MLB: 10 Days in to the Season, the Numbers Game Begins

We are now 10 days into the 2008 MLB Season, so is there much that we can gather about our beloved teams yet? 

Well we can start with the fact that the Milwaukee Brewers traded 2007 starting catcher Johnny Estrada away and signed Ty Cobb...err...Jason Kendall as a free agent. Kendall is currently hitting .526 with an on-base-percentage of .565! Now Kendall is a career .298 hitter, but this type of performance is crazy! Chicago Cubs fans are wondering where this guy was last year?

The best record in baseball to this point belongs to...the Baltimore Orioles? At 8-1 the O's are currently 2.5 games clear of the competition in the AL East. Led by such pitchers as cast-off Dennis Sarfate and former Houston Astro Matt Albers, the Orioles are looking to make the postseason for the first time since the 1997 season under manager Davey Johnson.

A few other notes of interest. 

- A team that few people had high aspirations for is the St. Louis Cardinals. St. Louis is somehow off to a strong 7-2 start.

- Milwaukee's Eric Gagne has blown two saves in three appearances. On Tuesday he gave up the game-tying home run to Cincinnati's Corey Patterson. COREY PATTERSON?

- The San Francisco Giants have far and away established themselves as the single worst team in Major League Baseball.

- Cincinnati is 5-4 and Dusty Baker has this knack for his teams being wildly successful in his first year at the helm (1993 SF 103-59 and 2003 CHC 88-74)

- Detroit may only be 1-7 and mired in last place in the AL Central, but let's get serious here, this team will more than compete in that division.

- The Chicago Cubs have played some seriously ugly games of late, but won those games. A good sign since good teams win even the ugliest of games.

The only real thing we can take out of this period of time is the following: Per a study from BaseballInfoSolutions of the teams that started out the season 3-7 or worse in the past 50 years, 80 percent of those teams ended up under .500. Whereas 80 percent of the teams that start off 7-3 or better ended up over .500 with an average of 92 games won. 

Will Baltimore win 92 games this season? Most likely not.

Let's see what happens in the next 10 games.