57 thoughts on “February 23, 2013: Have Some!”

    2. I was there and sitting in the jut-out down the 1B line. Great view.

      It was an awesome game. IIRC they were down 5-0, came back. I think they scored a run(s) against Percival at the end. Of course they were not earned.

      Oh, and Anaheim played a 5-man infield at the end, which I've never seen in person at an MLB game.

      (My memory says Guardado laid out parallel to the ground for that catch. The reply tells a different story. 🙂

  6. Two years have now passed since the Carmelo Anthony trade and somehow Denver is still a better team than NYK. A swag adjustment is needed!

    Things were looking bad for awhile as the Knicks started 18-5. But, since then, they've been a pedestrian 14-15, and I've kind of enjoyed that.

    1. I had been hoping that they might come up with a new theme song. Actually, I was really hoping they'd go back to the old theme song, but I didn't expect it.

  11. Worth a read. While some teams (and gamblers) are using incredible quantitative analysis, the Twins barely know what BABIP is and are clarifying what the phrase "pitch to contact" means. I realize that the article is about basketball, but what I understand is that some baseball teams are using highly advanced analysis (well beyond what is publicly available).

    1. Whenever I read about this stuff with multiple millions bet, I wonder if we are getting the full story. Wouldn't it just be easier to bet the over in the second half and pay a referee $25,000 to call a couple extra fouls at the end of the game, if needed?

    4. He did play really well against the Twins once. I wonder why the Twins never signed Tom Lawless or Mark Lemke.

  13. Holy Gee-woly, four walks and only one K for the staff today? Gonna be one of those years. Guess I have some time to put together this season's new graphics, at least the strikeout thumbnails.

      1. Update:

        Sergeant John Creamer of the Daytona Beach Police said that 15 fans were injured. Eleven are at Halifax Medical Center with one on the way to surgery with head trauma, and four are at Florida Memorial Hospital in Daytona.

          1. NASCAR drones have bumper stickers that say things like "It isn't a sport unless you can die from it." If anything, this will probably strengthen ratings.

          2. Football will be done before NASCAR is. At least people involved with the sport accept that there will be fatalities.

            1. Yup. Dale jr. Didn't even take a break when his dad died. It's a culture, not a sport. Football may die in some areas, but in places where it's also the culture (Texas) I have a hard time imagining it.

              1. I will say, however, that a chance of dying is probably more easy to overlook than a chance of living for years with a neurological disorder.

            2. I certainly don't disagree, and I wouldn't (won't) shed a tear if (when) football goes away. I'd just rather see NASCAR (and all auto racing, really) go away first because I find it to be an irresponsible waste of natural resources.

                1. if you're worried about natural resources, then ban football immediately too. While race cars drive around and around, football teams are large and fly to their destination cities for games.

                  I really don't think "waste of natural resources" is a meaningful critique of any entertainment field, however. All businesses use energy resources in order to produce economic value.

                    1. This.

                      I'm donating to science.

                      Cremation is not a favored option amongst Tribe members (for rather obvious historical reasons), so the mrs probably won't be going that route. But I'm urging donation for her too.

                    2. Most golf courses have creeks, lakes, hills- not the best farmland, in most cases. Usually in really good pasturing areas, though.
                      But I'm not disagreeing with you about natural resources, mostly because of the water demands to keep grass green. Golf courses in Arizona and Nevada seem very impractical to me, for the most part.
                      But NASCAR is ridiculously wasteful. That doesn't even take into account the number of people that drive to the races (average of almost 100,000 people per race). And that's just NASCAR. Start adding in all the weekend track racing around the country (there's four racetracks within an hour drive of my house), and the fuel consumption numbers are mind-boggling.

                    3. It depends on how you look at it. That 6,000 gallons (22,712 liters) of gas over two days starts to look somewhat reasonable when you consider that the United States eats up about 400 million gallons (1.5 billion liters) per day, any old day of the year [source: Finney]. And 4 million pounds a year doesn't seem like much compared to the world's 6 billion tons (5.4 billion metric tons) of CO2 emissions every year, or the 1 million tons (907,184 metric tons) emitted for the one day of the 2005 Super Bowl [source: Fulton].

                      Like I said. "Wasteful" is an interesting value judgment about an industry. I don't happen to be a NASCAR or auto racing fan, so I think my critique is fairly dispassionate.

                      Consider that ~100,000 flock to the Big House 5-6 times per season for Michigan football games. Suppose that entails 25,000 vehicles. Now multiply that by the hundreds of college games around the country each saturday in the fall, plus the 15-16 pro games each sunday. Now add in the transportation costs for the teams and the energy costs of building the stadia, which lie unused most days of the year.

                      I think we can do this game for a lot of entertainment activities. Oil refineries use a LOT of water, so any industry that invokes substantial transportation of participants OR consumers could be tagged as "wasteful" if you ignore the jobs and utils created by the industry.

                    4. I'll fully admit I'm just grabbing the low hanging fruit regarding wasteful sports. I really, really dislike 100% of NASCAR, and with gas the way it is these days, its an easy target.

      1. A win over the number one team and it wasn't even close. Logan Storley and Tony Nelson each pinned an opponent that was previously ranked in the top 3 at their respective weights.

        When the Gophers pulled the IOWA-OSU double to win the same tournament at this time last year, I recall there was at least one key injury to OSU and the win was a squeaker. 28-9 was the final score this year, and the Gophers won 7 out of 10 matches.

      1. yea, not even on the B1G channel that I could find.

        It really is pathetic how myopically focused the various sports networks are on men's basketball still. As much as I love hoops, ratings for basketball are miniscule. There ought to be more room on cable for other sports than is currently provided (soccer excepted, which now does quite well, what with Fox Soccer and Goal)

    1. I've found NoScript to be a useful extension for privacy. EFF's Panopticlick uses a variety of methods to fingerprint you to identify how unique you really are on the web. One of the best anonymizers is disabling JavaScript, which prevents much of the fingerprinting.

      1. yar, I use NotScripts on Chrome. It appears not to have been updated since 2010, however. I didn't see an update, or a proper NoScript for Chrome. Recommendations (in addition/contra Rhu's suggestion)?

  19. And, Antony admits, some of the most costly errors in recent years can be charged to the front office. J.J. Hardy? "Yeah, I wish we still had him." Tsuyoshi Nishioka? "No doubt, we failed." Alexi Casilla? "So frustrating."

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