It looks like I picked the wrong night to stop sniffing glue, and also be assigned to cover the NFL Draft in a fine mist of rapid-fire blog posts. I missed a nine-run inning, and more distressingly Lance Berkman's Super Saiyan transformation. Four notes about Lance Berkman the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder, in no special order:
1. According to HitTracker Berkman's ninth-inning home run was the second-longest of the season, with a True Distance of 467 feet. His sixth-inning home run, from the right side, traveled just 399 feet, which is why they talk about Berkman having such a pronounced platoon split in his old age.
2. Berkman didn't have a single month with an OPS over .900 last season. His last month with an OPS over 1.200 was May of 2008, in which he was somehow much, much better than he is at this very moment, when he's on pace to hit .410 with 52 home runs. That month he hit .471/.553/.856 and, perhaps most absurdly, stole six bases.
If he keeps doing what he's doing we're probably witnessing the second-best month of his career, narrowly edging out the 1.306 OPS he put up in the course of winning his first Player of the Month award in May of 2004, after you adjust for league and park. (That month he only stole the one base.)
3. Since April 9, when he came out of the Cardinals' 3-2 loss to the San Francisco Giants hitting .214/.290/.286, Lance Berkman has gone 28-55 with six doubles, eight home runs, and 21 RBI in 14 games. That works out to a line of .509/.557/1.054. Which brings me to my final point,
4. I wish he'd be a little more patient.
I've got still more NFL Draft coverage to write (did you hear there was a draft going on? Yeah, for the NFL), so consider this the morning thread and hopefully I'll have something else up this afternoon.