A sampling:

There's been too little baseball and too much analysis. We've been using so many cliches, I've made plans to voluntarily check into sportswriter rehab. With the Dodgers in town all week, team senior vice president Tom Lasorda has spent so many hours eating pasta at Charlie Gitto's downtown Italian restaurant, he's officially a gnocchi.

And then:

This season when they've lost the first game of a series, the Dodgers are 16-7 in the next game. And while winning the first match in a best-of-five playoff set is a major plus, it hasn't provided the victor with an overwhelming advantage. Last season three of the four teams that advanced to the league championship series did so after losing the first game of the division series. And since the best-of- five LDS began in 1995, 14 of 36 teams have rallied to win the first round.

The previous five 39-year-olds to set a career-high in home runs: Jim O'Rorque (1890) with 9, Fred Jacklitsch (1915) with 2, Harry Wright (1974) with 2, Red Faber (1928) with 1, Randy Johnson (2003) with 1.

"That's it," Silver writes. "Johnson and Faber, of course, are pitchers. Rico Carty, who hit 31 homers in 1978 to best his personal mark of 25, comes reasonably close if you expand the boundary to allow 38-year-olds in the mix."