I never caught up with TedQuarters San Francisco correspondent and frequently frustrated Giants fan Dailey McDailey upon the Giants’ playoff berth, and it’s a Friday and, to use his words, nothing clever is coming to mind. So here’s that.

TedQuarters: I never formally followed up with you, the TedQuarters San Francisco correspondent, about the Giants’ playoff appearance.

Dailey McDailey: Well, I’m still here, and I’m wearing my awesome Hawaiian shirt.

TQ: Recall that last we left off, you were cursing Brian Sabean for the Fred Lewis thing. And now the Giants are in the playoffs.

DM: And the Giants are still one outfielder short, since Aaron Rowand and Nate Schierholtz are on the roster. But Pat Burrell’s resurgence is the sort of thing that usually doesn’t happen for the old guys the Giants sign.

TQ: So Sabean and crew have gotten a bit lucky?

DM: In the roster construction department? Well, yes. Andres Torres, Aubrey Huff, and Juan Uribe have all been surprisingly good. And usually good teams don’t get surprised by how good they are.

On the flip side, Pablo Sandoval can’t hit on the road anymore, and hits into double plays at a Pierzynskian rate. But that’s four positive surprises to one negative. Thus, division championship.

TQ: Plus there’s the whole Buster Posey thing, which probably goes down as positive surprise, all told.

DM: I’m not very surprised by it to tell you the truth. I didn’t think he’d have this much home run power as a rookie, but other than that, he’s the player everyone told us he was when the Giants drafted him.

TQ: Yeah but I think you put way too much stock in all the animal sacrifices you’ve performed at the feet of your Buster Posey statue.

DM: On the advice of my attorney, I’m not going to respond to that

TQ: All their pitchers had pretty good years, too. Lincecum was sub-Lincecum-like, but Jonathan Sanchez put it together and they got good work out of Bumgarner,

DM: Yeah, most teams would love to be able to build their own staff from within like the Giants have, but for all his faults Sabean has always had an eye for pitching talent, and Dave Righetti seems to know how to turn that talent into a consistently good rotation.

TQ: So are you less inclined to [deleted for decency] Brian Sabean’s face right now?

DM: No. As good as this team is, it could have been much better with sound roster management starting, I don’t know, seven years ago.

This was always my problem during the Bonds years. You get no credit for winning 90 games when you start with the best player in baseball history. You have to use the other 24 spots to win 105 games. Also, winning 90 games starting with the four best 20-something pitchers in the league is not an accomplishment as much as an inevitability

TQ: Well that’s an overstatement but we’ll let it slide because you’re obviously amped up about your Gigantes. What of Bruce Bochy?

DM: Ever since Bengie Molina got traded away, he’s made all the right moves as far as I’m concerned. Especially in September, when the outfield was a jumbled mess, he deftly used Burrell and Guillen early to score runs, and then subbed in Ross and Schierholtz for defense late.

TQ: Did he look as awesome in person last night as he did on TV before I fell asleep?

DM: Awesomer? He had it all working.

TQ: Anything else you’d like to add for the TedQuarters faithful?

DM: Nothing clever is coming to mind.

TQ: Well, you had a late night.

Calling balls and strikes is not easy. Some umpires are better than others, of course. Major League hitters appear to have a better eye of for the strike zone than umpires do, and that’s a problem. As much as Bronx Cheer likes to defend umpires, sometimes it can’t. Wendelstedt had a terrible game on Thursday. Baseball has made great strides in cracking down on the strike zone, but it needs to do more. The Twins, not the umpires, probably lost the game Thursday night, but the uncertainty in that statement reflects a problem.

By isolating the discussion on the 1-2 pitch to Berkman, the media do themselves and the larger point a disservice. The controversy is not about that one missed pitch. Any umpire can miss one pitch. The problem lies in Wendelstedt’s terrible strike zone all night. He called a pitch right down the middle a ball. Jeff Passan has a good, if Twins-slanted, takedown. A strike zone that bad cannot happen in a playoff game.

– Tom Boorstein, SNY.tv.

Boorstein is, as he explained here, as big a fan, follower and defender of sports officials as anyone I’ve ever met. It’s pretty weird. But it appears the umpiring and instant replay discussion is going to keep coming up until some sort of clear resolution is reached, and clear resolutions have never been the forte of Bud Selig’s office. So Tom’s a pretty good guy to go to for this stuff since he’s been following umpiring since way before it was cool.

It strikes me — pardon the pun — that ball-and-strikes duties are the aspect of umpiring that could most easily be replaced by computers or a robot, and it wouldn’t even require cutting back the number of umpires since you’d still need a guy standing there to make calls at home plate and rule on hit batsmen and checked swings, etc.

Probably not something that will happen soon or be implemented without hiccups. And I’m not even sure it’s something that should happen; I really haven’t thought it all the way through.

But Major League Baseball has to find a way to diminish umpire error if it’s affecting the strike zone so much that it impacts the outcome of games. Yes, the human element is part of the game and all that. But no one’s arguing that the players be replaced by machines (although Transformers baseball would be pretty awesome to watch). It’s just about making baseball more fair for the humans competing in it.

Also — and Tom doesn’t get at this, but I’ve discussed it before — I’m shocked by how many people seem certain that umpiring has gotten worse and how few consider that umpiring may have been equally bad forever and we’ve only recently come into new technologies that allow us to more thoroughly and frequently judge the way the game is called.

Now we watch games in high definition with a dozen super-slow-mo replay angles. We see for certain when umpires are wrong on calls we might have shrugged off as questionable or close just a few years ago.

I’m curious how this is going to work out. Shields has always had good peripherals, but his ERA has been higher than his FIP and xFIP for his entire career. Things like fly ball to home run rate and BABIP are subjected to a lot of randomness, but that randomness is sometimes overstated. They’re not TOTALLY random. It’s not a complete fluke that his ERA has been higher than his other numbers would suggest.

At the very least, I find it interesting that a major league team is not only willing to look past the surface numbers, but openly admits to doing so. So if you’re into that whole revenge of the nerds thing, i suppose you might want to root for the Rays and Big Game James tonight.

– Patrick Flood, Exile on 126th St.

Like Patrick said, it’s pretty great that Maddon is willing to explain that he’s pitching Shields this afternoon because of defense-independent pitching statistics when he could easily say, “oh, well of course we’re going with Shields here, he’s ‘Big Game James,'” and meet with a lot less resistance from the majority of fans and the media.

All that said, I struggle a little bit with xFIP, as I’ve mentioned here on a few occasions. I have no doubt it’s a useful tool and that most pitchers’ HR/FB rate eventually, with a large enough sample, should normalize somewhere near the league average.

But if I could wonder if perhaps Johan Santana was reliably yielding weak fly-ball contact this season when his xFIP was way above his ERA, I must allow that there’s a chance Shields consistently yields stronger-than-average fly-ball contact.

I’m probably fighting a strawman here because I don’t think anyone who really thought it through would pretend xFIP is the be-all end-all of pitching statistics, but do I see it sometimes bandied about like gospel, and I suspect there’s still a lot more work to be done in divorcing the pitcher on the mound from the defense behind him and the randomness inherent in the sport.

All that said, I’m still rooting for the Rays. Obviously.