46 thoughts on “April 23, 2011: In Which Our Site Turns a Week Old”

  1. Whoohoo, first!

    my daughter Skim claiming to be a week old

    I aske my boy, who just turned three, how old he was going to be next year. He told me "Sixteen!"

      1. Okay, that's just as well. I haven't had time to look at the schedule in a few days. I'll run an off day View from the Ballpark (I have a few in the can), but I'm going to be scarce for the next while.

  5. Having given up on the kegerator idea due to lack of available, cheap, small, used refrigerators (advice was to wait until end of Spring semester), today I am scraping the labels off my recycled beer bottles. Actually, it's kind of relaxing (like cleaning walleyes) - NBBW walks by, sees my pile of scraped labels - says "nice gut pile".

    -10 to Stone Ruination IPA with printed-on labels - no friend of home-brewers.

    1. You are more dedicated to that than I ever was or will be. I refuse to take any label off of any bottle. I have a few clean bottles for competitions, but otherwise I figure the beer in the bottle will be the same regardless of what is on the outside.

      1. I bought a batch of the Grolsch bottles from Northern Brewer when in MN (great, only need new rubber stoppers), but figured I'd save the planet and recycle my used ones out here.

  6. Just something to think about: the Cup O' Coffee is totally lost on the home page. Anyone "new" showing up to WGOM is going to have to dig around quite a bit before they stumble upon it. Maybe it should sit right above the video? And have a logo image?

      2. On My in-laws' smaller screen with bigger text, Will's Walk is above both on the right, crowding the CoC down further than a screen.

        1. I see. Well, I don't want to move Sheenie from the top until the fundraiser is over. That's in, what, ten days? I should post a reminder soon that the time to donate is now.

          1. The walk is a week from tomorrow. The Nation has already done a great job of contributing.

            1. Shame us into action, DP. Do you have a running total for citizenry pledges/contributions? (not individuals, just the big picture)

                1. I knew I wouldn't be able to do much, but I finally figured that doing nothing was a bigger insult than doing just a little. I'd walk with y'all if I could.

      1. Nice location, but kinda understated, IMO. I mean, it's the major gathering place for the day's talk, but if you didn't know it (like we all do), well, you wouldn't know it. All the other posts have three times the font size.

      2. I feel like the best location is where Will's Walk sits, where it could be soon enough. I really don't see an issue with the current location, either, though it took me just a second to find.

        1. Yeah. In a week it would be right next to the videos and once again prominently displayed.

          1. I note that the "Donate" box appears as though it is about Will's Walk, rather than it's actual intent. I suppose that confusion will go away in a week too.

  7. Around the time the game was ending, I came home from The Beer Shoppe to a nasty self-replicating virus on my shiny new laptop.

    Fortunately, I'd just come home from The Beer Shoppe. Ugh. I'll never understand the dudes who write viruses. It's not like they can see my face when I realize what's going on.

  10. This is comic gold from Lincecum:

    But why fix what's not broken when it comes to the playoffs, Lincecum said.

    "Personally I think it's kind of funky, just because the game has been this way for so long," Lincecum said Friday, before the Giants' series opener against the Atlanta Braves. "Why mess it up, other than for monetary purposes, and that's probably what [Selig] is looking at. That's like, 'OK, don't worry about us as human beings or players.'''

    I love how the current system, which turns 17 this year, has been around "so long." At the same time, I'd rather not be adding more teams to the party. The only way I'm down with expanding the playoffs is if it means that WC1 and WC2 play each other in a one-game playoff the day before the ALDS starts. That would give a pretty huge incentive to win your division, I think, since your rotation would be out of whack in the ALDS and obviously there's no guarantee you even make it past the play-in game. There would also be a big incentive to have the best WC record, since you wouldn't want to go on the road for the play-in game, and Game 1 of the ALDS.

    It's not so much that I think the wild card teams generally aren't deserving of a playoff spot, it's more that in the current system, teams don't always fight hard for the division title, which seems like a bad outcome to me.

    1. I'm generally against playoff expansion. Selig has considered that there will be ten teams, but the "first round" will essentially be a play-in game for the two wild cards. That's just...gross. It's like Selig knows he can't get away with a 16-team playoff system, so he's trying to ease the fans into it.

      I can't blame Lincecum, really. The current system has covered probably just about his whole baseball-watching life. I was equally married to the four-team system, but as a guy who didn't watch baseball until 1986, I assumed that was just the way it had been done since the dawn of time.

      1. Eh, I think Lincecum should have a little more than a 17-year perspective on his profession, at least if he's going to go on about this kind of thing to a reporter.

        My main beef with the current system is that home-field advantage doesn't mean enough for teams to want the division title over the wild card spot in the playoffs. In my ideal world, it would be a 32-team league with 2 divisions in each league, with a more balanced schedule (so some extra games within your division, but not 19), and a 2-team playoff for the league title (since the two divisions played different schedules) and then the World Series. Realistically, that will never happen, so I'm open to ideas that make the division titles a little more meaningful.

        A one-game playoff isn't really a fair way to do things in an ideal world, but we went beyond considerations of fairness a long time ago when it was decided that the wild card would be determined by comparing teams with vastly different schedules.

        1. I am most definitely in favor of balanced schedules, given the existence of wild cards. I have no inherent issue with one wild card or with unbalanced schedules, but they don't play nicely together.

          As for Lincecum, I dig what you're saying, but getting guys his age and talent level to respect the past is pulling teeth. I take no issue with his statements, even if I think it would be prudent of him to keep his opinions on the sanctity of the game to himself. I try not to advocate silence, but in a game as obsessed with its traditions as baseball, it's good business.

              1. I think it was Lookout Landing who had a Carl Everett rally .gif with a dinosaur dancing. I thought I had it laying around in my photobucket account, but it must of got deleted

      2. I haven't read the proposals, but I hate the idea.
        I assume that to make things flow better, any ties will be settled with NFL-type tiebreakers rather than on the field. So I hate that even more. Baseball has 162 games per season. If a race isn't yet settled, just play another.

        BTW, I think the NBA and NHL should play extra games to settle ties, too. (though not for seeding.) But those are out of 16 games to make the playoffs, so the value of the last playoff berth is less, while the value of an extra game played is higher.

    2. if baseball were to expand to 10 teams, I would like to see the WC teams play each other in a 1 game winner take all game. As Ubes said, it gives teams motivation to win the division and not have to waste their best or second best pitchers on the play in game. A 3 game series would take a lot of time (5 days potentially with the travel days) and thats too much time for the divisional round to start

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