#AskSpector: Who has a dead battery on opening day?

Jesse Spector

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#AskSpector: Who has a dead battery on opening day? image

Welcome to the latest edition of the #AskSpector Tweetbag, where once again the answers to all of your questions may or may not be given. They certainly will not be given if you do not ask questions, so to do that, you should hop over to Twitter and use the #AskSpector hashtag. That's what makes it the #AskSpector Tweetbag, after all!

I'm not quite sure how to rank them, but I went back to 2000 on the indispensible Baseball-Reference Play Index and looked for unfamiliar names among opening day starting pitchers, sorted by ascending Game Score, the Bill James stat that evaluates a starter's performance. Not all of the pitchers who got lit up are awful, and not all of the awful pitchers got lit up, but here are 10 lousy batteries and their Game Scores from those openers, to set as a "target" for this year's potential Diamondbacks duo of Josh Collmenter and Tuffy Gosewisch...

(Game Score is in parentheses)

Tanner Scheppers and J.P. Arencibia, 2014 Rangers (14)

Wade Miller and Gregg Zaun, 2002 Astros (21)

John Patterson and Brian Schneider, 2000 Nationals (22)

Russ Ortiz and Johnny Estrada, 2004 Braves (24)

Mike Sirotka and Mark Johnson, 2000 White Sox (27)

Mark Hendrickson and Matt Treanor, 2008 Marlins (28)

Jimmy Haynes and Jason LaRue, 2003 Reds (28)

Tanyon Sturtze and Toby Hall, 2002 Devil Rays (32)

Oliver Perez and 40-year-old Benito Santiago, 2005 Pirates (36)

Rodrigo Lopez and Ramon Hernandez, 2006 Orioles (42)

The Nationals had the best record in the National League last year and retained all of their core players. It's a good place for Scherzer because he could very easily be the player who puts them over the top come October.

Maybe. I would lean toward Miguel Cabrera-Victor Martinez-J.D. Martinez/Yoenis Cespedes, but that also assumes health for the Tigers, and we know that Victor Martinez just had knee surgery. The question about the Blue Jays remains not whether they will hit but whether they will have enough pitching to be serious contenders.

That's a huge if, and given the age of the roster, highly unlikely. I think the Yankees are bound for something in the range of 85-90 wins.

Almost certainly. The Padres have too many outfielders. It will be fascinating to see, if everyone stays healthy through the spring, how Preller remedies that.

Would last year's 4 WAR season not count as a breakout for Porcello? He can improve, for sure, especially if he hikes his strikeout rate, but I think he put it together in 2014 to show that the prospect hype was deserved. The next step would be to true ace territory, and that's what the Red Sox are banking on happening, but to me the breakout has already happened. I don't think you're off in your thinking, just that we may view the concept of a breakout season differently.

Last year, it was A.J. Ellis. I'll guess A-Rod for this year. Why not? Stir the pot right off the top.

I've met Rusty Staub, but I cannot say that I know him.

I can't, but there's a hypnotherapist in my neighborhood whose office I often walk past with my dog. That might be your answer. It's a worthy thing to strive for.

Of course I don't deny that. While I love sprinkles, I do not find that they add to donuts the way that they do to ice cream. That said, given the choice between a donut with sprinkles and without, obviously I'm taking the sprinkles.

I had to look back and see exactly what happened, because in my hazy memory from college, Gary Anderson's missed field goal came at the end of regulation with the game already tied. Actually, the Vikings had a seven-point lead when Anderson missed a field goal that would have iced the game, and then the Falcons marched down the field and scored a tying touchdown. Minnesota got the ball back, but Green decided to take a knee with half a minute to go, rather than punt and risk Atlanta scoring again. I think this was the right call — the Vikings were not going to score, and they wound up getting the ball in overtime, but could not get the job done, and Morten Andersen wound up winning the game with a field goal for Atlanta.

Salmon becomes lox, so salmon is the best fish as food, although salmon steaks are a waste of time as far as I'm concerned. The coolest fish in the water, off the top of my head from having read an "ABC Animals" book with my daughter quite often, is the X-ray tetra fish, which is clear, so you can see its backbone.

I believe that Burnley just completed a marathon, and the players are wearing those special foil things that they give to marathon finishers so they can keep warm. That can't be a soccer uniform, right?

@jessespector Can you tell us how you really feel? #AskSpector

I really feel that pizza is great and that the very concept of "too much pizza" is so ridiculous that there should be a study about how that premise even came to exist.

I don't advocate shooting anyone, but there should be a good rap across the knuckles for style guide editors who omit the Oxford (or Harvard, or serial) comma. The classic example of why the Oxford comma should be used is "We intived the strippers, JFK, and Stalin." As Sporting News editor Tom Gatto pointed out to me the other day, you can get that sentence right without the Oxford comma by rewriting it to say "We intited JFK, Stalin and the strippers." The beauty of the Oxford comma, though, is that you don't have to worry about the order of your list. I endorse its use. (Ed. Note: We don't use it at Sporting News. Every time you use it, you're making my life more difficult. Stop, stop and stop.)

I've told the story of my trip to a bar to watch Sunderland-Manchester United, not wanting to be a frontrunner, and falling in love with Sunderland before. I did, however, spend a lot of time on Tuesday asking myself this same question during and after Sunderland's 2-0 home defeat to lowly Queens Park Rangers. Ugh.

I'm for it. Las Vegas is a major city and should have some kind of professional sports. From a climate standpoint, hockey doesn't make the most sense to be the first, but from a business standpoint, the NHL is the right league to take the (ahem) gamble.

Some do. According to a study by Dutch scientists Johannes H.P. Hackstein and Claudius K. Strumm, "Methane production in terrestrial arthropods," which involved "monitoring of the methane emission of the different ... species," it was found that "methane emission was restricted to Diplopoda, Blattaria, Isoptera, and Cetonidae ... nearly all tropical species ... emitted methane -- regardless of the origin of the different specimens and the duration of culturing in captivity. However, several millipedes, cockroaches, and beetles, mainly from European temperate environments, failed to produce methane. Instead, they emitted hydrogen or neither of the two gases." Now I'm trying to imagine the scenario in which you apply years of scientific education into a deep, multi-species study of not only whether bugs fart, but what gas they fart. Thank you, Netherlands.

Jesse Spector