Daily blurb
The baseball season opens today with six games scheduled. Weather issues make a couple of those games (particularly in NY and Washington) tentative, but we’ll see. The season typically opens on a Sunday, but this year’s schedule was advanced by a half-week, presumably in order to end the season a half-week earlier and try to get the World Series completed before the end of October. There is snow in the forecast for the northeastern U.S. over the next day or so, but I suppose that’s still preferable to playing into November. Not sure why they don’t schedule the earliest games in warmer climes, however.

It looks like the tools at DailyBaseballData.com are working properly so far. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Pitcher vs. Batter - shows career stats for the day’s matchups. Use the dropdown menu links to look ahead up to 7 days, based on ESPN’s forecasted starting pitchers.
• Weather Dashboard - shows weather outlook for the day, as currently forecast at weather.com.
• Lineup Dashboard - shows current lineups (posted at Yahoo), as well as in-game and completed boxscores for the day, all on one page. The Who’s Hittin’ and Who’s Sittin’ summary at the bottom can be a useful visual summary of the announced and actual lineups.
• Daily player stats - provides current stat lines for all of the day’s players. Summary format is designed to be phone-friendly. Note that this feeds off of MLB.com lineup info, so pregame lineup feeds may be available sooner or later than they are available via the Lineup Dashboard.