Archive for the ‘baseball’ Category

Five Assorted Thoughts: Dangerous Baseball Stats, Verlander vs Schilling, Giselle vs Brady, A Good Sign and the End of My Silent Personal #freestacy Twitter Protest

Posted: October 29, 2022 by datechguy in baseball, internet/free speech, Sports
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The St. Louis Cardinals were up 2-0 in the top of the 9th of game 1 when a graphic came up on the screen saying that the Cardinals had never lost a postseason game when up 2-0 in the ninth. The Phillies ended up scoring 6 runs winning the game and the series.

Yesterday the Astros were up 5-0 going into the 4th when on the screen came a graphic saying the Houston Astros have never lost a postseason game when up by five. The Phillies tied the game by the 5th and won in extra innings.

As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over”.

As of yesterday Justin Verlander who got a no-decision in yesterday’s game is 0-7 in World Series play and holds the highest ERA of pitchers with more than 30 innings pitched in World Series history.

I find that rather incredible. Verlander is without question a first ballot hall of famer1. He led the league in Wins, ERA WHIP and hits per 9 innings last year With 244 wins he has an actual chance of getting to the 300 win mark and if you watch him pitch over the years the person who most comes to mind in terms of style is Curt Schilling. Throws strikes and strikes out a ton of guys, walks very few but on the down side gives up HR’s and doubles on occasion to guys who can make contact.

Yet Schilling is legendary in World Series 4-1 with two more rings (3) than Verlander (1).

Given the similarity of stuff, style and grit I just can’t see how Verlander and Schilling produce such different results in World Series play.

Of course if Hoston wins this series nobody will be talking about or worrying about Verlander’s series stats except Verlander.

1Subject of course to having acceptable political beliefs in the eyes of the liberal sports media

How DARE Tom Brady decide to honor his contract and all those fans who bought season tickets to watch him play this year! No wonder his wife left him!

Gisele will of course land on her feet. She’s much richer than him and will have no shortage of a choice of rich accomplished men who will want her to choose from.

That she would break up their family over a season of football when Brady had stated that he would be playing through age 45 for years and for which he had a contract to play, is to me a narcissism on a huge scale. Would it really have been that hard to wait three more months?

This goes to show that wealth and fame does not guarantee happiness.

It’s day three of the Musk Era on Twitter and if you want to see the difference in real terms here it is explained in one tweet:

I’ve never got beyond 3500+ followers myself despite questioning Trump at press conferences and long interviews with Ted Cruz and some serious coverage of presidential campaigns and given that the blog is not of the scale it once was I likely will never reach the numbers other have but I’ve always presumed that was on me.

A lot of people think the return of Donald Trump to Twitter will be the sign that the era of censorship will be done. The moment I’m waiting for is different.

I use tweetdeck and because I follow Stacy McCain so closely I kept a column of his tweets up. On the day he was suspended the error messages: User has been suspended came up.

Stacy had 80,000+ followers at the time and his blog is his primary source of income. This was a direct attack on a conservative with six children’s ability to support his family by a bunch of leftist apparatchiks out to crush dissent and was the herald of what cumulated in the banning of Trump

Rather than remove the @rsmccain column I’ve left it there all those years and every time I open tweetdeck the “User has been suspended” message has come up and it refreshes several times an hour while I’m on the page.

When that column is populated again then I’ll know that free speech has returned to twitter.

Five Aaron Judge hits #62 Thoughts Under the Fedora. Yankees Lose, Arraez Rests, Anybody but Othani for MVP, Only Yanks OF need apply and where’s the juice?

Posted: October 5, 2022 by datechguy in baseball
Tags: , ,

As you might have heard if you follow baseball at all Aaron Judge led off the Yankees penultimate game of the regular season with his 62 home run of the season to set a new American League all time record.

On the other hand it wasn’t enough to give the Yankees a win as the once unbeatable team dropped the game to the lowly rangers by a score of 3-2

The one mountain that stands between Judge and the triple crown (lead in HR, RBI & AVG) which would be on the 2nd of the 21st century is Luis Arraez or more specifically his hamstring which has kept him out of games since Saturday. Judge will need to go 4-4 or 5-6 to catch him. If he manages to do this then people will not just be comparing him to Maris this season but to Ted Williams who famously went 6-8 in a doubleheader to finish the 1941 season at .406 the last man to hit .400 rather than settling for .3995 if he sat and making the landmark via a rounding.

One thing that 62nd home run does is take some of the pressure off the MVP voters.

You might think that Judge, would be the clear favorite over last years’ MVP Shohei Othani if you put their triplecrown stats side by side

PlayerBatting AvgHome RunsRuns Batted In
Aaron Judge.31162130
Shohei Othani.2783495

However Othani’s has something the Judge doesn’t have, a Pitching line

PlayerGames as PitcherIPWinsLossesPctStrikeoutsERA
Aaron Judgenonenonen/an/an/an/an/a
Shohei Othani27161158.6522132.35

Judge is 1st in Wins above replacement among batters with Othani 2nd, however Othani is also 2nd in wins above replacement among PITCHERS in the AL, 4th in ERA, 4th in wins . 3rd in strikeouts and did all of this for a team that is going to miss the playoffs and not even get to a .500 record..

Othani is clearly the more valuable player but as long as he is putting up batting and pitching stats like this he would naturally win every single year which the voters don’t want, Judge reaching a thrice in 122 year milestone give the voters and excuse to place Shohei 2nd.

When Babe Ruth (the other great hitting pitcher who was converted to the OF to take advantage of his bat every day) hit his 60’s HR in 1927 he reported said:

“Sixty! Count ’em, 60! Let’s see some other son of a bitch match that!”

It took 34 years and a slightly longer season (162 vs 154 games) for someone, namely Roger Maris to do so with 61

It took a further 61 years and both a DH rule and interleague play for that American league record of 61 to become 62.

Here’s the real oddity.

The only people in American League History to hit 60 homes or more have all been Left Handed Yankee Outfielders playing in a year the Yanks finished 1st.

You have to go back to Hank Greenberg of the Detroit tigers for the next highest man at 58. Mark McGuire’s 58 were split between Oakland (AL) and St Louis (NL)

This also raises a buggaboo for me.

A lot of people are making a larger fuss over Judge because his 62 was done without “juicing” or any kind of steroids, but consider he also was not facing pitchers who were juicing as well.

Or to put it another way. Despite the steroids the number of players who have reached 60+ home runs in the National league is the same number of player who have reached 60 home runs in the American League three (AL Judge, Maris, Ruth), as there have been in the national league (Bonds, McGuire, Sosa)

The difference is quantity Bonds reached 73 home runs in 2001 but never reached 50 any other year. McGuire would manage 70 in 1998 and 65 the next year before age and injury got to him. The real Irony is Sosa who would actually manage it three times while never leading the league with 66 in 98, 63 in 99 both times 2nd to McGuire and 64 in 2001 the year Bonds broke the record.

My thought is it was just as tough to hit those HR’s in the steroid era as without them because again, Judge, Maris and Ruth didn’t have to face juiced up pitchers at the same time.

Baseball will be a lot better off admitting that white regrettable the steroids’ era was a fun time in the game, the fans loved the game of that era and the players that played it and the sooner we get over it the sooner the game will recover.

A Cool Moment for a Dynasty Baseball Fan

Posted: September 18, 2022 by datechguy in baseball, dynasty baseball, fun, gaming, online gaming
Tags: , ,

Let’s forget the problems in the world for something cool.

As you might recall last season in my 1969 draft league I made it to game seven of the world series losing to the Mets (Daytraders) here is the Box score from the mets Game Seven victory downloaded from Dynasty

And here is Denny McLain the winning pitcher in that game signing it

I’m sorry if you’re a baseball online gamer it doesn’t get cooler than that.

Alas Pete Rose was apparently several tables away, if Bobby Tolan hadn’t caught up to that ball Rose drove over his head with the tying and go ahead runs on deck it might have been him signing my victory page, but then again I wasn’t there so it’s unlikely the Mets would have wanted to have a loss autographed.

Under the Fedora: The Left’s Sweat is Showing, Jackson MS isn’t North Korea Either, No Vaccine Troubles to See Here, A Rumbling Glacier and Baseball rule thoughts.

Posted: September 13, 2022 by datechguy in baseball, election 2020, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, tech, under the fedora
Tags: , ,

A bit back I suggested the reason why the Biden Admin is so willing to shatter norms is they are terrified of a Trump AG going all in for an investigation of what they’ve been up to.

The move on Trump Associates and Tucker is the first clincher on that kind of thing to me.

If I’m right, and my gut says I am, that means DeSantis will be unacceptable to them too because he will be doing the same thing.

That’s why you’re seeing the “Voting GOP means civil war” stuff. They know they’ve crossed a line and now they’ve scared.

They should be

I thought this story should have gotten a lot more attention.

However, following President Joe Biden’s emergency declaration, the Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) arrived on the scene, and within 24 hours, the city’s water crisis was fixed.

The EPA and Army Corps showed up and fixed the “issue” quickly and easily. Social media users have begun to speculate why Mary D. Carter, the Deputy Director of Water Operations for the past 8 years, could not fix the “problem” herself.

Of course getting the water flowing is one thing, making it drinkable is another. This is what happens when you use a public office as a source of graft rather than a public trust and that’s what the Democrat mayors of Jackson have apparently done for decades

Speaking of topics the media left wish would just go away:

More than 55 percent of children ranging in age between 6 months and 2 years had a “systemic reaction” after their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Sept. 1.

In addition, almost 60 percent had a reaction to the second dose of the Moderna vaccine, in the CDC survey of more than 13,000 children.

For some reason nobody seems to be reporting on this story, or this one:

According to a report in theblaze.com, the National Institute of Health (NIH) deleted certain sequences of coronavirus data from the agency’s Sequence Read Archive. This was allegedly done early in the pandemic, at the request of Chinese researchers. Doctor Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, published a study in June of 2021 that identified the missing sequences and recovered the files from the Google Cloud, from which he performed an analysis to learn more about the origins of the virus.

As the side effects become more apparent over the years you’ll continue to see the media pivot concerning the vaccine and I guarantee you by June 2024 it will be known as the “Trump vaccine” in every media outlet.

Of course if the election hadn’t been stolen all this would be front page today.

It’s been a while since I opened my Rumble account and told all of you that once all my youtube files were migrated I might start podcasting again.

Rumble warms you that it can take weeks, apparently that’s a pretty broad term because nothing moved over for weeks although all my stuff over two years old is listed as pending.

I’d be more upset except I suspect so many people are making such a move worldwide that such a time frame is inevitable.

I suspect Google/Youtube isn’t all that worried right now. As I recall neither was AOL or IE.

Finally a some quick thoughts on Baseball rule changes:

  1. If the new stay off the grass rule was in effect during Ernie Lombardi’s Time he would have hit .400 because he was so slow infielder would play there to field balls from him. He still was a regular .300 hitter.
  2. If modern players learned how to bunt there would be no need for this rule as guys would be dropping bunt singles left and right off these shifts.
  3. Since the distance from the home to 1st and 3rd has not changed I suspect that the larger bases while encouraging stealing will be more of an advantage to the defense at 1st since the first baseman can now be closer to the throw and a thrown ball is faster than a running man.
  4. I don’t know if the modified pickoff throw rule includes 3rd if it does as a manager I’d encourage runners to try to draw throws to 3rd then send my guy on 3rd as far down the line as I can to distract a pitcher.
  5. Frankly if they really want to speed up games put the mound back where it was in 1968 and let the pitchers get people out quicker. Problem solved.
Older Entries
Newer Entries