Cup of Coffee

June 4, 2014: Under New Management

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Within a week of taking over, the new management at our complex has fixed our dryer and sealed the ceiling light (after removing the scorpion carcass). We heard there were "some changes" but other than the woman at the top, I don't recognize a single person here, and that's a good thing.

87 thoughts on “June 4, 2014: Under New Management”

  1. I will be leaving this morning for Rapid City, where I will be attending United Methodist Annual Conference the rest of the week. Assuming all goes well, there should be no interruptions in programming.

    2. And just as I'm leaving, I find out that my last surviving uncle, John Nadenicek, passed away in the night. He was a chemist. He worked for Hormel in Austin, Minnesota, then went out on his own with a partner to form NuChek Preparatory Labs in Elysian, Minnesota. In recent years he and my Aunt Betty have been living in Arizona. Your prayers would be appreciated.

    3. Padre - we (wife & Kernel & I) will be in Rapid City this Friday & Saturday on vacation. We're actually staying in a campground out between the Rushmore & Crazy Horse Memorials, but may be in town one of those days. Feel free to shoot me an email (bmjohnson327 at the hot mail) if there's any interest in meeting up.

      Also - sorry to hear about your uncle.

  2. I am about 1200 miles from where I will be on Friday night. I have to work 20 hours between now and then.

  4. Portland brewery/brewpub selection assistance.

    We're taking an RV trip from MN to CA by way of SD, WY, MT, ID and OR. Our stop in Portland will only be two days, but I'd like to visit at least a few breweries. The obvious ones are Deschutes & Widmer because I've actually sampled their excellent products. I also have a few others in mind that have good reputations and are relatively close to where we're camping, but that I have not had before: Hair of the Dog, Upright, Breakside, Lucky Labrador, StormBreaker and Cascade to name a few. Does anyone have experience with these brews or any suggestions of places to visit in Portland (beer-related or otherwise)?

      1. Also, the Bridgeport tour is fun, and the taproom/restaurant very good. And Full Sail!

      1. Just yesterday! Put it into the fridge last night and plan to pop one open this evening to celebrate the start of my vacation.

        1. Fantastic. I was worried for a second that you'd already left and they were sitting outside. Let me know what you think, and if the first one isn't carbonated (it should be, but I used carb tablets, which can take longer) then give the second a couple more weeks.

  5. To the discussion the other day about how Tom Kelly allegedly hates platoons. Roughly, a player playing every day will face about 75% righties and 25% lefties.

    Career Splits

    Randy Bush: 97% righties
    Mark Davidson: 70% lefties
    John Moses (switch hitter): Over 85% against righties, including 96% in 1988
    Paul Sorrento: over 95% righties

    In 1996, Kelly had a semi-regular platoon between Roberto Kelly and Matt Lawton.

    To top it off, I did a play index search for every season Tom Kelly managed. 90% of the time a left-handed batter came to the plate for Tom Kelly, he was facing a right-handed pitcher. Right-handers faced right-handed pitching only 65% of the time.

    3. 1995 catchers (a trickier position to platoon because you don't want to lose your backup 11!!!11!!1!!!):
      Matt Merullo: 35 PA vs LHP, 181 vs RHP
      Matt Walbeck: 127 vs LHP , 295 vs RHP

      1996 catchers:
      Greg Myers: 33 PA vs LHP, 320 vs RHP
      Matt Walbeck: 76 PA vs LHP, 151 vs RHP
      Mike Durant: 58 PA vs RHP, 38 vs RHP

      1. Hmm, catchers platooning... obviously, the ones that bat lefty hit well enough to play in the majors, but there's got to be some penalty for hitting from your non-dominant side, isn't there? That might be an interesting thing to investigate further- actually, I'm sure someone already has. Google search time!

          1. Trey bats left and throws right. He naturally does that. Always has since tee ball. If he tried to bat right-handed, it would look as bad as if he tried to throw left-handed.

            1. Right now Aquinas is batting switch, throwing switch (but trending right for that). Both his throws and swings are about even from each side (and not terrible for a 4-year old)(swings are better than throws, but that wasn't true last fall), and I'm just going to encourage being ambidextrous.

              1. I think I'll have at least one of my girls work on becoming a left-handed hitter. I don't think there's any advantage to switch-hitting in fast pitch softball, but there's definitely an advantage to starting out closer to first base.

                1. Heh, with the nicer weather and Pete playing outside with hit bat and ball more often, I've been trying to subtly encourage him to bat from the left.

                2. This is true in slow pitch as well -- there's something to be said about being closer and also your momentum taking you in the direction you want to be heading.

            2. Some people definitely lean towards hitting from their non-dominant side. I feel pretty natural batting from either side, but I have a lot more power from the right.
              This got me thinking about eye dominance (I'm pretty sure it's been discussed on the WGOM before), and I ended up finding this article and this one. Both authors think that the batter is better off if their dominant eye is closer to the pitcher, since they won't move their head to track the ball. Makes sense to me, I guess.

    4. TK didn't call it platooning. He just used his bench smartly and he used it a lot. Jacque Jones' days off were when a lefty was pitching. Randy Bush was rarely a regular, but his times to fill in, in the corner OF spots or at DH came when a righty started.

        1. True. Like, for example, Al Newman. 😉
          231/306/275 in 1,876 PA with the Twins 1988-92.

          1. Newman was useful due to his flexibility, though it would have been nice if he could have stolen more bases.

              1. Coleman stole over 100 based with an obp lower than that.

                Also, Newman's success rate was awful.

                1. uhh, yea, one season (and 670 PA!), so you got me there. He had a career OBP of .324.

          2. Newman's PA total is inflated in good part thanks to the illustrious company Newman had at second base prior to Knoblauch's arrival. Lombo, Tommy Herr, Wally Backman, Fred Manrique, Chip Hale...

  6. Gleeman continues the Mauer v Jeter comparison.
    I will make one comment. The average runs per game* through Jeter's age 31 season was 5.0. The average runs per game so far in Mauer's career is 4.7. Doing the same crude averaging for OPS is .772 versus .747 respectively.

    * Crudely measured as averaging the average runs/game. Most of the years contain a similar number of games, except 1995 and 2014.

    1. I think quite a bit of this vitriol is fueled by the local media. If they would, you know, point out that Mauer is really, really good, even great, people might start listening to that.

      But, then again, these are the same clowns that thought KG wasn't all that.

      1. More specifically, I wonder if the Seattle media got all over Griffey when he had injury problems or if the Milwaukee media got on Molitar for his injury problems. Maybe they did, I don't know. But, our collection of sports mediots seem to be especially stupid.

        1. Agreed.

          The sheep are just repeating Reusse, Souhan, etc. I also think Torii and Cuddyer contributed through their quotes.

        2. Griffey didn't really have injury problems until Cincinnati, IIRC. The only thing I can really tell about the Seattle sports media is that they absolutely love football and I also think they know off-the-record things about the Mariners FO (some of which became public last fall) which make them fairly negative toward the Mariners, though it is difficult to differentiate that from deserved Mariners criticism from being so bad for so long.

          Now that I think about it more, some of them stirred up a lot of anti-Ichiro sentiment driven largely by what seems to be a dislike for the fact that he continued using an interpreter even when he had a pretty decent grasp of English. Lots of "Ichiro is selfish, only cares about his numbers" BS.

          2. Yeah, I heard that line on Ichiro constantly out there. "He just wants to put on a hitting display," one maroon said on a call-in show. To their credit, the hosts lambasted him when he admitted he didn't want a Japanese player on the team.

  7. Listening to the broadcast last night, the talking heads said that Dozier's transformation into a power hitter came because the coaches told him to stop worrying about hitting the other way and pull as much as he wants. If that's true, then hooray.

    1. At this point, I can't be convinced that anything the broadcasters and print media says is close to fact. I'm going to say Bruno and go with that.

      1. I was reading a Sports on Earth article on Dozier today, and they attributed it almost entirely to a change in approach:

        "Me and Bruno dissected all kinds of film," Dozier said. "I went 0-for-5 that night, couple of strikeouts. And all the strikeouts were fastballs down the middle. And that's one thing, I always thought I could hit a fastball. The other stuff always gave me trouble, but I could always hit a fastball. And I wasn't hitting them, so I knew something was wrong.

        "So we dissected my swing for days upon days, that whole week in Detroit. And we saw I wasn't getting my foot down -- meaning, I was getting my foot down, but my toe. My whole foot wasn't flat, so when I started my swing, my whole foot wasn't down, I started [and] everything kind of collapsed. We made it muscle memory for a week, trying to get the foot down, and ever since then, I started seeing the ball more, creating more power, walks up, strikeouts down, just because I could see the ball better."

        Also, it turns out coaches may have a use after all:

        "I want to really, not just stealing bases, but going first to third, knowing when to test a guy's outfield arm. But the biggest thing is stealing bases. Me and [Paul] Molitor and [third base coach] Joe Vavra, we've been working -- I mean, night and day compared to where I was, working on tendencies, times, everything for pitchers, what pitches to go on, what counts to go on. And I want to continue to get better, the next two or three years, to max out on my running game."

        1. So Vavra is better than Ulger, eh?

          Also, based on Dozier and that quote above, I fear that Bruno might not remain where he is for much longer.

    1. re: the top-ranked dude. His fastball tops out at 97 and sits 92-94, but his fastball grades a 65. Remind me again what the grading scale is, and why the frack they don't use 0-100 or 0-10 or summat?

      1. * Players are graded on a 20-80 scale for future tools -- 20-30 is well below average, 40 is below average, 50 is average, 60 is above average and 70-80 is well above average.

        It was underneath the player summary 😉

        I can't answer why not 0-100, though.

        1. here is one explanation. Seems too number-y.

          So what is the 20-80 Scale?

          This one is pretty simple. Take a look at your average scout. He's not much for vocabulary, or fashionable headware choices. His gifts lie elsewhere. And he likely is a bit of a journeyman, working for several teams over his career (or freelancing). Does it make sense for him to learn 30 different rating systems, so he can communicate with every front office? No, it does not. What does make sense is a simple, condensed system that he can use to paint a picture of the kid he sees now, and the player he sees that kid turning into.

          The beauty of 20-80 is that it's built of a simple distribution curve. The idea is in any population, you can fit 99.9 percent (ish) with plus or minus of three standard deviations of average. In this case, 80 (or 8, as 2-8 is just as widely used) is the best, a one-in-a-thousand type. 20 (or, 2) is what you and I would look like if we had to stand in against Yu Darvish right now. Appropriately, 20s and 80s are super-rare, while there's the highest population of 50's. Bell curve. Simple. Works. Favors a fedora.

          50 is average, and each ten points represents one standard deviation above average. Sixty is pretty good, seventy is one of the best in the league, eighty is calling your buddies over because you don't believe what you're seeing. Likewise, forty is crummy, thirty is so bad you don't want it around your stadium, and twenty just so rarely happens in the majors that you give your buddies another call to come see it.

          also, uh, a 95-pct confidence interval for a normal is plus/minus ~2 std devs. So, this quote is, uh, strange. Ok, I re-read it. I guess I need some coffee. The explanation of the scale makes sense. The use of it by scouts with questionable grasps of things like standard deviations is not really explained. Who decided that a std dev would be ten points? Why would anyone think that scouts could apply this scale relatively consistently?

  12. LeBron's popularity still lags behind where it was before the Decision. Guess who hasn't forgiven him?

    'Spoiler' SelectShow

    1. I'll say I was sore on LeBron right away after the decision. Basically because I want easy villians, and he availed himself.
      But nothing since added to any villainy, so I gave up on him being a villain and the extent of my interest in the NBA enjoys the fact that he's one of the best ever.
      How does ESPN play him? On a scale from Hockey to Tebow, where is he at?

        1. I lessened my view of Kobe as villain when he started wearing those horribly dorky tights (compression-sleeves for legs?).
          How could such a dork be a villain?
          (Yes, real things he's done outside the game, but that type of villainy isn't fun to cultivate in one's mind.)

          1. Redemption?

            'Spoiler' SelectShow

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