I’m sure Dusty Baker was a close second.

“Link-eh…linkeh”
“Lin-seh-come,” corrects the CTS.
“Who the hell is Tim Lincecum?” I say.
“Someone the Reds could have drafted.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that the NL Cy Young winner is someone I’ve never even heard of?”

But by this time, he was already pulling up the list of draft picks. The Reds chose Drew Stubbs in 2006 when they could have had this year’s Cy Young winner. Thank you Wayne “Kriv-dawg” Krivsky. Not to say that Stubbs won’t still turn out to be the bomb or that the Reds were lacking for Cy Young-caliber pitching this year: hell, Edinson Volquez even got Rookie of the Year votes he wasn’t eligible for.

Award Non-rookie 4th Place in Rookie of the Year Voting

See that little table just above here? That’s the results of the 2008 Rookie of the Year voting, as performed by the Baseball Writers of America. The writers did manage to get the top two correct, as there was no doubt the Cubs Geovany Soto was the best rookie, with the Reds Joey Votto a close second. Congratulations to both of those players who had breakout years in the bigs.

However, see that little asterisk next to the name of Edinson Volquez in fourth? That’s there because he wasn’t even a rookie! It’s really nice to see the writers doing their best to ensure that criticism of their intelligence and voting ability has no basis in baseball blogs. Maybe they can follow this up by voting for Babe Ruth for Cy Young.

Statistics K501 is kicking my ass tonight. Would it really be so freaking hard to explicitly say that if the standard deviation of the population is unknown, you can use the standard deviation of the sample to calculate the standard error? For f*cking out loud, I’d still be on question 4 if it weren’t for Wikipedia.

And it’s impossible to do a gut check on whether these answers are right when the book fails to tell you the significance of the values. Woo boy, now I know the t value with 45 degrees of freedom. What the hell does that mean??

Homework’s due Wednesday night. Seriously, if you’re an expert and want to help, I’m sure we can work out some sort of exchange of goods or services. Just think: there’s a Paul Janish-autographed baseball that could be yours!

In the continuing series on Women in Baseball, the ladies at We’ve Got Heart talk to Cheryl Zimmerman, mother of Washington National’s third baseman, Ryan Zimmerman. In addition to being his biggest fan, Cheryl has inadvertently been the inspiration for his Multiple Sclerosis foundation.

Check out Cheryl Zimmerman’s story for yourself.