Joe Posnanski notes the Rays don't like useless stats much. While the Rays hold a run the bases day, they show baseball cartoons on the big screen. One of them have super hero Rays chasing down Dr. Stat:

But, believe it or not, that's not the hilarious part. No, the hilarious part is this: The villain they were trying to catch was someone named "Dr. Stat." No, really. It seems that Dr. Stat -- and I'm quoting from the cartoon now -- wants to "use his knowledge of useless statistics to destroy the game."

Yes, I'm completely serious here -- I saw the thing twice. This Dr. Stat them appears on the Superfriends monitor, and he asks them who was the highest paid umpire in 1888. The Rays, of course, don't know, and they make it clear to him that it is a stupid and pointless question. Dr. Stat then says, "Wrong answer," and he says as punishment he will point his stat ray direction at Tropicana Field in order to make it impossible for people to enjoy the games.

OK, timeout here -- what is a stat ray? How would that work? I should ask the guys at Baseball Prospectus if they have one. A stat ray. How great is that? I wonder what would happen if we would point the stat ray at some of my baseball writing friends. I'd love to aim it at my buddy Rick Morrissey up in Chicago, just to see what happened. Would he explode? Would he start talking about VORP and Eqa? I need to get me one of them.

Anyway, the cartoon Joe Maddon, realizing that this stat ray could destroy what the game stands for, started burning copies of the book Moneyball. No, wait, that's not right. No, what he did was turn his Rays into superheroes and send them after Dr. Stat. They landed in Dr. Stat's lair, and Dr. Stat being a fairly uncreative and unimaginative villain type sent some robots after them. I have no idea why he thought this would work, nor do I know what robots (and I mean they were the most boring looking robots you ever saw) had to do with his love of meaningless baseballs statistics. Maybe if they were, like, robots who invented new run matrixes, that would have made sense. But, in all honestly, wouldn't it have been more realistic if Dr. Stat had sent, I don't know, Pete Palmer and Voros McRacken after the heroes? The Rays would try to come after them, but they would be helpless against the power of linear weights and DIPS.

Some of those useless stats predicted the Rays would have a pretty good year.

The other half of the column notes that Grady Sizemore is no longer a leadoff hitter. His ability to both get on base and hit for power make him more of a number three hitter. With both Martinez and Hafner injured, moving Grady down in the lineup might help the team.

No, here's what we are saying: Eric Wedge doesn't seem to adjust very well. He seems to think that Grady is still the player he was two years ago. He seems to care a lot about keeping his players comfortable. He seems content to keep things as they are even when they are not all that sensible. I have absolutely no idea if the Indians would score more runs, fewer runs or precisely the same amount of runs to the 10th decimal point if Grady hit third (or second or fourth or whatever). I don't know, and as mentioned a time or two, I don't care. I just care that the Indians have a manager whose team came within one game of the World Series and is now buried in last lace, a manager who is hitting the American League home run leader leadoff and Ben Francisco third.

I put the lineup used by the Indians on Sunday into the Lineup Analysis Tool, and it has Sizemore batting second. That makes sense as his high OBA does best at the top of the order, but his power needs to be behind some others who get on base. However, the difference between the best lineup and the Sunday lineup is just 0.12 runs.

My guess is the best Indians lineups have Sizemore batting ahead of a slugging Hafner and Martinez. Unlike Soriano, Sizemore does a great job of getting on base. As long as there are slugger behind him, he's fine at the top of the order. Right now, however, Joe is right. Grady should be at least moved down to the two hole.