60 thoughts on “November 8, 2017: Doc”

  1. I'm posting this Twins Daily comment from the Molitor for Manager of the Year thread just to watch Jeff's head a-splode:

    I think Molitor should win. I worry that he won't, and that it'll be Francona. But given Molitor's pitching staff -- he had to use 36 pitchers! -- and the team's improvement in the second half, he should win.

    1. Clearly he had to use thirty-six pitchers. It was in the rules someplace. Occasionally he tried to use all thirty-six in the same game, but he could never quite get it done.

      Also, the Twins were 41-40 in the first half, 44-37 in the second half. That three game improvement was apparently more impressive than I realized.

      2. And to be clear, it's not that I'm that down on Molitor, really. He has his strengths and weaknesses, like everybody does. But those two things are among the weaker arguments you can make for him being Manager of the Year.

        1. I think the good argument would be, "Look at the pitching staff they handed him. And he still made the playoffs!"

      3. It depends on your definition of "first half" since a lot of people think of the All-Star break as the midpoint of the season, including B-Ref, which shows the Twins as being 45-43 in the first half and 40-34 in the second half, which is a 30 point improvement in winning percentage. Also depends on your definition of "improvement." The Twins were outscored by 60 runs in the first half and outscored their opponents by 87 runs in the second half (going by B-Ref's splits). I would argue, though, that the Twins outplaying their pythag in the first half so much reflects better on Molitor at least on his ability to manage close ballgames.

  4. Trying to decide whether to buy a new solenoid for the upstairs furnace humidifier unit; I was quoted $194 to replace it, but I see it for less than $25 on eBay...off to YouTube!

  5. Anyone here deal with Jonny rock bikes in Hopkins? They appear to have the last Torker inter urban ever built. I’m seriously considering having a relative drive up there to buy it for me as the pos I’m riding on now is frustrating to say the least.

            1. Or play in the outfield in between. The Fighters are in the Pacific League and they adopted the DH shortly after the AL did. Moving to the AL would actually be more familiar.

            2. Do you have to use your DH on the pitcher by rule in MLB? Or is it just that the pitchers are the worst hitters in general?

          2. Because he wants to play every day, but has most value as a pitcher. The team the gets him needs to be able to DH him on those other 4 days, given increased injury risk of playing in the field.

              1. Admittedly, it's not my point; I was thinking NL-only too for a while, before reading a bit more about him and how both his bat and arm were too valuable to give up.

    1. I feel like I should be more upset about this, but then I prioritize it and the feeling goes away.

  8. Early returns on the new laptop. I bought an HP Envy (i7, 16Gb RAM, 1 Tb hard drive plus 256Gb SSD, or thereabouts, Windoze 10 dumbass edition) via Costco. 15.6 inch display. Touchscreen and a touchpad. It was like $1,100 delivered.

    I like the screen and the responsiveness, although I've not done anything heavy duty yet (just starting to teach myself R, since I am already paying $$$ for my staff to have access to SAS at work and I'm too cheap to shell out for STATA for everyone, being a frugal state burrocrat).

    But the touchpad suh-hucks. I keep accidentally launching windows, switching views, whatever, because it is a big-ass touchpad right below the space bar, and the heels of my hands tend to rub on it when I type and it seems overly sensitive. Plus, just one big touchpad. It is sort of sensitive to left-right distinctions, but I have not gotten the hang of it yet. Sitting in bed, there's no place to put a mouse anyway, so I'm kinda stuck with it.

    First world problems.

    1. If it's a touchscreen, then you really don't need the touchpad. You can always just turn off the touchpad in the settings. I think you should be able to adjust the sensitivity of the touchpad as well.

        1. You're sucking a lot of power through that system so even a good battery's going to drain pretty fast. With that much RAM you should be able to run virtual machines no problem and if you have the NVidia graphics adapter it should handle video and games real well. Is the HDD a hybrid with 1TB on rust platters and 256GB on silicon?

          1. Likely two separate hard drives. Hybrid drives tend to not have so much space in the SSD portion.

            And, absolutely right on the battery life. Large screen, high-end processor, lots of RAM, and cheap overall means the battery will not be very large and thus drain quickly.

              2. Looks like it is a dual drive setup, 1TB HDD 2.5" format and a 256GB SSD card. So the OS will be loaded on the SSD and there's probably a factory recovery partition on the 1TB. Still, I'd partition out some space on the 1TB to do regular clones of the SSD. If the SSD dies, just boot to the cloned partition on the HDD and keep on truckin'.

  10. also, Twayn signal.

    The Boy was out delivering scripts Monday night (he works on Superior Donuts as a PA) and his car died outside of one of the actors' houses. It's a on-demand 4wd Ford Escape, circa 2004. Car would not start and the shifter was stuck in park. Turns out that it was a broken shifter chain. Pain in the ass because of the 4wd (the thing was dropping into 4wd, so the first two AAA tow guys could not tow; third guy figured out how to make it happen).

    anyhoo, he's picking it up today or tomorrow. Total bill was right around $300. Big relief, as I was a-fearing it was gonna be a transmission rebuild, i.e., not worth doing on a vehicle we paid $3800 for about 4 years ago.

    1. From the little I've watched it seems like there are two main problems: offense and defense.

      Seriously though, when the wild gain the zone the play almost exclusively behind the net, and teams just put all of their guys in front of it. Hard to get a puck in that way, and harder still to catch up to teams going the other way when you spot them that distance. I know exceedingly little about hockey plays and such, but this seems really obvious when I watch them, and I've not yet heard any explanation for why they play it that way.

    2. dw: My impression is that Philo's joak ain't far off.

      Offense - lots of early injuries to top-6 forwards (Granny, Parise, Coyle, Nino) makes it tough to develop chemistry, plus the replacement of Pommer (13 pts thru 15 games) and Marco (3 pts) - not flashy players, but contributors - with Ennis (5 pts - 14 games) & Foligno (6 pts - 13 games), who are not really contributing.

      And defense - it is not good when your top two D-men in terms of ice time (Spurgeon & Suter - averaging 25 & 26 mins.) are both -5's in the old +/-, tied with Granlund for the team "lead" in that department.

  12. I mean, it's no "T.J. Stiles was my roommate" but I co-founded a law school comedy group with the guy featured here.

Comments are closed.