70 thoughts on “October 15, 2012: So Unfair”

    1. 1. At first I thought it was by John Gordon and got all excited. But then I realized it wasn't, and his name was spelled differently, so I never should have really gotten that excited.
      2. Landjaeger as "a spicy, semi-dry German sausage" seems a bit inaccurate. They're more like the German equivalent of Polish Sausage, although I've seen them made in Hot-Dog sized links as well. Perhaps the writer is thinking of Summer Sausage, which is what Schmidt's is famous for.
      3. My folks' house.
      4. Even if you're not religious, the Cathedral's got some great paintings.
      5. Flandrau State Park, which is about 30% within city limits is pretty great. If I were in town now, I'd be up on Indian Point looking over the Cottonwood River Valley in its fall colors nearly every day.
      6. That's it for now.

      Spoiler SelectShow

  3. So, it turns out that the Yankees and the Twins have exactly the same winning percentage in games in which they score zero runs. Go figure.

      1. I looked at how the Phillies did with that Ryan Howard contract, and theirs was the same! I'd say your theory is pretty much proven.

            1. Only four more years to go!

              Every time a Stribbie complains about Mauer's contract, they should be forced to realize exactly how awful that Howard deal is. It's (thankfully?) only five years long, but wow.

  4. I hadn't heard this until today. I don't care what anyone says, this is not good. The guy looks terrible, his color is awful.

    1. This isn't anything new. He's had seizures for years and has never missed a game because of them, other than the final minutes of a game when he had a seizure on the sidelines.

      1. I'm fully aware of that history. I'm just saying that it isn't good. My comment isn't about "missing a game", it's about his personal well-being.

    2. I agree with him that he should stay active rather than "waiting around for the next seizure," but he could probably be active in a less stressful career than D1 football coach. I hope things work out for him.

        1. i fully realize, and have previously noted, that my thinking swisher is a douchenozzle is completely irrational. that said, i still think he's a douchenozzle.

          1. I don't think it's irrational, but I'm in complete agreement. I can't stand the guy.

            I think Rivera is easily the best dude on the team. I like Ichiro quite a bit, too. I loathe Teixeira, A-Rod, Jeter, and CC. I'm not fond of Cano or Granderson, but I don't think I hate them. Their manager is lousy. Most of the other players I have ill feelings for mostly because of the laundry. If, say, Andruw Jones or Eric Chavez came back from the dead for any team but the Yankees, I'd probably be pretty happy for them. As it stands, it's obnoxious to watch every washed up or non-descript player turn into a quality piece once they put on the pinstripes.

          1. Well, I obviously can't prove it, but I've only ever seen him portrayed as a philanthropist. It's possible he's a douche, but I can't think of anything that fans have seen that would suggest that. I just wonder why he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt.

                2. He has a personal manager that does that for him, so that he looks like he has real human emotions and stuff.

              2. Swisher was very fan-friendly in Sactown and Oakland. He has a perpetually douchey smirkface, but I think his actions generally support the non-douchey interpretation.

                As for CC, I'm not a fan, but my understanding (from a friend who teaches at CC's former high school) is that he's been very supportive of the school and community. Not proof of him being a good guy, but he's got that going for him at least.

                  1. And how. His smirkface showboat dance to step on the first base bag at the end of game 163, 2008 edition was infuriating. Act like you've been there.

            2. He seems like a fine guy off the field. I just can't stand watching him play baseball. There's a lot more guys I dislike for their on field demeanor than their off field behavior. Most of the Yankees fall into the former.

              1. This.

                It is important to keep the characters distinct from the people. Generally, we know very little about the people.

    2. You play for the Yankees, you gotta know that fans will always expect more*. If ARod had led them to the WS Championship every year and won ten MVPs, fans would complain about how he was retiring without going for fifteen straight.
      *True Yankees excepted.

    2. Step 1: Buy large quantities of tickets at face value from Yankees box office.
      Step 2: Sell tickets below face value on Internet.
      Step 3: Profit!

      Capitalism rules.

    3. I have some sympathy for the devil here. Their regular season problem would seem to be that scalpers can pick up season tickets at a rate which allows them to profit from selling a few of those tickets at a large margin while dumping most of the tickets at a loss. That's not really a sign of pricing the tickets too high or low on average, but just not having honed in on the correct variation in price from game to game (a variation which appears to be quite large.)

      Now in the postseason, if there is a ton of volume on StubHub, that would suggest to me that the majority of their tickets are not priced too high. In fact, a lot of those tickets might be priced too low, enticing scalpers to buy them in hopes of turning a profit. The scalpers are not interested in selling all of the tickets, they are just interested in making a profit. If they can sell a fraction of their tickets for a significant premium, they can at least break even, and some of them may be content to let the unsold tickets remain on the market at a significant mark-up. The few last-minute overpays that they get might offset the tickets that they get nothing in return for.

      I'm sure the unsold Yankees tickets are overpriced, and I'm not sad about that, but their goals are not aligned with the goals of the scalpers, and that's a problem for them.

      I've heard that some clubs in the EPL (Arsenal is one, I believe) don't allow their tickets to be re-sold. If you buy a ticket from the club, you have to be the person who uses it. I'm not certain how they enforce this, but I think it's something like a membership card which acts like a debit card. Tickets are credited to your account and your membership card gets you into the games you paid for. I think I've heard a couple of quips from the Yankees about how StubHub won't be a problem for them next year, so I wonder if they are going to go to a system like this. Presumably if you had a game you couldn't make it to, the Yankees could facilitate you selling the tickets to another card-holder, but they might require you to do this on their terms (that is, you might not be able to sell it at a mark-up.)

      1. Were the Yankees doing anything outside of baseball rules when they had a payroll significantly higher than every other team in baseball? No? I believe their justification for their behavior was that they were playing within the rules with an insinuation that those who were complaining were whiners.

        Is what StubHub and those who use StubHub doing illegal? No? Well, then, they are just playing within the rules.

        1. Were the Yankees doing anything outside of baseball Yankee rules when they had their new ballpark outfield distance down the foul lines as short as they are? One word: entitlement

        2. What StubHub is doing is not illegal, but it doesn't help the Yankees. And some fraction of their shitpiles of money goes to the Twins. Plus, having good crowds at playoff games impacts baseball's reputation, so I'd like to see if they can do something about it. In the end, I don't like the Yankees, but I like them more than ticket scalpers.

          If the Yankees take action to make the system work more in their favor, I'm all for it, just like I'd be all for the other 29 teams in baseball pressuring the league into more comprehensive revenue sharing and a stiff luxury tax.

          1. I'm not defending scalpers. I'm saying that the Yankees whine a lot when the shoe is on the other foot.

            1. Scalpers are small-business entrepreneurs.*

              *I say that in Forbidden Zone-defying jest, but my economist-on-tv self actually thinks that scalpers provide net value to the economy. I don't understand why clubs haven't moved more aggressively to auction off some share of seats on Stubhub or similar sites. Empty seats are bad for business -- no parking or concessions sales.

              1. Even if they do add net value, they have both positive and negative impacts on different businesses and their net value needs to be high enough to justify the negative impacts--and I don't think the line should be drawn at any net value justifying all negative impacts.

                I'd rather see businesses--sports teams and other entertainers in particular--have more direct control over their pricing. Maybe they don't have good reasons not to auction off their seats, but I'd rather not see them forced into a particular pricing scheme by speculators. And we've certainly seen speculators have significant negative impacts in other markets.

      2. I'm pretty sure that having a large number of unsold seats is indeed a sign of pricing their tickets too high. Through Stubhub, they are quite capable of varying prices at the seat level in order to maximize profits.

        2. Through Stubhub, they are quite capable of varying prices at the seat level in order to maximize profits.

          I'm not convinced of this. There are always going to be brokers out there who are more aggressive than the Yankees in how they price the tickets. If those brokers are terrible at their job, sure they'll lose money, but in the meantime, a seat will go empty and the Yankees will lose the associated revenue with butts in seats. In fact, if there was no secondary market, it's probably in the Yankees' best interests to leave some money on the table in ticket prices so they can generate additional revenue at the park, but they can't control that as long as someone is standing between them and their customers.

          1. Let's say that I'm worth $50,000,000. I buy a ticket to a Yankees game. The day before the game, I meet a young man working two jobs just to make his rent payment. He's a bright and kind young man and he also seems to be a big Yankees fan. I'm moved by him and decide to give him my ticket. Now, when I usually go to Yankees games, I spend a couple thousand on hot dogs and programs for those around me, but this kid only has $10 in discretionary spending power, so he gets a half a hot dog with no bun (man, you can't just give those things away).

            The poor Yankees! They have suffered by not having the right kind of butts in the seats! I have selfishly deprived them of $2000 of additional revenue.

            People who buy tickets should generally have the right to do what they want with tickets that they have purchased, whether it means that they attend the game, eat the ticket, give it away, or sell it for a profit (or loss). Scalpers take risks by buying tickets. We've seen the Yankees take similar risks by pricing tickets for regular season games at $2500 a seat -- and they found out that maybe that's a little too steep. So, they need to price their tickets to try and maximize their profits. If they don't price their tickets appropriately, then that's the breaks.

            1. If we're going to use absurd examples, how about I'm worth billions and as a huge Red Sox fan, I employ some people as agents to use my money to buy up as many Yankees playoff tickets as possible and incenerate them. Too absurd? Well, it's not like no one's ever tried to corner a market before.

              Personally, if I'm the Yankees, I'd do everything I can to keep someone from stepping between me and my customers. If I price my tickets too high, then it was my mistake and I can accept the consequences of that. If I happen to sell my tickets so that they a good value and someone else marks them up and the tickets don't get used? That would infuriate me.

              It's not like I'm even a fan of the Yankees' pricing. I think their new stadium is terrible, like many new stadiums, with too low of a seating density in the most prime real estate. I've been noticing throughout the playoffs that it's not uncommon for the seats right behind home plate to be somewhat sparesly attended and for the energy level there to be below average for the stadium. That's probably what you get when you price those seats through the roof and make them extra-wide, extra-soft luxury seats, but it doesn't make for the greatest television.

              Anyway, if this gets to be enough of a problem for teams, they'll just resort to tactics like holding all the tickets at will call until the gates open (this already happens for other events) or having to show some kind of ID with your ticket to get in the game. Neither of those tactics is very customer-friendly, but having large portions of your tickets bought up by scalpers isn't very customer-friendly, either.

        1. Lame, I thought they might actually do something creative. I doubt a price floor will really help them so much, but on the other hand, colleges keep upping their tuition in part because higher tuition makes people think the education is better. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if a similar phenomenon occurs with ticket prices.

  8. Dr. Chop just informed me that our wireless router died this morning. Any suggestions (twayn)?

    2. Head over to Best Buy, crack open the wallet and pull out a 50. Tell em you want a new router and that you know Spookymilk.

    3. I very recently updated our router to a Belkin (N450 I think?). I'm pretty fond of it. Super easy set up, and it was cheap. Linksys had always done well by me in the past, but I guess the new Cisco ones aren't as good?

  9. If your laptops support 802.11N (or you see a new laptop that does in your near future) you definitely want to go that way for maximum bandwidth and throughput. Otherwise the variables to consider are range, ease of use (i.e. setup/administration), security and peripherals (like if you'll be using a wireless printer with it). If your devices are all limited to 802.11G and you just want something cheap, quick and easy, find a Linksys WRT54G on craigslist or ebay.

      1. If you're running Windows, go to the Device Manager and click on Network Adapters. You'll have two of them, one wireless and one wired. Check the properties on the wireless adapter, looking for a reference to 802.11a/b/g/n. Or just send me the laptop brand and model number and I'll look it up for you. I think manufacturers starting converting to the 802.11N standard around 2008.

  10. I am watching a re-airing of the Philly/Boston preseason hoops game. Darko is starting for Boston. He looks, umm, overweight. Wearing number 99 probably doesn't help out.

    Maybe he quit smoking?

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