Category: Sports Page 2 of 3

Where are they now?

Did you know?

The “John 3:16” guy is in jail.

Which NFL franchise is the best?

Football fans reading this blog can enjoy this article instead of working today.

They rank the 32 NFL franchises based on their all-time records. An ambitious task indeed. You’ll never guess who’s #1.
(Hint: I might not have posted this if I hadn’t been in agreement with it.)

(Non-football fans, you can safely ignore this article.)

Now, back to work.

Baseball becomes chess

Best baseball clip ever: Pat Venditte, switch pitcher for the single A Staten Island Yankees, decides which hand to use against a switch hitter, who is simultaneously deciding which side of the plate to hit from.

That’s right, I said “switch pitcher.” More on Venditte from the Sporting News. [Editor’s note, 2023: THANK YOU SO MUCH, ARCHIVE.ORG!] This is seriously the best thing ever. I hope Venditte gets to the majors. Seeing him in action would be more than worth the price of admission.

There are so many more points of decision in this scenario than the standard one with a switch-hitter and a non-ambidextrous pitcher. Normally, it’s easy: The conventional wisdom is to bat lefty against a right-hander, and bat righty against a left-hander.

But if you don’t know which hand he’s going to pitch with before you approach the plate, when do you decide which batter’s box to go stand in? And if you’re the pitcher, when do you decide which hand to throw with?

Banned from baseball, but not from texting A-Rod

I had no idea: Pete Rose and Alex Rodriguez have been talking hitting for years. It’s a good article.

The Carolinian approaches the Kannapolis, NC Amtrak Station, May 28, 2009

Contrasts

This kind of thing (previously) seems to tend to happen right around the time I’m about to take a long trip on Amtrak. Or maybe that’s when I most notice it.

I did ride 13 hours on Amtrak last Thursday, and it was pretty uneventful and relaxing. It was also supposed to be an 11-hour ride (which is a fairly typical delay, I think). And I’ve had a great time in North Carolina with my family. But how long, I wonder, will my scheduled 13-hour trip from Kannapolis to Manhattan take tomorrow?

Speaking of NYC, I enjoyed Yankee Stadium way more than I expected to.

All Your Baseball Questions Are Belong To Us

This is a great read for anyone who loves baseball, and I know you do:

Bill James Answers All Your Baseball Questions (from the NY Times “Freakonomics” blog)

I really need to get some Bill James books.

Saving the world, whatever that means

While I’m not blogging or anything, go ahead and read this post detailing The Top Root Causes of Everything Wrong With the World. Let me know what you find out. That is an early entry on a blog I probably want to read. I’m noting it here so that it will enter my consciousness every time I check to see whether or not I’ve posted a blog entry lately [I haven’t]).

I have been commenting on other websites a lot lately, which strikes me as, if not stupid per se, then at best wasted energy. Why should I provide my awesome content and insights to other websites, when I have one right here dying from lack of care and feeding? There is no good reason save sheer laziness. (I think there are other, bad reasons, though.)

Good old King Kaufman got me going on a bunch of tangents tonight by listing a few bloggers he liked a lot. That distracted me from my main task of the moment, which is (shh!) updating my online portfolio. Not just updating it — completely creating a new one almost entirely from scratch, since my current portfolio site was designed sometime around 2001 or 2002 and was last updated in 2004. Now that it’s “time for a change” (imagine me saying that in my best Bill Clinton voice), a new portfolio is due.

The transit dilemma

Sacramento River Cats Logo

Say you wanted to go from Oakland, California to Sacramento, California, a distance of 80 miles, to catch a Friday night Sacramento Rivercats game. (They’re a minor-league baseball team.) And you wanted to take public transit and come back the same night. That seems possible.

The A’s-Brewers connection

According to Four Blocks to Miller Park, a Milwaukee Brewers blog, there’s a connection between my two favorite baseball teams (the Brewers and the Oakland A’s) that I hadn’t previously considered:

…if it weren’t for the Royals, or more specifically, Charley O. Finley’s screwing of Kansas City (by unceremoniously yanking the A’s out of town) that compelled the American League to grant the city the expansion Royals, it’s a safe bet the Brewers would not exist (the only reason the American League okayed the risky venture that was the original Seattle franchise was to create schedule balance).

I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s interesting.

“We’re not daunted.”

Before a tough road trip, Brewers manager Ned Yost:

“We’re not daunted.”

After the Brewers went 5-13:

“It was daunting. It wasn’t daunting at the time but it proved to be daunting.”

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