Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, another former Billy Beane boy, has been doing great things with the Mets pitching staff:

Peterson cannot be confined to the stadium, using his spare time to develop a baseball-specific laptop computer and a software program that computes data on every hitter. Peterson tells his pitchers what a given hitter is batting against 1-2 changeups on the inside corner of the plate, and what they should throw as a result.

"There's a reason why we have the best pitching staff in baseball," said Tom Glavine, who is making a bid for comeback player of the year.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball" on sports journalism. It has presented baseball with an entirely new story line. That's an impressive feat for a journalist to have pulled off. As Lewis said, he fell in love with the story of guys using brains and bits and bytes to gain a competitive edge. It's a great story, and it's continuing to pay journlistic and narrative dividends.