I don't agree with their assumption that alcohol consumption will go down on college campuses and people would bemore productive. A new distraction is always available.
Having gone to a school whose football team was DIII (and thus, no one cared on Saturdays), I can go from personal observation that college students would not drink less and study more on Saturdays.
Exactly. Case Day is a spring event.
At Augsburg, too!
My school didn't even have a football team and there was plenty of alcohol consumption on Saturdays.
Psst... Will... They did have a football team, you were just too drunk to notice.
what cheapsie said. Football occupies only the fall quarter (or part of the fall semester) at most schools, yet drinking to excess happens all year 'round. Football games are an excuse, but so is "dude! I finished my term paper!/midterm/problem set! Let's par-tay!"
As I recall, "Dude! It's Tuesday!" was a sufficient excuse.
one of the best things about Carleton was the "A" schedule (MWF classes). Party M, W, F, S nights! One of the worst was the "B" schedule (TRS classes). the ultimate in bad was to have a 1A, 1B schedule (8:30 a.m. six days per week) 🙁
For some reason I never comprehended, a large percentage of classes for my acting major were at 8 and 9am. We were the most excessive people on campus.
I managed to never miss an acting class, but we always played "Who's got a hangover?" and I was one of them on more than a few occasions.
I remember taking an "early" class (9am) in college. Once.
Now, the boy wakes up at 5.
I feel like college made me weaker in some ways. In HS, I'd be waking up somewhere between 5:30a and 7:00a, depending on the day of the week. In college, it was rarely necessary to be at class before 10:30, so I rarely woke up before 9:30. Which I guess just goes to show that my "strength" in getting up early in the morning wasn't much of a strength at all.
In college, it was rarely necessary to be at class before 10:30
FTFMLAM.
This. I managed a semester with no class before noon once. Philosophy classes made that easier, since afternoon daydreaming and philosophy line up well together.
Never. Best was the one semester when my first class was 9am MWF. The other 7 semesters all had at last 8am MWF, if not MTWThF. (Some of that was due to my job as supplemental instructor and later special assistant for an autistic student.)
Oh yeah, even the semesters where all my classes were late, I usually had work study early. Or earlyish. But I definitely avoided mornings as best as I could.
I wouldn't really describe myself as a night owl, it's just that I'm highly susceptible to inertia. When I'm awake, I tend to stay awake, and when I'm asleep I tend to stay asleep.
Well, I attended the classes at 8am, so I was there, in class, at 8am.
I like your inertia idea. I stay up late except when I fall asleep whilst holding the baby.
But I still get up early because I have no other choice.
Yeah, that waking up thing is brutal. And lately Aristotle hasn't been sleeping at all (a couple hours here and there, never between the hours of 2 a.m. and 7 a.m.), so it's been even more rough.
My masters Art program would hold seminar at 9 am on Fridays. One of my advisers held his office hours at the Pink from 9-4 am on thursdays. As my defense neared the occurrence of hangovers increased, and I remember one distinct day I went to seminar still blasted. I don't really miss those days.
Whoa, I'm having double vision - there's a miniature on my screen and a "life-sized" over my right shoulder.
What can I say, I'm into self promotion.
I took calculus at 8:30AM every day for two years, except for those terms when I took it at 7:30.
You sure failed calculus a lot, huh?
Maybe because I was sleeping during class? Nah, two years of wondrous learning!
Yah. I had the first quarter of calculus 8:30 TRS fall quarter, freshman year. Then I had it at a more reasonable time winter quarter. 🙂
I set my schedule up like that one semester. Somehow I survived.
I loved the early classes, but I'm a morning person anyway. Plus I didn't drink watch football in college.
I'm not particularly a morning person, although I don't especially mind the morning, but what I liked about morning lectures was that it seemed like a good way to ease into the day. Sitting down and absorbing information is a pretty relaxing way to start the day.
I often found them to be too relaxing. On the plus side, I now have little difficulty sleeping in chairs.
I have NEVER had difficulty sleeping anywhere (unfortunately); Runner daughter inherited this as well, and calls it a blessing and a curse. Heh.
My ideal schedule was 8AM/9AM/10AM/11AM M-Th, plus the Tuesday evening choir. Afternoons wide open for study, programming, hanging out in the hardware lab, napping, intermurals, or whatever. And long weekends should I decide to drive home.
The other nice thing about early classes that I learned the last couple years I was in college is that the demographics of the students taking those classes skewed away from the hard partiers, which was nice. I had no problem with the 8 am classes largely for this reason.
as a faculty member, I can't say that I enjoyed early lecture times, but they did tend to separate the people who wanted to be there from those who were absent. Which simplifies grading.
I was never a morning person until I started seminary. At that point, the only way I was going to get everything done that I needed to do was to get up very early in the morning. What I discovered is that I can be a lot more productive getting up early than I can staying up late. So, I guess now I'm a morning person.
I tend to find my morning productivity to be tied pretty intimately to how rested I feel.
As a science major, it was morning lectures and afternoon labs that could carry over into the supper hour - lose, lose. We envied the business majors who were done by noon. St. Johns had a 6 day class rotation; classes were on a day 1,3,5 or 2,4,6 schedule - or some combination thereof.
I really liked that 6 day rotation.
And was also irritated by the business majors.
That rotation and January term were definite pluses.
I only got 2 years of J-term before they squashed it, but those were wonderful.
Sad that they got rid of it. It was great to have time to do something completely different from my major - that was the only way I was able to take a theater class. It helped to clear out the mind before heading back in to the science grind.
Thank you, Rev. Jeff -- with this article, there's been no mention so far of anything baseball related so far today. A well-needed respite.
Not that I like to do commercials for the Man, but if you guys are in the market for a camera, you might want to visit my company this week. Some of the deals are Black Friday-level. $100 off on some of them.
I thought for a second you had an acting gig.
I wouldn't think twice about doing a commercial for that.
What's not to love about Harper? Hamels his him intentionally and he responds by stealing home.
I saw that exchange on the four-letter last night. I don't have a horse in that race so I thoroughly enjoyed both the plunk (welcome to the big show kid!) and the swiped plate (right back at ya Cole).
To me, the plunk makes Hamels seem insecure, and it seemed more than a little bit silly. Stealing home on the pickoff attempt was pretty great, though.
Hamels got the dreaded "five game suspension for a starting pitcher" and fined for beaning Harper. Pretty low rent move, I'd always liked Hamels.
Oh well I'd still root for him if the Twins signed him next year!
He has a really ugly haircut. That's all I have so far.
I adopted the Nationals as my NL team when they became my local team. So the answer is "nothing. There is nothing to not love about him."
The Twins have to go at least 56-79 to avoid 100 losses. That's a .415 winning percentage, which over a full season equates to a 67 win campaign. They are 30 runs clear of anyone else in the majors in run differential, to the bad side.
Baseball Prospectus still projects them to 70.2 wins in their postseason odds simulation algorithm.
That's a lot of regression to the mean. I currently have them at 63.3 expected wins. That puts their balance-of-season winning percentage at .417. It's a weighted average of their current 7-20 record (27 games at .259), and my initial estimate of their season-long winning percentage (135 games at .449), which was based on their '11 winning percentage regressed to the mean.
I have no way to test BP's against my stupidly simple projection, but I like the simplicity of my method.
Also, the simplest/dumbest stress test of my model I can think of is how the projection would respond to a 5-game winning streak or a 5-game losing streak. Winning the next five games would put the Twins at 68.4 expected wins. Losing the next five games would put the Twins at 59.4 expected wins. So there is relatively more upside than downside at the moment, which makes sense, I suppose.
Huh, $10 & $20 leases eh? I could afford a few of these...
Mauer pressured the Twins to drop Klete in favor of Komo Beatz.
He's in Minnesota now, so shouldn't it be Como Beatz?
I am totally in support anything that avoids the letter "K" when referring to the Twins batters.
So every time I navigate over here today I find myself misreading the CoC as "Will's Wild Ride."
I like that better.
Well, Joe Benson won't be ready anytime soon to help the Twins. He was just demoted to AA to make room at AAA for Trader Klete.
179/269/316 will do that to a guy, even if it was only 108 PA.
Yeah, he was off to a terrible start. It will be interesting to see if Hicks passes him up. Hicks is off to a good start and his current OPS is 70 points higher than what he ended up with in Class A last year. He also is hitting almost as well against righties as he has against lefties, which has been a problem for him in the past. It will also be interesting to see if the two share CF and move around the OF or if one of them is the primary CF with the other moving to a corner. My understanding is Hicks is considered the best CF in the system with the best arm by far (many teams considered drafting him as a pitcher). Benson is also a great CF, however, and has more seniority.
I suppose they see something wrong with his swing or whatever, and his power is down in a limited sample, but power numbers are going to be especially prone to SSS errors. (For instance, at his career home run rate, you'd expect him to have 4 home runs so far and he has 2. On the one hand--OMG, his HR rate is cut in half! On the other hand, he could make that up in one day.)
Anyway, short-term maybe this is the right move, but I don't see anything terribly concerning from a long-term standpoint that wasn't already concerning.
Since Benson has been identified as one of the very few short term answers from the minor league system, it is only right that he be sent down. I'm assuming, of course, that the goal of the 2012 season is to completely eliminate any good feeling amongst the increasingly few hardy souls in the fanbase that have them.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
Benson got off to a really poor start in 2010 as well, resulting in a demotion from AA to A. I don't remember how he started last year, but maybe poor starts are just a thing with him.
Was there much talk about Dozier's call up that I missed over the weekend?
Hmmm... that conversation seemed awfully heavy on Valencia talk and light on Dozier talk.
Not that I have anything to add on either topic.
I'm hoping Dozier comes up and plays decent defense and doesn't look completely out of his depth while batting, but it wouldn't surprise me if he boots a couple balls and flails weakly at pitches down and away for a couple weeks before being sent back down.
Here's something that was bothering me. We all complained about Punto (I created the Ineptitude poster, for example), but let's look at this ridiculous list: Juan Castro, Adam Everett, JJ Hardy, Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Jamey Carroll. That's five times the team went out and tried to fix their SS hole that has existed since Cristian Guzman and the front office only batted .200 (basically, just like the five guys they brought in). Ugh.
Which one was the success? Hardy?
Yes, he's the only one that wasn't getting replaced by July.
Would normally save this for Music Day, but I'm not sure the stream will be up that long. Killer Mike's R.A.P. Music, entirely produced by El-P, is streaming on Spin's website. Mike is one of the best rappers in the south, and the dude is way under appreciated. If there's any justice, this album will blow up. It's outstanding.
Hoops doesn't start until 1030est/930 central tonight? Come on! Don't they know that I have to watch the Twins first? How am I supposed to want to stay awake that late?
Uncategorized; I went ahead and put it under Co'C.
An interesting article speculating about the end of football.
I don't agree with their assumption that alcohol consumption will go down on college campuses and people would bemore productive. A new distraction is always available.
Having gone to a school whose football team was DIII (and thus, no one cared on Saturdays), I can go from personal observation that college students would not drink less and study more on Saturdays.
Exactly. Case Day is a spring event.
At Augsburg, too!
My school didn't even have a football team and there was plenty of alcohol consumption on Saturdays.
Psst... Will... They did have a football team, you were just too drunk to notice.
what cheapsie said. Football occupies only the fall quarter (or part of the fall semester) at most schools, yet drinking to excess happens all year 'round. Football games are an excuse, but so is "dude! I finished my term paper!/midterm/problem set! Let's par-tay!"
As I recall, "Dude! It's Tuesday!" was a sufficient excuse.
Mondays were popular, too.
Most days would work, but one day in particular.
Not today. Sigh.
one of the best things about Carleton was the "A" schedule (MWF classes). Party M, W, F, S nights! One of the worst was the "B" schedule (TRS classes). the ultimate in bad was to have a 1A, 1B schedule (8:30 a.m. six days per week) 🙁
For some reason I never comprehended, a large percentage of classes for my acting major were at 8 and 9am. We were the most excessive people on campus.
I managed to never miss an acting class, but we always played "Who's got a hangover?" and I was one of them on more than a few occasions.
I remember taking an "early" class (9am) in college. Once.
Now, the boy wakes up at 5.
I feel like college made me weaker in some ways. In HS, I'd be waking up somewhere between 5:30a and 7:00a, depending on the day of the week. In college, it was rarely necessary to be at class before 10:30, so I rarely woke up before 9:30. Which I guess just goes to show that my "strength" in getting up early in the morning wasn't much of a strength at all.
In college, it was rarely necessary to be at class
before 10:30FTFMLAM.
This. I managed a semester with no class before noon once. Philosophy classes made that easier, since afternoon daydreaming and philosophy line up well together.
Never. Best was the one semester when my first class was 9am MWF. The other 7 semesters all had at last 8am MWF, if not MTWThF. (Some of that was due to my job as supplemental instructor and later special assistant for an autistic student.)
Oh yeah, even the semesters where all my classes were late, I usually had work study early. Or earlyish. But I definitely avoided mornings as best as I could.
I wouldn't really describe myself as a night owl, it's just that I'm highly susceptible to inertia. When I'm awake, I tend to stay awake, and when I'm asleep I tend to stay asleep.
Well, I attended the classes at 8am, so I was there, in class, at 8am.
I like your inertia idea. I stay up late except when I fall asleep whilst holding the baby.
But I still get up early because I have no other choice.
Yeah, that waking up thing is brutal. And lately Aristotle hasn't been sleeping at all (a couple hours here and there, never between the hours of 2 a.m. and 7 a.m.), so it's been even more rough.
My masters Art program would hold seminar at 9 am on Fridays. One of my advisers held his office hours at the Pink from 9-4 am on thursdays. As my defense neared the occurrence of hangovers increased, and I remember one distinct day I went to seminar still blasted. I don't really miss those days.
Whoa, I'm having double vision - there's a miniature on my screen and a "life-sized" over my right shoulder.
What can I say, I'm into self promotion.
I took calculus at 8:30AM every day for two years, except for those terms when I took it at 7:30.
You sure failed calculus a lot, huh?
Maybe because I was sleeping during class? Nah, two years of wondrous learning!
Yah. I had the first quarter of calculus 8:30 TRS fall quarter, freshman year. Then I had it at a more reasonable time winter quarter. 🙂
I set my schedule up like that one semester. Somehow I survived.
I loved the early classes, but I'm a morning person anyway. Plus I didn't
drinkwatch football in college.I'm not particularly a morning person, although I don't especially mind the morning, but what I liked about morning lectures was that it seemed like a good way to ease into the day. Sitting down and absorbing information is a pretty relaxing way to start the day.
I often found them to be too relaxing. On the plus side, I now have little difficulty sleeping in chairs.
I have NEVER had difficulty sleeping anywhere (unfortunately); Runner daughter inherited this as well, and calls it a blessing and a curse. Heh.
My ideal schedule was 8AM/9AM/10AM/11AM M-Th, plus the Tuesday evening choir. Afternoons wide open for study, programming, hanging out in the hardware lab, napping, intermurals, or whatever. And long weekends should I decide to drive home.
The other nice thing about early classes that I learned the last couple years I was in college is that the demographics of the students taking those classes skewed away from the hard partiers, which was nice. I had no problem with the 8 am classes largely for this reason.
as a faculty member, I can't say that I enjoyed early lecture times, but they did tend to separate the people who wanted to be there from those who were absent. Which simplifies grading.
I was never a morning person until I started seminary. At that point, the only way I was going to get everything done that I needed to do was to get up very early in the morning. What I discovered is that I can be a lot more productive getting up early than I can staying up late. So, I guess now I'm a morning person.
I tend to find my morning productivity to be tied pretty intimately to how rested I feel.
As a science major, it was morning lectures and afternoon labs that could carry over into the supper hour - lose, lose. We envied the business majors who were done by noon. St. Johns had a 6 day class rotation; classes were on a day 1,3,5 or 2,4,6 schedule - or some combination thereof.
I really liked that 6 day rotation.
And was also irritated by the business majors.
That rotation and January term were definite pluses.
I only got 2 years of J-term before they squashed it, but those were wonderful.
Sad that they got rid of it. It was great to have time to do something completely different from my major - that was the only way I was able to take a theater class. It helped to clear out the mind before heading back in to the science grind.
Thank you, Rev. Jeff -- with this article, there's been no mention so far of anything baseball related so far today. A well-needed respite.
Not that I like to do commercials for the Man, but if you guys are in the market for a camera, you might want to visit my company this week. Some of the deals are Black Friday-level. $100 off on some of them.
I thought for a second you had an acting gig.
I wouldn't think twice about doing a commercial for that.
What's not to love about Harper? Hamels his him intentionally and he responds by stealing home.
I saw that exchange on the four-letter last night. I don't have a horse in that race so I thoroughly enjoyed both the plunk (welcome to the big show kid!) and the swiped plate (right back at ya Cole).
To me, the plunk makes Hamels seem insecure, and it seemed more than a little bit silly. Stealing home on the pickoff attempt was pretty great, though.
Hamels got the dreaded "five game suspension for a starting pitcher" and fined for beaning Harper. Pretty low rent move, I'd always liked Hamels.
Oh well I'd still root for him if the Twins signed him next year!
He has a really ugly haircut. That's all I have so far.
I adopted the Nationals as my NL team when they became my local team. So the answer is "nothing. There is nothing to not love about him."
The Twins have to go at least 56-79 to avoid 100 losses. That's a .415 winning percentage, which over a full season equates to a 67 win campaign. They are 30 runs clear of anyone else in the majors in run differential, to the bad side.
Baseball Prospectus still projects them to 70.2 wins in their postseason odds simulation algorithm.
That's a lot of regression to the mean. I currently have them at 63.3 expected wins. That puts their balance-of-season winning percentage at .417. It's a weighted average of their current 7-20 record (27 games at .259), and my initial estimate of their season-long winning percentage (135 games at .449), which was based on their '11 winning percentage regressed to the mean.
I have no way to test BP's against my stupidly simple projection, but I like the simplicity of my method.
Also, the simplest/dumbest stress test of my model I can think of is how the projection would respond to a 5-game winning streak or a 5-game losing streak. Winning the next five games would put the Twins at 68.4 expected wins. Losing the next five games would put the Twins at 59.4 expected wins. So there is relatively more upside than downside at the moment, which makes sense, I suppose.
So apparently our new outfielder Erik Komatsu moonlights as aspiring rap producer Komo Beatz. I wonder if he'll get Joe Mauer to spit some fire on a couple of tracks?
Huh, $10 & $20 leases eh? I could afford a few of these...
Mauer pressured the Twins to drop Klete in favor of Komo Beatz.
He's in Minnesota now, so shouldn't it be Como Beatz?
I am totally in support anything that avoids the letter "K" when referring to the Twins batters.
So every time I navigate over here today I find myself misreading the CoC as "Will's Wild Ride."
I like that better.
Well, Joe Benson won't be ready anytime soon to help the Twins. He was just demoted to AA to make room at AAA for Trader Klete.
179/269/316 will do that to a guy, even if it was only 108 PA.
Yeah, he was off to a terrible start. It will be interesting to see if Hicks passes him up. Hicks is off to a good start and his current OPS is 70 points higher than what he ended up with in Class A last year. He also is hitting almost as well against righties as he has against lefties, which has been a problem for him in the past. It will also be interesting to see if the two share CF and move around the OF or if one of them is the primary CF with the other moving to a corner. My understanding is Hicks is considered the best CF in the system with the best arm by far (many teams considered drafting him as a pitcher). Benson is also a great CF, however, and has more seniority.
25% SO% -- Benson, AAA '12
23% SO% -- Benson, AA '11
10% BB% -- Benson, AAA '12
12% BB% -- Benson, AA '11
.227 BABIP -- Benson, AAA '12
.356 BABIP -- Benson, AA '11
(.334 BABIP -- Benson, career, minors)
I suppose they see something wrong with his swing or whatever, and his power is down in a limited sample, but power numbers are going to be especially prone to SSS errors. (For instance, at his career home run rate, you'd expect him to have 4 home runs so far and he has 2. On the one hand--OMG, his HR rate is cut in half! On the other hand, he could make that up in one day.)
Anyway, short-term maybe this is the right move, but I don't see anything terribly concerning from a long-term standpoint that wasn't already concerning.
Since Benson has been identified as one of the very few short term answers from the minor league system, it is only right that he be sent down. I'm assuming, of course, that the goal of the 2012 season is to completely eliminate any good feeling amongst the increasingly few hardy souls in the fanbase that have them.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
Benson got off to a really poor start in 2010 as well, resulting in a demotion from AA to A. I don't remember how he started last year, but maybe poor starts are just a thing with him.
Was there much talk about Dozier's call up that I missed over the weekend?
Yes.
Hmmm... that conversation seemed awfully heavy on Valencia talk and light on Dozier talk.
Not that I have anything to add on either topic.
I'm hoping Dozier comes up and plays decent defense and doesn't look completely out of his depth while batting, but it wouldn't surprise me if he boots a couple balls and flails weakly at pitches down and away for a couple weeks before being sent back down.
Here's something that was bothering me. We all complained about Punto (I created the Ineptitude poster, for example), but let's look at this ridiculous list: Juan Castro, Adam Everett, JJ Hardy, Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Jamey Carroll. That's five times the team went out and tried to fix their SS hole that has existed since Cristian Guzman and the front office only batted .200 (basically, just like the five guys they brought in). Ugh.
Which one was the success? Hardy?
Yes, he's the only one that wasn't getting replaced by July.
Would normally save this for Music Day, but I'm not sure the stream will be up that long. Killer Mike's R.A.P. Music, entirely produced by El-P, is streaming on Spin's website. Mike is one of the best rappers in the south, and the dude is way under appreciated. If there's any justice, this album will blow up. It's outstanding.
Hoops doesn't start until 1030est/930 central tonight? Come on! Don't they know that I have to watch the Twins first? How am I supposed to want to stay awake that late?