Thoughts on watching Oliver Perez struggle through 12 pitch at bats

Say you've got a choice between your leadoff hitter starting the game with a 12 pitch AB that ends in an out vs. a first pitch single. Which would you take? What's your over/under on the pitch number? I'm pretty sure I'd take 20, that's a fifth of the pitches the starter can throw. But of course 20 pitch at bats are an extreme rarity; 10 is more common but still noteworthy.

Anyway a big key to modern baseball is getting the other team's middle relievers into the game ASAP. Wonder if anyone's working on a measure to incorporate a hitter's "pitch absorption" into calculations of value. It's extremely context-sensitive obviously; if the starter is Randy Johnson in his prime, getting him out of the game is more important than if it's the Pirates' fifth starter.

Books we're reading here

Europe Between The Oceans by Barry Cunliffe. A history of the continent, starting with the spread of the Neolithic package (farming, animal domestication, large settlements, pottery, etc.) from Turkey westward, displacing or converting the already present hunter-gatherers. I'm finding it quite interesting in the context of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I read a couple of years ago. Diamond's major thesis was that Europe (and to a lesser extent Asia) conquered the world rather than vice versa in the post 1492 era because it had a fortunate head start thousands of years earlier. Better wild animals to domesticate, much better plants to bend into productive crops, and an east-west continental orientation which allowed successful innovations to quickly propagate through similar climatic zones. The early adoption of productive agriculture allowed centers of high population to grow, which led to innovation and specialization, and not least to the evolution of deadly communicable diseases to which the people became (through a painful and deadly process) relatively immune, but to which the native populations of the Americas were highly susceptible once contact was made. I know this is considered an oversimplification by many, especially those who tend to read a lot into race. The head start does seem to be fairly inarguable though.

Regardless of the Diamond connection though, Cunliffe's book is one of those monumental accomplishments around which it is hard to get one's mind. The book is clearly the life's work of a man who knows and has synthesized more about a subject that most of us can ever dream of. It is technical and demanding reading (you are very quickly after a single quick definition presumed to remember what terms such as Linearbandkeramik signify), and I wonder how such a book (expensively produced with high quality color illustration and photography) even makes its money back. It's not exorbitantly priced or anything, $30 at Amazon.