Whether it’s fourth-and-two or fourth-and-12 at the 35-yard-line, your decision to punt or kick a field goal should be the same. But not so in the NFL.

On 4th down from identical field positions, coaches tend to attempt FGs more often with shorter distances to go and punt more often with longer distances to go. For example, when kicking on 4th and 1 from the 32, coaches went for the FG 100% of the time. But when kicking on 4th and long (7+ yds) from the 32, coaches went for the FG less often–80% of the time.

I’d love to see the numbers for each team/coach.

Here’s a great series of articles by Brian Burke. He concludes that you should go for it when you have two yards or less to go to the first-down marker everywhere on the field except between your own five- and 10-yard-lines.

As he notes in the comments,

Here’s another thought: Imagine there is no punt in the rulebook, and then one day it’s invented. A guy like me comes up to a coach and says, ‘Kick the ball on every 4th down and the other team gets it 35 yds further down the field.’

The coach would think I’m crazy. “Wait, you want me to give up 25% of my opportunities for a first down on every series…just for 35 yards of field position? Do you realize how much that’s going to kill our chances of scoring?”

I looked at all quarterbacks with 250 attempts with the same team in two straight years and found the correlation between their various year-one stats and their year-two fantasy points and fantasy points per attempt. Here are the results:

(Click column headers to sort.)

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Tommy Craggs:

As Alex remembers it now, Olajuwon had a double-double with nine blocks at some point during the fourth quarter. “Someone in management came to me and said, basically, Thou shalt give Hakeem Olajuwon a triple-double. Come hell or high water, he’s getting a triple-double. I’m like, uh, OK.” The Grizzlies had small monitors on which they kept a running box score. Anyone could see if someone was closing in on a milestone. “If a guy is in vicinity of a record, people are tracking those things. I know those things,” Alex says. “If a guy has an eight-game streak of getting 10 rebounds, I’ll know that. Am I gonna help that? Probably.” The Rockets game, though, “was the one time someone said, ‘You’ll do this.’ And I did.”

The NBA is currently working on a data-collecting system with STATS LLC, but it doesn’t sound like it could replace scorekeepers entirely.

Do pitchers play better under pressure? Chris Jaffe looked at whether pitchers perform better when facing their 20th loss and found no increase in production—hits allowed, strikeouts, win percentage, etc.—and found no large uptick in performance.

He concludes that, in all starts when a pitcher has 19 losses, hits, strikeouts, walks, and home runs stay more or less the same, but their ERA falls almost a quarter of a point. Looking at just the first start in which a pitcher has 19 losses, however, there’s no difference in ERA:

Rate	Key	All	Adj
H/9	9.29	9.16	9.21
W/9	3.33	3.15	3.17
K/9	5.07	5.17	5.14
HR/9	0.89	0.90	0.90
R/9	4.48	4.60	4.66
ER/9	4.03	4.04	4.10

John Benson over at THT calculates Marcel projections as if a human controlled the weighting—a yearly weighting of 80%/15%/5%. He says that Jason Bartlett’s projected OPS would be 80 points higher with the more nearsighted weighting.

Another guy with a career year is Ben Zobrist, who is third in the AL with a .961 OPS. Benson calculates a 49-point oversight with the human weighting as opposed to Marcel’s weighting.

Baseball America’s Aaron Fitt says that No. 1 overall pick Stephen Strasburg signed a four-year deal worth $15.67 M with the Washington Nationals.

At about $3.9 million per year, Strasburg would have to perform as a 0.9 WAR player per year to be worth the money, assuming a rate of $4.4 million per win. That equates to an ERA of 4.77 in 150 innings or a 4.87 ERA in 180 innings in the NL, benchmarks the Nationals are certainly expecting from Strasburg.

According to Mike Silva:

Joe Mauer is a great player. His overall numbers are slightly better than [Mark] Teixeira, especially when you look at OPS and OPS+. The fact that the Minnesota Twins are under .500 should disqualify him immediately [from the AL MVP discussion].

As brought up on BBTF, the rules for MVP voting include nothing about team quality:

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Chris Mortensen reported during ESPN’s Monday Thursday Night Football that Michael Vick has signed a two-year deal with the Eagles.

Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer says Vick signed a one-year deal with a team option. Vick will make $1.6 million in the first year of the deal with a $5.2 million team option in the next year. As PFT suggests, it’s unlikely the Eagles will pick up Vick’s option, as they will be paying starting quarterback Donovan McNabb $11.2 million next season.

Vick is still suspended by the NFL. Commissioner Roger Goodell will decide on Vick’s fate by Week Six.

The Eagles face Vick’s former team—the Falcons—on the road in Week 13.

From BtBS:

With a 10-7 record, Vazquez has not grabbed many headlines, however, you can make a legit case for him being the NL’s best pitcher not named Tim Lincecum. His 2.62 FIP is second best in the NL behind Lincecum’s freakish 1.96, and third in the majors behind Lincecum and Zack Grienke (his xFIP is also second to Lincecum in the majors). His sensational K/BB of 5.34 is actually ahead of Lincecum and Grienke, and ranks third best in baseball behind Dan Haren and Roy Halladay. He is the only NL pitcher outside of Lincecum to rank in the top five in FIP, tRA, tRA*and xFIP.

I think Vazquez might be my favorite major league pitcher, simply because he’s been so good yet no one notices. He had a 2.95 ERA, 1.05 WHIP, and a 5.91 K/BB ratio in the first half but wasn’t elected to the All-Star game!