Postie #4

Every day during the major league baseball season, the Washington Post, like most other daily U.S. newspapers, publishes the expected starting pitchers for that day's games. For each pitcher, the Post's listing includes name, handedness, won-lost record, ERA, and the team's record in games the pitcher started. All very nice, except that apparently no one at the Post ever actually looks at the (presumably computer-generated) final product. 

Dating back to last season at least, the listing has been garbled when there's a pitcher with embedded blanks in his name, as illustrated by this example from this morning's paper: 

CARDINALS AT ROYALS, 7:10

Wainwright (R)    8-3   2.32   9-3

Vargas, J J     8:10p    5-2  3.39

Sometimes the output is even more perplexing, with negative numbers floating around. Seems to obviously be a computer glitch, but you’d think that someone could fix it by now.

Another systematic problem occurs when a team is unsure of its likely pitcher and provides two possibilities, in which case the entire game is listed twice, once with each pitcher’s name. It really appears to be a double-header unless you’re paying close attention. 

This past Saturday, I was glancing through the listing and was surprised by the number of day games – although there are plenty of exceptions, teams usually play their Saturday games at night. I finally realized that the listing of games and pitchers was not for Saturday, but rather for Sunday. 

They also can’t seem to quite decide the order of the groupings. Typically National League games are listed first (with the Nats game first in that group), followed by American League games, with interleague games as the final group. When the Nats are playing an AL foe, however, sometimes they keep the standard order of the groups, meaning that the Nats game is buried near the bottom, and sometimes they move the interleague group up to the top. 

OK, these are not exactly life-and-death issues. But you’d think that some sentient being in the Post’s sports department would be on the ball enough to get all of this straightened out.