The Cespedes homer may have been predictable, but not the Pagan dinger. Remember Angel Pagan in spring training? You probably didn’t have too much faith in him being a legit producer. But here we are, a few weeks into the season, and he’s got an 11-game hitting streak, during which he’s hit .308.

Pagan is a perfect example of why you can’t predict what’s going to happen in baseball. I’ll never understand why people bet on baseball, but apparently lots of them do so at great sports betting sites.

Personally, I prefer poker for my gambling, but I’m sure it’s also possible to win in the long term at sports betting if you stick to what you really know. Of course, the sport I know best is baseball, and it’s pretty hard to bet on baseball, so I guess I’ll stick to poker.

Can you see Lew Wolff and Larry Baer sitting down at a poker table playing heads-up. With the sunglasses and the iPods.

How cool would that be?

Speaking of poker, I’ve discovered another source for reviews of the online poker sites that still operate in the U.S. Check out Cardschat poker. It gives you the low-down on which sites are the best for U.S. players.

I haven’t played online poker in a while, but it would be a nice way to get in a little practice before I go down to win the World Series of Poker.

I’ve come to learn that people in the U.S. are still playing poker with real money online. There may not be as many sites as there used to be, but there are still some.

Personally I prefer to play live poker, although I can’t do that too much because it requires me to make the commitment of leaving the house for hours at a time. So I guess I ought to just hope for the return of full-scale online poker, like back in the glory days of 2006. In the meantime, at least there are options.

As you probably know, I’m quite the poker player. In fact, I’ve been to the World Series of Poker (six times) more times than the real World Series (three).

I’m going to be interested to see what the turnout is like this year, because of the laws that shut down online poker in the US. It all came to an end in April 2011, so that may have been too soon before the 2011 WSOP for the impact to be apparent.

I’ve wondered how many U.S. poker players just moved to Canada to continue playing? There is still plenty of legal online gambling in Canada. If you’re interested in finding a good one, there are reviews at Casino.org.

Anyway, I’m still not sure when I’ll be going to the WSOP this year, but I’m sure it will depend on the baseball schedule.

I figure I’m due to win the thing this year, so if you want to invest…

That shows a lack of understanding not just of the law, but of simple logic.

Let’s say he’s innocent. Say he never took a single drug in his life. Not even aspirin.

MLB: “We have a test of your urine that shows Chemical X.”
Braun: “But I never took anything.”
MLB: “OK, but we have a test of your urine that shows Chemical X.”

Where do you go from there?

Braun’s only defense is to challenge the accuracy of the test, whether he is totally innocent or whether he’s guilty and looking for an out. Doesn’t matter. His only defense is to challenge the accuracy of the test.

This isn’t some murder case where there is other evidence, like witnesses who can be challenged. The only evidence is the test. So the only way to beat it is to challenge the test. Period.

Did you think that MLB would come back and say “Even though we have this positive test and Mr. Braun gave us no reason to believe the test was faulty, he looked us straight in the eyes and said he was innocent and we believed him, so we let him off”?

I don’t know whether Braun is really innocent or if he’s really guilty and did get lucky on a loophole. (I think the most likely scenario, considering all the tests he passed before, is that he accidentally took a banned substance.) All I know is that he defended himself in exactly the way he should.

It is the finals of the World Series and it is all down to this. The crowd favorite is down to just one out to keep his hopes alive for a World Series title. Fans are all on their feet and are frantic with cheers for their favorite players while fans for the opposite side are just as frantic. Sports writers, journalist, and media from around the world watch and are ready with their camera to see if the player can make a comeback or fall short.

The official signals and the pitch is thrown. It’s is a deuce of spades, a total blank, and the other guy has just won the World Championship of Texas Hold’em! The crowd goes wild and confetti flies as the fans cheer their new World Champion. Press from websites like Pokerlistings.com and other sports writers start to interview the new champion while family and friends console the loser.

What? You thought I was talking about baseball? Sorry folks, I was talking about the finals of the World Series of Poker, the World Championship of professional poker. Every year, thousands of players from around the world descend upon Las Vegas to take their shot at immortality and literally Millions in prize money.

Sounded pretty exciting didn’t it. A bit like Major League Baseball. That was the point. Many people don’t understand how that poker, much like baseball, can have such a huge fan base when there are long periods of inactivity. Texas Hold’em is often described as “hours of boredom followed by moments of excitement.” As you can see from above, the thrills in the game can equal that of baseball and other sporting events.

The great part about the game of poker is that it is an everyman game. Baseball is a game loved by millions of people all over the world, but the reality is that once we hit a certain age, our skills begin to decline and we aren’t as proficient in the game. The great thing about online poker and live poker is that as long as our minds are sharp, we can still compete at a high level in the game. So if you don’t already play the game of poker, check it out. You may not win the World Series of Poker, but you might find a fun new hobby.

I know the MLB numbers are pretty good for all hitters who put the first pitch in play, but that a) only takes into account when they actually hit the ball and b) could be slanted because hitters are supposed to know to only swing at fat first-pitches, which would mean their results would naturally be good when they hit the ball.

But, I assumed, the vast majority of first pitches are not cookies, so anyone who swings at a lot of them is probably swinging at a lot of them that he shouldn’t.

So, I figured if I took a list of the guys who swung at the highest percentage of first pitches, and a list of the guys who swung at the lowest percentage, the guys in the latter list would be waaaaay better.

These are their overall stats, not the first-pitch stats, because I wanted to judge the overall success of the guys who swung at first pitches, not just their success on those first pitches. This is just 2011, only for players who had enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title (502)…

(Before you ask, Pablo Sandoval, at 40 percent, would have made the first list, except he came up 35 plate appearances short of qualifying because he was hurt.)

Anyway, what you see here is that the guys who swung at most first pitches had cumulative numbers better than the guys who swung at the least. That surprised me.

I suppose I could redo this and look at overall swing percentage, and that might be a better indicator, but I just spent 45 minutes doing this, so I’m going to leave the rest up to someone else.

I voted for…

Jeff Bagwell (read this)
Barry Larkin
Mark McGwire (read this, this, this and this for a good synopsis of my thoughts on the steroid guys.)
Tim Raines

I gave strong consideration, but did not vote for…

Edgar Martinez (read this)
Alan Trammell (read this)
Fred McGriff (read this)
Larry Walker (read this)
Bernie Williams (read this)

And I long ago discounted Jack Morris.

So I wanted to make a few points that went beyond the 140-character limitation of Twitter…

First, all I know is the A’s have had preliminary talks with Ross’ people. I don’t know how hard (financially) they plan to go after him, and I don’t know how much interest he has in filling the role they want him to fill. Not long ago, he had his sights set on a three-year deal, or at least a shorter deal in a hitter-friendly park, and he’ll get neither in Oakland.

Whatever the A’s end up giving Ross (or whoever they sign in his place), I’m sure it won’t be enough to fundamentally change their financial outlook in the long-term. The A’s current payroll is somewhere in the $30M $35-40M range (I miscalculated how much the guys making the minimum will add up), if they give a veteran another $2-3M, it’s not going to prohibit them from making any other moves that more fit with the long-term interest of the club (like signing Jorge Soler). I feel confident that Billy Beane understands this, or has his long-term plan not become clear to you? It’s obvious he’s not concerned with winning a few extra games in 2012.

What he is concerned with is developing, and there are more elements to development than simply throwing every unproven player you can find on the field and letting them play.

For one, sometimes guys go in slumps and shouldn’t play anymore. Sometimes they need to sit down for the sake of their own confidence. Sometimes they need to sit down as a wake-up call, so they realize that nothing is being handed to them.

Also, it’s not a great environment for development if you are sending a message to the players that you don’t care about winning. If I’m, say, Michael Taylor, and I’m busting my tail and hitting .300 and I look over in center field and Collin Cowgill is hitting .160 and catching nothing, and the team just keeps patting him on the butt and saying “Go get ‘em Collin! We’re just here for you to learn!” how does that look to Michael Taylor?

Another part of development is being around other players who have developed already. They’ve made the mistakes that you are making, and they can help. You don’t want to have six or seven guys just hanging around the clubhouse dispensing wisdom like Yoda, but it doesn’t hurt to have a few.

No one is going to get short-changed by the presence of Cody Ross or another veteran outfielder like him. There are 2,000-plate appearances to go around for A’s outfielders this year, so that’s plenty for the young guys to get all they can handle, and still have Ross soak up the excess for whatever they can’t. And I promise you, by June, you will be absolutely sick of one of these young guys who right now you can’t fathom the possibility of not seeing seven days a week.

You need to have options. Right now, the A’s don’t have enough.

Presumably it would be a one-year deal, as they look for someone to add just a little experience to their outfield.

Right now their starting outfield looks like, uh, Michael Taylor in LF, Collin Cowgill in CF and Josh Reddick in RF.

Ross reportedly was looking for a good hitter’s park to restore his value, so the A’s don’t offer him that. He also wanted a multi-year deal, and the A’s probably don’t offer that either. However, he may not have a lot of extra choices at this point, so we’ll see.

If the A’s don’t get Ross, I expect them to go after someone else for the outfield. They do have money, and they need a little more than Taylor, Cowgill and Reddick, especially since they’d like Taylor to dominate AAA before he comes up.