86 thoughts on “May 12, 2015: Harvey Birdman”

  1. Would someone put Beau's name on the empty spot in round two of the cribbage bracket? I still blame Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 😛

    1. I'd offer a play by play but it was such a shellacking that I don't want to bore anyone. Who's my next victim?

        1. my records suggest that I registered on 6/9/06. (that may have been a change in password or summat; looks like I was around a little earlier)

          1. Spent a bit of time with the WBM for the old basement. After yesterdays new blood.

            I lurked for much longer than I remembered. Weird.

            6/30/2008

            1. It would be interesting (and potentially embarassing and that's why interesting) to see everyone's first post, but I don't have the technology to pull that off...

              1. If Stick still has the database behind the site, then everyone's first thing they said on WGOM-That-Was could be retrieved.

                2. This page says I started 7-27-06, but that doesn't seem right. It has some guy named "Andrew" starting 6-10-06.

                  I've also found proof that I was around on April 30, 2005.
                  The page doesn't load right, but I can "View Page Source". I wrote:

                  That is what I love about Silva. His games are fun to watch. I'm waiting for him to throw a game with 9 dps or 20 hits (all singles) for no runs or something like that. He's not a great pitcher, like Santana or Radke, but he's got so much style in how he wins or loses. Unlike Lohse, who runs hot and cold, inning to inning.

                    1. Yeah, me too. In that 05 link, one of the posts is called "Pepper!" Prescient.

                      Oh, back in the day before nested comments.

        2. I started my POS blog the summer after my freshman year, 2004. I was visiting the original stickandballguy.blogspot.com that year.

        3. Mine is easy to find, because my first comment was something about Guerrier being in line for his first win in his 89th career appearance.

          I know I lurked for most of that '06 season before commenting.

      2. The original old blog started on 7/17/04. Thursday is my 10th wedding anniversary.

        2. Congratulations on that!
          Had my 10th anniversary last September....it's really something to think about, isn't it?

        1. I noticed there are a bunch of us that show up registered on 7-27-2006 (me, AMR, JeffA, Tway, Bjhess and a bunch lost to time). I wonder if there was something that happened that day to have us all sign up or if that was default date for something earlier.

          3. That's when I moved from blogspot to hosting on my own at stickandballguy.com/blog.

    2. I'm not much of a festival guy. Lydia (incidentally, now playing on my iPod) is coming during the summer, right?

    3. .......... lots of interesting bands. Free you want to spot me two tickets in the off chance I convince Dr. Chop to fly back.....

  4. Regarding the Hicks promotion:

    The team placed outfielder Shane Robinson on the Family Emergency List, which he can stay for from three to seven days. The list is for players with a serious family emergency or after the death of a family member. The Twins did not release details of Robinson's situation.
    -Phil Miller

    2. My first thought is, what happens when Robinson comes back? This seems like it might be temporary but it could instead be that he was called up earlier because of it.

        1. Schafer can't be around much longer. Hicks should be up for 2015. Sink or swim.

    3. It turns out I am really, really not white. I only own three on that list.

    4. Own 8. Read 30.

      (both assuming that you count Wheel of Time as one)

      Would have thought Tom Robbins would make an appearance on the list somewhere as well.

    5. I don't understand the premise here... Or maybe it's just really inane? It reads like a random list of books from all genres.

        1. I'm going with "really inane list of books I like with a title to generate page views."

          1. I'm pretty familiar with the site and the writer... it's meant to be taken as a joke.

            1. I suppose one could have guesstimated that it was meant as some sort of self-deprecating humor, or pseudo-self deprecating mocking of self-important lists of books. I thought it was just kinda dumb. Not outlandish enough to be funny.

              1. That was where I was. Had it been much shorter, it could have worked as a joke. Something about brevity and wit, I suppose.

              2. Well I mean sure it's dumb, but it's not meant to be smart. It's just a bunch of very popular, somewhat cliche books, akin to something like this. It doesn't say that the books are bad, or that owning them is bad, or that white guys are bad. It's just some very gentle ribbing.

                1. I think if it was a ranking (like the example), it would have worked better for me.

            3. I'm familiar with the site, but not the writer.
              If it had been Mallory Ortberg, I'm sure I would have gotten the joke and enjoyed it.
              The humor didn't hit for me, maybe because of my unfamiliarity with the authors or men who read thing outside of Louis L'Amour (present company notwithstanding).

    6. Have finished: 4 (in order: London, Hawking, Tolkien, Levitt)
      Have started but not finished: 3 (Rushdie, Heller, Fitzgerald)
      Have watched a film adaptation of (excluding above)*: 4 (Palahniuk, Beowulf, Brown, Larsson)
      Have started to watch a film adaptation of: 1 (Puzo)
      Own: At most 4 (Hawking, Fitzgerald**, Tolkien, Palahniuk?)

      I wonder which I read when I was younger, A Brief History of Time, or the first few chapters of The Satanic Verses.
      I found Rushdie's book on Nicaragua to be quite interesting to a 14-year-old (or whatever age I was).

      *I started reading Gatsby and also watched an adaptation.
      **EAR's copy

    7. I think I've read 9 (own 2); it's all your standard English major stuff. (White men: part of the canon since . . . forever!) (Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy those books.)

    8. I own 16 of them and have read a few more. I think the list is pretty funny, but it sure got some people riled up.

  6. Back to baseball. This headline made me throw up in my mouth a little.

    Just as Hunter provided leadership in two previous seasons with the Tigers, he returned to the Twins, where he started his career, to lead a bunch of youngsters.

    "I've heard that from people there, that they feel that he's made a big difference," Olney said. "It's interesting because when Torii left the Angels, you'd talk to the Angels' people and they'd go on and on about how great Torii was in the clubhouse. You talk to people here and same thing, you'd hear, 'Boy, it's different.' Because Torii has that kind of impact."

      1. Yep. And don't look now, but BabyJ has been turrble since at least the start of May.

              1. even working inside the engineering world, you should know that any sample statistic is just a draw from a distribution. If that sample statistic is "close" to zero relative to the confidence that we have in its precision, then it's indistinguishable from zero and may "really" be negative. 😉

                1. and yes, I'm using current rWAR as a sample statistic to signal expected value for the season. You can reasonably retort that it's a population statistic (assessing contribution-to-date) and therefore has no variance. I say "bah!" in this case.

                  Alternatively, we could just focus on how well rWAR measures the underlying concept and admit to measurement error.

                  1. I don't speak the language of statistics -- I'm an engineer. ii has a negative WAR. I see Joe with a positive number, which is all I stated originally. If you want to round it to zero, you are the one who's going to have to answer to Jeebus.

                    2. I don't speak the language of statistics -- I'm an engineer.

                      also, what engineer doesn't have to at least think about design tolerances? Statistics, baby.

                    4. pfft. My brother is a QA guy. All he does is figure out how to break stuff that people like you build.

                    5. Tries to figure out. Some of us are better than others.

                      (I am not in that group.)

  7. So, my dad sent me a joke. I won't relay the whole thing, but here's the gist. An all-female flight crew on a military transport tells the grunts they are transporting that they've renamed the "cockpit" to the "Box Office". Heh.

  9. Good work if you can get it.

    San Diego — The Chargers have received $3.2 million from the city through their Qualcomm Stadium lease since 2006 because of various rent credits, city financial documents show.

    The Chargers would have owed the city $22.7 million in total lease payments from 2006 through 2013, but the lease requires the city to give the team large rent credits for concessions revenue, use of suites, parking, property tax rebates and other things.

  10. Giancarlo Stanton hit a HR OVER the LF bleachers at Dodger Stadium.

    whoa.

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