Tonight: A’s at Rangers, 5:05 PT, Braden vs Harden
Tomorrow: A’s at Rangers, 12:05 PT, Gio vs Lewis
Platter of cold cuts:
- Right off the bat: still waiting for GayFx
- “My hair feels oily and heavy. My breath stinks. I feel so dirty.â€
- I mean to actually apply for this job one of these years …
Nevermore!
Interesting
2: this is why i bathe once a week.
And you hang out with us dirty hippies so you can feel morally superior.
gayfx? you want to track the speed and location of gay people?
Where on the field they’re played
There’s an app for that.
As an ex-Hawaii Little Leaguer myself, I’m rooting hard for ’em this weekend.
Whoo hoo! On to the World Championship game!
weekend quiz: how many of the top 10 active players, by career war, can you name without looking? Hint: none are pitchers.
Ill go with:
Alex Rodriguez
Manny Ramirez
Vlad Guerrero
Albert Pujols
Derek Jeter
Jim Thome
Chipper Jones
Todd Helton
Magglio Ordonez
Aramis Ramirez
(and assume I’ll forget one or two obvious ones)
Hm, 6 right, 2 near misses and 2 non-near misses
The four you missed have significant defensive value; those guys threw me off as well.
Still not knowing what exactly goes into WAR (and whether subpar/inactive years knock career WAR down), I’m gonna guess there’s a couple defensive surprises. And knowing who’s asking … Chavez? Beltre? Cameron? Hunter?
None of those guys…think historically great fielders at C, 3B, and CF.
Also think people you might barely remember are still active.
yeah
And, no, not Jason Kendall (though he does make the top 30).
Pudge? Griffey? Rolen?
Pudge and Rolen; I wasn’t countin Griffey as active.
Jim Edmonds?
Thanks, and go As.
bingo
And Andruw.
Carter to Triple A DL (left thumb sprain)
Well, that was satisfying.
Dinner time: oven-grilled London broil (as with most of our red meat, from here), polenta (chix stock, parm, 1/2 C whole milk), salad (greens from here, heirloom tomatoes from … eh, some vendor here, I forget which).
Starting cooking for tomorrow/next week: oven-grilled chix breasts (leftover marinated breasts from last weekend’s Kebab Gerens; bird parts from here); doing the Rocky Jr leg parts in an olive oil confit to put in a cassoulet with flageolets (soaking right now) from here (will need some sausages … usual Sunday return trip from here with JP, gonna stop at Whole Paycheck). Probably do some carrot muffins and/or cheese scones tonight or in the a.m.
That Clark Summit Farms link was pretty interesting. Do you actually purchase and freeze a whole quarter or half beef and keep it frozen or have you simply found an after-market place that sells it?
I’m about to make pizza dough for tonight’s attempt at grilled pizza.
Neat that they sell their eggs at the Hippie store (Rainbow).
I’ll keep an eye out for them.
Rainbow is great (I’m just a couple blocks away) for the bulk goods, but the produce is just way too expensive.
Depends. If you want these eggs (or various other specialty products) it’s all there is.
The last 3 of our 4 chickens started laying this weekend (Night, Pip-1 and Pip-2 … the leader of the flock and first layer being Gladys). What’s the eggs-per-point bridge conversion rate? And whatever happened to mikeA anyway?
BEST. CHICKEN NAMES. EVER.
Our previous brood started with Love and Squalor (as in “For Esme with … “) who were then joined by Faith and Begorrah.
This time, Gladys was already named and Lily chose Night because she’s black with white spots, after which the Pips were inevitable.
$200,000
And that’s a good question. He’s been off grid for awhile.
No, they haven’t updated their website in a long time. They have a limited a la carte CSA that we participate in.
They should fix their website. That’s a lot more interesting to me than 150 pounds of cow at a time.
1. Braden!
2. Dan. Johnson.
Thanks to 11 A’s hits tonight, there’s $11 off Plaza OF tix for fireworks game Friday 9/3 (coupon code HITS). Might have to git me and the kids some of those.
Only 16 home games left. Gotta get out to as many as I can before the long sad lonely unbaseball season starts.
Rare day game in Arlington tomorrow. Forecast high is 97°. I won’t be sad to miss that one.
I got some of these.
Kris Kristofferson
John Prine
Don’t know if any of you miscreants will appreciate these, but I do.
Appreciated.
appropriately for this salmagundi, “gundi” is the urdu/hindi adjective (for feminine nouns) for dirty.
boy, that curve was hung like laundry, and barton could only manage a sac fly?
he has no power.
According to the Byg Uyb, his sources (who have been around the game for a very long time) tell him that if you are six games or fewer out of first place come 9/1, you have a chance.
If the Oakland offense that showed up in Arlington today would appear more than two or three times a month, I’d take the A’s chances seriously. The Rangers are only 7 games over .500 in AL play (10 over in interleague), so if I thought the A’s were capable of something like a 25-9 finish there would be a shot. As it is I think we’re too dependent on an El Foldo by the Rangers.
If Kinsler and Cruz could stay AWOL, that would help too.
Angels swept at home by the Orioles while only scoring 1 run in the series – sweeeeeeeeet.
Orioles sweep the season series, too.
A’s vs AL: 57-54
Rangers vs AL: 59-53
A’s vs NL: 8-10 (vs. Chc, Cin, Pit, Stl, SF)
Rangers vs NL: 14-4 (vs. Chc, Hou, Mil, Fla, Pit)
While we played Stl, SF, Cin (4-8) they got Fla, Mil, Hou (10-2). There’s your freakin’ division right there.
Losing 2/3 to the Cubs certainly did not help the A’s cause. If I recall, the A’s took only the rubber game against St. Louis. I’m not so sure they would have fared much differently against the Fish. At the beginning of the year, I would have preferred the Reds to the Brewers. Now, not so much.
BP’s 3rd order rankings, which take into account strength of schedule, think the A’s are just 2.5 wins worse than the Rangers. Given the A’s youth and the fact that the Rangers are going to lose a bit of talent going into next year it really does look like Forst’s idea of running back the “same 25” next year could be the right play. Delusion’s of grandeur regarding Crawford not withstanding :)
sputter sputter sputter
That’s an interesting calculation, since it is reflexive (normalizing the A’s to the strength of the opposition in part depends on the strength of the A’s). Do you know how BP handles that? I wrote a code to do it iteratively for pitchers and batters a few years back.
They don’t do anything to handle the feedback, which is why at the beginning of the season you have ridiculous results where if team A beats team B by a large margin team A’s “true talent” number actually decreases. But by this point in the season the feedback signal is weak enough that it probably doesn’t matter much.
It’s precisely because this team is close to competing for the playoffs that improved offense at the corner outfield spots is critical. That’s our weak position right now, by a good margin, and it doesn’t look like we should count on Carter or Taylor being good any time soon. Though, yeah, Crawford probably ain’t happening.
I know it is somewhat off topic, but if you were a Giants fan, how worried would you be that Lincecum’s once 94-97mph heater is now topping out at 89mph?
Manny to the White Sox.
WTF is “mostly mixed”?
Dan Johnson, Slayer of Red Sox!