before i get to the results of our pineiro projection, some news n notes:

• chris carpenter's feeling upbeat about his return:
  "The question is whether it's going to be before the All-Star break, after the All-Star break or somewhere in between," Carpenter said after a lengthy workout at the club's Roger Dean Stadium complex. "It just depends on how things go. I'm hoping it's going to be before. But everyone I've talked to has told me not to rush. . . . "

  Carpenter made three sets of 25 tosses from 90 feet Wednesday. He plans to reach 120 feet next week, 150 feet in early March, then to throw off a mound before the team breaks camp.

  i file this into the "hope springs eternal" category; every team is undefeated in february, yadda yadda. but hey, i'd be thrilled to get even 10 starts from carpenter this year; anything more than that and i just might have to plotz.
• i wonder how an early carpenter return would alter the vegas odds on the cardinals? the bookies currently give our guys a 1 in 28 chance to win the world series. insofar as the cards have won 1 of the last 25 titles and are 1 of 30 big league teams, those are just about the vanilla-est odds you can imagine . . . .
• if you're a FireJoeMorgan fan, you might be shocked to know (or maybe you already suspected) that Ken Tremendous and Michael Schur (Emmy-winning The Office writer) are the same person.
• three games past the halfway point, the 1986 cardinals are 2 games up on the nl east and 4 games ahead of the pond scum. this despite an apparent injury to terry pendleton (who only has 32 at-bats all year) and batting averages of .212 (jack clark and vince coleman), .219 (tom herr), and .229 (jose oquendo) in the everyday lineup. the '86 cards rank dead last in the league in batting, obp, and slugging, a clean sweep; it goes without saying they're dead last in homers. but they've got the 2d best era in the league.

alrighty then; to pineiro. we had 82 individual projections on this guy, a nice healthy total. the two most popular era forecasts were 4.47 (pineiro's career mark) and 4.12, with four apiece. nearly 1/4 of the projectors (20) placed pineiro at 12 wins --- and every single one of those 20 forecasts had pineiro at .500 or above. indeed, only 15 of our participants foresee a losing record for pineiro; that's pretty sunny considering the guy has only had 1 winning season in the last 4 and is a cumulative 28-40 over that span.

but won-loss records never tell the whole story, and they're inherently squirrelly. in the aggregate, i think the community has made a pretty realistic projection. here it is, alongside those generated by the name-brand forecasters:

			GS	IP	H	W	K	HR	W	L	ERA	WHIP
PECOTA			10	82	90	25	49	10	4	5	4.35	1.402
CHONE			--	136	145	45	84	15	--	--	4.37	1.397
VEB			27	169	181	51	110	21	11	10	4.44	1.377
b james			27	173	189	56	109	22	8	11	4.53	1.416
marcel			--	107	123	37	67	14	6	7	5.13	1.495
ZIPS			22	150	171	53	80	20	6	10	5.28	1.493

while VEB is optimistic (relative to the other systems) where won-loss record is concerned, our rate stats are comparable to the ones most of the computer-based systems are generating. if you take the PECOTA projection and multiply the counting stats by 2, you end up with numbers nearly identical to ours. as with matt clement, our community made an internally consistent projection on pineiro: our numbers yield a projected FIP of 4.43, almost dead-on the projected era of 4.44. even more striking, our community nailed pineiro's career averages in the rate stats:

	IP/S	H/9	W/9	K/9	HR/9	ERA	WHIP
proj 2008	6.1	9.6	2.8	5.9	1.1	4.44	1.377
career	6.1	9.6	2.8	5.8	1.1	4.54	1.369

crowds; wisdom; whatever. the quintessential-projector award goes to Mr Clean:

			GS	IP	H	W	K	HR	W	L	ERA	WHIP
VEB			27	169	181	51	110	21	11	10	4.44	1.377
Mr Clean			23	160	167	53	101	18	10	9	4.47	1.375