October 30, 2010
October 29, 2010
Texas Tagged Twice: Giants Lead Series 2-0
October 28, 2010
Study Shows Probability of Something Eventually Happening in A Baseball Game Approaches 1!
Last night Freddy Sanchez, appearing in a World Series for the first time, hit a double in each of his first three plate apearances, something no one had ever done before. Any batter who hits three consecutive doubles is realizing a marvelous improbability. Hitting two in a row is a rare event itself in regular play. But now there's a unique record of accomplishment against which to measure the first three at-bats of every future first-time batter: can you clear the unlikely bar that Sanchez set with his three World Series doubles?
October 27, 2010
A World Series Factlet: Attention Umpires
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
If you can't say it, you do leave it silently unsaid; sometimes this is for the best, sometimes not, your purposes being what they are.
You may or may not have vocabulary adequate to express that of which "whereof" bespeaks. If you can't form the meaningful words thereof, if it's out of the bounds of what's expressible by you, everything you can say can be about something else but never quite that which you might have said on that for which you must now remain silent perforce, not having the adequate words.
Or, it may simply never occur to you, either from ignorance or preoccupation, to say anything at all on the matter. Whereof you know not, thereof you shall not speak, so to say.
Or you may be interrupted or distracted before you have a chance to say what you had to say, leading to a silence equalling the other silences collecting around the prospective word thereof.
Wittgenstein was into some pretty abstruse arguments in his little chapbook, the Tractatus, but this last one, good old proposition 7, is the one that certainly justifies but rarely predicts my own silence on this and a raft of other subjects.
If you can't say it, you do leave it silently unsaid; sometimes this is for the best, sometimes not, your purposes being what they are.
You may or may not have vocabulary adequate to express that of which "whereof" bespeaks. If you can't form the meaningful words thereof, if it's out of the bounds of what's expressible by you, everything you can say can be about something else but never quite that which you might have said on that for which you must now remain silent perforce, not having the adequate words.
Or, it may simply never occur to you, either from ignorance or preoccupation, to say anything at all on the matter. Whereof you know not, thereof you shall not speak, so to say.
Or you may be interrupted or distracted before you have a chance to say what you had to say, leading to a silence equalling the other silences collecting around the prospective word thereof.
Wittgenstein was into some pretty abstruse arguments in his little chapbook, the Tractatus, but this last one, good old proposition 7, is the one that certainly justifies but rarely predicts my own silence on this and a raft of other subjects.
October 23, 2010
October 16, 2010
October 14, 2010
October 10, 2010
October 04, 2010
Baseball !!!
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| A Lesson in Lens Flare From The Giants' Official Photographer |
The San Francisco Giants won the National League West Division Sunday, the last day of the 2010 regular season. They improved on last year's record of 88-74 by an additional four wins, ending the season with the second-best record in the National League at 92-70. This is a good thing.
The National League's Pittsburgh Pirates, Major League Baseball's weakest club, won 57 games this year. It takes, unarguably, the assembling of a fair amount of talent to win more than a third of the games your team plays against the best ballplayers in the world. Sadly for true Pirates fans, a fair amount of talent is no match for the exceptional amount of talent assembled on the better teams in the National League.
Giving the Pirates a pass, the worst teams in baseball will win roughly four of every ten games played each year, and the best teams not quite six of every ten, with all the other middling teams spread somewhere in between. Every additional win over 81 wins is harder and harder to achieve. Winning 100 games in a 162-game season, just a fraction more than six of ten, is a relatively rare phenomenon in baseball, rarer than a pitcher winning 20 games or a batter hitting 50 home runs, singular accomplishments in themselves, and it didn't happen this year. The Philadelphia Phillies won 97, not quite as good a season as Pittsburgh's was bad, but certainly marking them as the favorite to advance in the playoffs leading to the World Series.
Great pitching, solid defense and some timely hitting is an age-old formula for winning baseball. The Giants benefited from the best pitching in baseball this year and a surprisingly solid defense, but only an average offense.
The San Diego Padres, built along the same lines as the Giants, had superior pitching and defense this year as well, and only five percent fewer runs scored than the Giants — not a horrible offense surely, not Pittsburgh horrible or Houston horrible or even Mets horrible at scoring runs, but no dynamo of offense like Cincinnati or Philadephia or Atlanta, either, — and it was almost inevitable that at least one team of that sort would advance to the playoffs. Being in the same division, the Padres and the Giants met 18 times during the year, and the Giants very average offense showed, throughout the season and again this past weekend, that it could win one of three games against the very best pitching in baseball. The Padres took the season series against the Giants 12-6, and they won this past weekend's series 2-1. Even excellent Giants pitching wasn't enough against the Padres this year: Jonathan Sanchez gave up one hit, a single, in seven innings against the Padres back in April and lost 1-0 to Matt Latos. A few weeks later he faced the Padres and Latos again, and gave up three hits in eight innings and lost 1-0 again, too. Latos, the Padres pitcher, won both games, and drove in the only run himself in the second game with a two out basehit. In the last game of the season Latos and Sanchez faced each other yet again, and this time it was Sanchez with the unexpected hit, a triple (!) that positioned him to score the first, and as it proved, the only necessary run of the game that clinched the National League West Division title for the Giants.
October 01, 2010
Giants Baseball: Torture
The Giants spotted the San Diego Padres six runs by the fifth inning and I made a quick retreat to the garage and succumbed to the ministrations of some Van Morrison: I found echidne's YouTube link to "Into the Mystic", and it was a balm. I looked on ESPN's MLB scores page and saw that the Giants had pulled four runs out of their hat to make a contest of the thing: 6-4. When "Into the Mystic" ended I used the little pictorial index of Van Morrison tunes at the bottom of the YouTube screen to scroll over to "Sweet Thing and The Way Young Lovers Do and I played those two, opening up a window with just YouTube in it, and playing Ballerina again in that window, too. By then it was the eighth inning and the ESPN Play-by-Play page showed the Giants had a couple of guys on base, two outs, and Torres, this night's Wille Mac Award winner for 2010, up at the plate.
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