In this week’s video post: brats and beer, baseball, and biblical languages. Two of the three required an umbrella.
Category: Baseball
Kyle Oliver: Bat Wrangler
For those of you who don’t know, I now live at a church. An old church. One with bats.
I’ve decided the best way to cope with this less-than-ideal aspect of my otherwise wonderful living situation is to have a little fun with it. Watch my Twitter feed (reproduced at right and on my Facebook status) for updates to the bat wrangling quotient (aka Graydon Number or simply batting average), which is calculated by dividing the number of bats I manage to wrangle out of the house (bat wrangled, BW) into the number I encounter (bats encountered, BE, aka at bats).
Some notes:
(1) I’ve already learned that bat wrangling is (often necessarily, and I suspect also to our mutual advantage) a team sport. BW and BE numbers will be split among all participants in the encounter/wrangle. Thus my current bat wrangling quotient is 1 / 2.5 = .400, because tonight I added two solo encounters and one successful wrangle (don’t know where the other one got off to) to my previous 0/0.5 record after Carl and I had an unsuccessful bat run-in last week. As you might expect, I’ll report my stats baseball-style, i.e. “Current bat wrangling quotient: .400 in 2.5 at bats.”
(2) Despite all the baseball language, I want to emphasize that all the blunt instruments (they’re badminton paddles actually) on our floor are for self-defense only, and I’m not actually taking swings at them (the bats). The goal is to guide them out of the house, not knock them into oblivion Dan Lin-style.
(Sorry for mixing metaphors here. I’ve so far avoided bat-transmitted rabies, but I do have Olympic fever.)
Stay tuned for bat wrangling advice and tales of heroics…and probably also anti-heroics, as in my second at bat this evening, wherein I just shut the door to the TV room and went on watching hurdles and gymnastics.
Ned Yost Is A Big Honkin’ Doofus
What the hell was C.C. doing batting in the eighth (and then pitching a long ninth) with such a huge lead last night? I know we’re probably not going to be able to keep him, but we still gotta get him through hopefully a couple months’ worth of baseball yet. Don’t get me wrong, the guy has every right to keep himself in games and risk flushing millions of dollars down the drain in a contract year. But, rental player or not, we shouldn’t let him be so hasty with his future, because it’s our future too until after the season. Grrh.
Gainin’ On Ya! All Up Around Your Neck
The Cubs are in first place, in case you haven’t heard. The Brewers are in second, “but that’s a temporary condition too”:
To each his reach
And if I don’t cop, it ain’t mine to have
But I’ll be reachin’ for ya
‘Cause I love ya, CC.
Right on.
Ain’t it funky, Chicago?
(Or how about “J.J.? C.C.; C.C.? J.J.”)
All kidding aside, the Brewers now have arguably the best one-two starting pitching punch in baseball with, in no particular order, Ben Sheets and C.C. Sabathia. (Who am I forgetting? Surely a pair in the AL?) Sheets’ ERA and WHIP are a little better this season, but Sabathia pitches in the AL, leads baseball in strikeouts, and is the reigning Cy Young winner (he also got off to an unusually bad start).
It’s gonna be a fun second-half!
RIP HOFG
Well, in its 69-year history, the Baseball Hall of Fame Game has been rained out five times. My dad and I have now had tickets to two of those rain outs (including one back in the ’90s when I was a little boy). The “good” news: we won’t miss another. The bad news: that’s because this was going to be the last one. Ah well.
Despite the lack of baseball, my dad and I had a great little Father’s Day trip out east. We stayed at a camp on Great Sacandaga on Saturday (my mom’s side) and hung out at another on Goodyear Lake on Sunday with a bunch of relatives I haven’t seen in years (my dad’s side). Many clams and beers were consumed, stories told, etc. (For those of you without any roots in upstate New York, “a camp” is what we’d call “a cabin” in Wisconsin).
As for Cooperstown, I think the locals lack a certain perspective on why this game is being discontinued, but I’m sad to see it go nevertheless. I hope they go to a “Legends Game” format or something in the future–in my opinion, that might actually be more interesting than watching a bunch of minor leaguers play for the disinterested major leaguers sitting on the bench griping about having to make the trip for an exhibition game (then again, I never got the chance to see even that, so I can’t know for sure). Either that or make the game count, but that’s never going to happen, since it would mean ridiculous lost revenue (historic Doubleday Field holds like 10,000 people). Anyway, it’s always a good time when you get to go to Cooperstown, so I’m grateful for the trip, regardless. Plus, I’m going to four Brewers games in the next two weeks, so I should get my fill of live ball.
Sorry for my continued absence on CSC. I’m still having a strange but very busy and rewarding summer, the details of which I’ll share when the time seems right.
Triple Take
In case you haven’t heard, there was an unassisted triple play in the Cleveland-Toronto game last night. These have always been really, really exciting to me; I remember watching highlights of one when I was a seven-ish-year-old baseball nut living in Bradenton, FL (where the Pirates spring train, incidentally). I have the nagging sense that someone on the Reds turned it, and that it happened in a dome, but I haven’t done the research to confirm either fact.
To give you some sense of how rare these things are, note that this was only the 14th such play in major league history. If I manage to track down some good video, I’ll pass it along.
OK, I’ve been doing runs on TOLSTOY (more on this most recent project of mine soon) all morning and am ready to put myself into exile until the associated paper is finished. Catch you on the flip side.
Thanks to my friend Matt, by the way, for calling me last night with the news. I happened to be in a bar watching the Brewer game with his parents and fiancé at the time, but I never caught the highlight. Soon.
Update: Matt just sent me a little info that I thought I’d pass along:”You were right, the Unassisted TP has only happened one way, every time. It was usually catch, bag, and tag… but a few were catch, tag, and bag. Interesting stuff. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unassisted_triple_play“
Incidentally, I think we need a commonly accepted word that allows you to credit someone with doing some research but that also connotes a bit of flimsiness to that research because, in fact, it just involved finding the right Wikipedia article. How about wi-search? My only problem with this choice is that I’m worried about possible confusion with Nintendo-Wii-related words (e.g., Wiimote). Any thoughts?
Another update: I just did a little wi-search of my own and figured out why I remember that unassisted TP of yore so vividly–it came at the expense of my Pirates: “September 20 – Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Mickey Morandini completes the first unassisted triple play in the National League in 65 years against the Pittsburgh Pirates. In the bottom of the sixth inning, Morandini snares Jeff King‘s line drive, steps on second to double off Andy Van Slyke, and finally tags Barry Bonds out before he can return to first. It is the ninth unassisted triple play since 1901, but only the second to be pulled off by a second baseman.”
And since I’m on a role:
I was just shattered to discover that my mind apparently created what I always thought was a sweet fact about two of those same Pirates. I had in my head that Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Andy Van Slyke comprised the starting National League outfield as Pirates in at least one All-Star Game. However, if my wi-search is to be believed (1 2 3), it looks like the intersection of their respective all-star season sets is {1993}. However, by that year Bonilla and Bonds had moved on to the Mets and Giants, respectively. It also turns out that Van Slyke sat out the game with an injury. So much for that special memory from my childhood.
OK, back to TOLSTOY.
Can This Just Be My Career?
My baseball partner-in-crime Matt sent me this awesome link to a New York Times story I missed about a month ago.
If you want to know how tons of nuclear engineers spend their time, look no further. We run simulations like the one in the article. Except instead of flipping these virtual weighted coins to see how simulated batters fair over the course of their careers, we’re trying to see how simulated neutrons (or x-rays, or electrons, or whatever) fair over the course of their lifetimes (from their creation in the reactor or whatever until their eventual absorption or leakage from the system). Of course, for a binary process (e.g., DiMaggio either gets a hit or he doesn’t) it’s OK to visualize coin-flipping, but I think it’s better to think of the “randomness driver” as the roll of a many, many-sided die–which is why the Men from Mars referred to this clever trick as a Monte Carlo method. (In fact, I used Monte Carlo to write this absurd little simulation, which happens to be about rolling dice.)
Man, writing baseball simulations for a living would maybe be my dream job. Hey, Baseball Prospectus: need any more modelers?
Playing Catch (-Up)
In honor of yesterday’s beautiful weather and the associated (and long overdue) first game of catch, I checked out a couple of baseball blogs today.
Perhaps I’m too much of a Turnbow apologist, but I think this guy is partially misplacing the blame for today’s Brewers loss. I was only listening to it on the radio, but it seems like base-running mistakes really cost us a chance to take the lead in the bottom of the eighth, which could have kept us in it. Nevertheless, I think Brewers Bar looks worth reading, so I’ve added it to the new Sports links at right. (Speaking of sports blogs, did you see this? I’d like to hear more about Cuban’s viewpoint, which sounds a little hypocritical but is perhaps only superficially so.)
In other news (since I’m still just getting slammed at work and need to knock at least one story off the old ToBlog queue before I lose all my momentum), congratulations to Professors McMahon and Murphy on their recent teaching awards. Watch for Insights‘ interview with Regina Murphy in the next edition. I was there for the brown bag and thought she covered some really interesting stuff.
In the meanwhile, here’s some wisdom from McMahon:
“He inspired me to think of students as ‘candles to be lit, not vessels to be filled,'” she says. “I think of myself not as a conduit for facts, but as an exuberant tour guide introducing students to the joy of problem-solving and learning about the world around them.”
We need more exuberance.
Science News: Patterns
All the stories that caught my eye in this week’s Science News digest had to do with violated patterns.
(1) I was checking out the videos of the big Intel young scientist competition finalists and was pleased to see a few non-biological scientists getting some recognition. It seems like almost all of the elite young science students you hear about are heading toward bio-related fields (and who can blame them?), so I’m glad to see that some de facto traffic and materials engineers made the cut.
(2) This week’s Math Trek discusses the inherent statistical noisiness of individual performance in baseball:
“In fact, according to a new analysis by Lawrence Brown of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, predicting that a player’s batting average will be the same in the second half of the season as the first half is about the worst plausible method out there.”
Fair point, but I think it’s a bit misleading to call baseball a noisy sport, since it’s a mere pin-drop compared to the deafening statistical roar in team sports like football, where the variables are so hard to isolate and control that nobody seems to bother much. (Well, except for these guys, from the looks of it.)
In any event, though you don’t need to be an Ivy League professor to realize that two weeks’ worth of baseball is a minuscule sample size, this story was still a soothing balm as I contemplate the early struggles of several of my very high fantasy picks: Jose Reyes, Russell Martin, and Hunter Pence in particular. C’mon guys, TeamGuido needs you!
One non-violated pattern involving this story: my continuing professional crush on Julie Rehmeyer.
(3) I don’t pay much attention to elements with atomic numbers higher than about 98, but apparently element 114 is giving some physical chemists a little trouble. If their results are correct, ununquadium seems to violate over 100 years of unflappable electro-numeric periodicity. (Man, there’s no way that’s the right term, but I like the sound of it.)
Why? Well, “nuclei with more protons attract electrons more strongly. Those electrons orbit faster, and according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time for them stretches out. As a result, some of the electrons’ orbits are tighter than in lighter elements, affecting that element’s chemistry.”
There seems to be some debate about whether such relativistic effects, which have been observed before, should be great enough to significantly alter the-element-that-would-be-Atlantisium‘s chemistry. This work is worth keeping an eye on, to the extent that any artificial material with a half-life on the order of seconds is worth knowing anything about. (Full disclosure: I’m being a little flippant here, but the prospect of 114-298 being stable is pretty exciting, the difficulties of cramming nine more neutrons into 114-289 notwithstanding.)
Well, unlike the subjects of these stories, I don’t tend to violate a lot of patterns. Case in point: I just burned another Saturday morning doing armchair science writing despite boatloads of real work ahead of me (and, also as usual, I didn’t get past the Saturday morning Science New digest in order to get to all the other interesting stuff I’d saved up all week). Ah well. Happy Saturday, everyone.
P.S., I’ve been getting a lot of nice feedback about this blog lately. Thanks very much for reading, everyone! I hope the rest of you are enjoying CSC as well, and I hope you’ll all consider leaving comments, dropping me some email, blogging about interesting posts you find here, etc. I’d love to make this space more of a conversation; if there are ways you think I can better facilitate that goal, please let me know.
The Hacker Within: Baseball Edition
With a little help from geek and proud, I’m now able to listen to MLB.TV radio broadcast streams on Kermit, the Linux machine I work at. Using the MediaPlayerConnectivity plug-in Alan suggests and choosing Totem as the default player in the configuration wizard seems to do the trick on my system (“i686-redhat-linux-gnu” according to configure).
I couldn’t get the video to work, though. I don’t view much MLB.TV video at work anyway, so you’d think I’d have been able to leave it at that. I couldn’t. I spent much of the afternoon reading up on Silverlight and Moonlight, GStreamer and Pitdll. I battled with autotools and Mono distributions. I was defeated. Hopefully the Moonlight people get a Firefox plug-in finished soon. They’re working pretty hard, from the sound of it.
Speaking of computing in the name of baseball, stay tuned for a report on draft.gms, my network flow model that will hopefully let GAMS choose my fantasy baseball draft picks. I think I can do it as a modified assignment problem with the help of little tuning trick I learned about in a breast cancer diagnosis project I learned about in linear programming last semester. I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat.