85 thoughts on “February 9, 2012: AMR + EAR = ?”

    1. If you would have told me the Wolves would split the two games Love would miss, I would have been thrilled. I also would probably ask what you've been drinking.

      1. Sometimes it's not the record, it's the way you got there. Last night looked like a Lord of the Flies type breakdown. I'm okay with 1-1 over the last two, but they were just awful last night.

        1. That was a lot of missed layups and airballed or near-airballed jump shots. I like the Lord of Flies comparison.

    2. It turns out Dad did see the game. He had surgery yesterday, but was watching the game last night. Suffering all around! (He's doing fine.)

  1. Last night, I was excited to get off of work at 10, an hour before I anticipated. However, halfway through the drive home, I blew a tire.

    The 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan has this asinine dual-latch system to release the spare from the bottom of the van that can only be seen to be appreciated, but suffice it to say that I attempted to free the tire from the van for about 75 minutes before I called roadside assistance. The guy said that the setup was famously bad among mechanics, and that even with his extra tools and knowledge, it was tricky. I ended up getting home at 12:30 after getting off work at 10.

    If I hadn't been too tired to stand when I got home, and had remembered the Cup, that's what it would have been about. What a horrid night, laying on the side of a busy interstate in my work clothes.

    1. What a horrid night, laying on the side of a busy interstate in my work clothes.

      Actually, you were lying. My sympathies to your rough night, but it's nice for a Survivor contestant to be able to rib you about grammar for a change.

    2. Sorry to make light of your situation, but performing sexual favors for car parts generally isn't going to get you very far in life.

      Or did you mean that you had a flat?

      1. So a penguin is driving down the road, on his way back to Antarctica for the winter. when his engine starts rattling. He decides to stop at an auto shop to get it checked out. He leaves the car with the mechanic, and heads off to a restaurant across the street where he helps himself to a big messy banana split.

        After a few minutes, he goes back to the auto shop to check on the status of his car.

        "It looks like you blew a seal," the mechanic tells him.

        "Oh, no," says the penguin, "this is just ice cream."

    3. I'll bet our Chrysler van has the same spare tire latch. I should probably get under there and figure out how to make it work before I'm in a similar situation.

      1. I was thinking the same thing, though ours is a 2005 so I'm hoping they figured it out by then. I am not confident, though.

          1. I actually like this idea. I'm sure we have some leftover funds from the recent fund drive? Perhaps we could agree on a player to sponsor. Are there any Twins available?

            1. Somehow Butters costs $40 and he looks like the cheapest one available (Chrissy Chrissy Parm Parm, for example, cost $45).

              1. I am in favor only if we can get a pic of Butters (the character) on Butters' (the player) page.

              2. Holy crap, I haven't paid attention to those sponsorship amounts in a while. Willingham's page is $430? Cuddyer is $665? (Maybe we can use bb-ref ad costs to quantify "ratedness" amongst players and show definitively that, say, Cuddyer is overrated compared to Willingham.) Delmon is $310?

                Is there any way to know how much ads will go for when the current sponsor expires? I am noticing that some ads expire soon-ish.

                Compared to Butters at $40, Valencia at $60 seems like a steal. DSPAN2 is $75. Casilla for $50 seems a bit high. Perkins is at $45.

                It seems as though minor league player pages can't be sponsored, so perhaps the trick would be to keep an eye out for a Twins player making his major league debut this season and then pouncing on his page the day after he accumulates his first major league stats.

                1. Not quite:

                  No, we get many such requests and are not able to honor any of them. New debut pages become available the day after their debut at between 6am and 7am when the site updates. The price is set at a high price and then drops $5-$10 per day until it hits $20.

                  There's no way to know how much a page will go for since it requires knowing how popular a page is. You can work backwards though and perhaps make a guess. The pricing info:

                  The prices are roughly set to match an advertising rate of $1.25 per 1,000 page views with a minimum charge of $5.

                  It seems reasonable to make educated guesses about how popular a player might be in relation to others and estimate the price.

                  1. I wonder if that means the Willingham/Cuddyer/Delmon rates are pretty close to $1.25 per 1,000 page views. That'd be over 500K PVs for Cuddyer.

                2. Only slightly related, but I hate how Topps continues to hang on certain players long after they're no longer an item. For example, Delmon STILL continues to be included in semi-exclusive subsets. Same for F-Bomb. And prices are slow to fall as well: Danny V has pretty much proven that he's an okay third baseman but not the player he looked like he could be his rookie season, yet prices for his cards still treat him like hot you-know-what. Again, same with F-Bomb; his no-hitter renewed his overpriced status. Collectors are slow to accept that they're not going to get the investment $$ that they are hoping for.

                    1. exactly.

                      It irks me because I collect to collect. I hate to spend a premium on cards that aren't worth that premium, because they're not an investment to me.

            2. We can sponsor more than just players:

              • All player and manager pages (Earl Weaver or Bobby Bonds)
              • Team pages from individual years (The 2001 Diamondbacks or the 1899 Cleveland Spiders)
              • Team index and summary pages grouped together (The Yankees, leaders, managers, etc.), but not individual years
              • Individual Travel Directory Pages
              • Individual School Pages
                1. That's more than $5, which means he's above the minimum. Assuming the above prices are still accurate (doubtful), that's at least ~8k hits. We might be lucky to get 1% of that though.

      1. I use MLB.com for baseball scores, B-r.com for player stats, and cbssports.com for other sports. Because I know that their game-tracking services won't lock up my computer. (Like say NBA.com or NFL.com.)

    1. It's after a 10...

      I still stand by XYR - it works for either gender (Xavier Yadier or Xena Yvonne!)

      1. Could be more confusing for a girl than a guy though. She might feel like the wrong genes got mixed.

        1. My last name starts with a z, so I think the confusion might be mitigated if I took this route.

      2. Xavier Yadier? Really?
        Two nearly identical spellings with different pronunciations?
        At least you weren't proposing them for a set of Twins.

  2. AaronGleeman Aaron Gleeman Double meh: To make room for today's waiver claim, Darin Mastroianni, the Twins dropped September waiver claim Esmerling Vasquez.

      1. Really? I mean, I wouldn't ever expect a waiver claim to change the world (players usually get to be waiver claims for a reason), but Vasquez had no real plus skills, but Mastroianni is a CF/LF who has walked in about 12% of his minor league plate appearances, and he hasn't really played more than a full season at any one level (that is, we wouldn't really expect his numbers to be significantly inflated relative to his ability because he's stayed at one level for 2-3 seasons.)

        This is exactly the sort of player AG would complain about the Twins not having if someone got injured and there wasn't a competent replacement-level stopgap. On paper, I think Mastroianni's resume compares well to, say, Dustin Mohr (who managed to earn 1500+ PA in the majors.) Mohr had a better minor league OPS going into the majors, but his SO/BB ratio was a lot worse, so Mastroianni figures to have a better shot at hitting for average, which combined with his seemingly good patience at the plate gives him a decent chance to have a respectable OBP. He seems unlikely to hit for power, but you never know, that sometimes develops last.

        I suppose AG has to save his energies for complaining about the next two-bit relief pitcher that the Twins don't sign for a $1M-$2M major league contract.

        1. ubes, were you responding to my "whatever" comment (which is how I read Gleeman's comment)?

          Mastroianni carries a career 279/370/372 minor league slash line, including 276/358/389 over 79 games as a 25-year old debuting in AAA Las Vegas -- a high-offense environment, right? -- last season. Nice OBP, I guess, but not much else to see here.

          (and he spent all of 2010 in AA, plus bookend stints in 2009 and 2011 of 70 and 44 games, respectively)

          He's another speedy, patient, contact hitter. If you gather enough of those, eventually you will find the next Juan Pierre. w00t.

          1. League average in the PCL last year: .286/.359/.448. I don't have anything for Cashman Field though. It looks like it might suppress hitting some compared to the league average.

          2. PCL is a high offense league, sure, but I think people make way too much out of individual seasons here or there, especially in the minors. Just because a guy has a down year in his most recent season doesn't mean he's lost all his value.

            The bulk of my complaint here, as I mentioned before, is that this is exactly the sort of replacement-level talent at no cost that AG continually complains that the Twins don't have when they wind up calling up Butera or whoever. Also, Juan Pierre has been league average or above by fWAR 9 of 11 seasons in the bigs. That's more w00t! than w00t. (Plus, Pierre's never been known as a patient hitter so he seems like an odd comp here.)

            The whole Titanic reference just seems silly. It's a small move, sure, but a drink coaster on a ship headed for disaster?

            1. It was a throwaway line for what I took to be a minor minor minor deal. You make cogent points as to why this deal is worthwhile, to be sure. But it's not exactly signing Pujols or summat.

  3. Before we go...
    A little fun math story here. AMR + EAR = LBR.
    [More inane prattle while B-Roll plays.]
    Cheers is next.

    1. L = Lucy
      B = Bernadine

      L was not EAR's top choice, nor was it mine. I was able to frame it where EAR preferred L to her going-in top choice, which is the one that was rejected after birth for AJR. But I had little way of getting further up my list. I had once had L very high on my list until I saw its popularity. (2010 was its first year in the top 100.) EAR countered that HPR's name was in the top 20 the year he was born (not true: 102, now 67), and that 75th isn't as bad as 20th. AJR was 172 and CER was 434 and is now 276. But I also believe that Boys' names and Girls' names are different when it comes to that. (Also, and I didn't think of it til right now, HPR's name has three common nicknames &emdash; Hank, Hal, and Harry &emdash; while L has only Lu or Lulu.) However, the popularity was really my only concern about it. By itself, I'm cool with it.

      Another problem is that one of my top names, Matilda, was well liked by EAR, but only with "Mattie" as a possible nick, while I wanted the name to be Matilda so I could call her "Tillie", which EAR hated.

      Benefits of L:
      1. Saint's name (as we are Catholic (which is probably becoming apparent)).
      2. Different initial (as I use first-initial shorthand for just about everything written involving them).
      3. Is listen in the book Hooper Humperdink, Not Him! by Theo LeSieg. This is an alphabet book with names that we discovered after AJR was born, but learned that it contained CER's name, HPR's name, and AJR's name.
      4. EAR is good with it.

      B was chosen by me. I may have mentioned it before, but it contains three of her four great-grandmothers' first names: Bernice, Berneatta Bernelda, and Geraldine. The fourth great-grandmother shares a middle name with CER. (Which is also the first name of EAR. All contain a slightly more continental spelling.)

      I'm satisfied, and I think EAR is, too. Now if I could just stop calling LBR by AJR's first name.

      It doesn't help that the consonants are the same. I didn't think of that until it was too late. We did rule out Eleanor because that would shorten to "Elly" and we often call AJR by the shortened "Ali" (pronounced like "Alley"), and that just wouldn't do.

      1. It's a great name. Much congrats!

        Your post here makes me think I like you. Or at least, am like you. (Catholic, would lean towards Tillie over Mattie, I heart LeSieg, etc.).

        Well done. Enjoy the tar poops!

        1. I think she got out all the tar poops at once. We getting her ready for her first bath and then grunt, red, grunt, boom! Perfect timing: I got the nurse to change her.

          1. i believe i mentioned to cheaptoy that i always thought "meconium" would be an awesome metal band name.

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