that best case scenario is to look at a memorable baseball moment and see what the numbers show us that might give us more insight into the game. For me, the most exciting World Series I ever watched was also the first World Series I was old enough to stay up and watch: the 1991 matchup between the first two teams to ever win the pennant after finishing in last place the year before, the Atlanta Braves and the Minnesota Twins. Even then-commissioner Fay Vincent remarked, "It was I think probably the greatest World Series ever!"
Using Win Expectancy (WE), a metric that tells us the likelihood a team will win a game at any moment during that game, I decided to re-evaluate that World Series to see if the plays and moments I found most memorable were actually the most important ones in the Series. I created a new metric, Championship Expectancy (CE).
Click here to read more and vote
To vote, you need to be a member of Baseball Prospectus. If you're not a BP member, now might be a good time to join. Even though he's a Phillies phan and blogger, we still gotta vote for him, after all his most memorable baseball moment was a bunch of Braves games.
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The last thing you need to vote on today is over at ESPN, where they are doing one of their popularity contests, this one is about who is the best modern era manager. Of course our very own Bobby Cox is one of the finalists, along with Torre and La Russa. This is our chance to see how close we can come to having as much time to waste as New York fans, who will undoubtably turn out en masse.