Sarah and I biked down to Coney Island yesterday for the Cyclones' final regular-season game. Playoff slots had already been determined, so there wasn't anything at stake, which might have been why both teams kept putting in new pitchers. It was weird.
Carlos Beltran was playing for Brooklyn on rehab. He had a solid hit for his second at-bat, and some good if unspectactular fielding, but I think he struck out swinging a couple times. Not really a big hitting day for anyone, actually, with a really strong wind coming in off the water.
Ultimately an exciting game, with Brooklyn attempting a rally in the ninth but unable to overcome the 4-2 deficit. We were glad we brought sweaters, and didn't stick around for the fireworks show scheduled for ninety minutes later.
The ride down was fun, it was our first time going down into Brooklyn from the new neighborhood, which really just means we take Bedford down and then go West on Caton Ave where before we would have been going East on it. I think next time I'm going to stay on Bedford and take Church instead; maybe it was just West Indian Day Parade traffic last night, but I think Caton is usually pretty crazy.
Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts
Monday, September 7, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Baseball Sex
Man, it's been forever since I downloaded mix tapes...now Gucci Mane is everywhere? With OJ Da Juiceman?
But Lil Wayne's "Baseball Sex" was basically designed in a laboratory to appeal specifically to me.
But Lil Wayne's "Baseball Sex" was basically designed in a laboratory to appeal specifically to me.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Balk Like an Egyptian
So Mike Pelfrey balked thrice against the Giants last night? Weird. I am fuzzy on what even constitutes a balk...the first one is obvious, I can see the second one, but the third one is just a mystery to me.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Mets!
It's hard not to feel optimistic coming off the two wins in the mini series against Philly.
My ignorance of the sport of baseball means I'm not really aware of the psychological impact something like, say, pulling a pitcher out of the rotation, can have on the whole team, but it sure seems to have had a good effect so far. It's not so much the string of recent wins, but that they seem to be more like whole team affairs, rather than Johann carrying them or just getting lucky when an opposing pitcher blows it.
Looking forward to seeing how Jon Niese does tonight. I don't think I remember him from last season.
My ignorance of the sport of baseball means I'm not really aware of the psychological impact something like, say, pulling a pitcher out of the rotation, can have on the whole team, but it sure seems to have had a good effect so far. It's not so much the string of recent wins, but that they seem to be more like whole team affairs, rather than Johann carrying them or just getting lucky when an opposing pitcher blows it.
Looking forward to seeing how Jon Niese does tonight. I don't think I remember him from last season.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Putting the "Erm..." in Sabermetrics
Particularly absurd post on Mets Geek charting each team's bullpen's average fastball speed against strikeouts. Don't even try to wrap your mind around what it might even mean to average the pitch speeds of an entire bullpen together, the results are random noise, not "a slight trend."
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Dream
The night of the last game of the World Series, I had a dream I was looking for a snack and found myself next to Shea Stadium. I went in for a hot dog and a beer. Weird that I wasn't even following the Series, and yet somehow Shea found a way to say goodbye...
Monday, August 25, 2008
An International Shame
I'm sure that baseball fans have heard that Olympic baseball is, with the completion of the Beijing Games, not again to return for the foreseeable future. This is a huge misstep, in my opinion, especially in the context of an Olympic Games which continues to include soccer, one of the dullest and most pointless team competitions in the world of sport.
In the US, soccer (which is known in countries such as Britain and the United Kingdom by the misnomer "football," and sometimes abbreviated to the less formal "footsie") is mostly considered a juvenile pursuit: it's what young children play before they are old enough to participate in regular sports such as baseball and (actual) football.
But to the uninitiated observer, the gameplay, which consists largely of grown men in collared shirts running around after a small white ball, more closely resembles an activity with which one might entertain a beloved family pet. (One does hope that soccer coaches at the international level are at least capable of generating encouragements for their players that rise above commands to "fetch," but who knows.)
At the Olympic level, soccer's major event is known as the World Cup, a sad overstatement for a game whose popularity doesn't extend far beyond the Irish foothills and a handful of third-world backwaters. The sport joins a long list of topics (including breakfast cereal, the works of Shakespeare, and Episcopalianism) afforded attention far exceeding that which they are due, by dint of their origins in the late British Empire and Her colonies. This competition has generated no major stars of more than regional acclaim, and certainly no international idols on the level of a George Foreman or a Muhammad Ali.
The Olympic Soccer World Cup is for all intensive purposes a meaningless bit of pageantry, a bone thrown to also-ran nations with an attitude that would be considered insulting condescension were it directed at a state with half a teaspoonful of self-respect. That the Olympics have continued to support this parody of decent sport, while jettisoning the intricate and beguiling subtleties that infuse the international game of baseball, only underscores the Olympic Games' continuing descent into irrelevance.
In the US, soccer (which is known in countries such as Britain and the United Kingdom by the misnomer "football," and sometimes abbreviated to the less formal "footsie") is mostly considered a juvenile pursuit: it's what young children play before they are old enough to participate in regular sports such as baseball and (actual) football.
But to the uninitiated observer, the gameplay, which consists largely of grown men in collared shirts running around after a small white ball, more closely resembles an activity with which one might entertain a beloved family pet. (One does hope that soccer coaches at the international level are at least capable of generating encouragements for their players that rise above commands to "fetch," but who knows.)
At the Olympic level, soccer's major event is known as the World Cup, a sad overstatement for a game whose popularity doesn't extend far beyond the Irish foothills and a handful of third-world backwaters. The sport joins a long list of topics (including breakfast cereal, the works of Shakespeare, and Episcopalianism) afforded attention far exceeding that which they are due, by dint of their origins in the late British Empire and Her colonies. This competition has generated no major stars of more than regional acclaim, and certainly no international idols on the level of a George Foreman or a Muhammad Ali.
The Olympic Soccer World Cup is for all intensive purposes a meaningless bit of pageantry, a bone thrown to also-ran nations with an attitude that would be considered insulting condescension were it directed at a state with half a teaspoonful of self-respect. That the Olympics have continued to support this parody of decent sport, while jettisoning the intricate and beguiling subtleties that infuse the international game of baseball, only underscores the Olympic Games' continuing descent into irrelevance.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Katie Casey was baseball mad
I finally got around to going by Peter's place to watch the third disc of Ken Burns' Baseball. This was a good one...I think we each only started nodding off once or twice. It started with Ty Cobb, continued on through World War I, and then wrapped up with the Black Sox. Pretty fascinating stuff.
After it was over, we looked up the full lyrics to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," sang a few rounds, and then played the trivia game that's part of the special features of each DVD. For the first time so far, we batted a perfect 1.000! I think we only had to guess on like one question.
After it was over, we looked up the full lyrics to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," sang a few rounds, and then played the trivia game that's part of the special features of each DVD. For the first time so far, we batted a perfect 1.000! I think we only had to guess on like one question.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Whee, baseball!
After brunch yesterday, a couple of my usual cronies went by to play with Gabe's Wii (nullus). Peter immediately noticed that the sports game had a baseball mode or level or whatever.
Andrew: Oh, Baseball's really boring.
Me: I know baseball's boring. That's why I like it.
Needless to say, Peter and I played at the first opportunity. He took an early lead with a single-run homer in the bottom of the first. I tied it up in the next inning and left a man stranded, but then fanned three batters to end the inning. I went scoreless in the third, and then Peter stepped up and won the game with a two-run walk-off home run. Pretty dramatic! I believe I hit for .222 and struck out five or six batters.
One funny thing was that Peter was striking me out throwing the same outside breaking balls that earned him so many K's in the wiffleball park.
I was also no good at Boxing. Video games!
Andrew: Oh, Baseball's really boring.
Me: I know baseball's boring. That's why I like it.
Needless to say, Peter and I played at the first opportunity. He took an early lead with a single-run homer in the bottom of the first. I tied it up in the next inning and left a man stranded, but then fanned three batters to end the inning. I went scoreless in the third, and then Peter stepped up and won the game with a two-run walk-off home run. Pretty dramatic! I believe I hit for .222 and struck out five or six batters.
One funny thing was that Peter was striking me out throwing the same outside breaking balls that earned him so many K's in the wiffleball park.
I was also no good at Boxing. Video games!
Thursday, November 8, 2007
More Baseball, and other stuff
Peter came over on Tuesday night with the second disc of Ken Burns' Baseball and we enjoyed it alongside some beers and Middle Eastern food. The further hijinx of tremendous asshole John McGraw—on the one hand carrying a piece from a noose used in a lynching for good luck, on the other (?) hand trying to sneak a black player onto his team by calling him "Chief John Tokohama," supposedly an Indian—were of course entertaining, but the highlight for me were the clips from a DeWolf Hopper recitation of "Casey at the Bat," a poem whose charms have always eluded me.
The pictures in the Wikipedia entry show him as a young man, and it says he was only thirty when he first performed the poem. But given that that was well before the turn of the century, I suppose it isn't surprising that by the time the film used in the documentary was recorded, he was pretty creepily ancient. I wish I could find a YouTube of it, but his lipstick alone is spine-tingling, and that's before he even begins his Cryptkeeperly melodramatic delivery. Ugh. I can't tell if the repulsiveness of the performance indicates the wide gulf between what was then and what is now considered entertaining, or if rather it suggests an element of the freak show in vaudeville that modern audiences only look for in reality television.
Hm, Wikipedia also says Hopper had (at least, I suppose) six wives. Interesting that as I watched the clip, some of my thoughts were along the lines as "so sad that this is what gays once had to resort to to make a living."
On the topic of oldish film clips (and gays, and tremendous assholes), a blog discussion of a debate on 9/11 conspiracy theories led me to discover clips from one of a series of debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 presidential election. So many awesome things about these.
First, I love the rhetoric. Buckley's intimations of treason are of course not so different from what we hear from the bloodthirsty right today, with standard issue red-baiting standing in for contemporary accusations of Saddam-loving and terrorist-loving. But Vidal's side, damn. I realize that this one debate, taking place as it did during the unrest of the Chicago Democratic Convention, is unique even for the time, but the idea that the whole issue of the debate is framed from the beginning as essentially "yes or no: we are now living in an authoritarian police state" speaks volumes. Coming from a world in which Russ Feingold's is a champion of the left for quietly opining that perhaps millionaires should not be able to buy their way into political office, it's refreshing (and depressing) to see that national television once made room for a genuinely left-wing point of view. Vidal is still around, but he's so old
Second, there is the part where the two "nearly come to blows," as it seems to always be described. It is basically just Gore Vidal calling William Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and then Buckley calling Vidal a "queah" and threatening to punch him, but it is awesome. Again, you have to love the willingness to casually accuse someone of harboring fascist tendencies. Try to get a public intellectual (do such beasts still roam the world?) to apply the f-word today to even such a worthy target as, say, Rudy Giuliani. Here's the episode from YouTube:
Finally, it's fascinating to hear conservative cant from a source other than a faux cowboy jes' talkin' common sense. This predates the conservative movement's rebranding as an ideology of the working man. It's the same apologetics for the rich and powerful, but actually voiced by someone who is unabashedly rich and powerful. Which should be the most straightforward thing in the world, but because of how successful the right wing has been in burying the realities of the movement, it comes across almost as a put-on. Clearly this upper-class twit cannot really be a Nixon supporter.
Also while looking for those videos, I found a two-part debate from 1969, between Buckley and Noam Chomsky. The subject was US imperialism and interventionism, and how the two might be distinguished, if indeed they can be. Again, you have to love Buckley's shameless effete upper-classness. Chomsky comes across, appropriately enough, as a real professor type just trying to get down to the hard facts of the matter, in stark contrast with Buckley's high-flown rhetoric. It's in two parts:
The old-fashioned days, guys. So awesome.
The pictures in the Wikipedia entry show him as a young man, and it says he was only thirty when he first performed the poem. But given that that was well before the turn of the century, I suppose it isn't surprising that by the time the film used in the documentary was recorded, he was pretty creepily ancient. I wish I could find a YouTube of it, but his lipstick alone is spine-tingling, and that's before he even begins his Cryptkeeperly melodramatic delivery. Ugh. I can't tell if the repulsiveness of the performance indicates the wide gulf between what was then and what is now considered entertaining, or if rather it suggests an element of the freak show in vaudeville that modern audiences only look for in reality television.
Hm, Wikipedia also says Hopper had (at least, I suppose) six wives. Interesting that as I watched the clip, some of my thoughts were along the lines as "so sad that this is what gays once had to resort to to make a living."
On the topic of oldish film clips (and gays, and tremendous assholes), a blog discussion of a debate on 9/11 conspiracy theories led me to discover clips from one of a series of debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 presidential election. So many awesome things about these.
First, I love the rhetoric. Buckley's intimations of treason are of course not so different from what we hear from the bloodthirsty right today, with standard issue red-baiting standing in for contemporary accusations of Saddam-loving and terrorist-loving. But Vidal's side, damn. I realize that this one debate, taking place as it did during the unrest of the Chicago Democratic Convention, is unique even for the time, but the idea that the whole issue of the debate is framed from the beginning as essentially "yes or no: we are now living in an authoritarian police state" speaks volumes. Coming from a world in which Russ Feingold's is a champion of the left for quietly opining that perhaps millionaires should not be able to buy their way into political office, it's refreshing (and depressing) to see that national television once made room for a genuinely left-wing point of view. Vidal is still around, but he's so old
Second, there is the part where the two "nearly come to blows," as it seems to always be described. It is basically just Gore Vidal calling William Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and then Buckley calling Vidal a "queah" and threatening to punch him, but it is awesome. Again, you have to love the willingness to casually accuse someone of harboring fascist tendencies. Try to get a public intellectual (do such beasts still roam the world?) to apply the f-word today to even such a worthy target as, say, Rudy Giuliani. Here's the episode from YouTube:
Finally, it's fascinating to hear conservative cant from a source other than a faux cowboy jes' talkin' common sense. This predates the conservative movement's rebranding as an ideology of the working man. It's the same apologetics for the rich and powerful, but actually voiced by someone who is unabashedly rich and powerful. Which should be the most straightforward thing in the world, but because of how successful the right wing has been in burying the realities of the movement, it comes across almost as a put-on. Clearly this upper-class twit cannot really be a Nixon supporter.
Also while looking for those videos, I found a two-part debate from 1969, between Buckley and Noam Chomsky. The subject was US imperialism and interventionism, and how the two might be distinguished, if indeed they can be. Again, you have to love Buckley's shameless effete upper-classness. Chomsky comes across, appropriately enough, as a real professor type just trying to get down to the hard facts of the matter, in stark contrast with Buckley's high-flown rhetoric. It's in two parts:
The old-fashioned days, guys. So awesome.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
More Wiffleball, Baseball
Peter and I played a seven-inning wiffleball rematch yesterday. Cadman Plaza was full of people, so we headed down to DUMBO and found a great spot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Somewhere around the fourth inning, Peter figured out how to hit my high faster pitches, and I just fell apart. With the wind at the batter's back, fly balls were more often doubles and triples than anything catchable, and I was only able to get swinging strikes off my changeup. Meanwhile, no sooner had I learned to stop chasing the high and away sliders Peter had relied on for K's last week, than he started fanning me on the inside breaking balls, plus a wicked off-speed pitch of his own. It was brutal. If I don't start getting some more movement on my full-speed pitches, I don't think I'll be able to compete. When the carnage was complete, I believe it stood at 23 runs to only 3. Though, understandably, I may have missed one or two in there. Ouch.
Afterwards we took up some food from Rice and went over to Peter's to watch the first disc of Ken Burns' Baseball, which was so awesome. I thought it would be dull, but of course it was just hilarious and actually really informative. The labor stuff is fascinating. I love the implicit critique of state capitalism in the history of America's pasttime. I was disappointed to hear about the National League's puritan bourgeois history: the American "beer and whiskey" League sounded like much more my speed. The first disc only got us through the turn of the century, so I don't know what would eventually lead the AL to stray to evils such as the DH rule, not to mention the hated Yankees.
Meanwhile, there was apparently some actual baseball being played yesterday. Sounds like it was dramatical!
Oh, and I did a little illustration of a character I came up with called The Umpire. He's a villain or antihero type who casts judgment on people and vigilantifies their asses with a chest protector. SO AWESOME RIGHT. I wasn't sure how to show someone wielding a shield-type implement, so I did an image search and did the pose after this still from Captain America. Lines need some cleaning up, but I think you get the idea:
View Larger Map
Somewhere around the fourth inning, Peter figured out how to hit my high faster pitches, and I just fell apart. With the wind at the batter's back, fly balls were more often doubles and triples than anything catchable, and I was only able to get swinging strikes off my changeup. Meanwhile, no sooner had I learned to stop chasing the high and away sliders Peter had relied on for K's last week, than he started fanning me on the inside breaking balls, plus a wicked off-speed pitch of his own. It was brutal. If I don't start getting some more movement on my full-speed pitches, I don't think I'll be able to compete. When the carnage was complete, I believe it stood at 23 runs to only 3. Though, understandably, I may have missed one or two in there. Ouch.
Afterwards we took up some food from Rice and went over to Peter's to watch the first disc of Ken Burns' Baseball, which was so awesome. I thought it would be dull, but of course it was just hilarious and actually really informative. The labor stuff is fascinating. I love the implicit critique of state capitalism in the history of America's pasttime. I was disappointed to hear about the National League's puritan bourgeois history: the American "beer and whiskey" League sounded like much more my speed. The first disc only got us through the turn of the century, so I don't know what would eventually lead the AL to stray to evils such as the DH rule, not to mention the hated Yankees.
Meanwhile, there was apparently some actual baseball being played yesterday. Sounds like it was dramatical!
Oh, and I did a little illustration of a character I came up with called The Umpire. He's a villain or antihero type who casts judgment on people and vigilantifies their asses with a chest protector. SO AWESOME RIGHT. I wasn't sure how to show someone wielding a shield-type implement, so I did an image search and did the pose after this still from Captain America. Lines need some cleaning up, but I think you get the idea:
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