53 thoughts on “Cup of Coffee: 31 AUGUST 2016”

      1. Sure...that's what it was.

        No, I had to rebuild the sheet because it was being, well, fucky is the only way to describe it. It looks like I copied some data incorrectly.

        1. Haha, yours was the only one messed up!

          I swear, I couldn't have thought of that to prank you if I tried. Now I wish I had, though.

          1. I totally had it coming. Though, with my luck in this league, if I hadn't caught it I probably still would have ended up in first somehow.

            1. It's still early. At least, I assume it is. I have no idea how long the season is or when it ends.

              1. They've played two games out of a38 have schedule. End of the season is April or May.

  2. Maybe the Twins need to hire the trainers the Vikings have.

    3. Well, an ounce of prevention...

      I don't understand how a pro athlete can be that fragile. It's one thing for an ACL to tear because you jumped and landed awkwardly, or you planted your foot and had a 350-pound man-beast knock you in the wrong direction, but to do that much damage to your knee by just dropping back for a pass in a drill is troubling from the standpoint of physical preparation.

      2. I doubt it was from lack of preparation.

        That injury was so freaky that I am guessing he was either playing injured or had some weird biomechanical issue.

        1. Not so much lack of preparation, but wrong preparation. Most NFL trainers are in a bad position to actually do anything good for the players--by the time someone gets to the NFL, the trainer's main job isn't to make the player better, it's to make sure that they don't screw the player up too badly.

          Some sort of pre-existing injury would make sense, but even then I am highly skeptical that the Vikings training staff are fundamentally any different than the Twins' training staff.

      3. improper weight training? Not enough cross-training? I have no idea. I'm 35 now and hurt myself sometimes just standing, but at Teddy's age I seemed less fragile and I rarely worked out

          1. The angle I'm getting at its that he's a quarterback and, from what I remember, their knees seem to get abused an awful lot.

      6. Honestly these are the type of comments I find most troubling, especially in cases like this with the statistically inclined citizens.

        1. Troubling from what perspective? I just think that pro sports trainers aren't very good. Yeah, injuries are going to happen, and maybe this was totally unavoidable, but you usually either wind up with:

          1) Rah-rah trainers that are mainly there to walk around the weight room and yell really loud

          or

          2) Physical therapy types that base their training off of ideas they found in super questionable studies of N=18 done on non-athletes.

          Either way, they got their job through networking more than anything else.

          1. If I had a nickel for every time a student told me they wanted to be a Kinesiology major because they shredded their ACL/MCL/meniscus/ankle in high school, I could eat a big meal at a really nice food cart once each semester on the proceeds.

              1. Isn't that true of many career/major choices? It helps if you have seen others that do it. That's one of the reasons I changed my major from actuaria science.

          2. I am inclined to believe that this might be true about trainers in baseball, which is clearly affected with some antediluvian thinking in many corners (and which also enjoys a tied system of minor league backups). But the NFL? This isn't the 1960s anymore, nor even the 1990s. Those folks spend serious scratch on just about every aspect of evaluation (the pre-draft stuff is a serious meat market) to player development to maintenance for the expensive talent. I would be shocked if there were many teams employing training staffs today that are not well-versed in most aspects of teasing maximum performance out of the players while also preserving investments in the high-dollar talent.

            1. I don't doubt that NFL teams are devoting significant resources to this, I just doubt how well it's turning out for them.

              I should probably rephrase and be more charitable (a virtue always worth working on.) I think that a lot of the trainers are knowledgeable, and some are probably really good, but they are effectively in the same predicament as hitting coaches.

              Hitting coaches are notoriously ineffective because by the point the players get to the new hitting coach, they have hundreds of thousands of swings under their belt. The hitting coach can give them advice, but he can't go back in time. And the hitting coach also has to contend with advice from, say, a player's father (I believe Morneau said he would always ask his dad first about hitting advice) or other players or pretty much anyone else. You can lead a horse to water and all that.

              Pro trainers have almost exactly the same problems. By the time Bridgewater got to the Vikings, he already had a long training history, going back to whatever sports he might have been playing back in middle school. But certainly his four years in high school and his three years at Louisville exposed him to training methods that may or may not have been good but were certainly out of the Vikings' control and probably shaped him more as an athlete than what the Vikings could have done with him in the last 2+ years. In addition to high school and college, a lot of pro athletes hire their own personal trainers in the off-season and do their own thing. The Vikings trainers could be amazing, but if Bridgewater hires a terrible personal trainer in the offseason, it might be out of their hands. Or it could go the other way, where a training staff is bad but players hire great personal trainers in the offseason. NFL teams are controlling, but they can't actually make you follow their offseason regimen.

              All of this makes the pro trainer's job difficult, but also nearly impossible to measure. Ideally, if the Vikings wanted to test out different training methods, they'd need a cohort of players that have a similar training history to the players that they are actually playing. That would be even more expensive than NFL teams are willing to shell out for, but you'd at least be on sort of the right track for doing an effective study.

              I'd bet that the GM does more to determine a team's time on the DL/IR when he assembles the roster than the trainers can do in the gym. It's like in baseball where you can choose to draft a pitcher who was on reasonable pitch counts or you can draft the guy who was beaten like a rented mule and threw 190 pitches a game at times. There's only so much you can do to fix an already worn down player.

              1. Oh yeah, I was going to mention that out of all pro sports, pro soccer probably has the biggest opportunity to make an impact with their training staff. A lot of big teams have academies that go down at least to U12 (if not younger), and a lot of those kids aren't playing any other sports, so you have a huge opportunity to shape the player over time that you can't get by drafting someone at age 22, or calling someone up from the minors at age 27.

                1. I remember reading from John O'Brien (I think) that when he was at the Ajax academy, they completely rebuilt his running gait to be more efficient and less stressful on the body. The way he naturally ran wasn't optimal, so they essentially re-taught him how to run.

                  1. That's pretty cool. I think running technique is a little underrated from what I can tell. I felt like I had good track/cross country coaches in high school--our teams generally performed well--but we essentially spent zero time on technique, which seems odd in retrospect. It's hard to imagine a basketball team that never worked on shooting technique or a football team that never worked on tackling technique.

      7. when I was in high school, we had a kid who shredded his knee/leg throwing the discus. Compound fracture is my recollection (although, thankfully, I was not there to witness it). From planting and twisting.

        Shit happens sometimes. Athletes put a lot of stress on their joints and small defects or injuries can progress catastrophically in the right (or "wrong") circumstances.

        1. Sure, shit happens sometimes. It doesn't make me think the Vikings training staff would be great at making the Twins survive the season with fewer days on the DL.

  3. Please check mine too. I did not have Bournemouth at 6.

    Manchester United
    Manchester City
    Chelsea
    Liverpool
    Tottenham Hotspur
    Arsenal
    Southampton
    West Ham United
    Leicester City
    Stoke City
    Everton
    Watford
    Crystal Palace
    Swansea City
    West Bromwich Albion
    Hull City
    Bournemouth
    Sunderland
    Middlesbrough
    Burnley

    2. You fell victim to the same think spooky did. Not having "AFC" puts Bournemouth after Arsenal alphabetically instead of before, so the two were switched. Fixed

  4. I got a PVM! Finally got through to someone quickly enough on Craigslist, it is an 2003 medical model with two RGB/Component inputs and looks to be in great shape. It might be a while before I get anything else modded (other than a Genesis I need to pick up), this wiped out my discretionary gaming funds.

    1. Nice! What model is it?

      I've been trying to find someone who can fix mine. I'm beginning to think it's hopeless and I should try to do it myself.

      1. It is a 20M2MDU, I really hope this thing holds up for a while.

        I figure at some point the FPGA consoles (like RetroUSB's AVS ) will get to the point where it makes sense to have those hooked up to modern displays. But until then, I'm pumped to be able to play my old stuff on a PVM.

        1. Mine just has some weird crawl on it. It's annoying, not a deal breaker, but when you dump money into the RGB or bust wagon, not perfect is annoying haha.

          I'm tempted by the AVS, but I think if I drop that kind of coin I'd buy a Framemeister. I've been considering one for a while.

  5. We're off tomorrow on our 14ish hour drive back to God's Country, with our typical stops roughly around Hannibal, MO for breakfast, Albert Lea for lunch, and Fergus Falls for supper. We'll wave as we go by...

    2. You could eat supper 45 mins earlier - do Pike and Pint in Alexandria, maybe add another Citizen to your list of "met in person"...

  7. Random notes from life with a 3-year-old . . .

    We’re at the playground. He wets his pants. While I’m changing his clothes I say: Where did all that pee come from?

    He responds: From my penis.

    Earlier tonight I asked him: What would you like for your bedtime snack?

    He responds: Food!

    1. He's going to make a wonderful father someday, seeing as he's already mastered that level of Dad Joke.

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