- Interesting thought-experiment by Tango. Don’t let Beane see it.
- This looks like something I really want to see. And Drew’s right — the Warner Archive is a genuine treasure. Have yet to order anything … mostly due to the fact that I’d have a hard time stopping at any reasonable number of titles. This, though, I have to buy.
- Hale … Jr. likely to be Jays’ next Skipper
- Cue up the Patsy Cline …
- A giddy, thong-flinging Santa Claus (LB wants to know if he threw one to Slusser)
- This is a sad, sweet story
Rangers at Yankees @ 1:07 PT, Rangers up 3-1
Phillies at Giants @ 4:57 PT, Giants up 2-1
When I get a post like this on my facebook feed I just want to close my account:
is that supposed to make any sense?
It appears to be a quote for some put options. And is apparently laugh out loud funny.
Hmmmmm…explains why I have had no contact with this person since high school.
That’s what you get for being a fan of Nate Silver. Or Wil Wheaton.
wtf is going on there?
Douchebag fans are douchebags.
4.
6:
One of my favorite movies.
Can I have 50 dollars, free food, transportation, and lodging at a beautiful hotel in Delaware?
How is that at all important, unusual, exciting, newsworthy, or scandalous?
I think at this point it’s safe to say that Oprah and Jenny McCarthy are the greatest public health hazards in this country/
Sorry, I’ve actually seen someone laboring to breathe while minutes from death, and know what? It’s the most unpeaceful fucking thing imaginable.
1. Yes, interesting experiment. Per the comments, the conclusion seems to be that short-term free agent deals are better WAR/$ values than long-term ones. Given the way the A’s have spent what money they had in the past few off-seasons, that seems to be something that Beane already believes.
Of course Beane has had more misses (Sheets, Gross, Giambi, Nomar) than hits (Crisp) with this strategy, but the same is true of tango’s team: of his 25 players, only one (Beltre) had a star-level performance, and only 5 others (including Crisp) exceeded 2 WAR. While these contracts are clearly less risky than the longer-term bigger-money deals, they are still high variance in the sense that you can easily spend $10 million on someone and get very little in return.
Comment #9 there also raises a point that’s worth keeping in mind: it’s possible that teams do (and/or should) value WAR non-linearly (perhaps due to the knapsack problem).
Neyer addresses the Knappsack problem
/Austin Powers
4. That fan attack story is scary, about as unfunny as you can get…except for the dude’s name being Grim LeRogue. I wish that was my name. Maybe without the Grim part…perhaps Jim LeRogue.
You know what, yep, you were a monkey once.
Picture worth a stand-alone:
Christ on a stick, it’s Drew Carey.
Greg Proops. The whole thing has been a gag.
I would only be 60% surprised.
Can the “truth is truth” part become the next coming of the Kanye joke?
I’m envisioning a url that puts that sound over whatever you link in.
The heliocentric thing, however…
Johnson Freezes
Johnson Iced (almost).
A father of one of my high school classmates was supposedly in President Nixon’s secret service detail; his job was to run the projector in the White House movie screening room. Now he’s an IRS agent who moonlights as a children’s magician.
why would you moonlight as a magician? Has he made a terrible mistake?
I know that there are subtleties and legal wrangling and bureaucratic this-n-thats to wade through, but it really does feel like we’re through the looking glass when Republicans are suing to kill DADT and the Democrat administration is fighting to keep DADT alive.
Concur.
I can understand why the appeal is necessary, but the stay simply isn’t.
Ah, now that’s the TX pitching we’ve been waiting for.
WTF? Movies that I stood in line to see as a 12-year-old are not old enough to be remade.
HAHAHAHAHA!!! How’s it feel, old man?
welcome to the club.
Wait till your oldest turns 30 …
How about this: it’s been ten years since Scream 3 came out
As always, XKCD wins:
CC is a crafty veteran who knows how to pitch to the scoreboard.
a veteran would pitch to the batter, not the scoreboard. that’s like, in the complete opposite direction!
Another one bites the dust; Grandpa Skaalen canned. 20 Free Kraut Reward Points to anyone who can name every hitting coach in the Beane era.
Noodles McBat
Sluggy von Chokeup
Count Workman
Slapsworth J. Decustinator
Sucksatbaseball McCan’tteachhowtohitterson
Too far?
Slider Downeneweigh
Coach St. Inks
Ooooo, I wanna sit there instead!
I think they should be rearranged.
Only if we can exhume Wallace Hartley.
No points for me, as I had to cheat (a lot), but it seems to be:
1999 Dave Hudgens
2000-3 Thad Bosley
2003-5 Hudgens
2006 Gerald Perry
2007-8 Ty Van Burkleo
2009-10 Jim Skaalen
2011 Perry
So I was right.
And since 2006 saw the A’s advance further into the post-season than any of those otehr squads, naturally they’re bringing Perry back!
Hey, if he can make a hitter out of Frank Thomas …
Dead last. About 2.5 American Standard deviations below the mean. Though someone on BTF has already raised the important question of how troughs are counted.
Hah! I was certain that the link was going to be some abstruse offensive analysis calculating the AUC …
Clearly propaganda by the anti-trough establishment.
Also, I presume that’s using baseball seating capacity — Raiders fans surely must emulate the players on the field.
The ratio would have been even worse in the pre-tarp days, since now that a sliver of the third deck is re-opened, I believe all the restrooms are available, even with ~10K fewer seats.
excellent!
But what’s the pee value?
This Phillies team has one of the all-time great Spoonerized rosters.
It is long past time to see the Jairo that made me quake with fear.
Yeah, that’s him.
Yahoo still has him in an A’s cap
I love the name Bastardo!
if only he could have beaned griffey…
We should have nicknamed him Hierophant when he was on the A’s
now that’s how you do gba at a ballgame. fucking fantastic.
AGREED! I thought the same thing last night. If you’re gonna force people/teams to do it, which clearly Selugswerth is, then SF did it right.
Patriotic songs were meant to be singalongs.
I dunno, but it was weird enough that I said what you said, verbatim. And trust me, that probably don’t happen too often, though I am aglow with anticipation to your being here!
e.g., Oakland, Oakland uber Anaheim
I wasn’t watching at that time. What did they do, Gay Men’s Chorus?
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Horns of Dilemma.
Just a guy on a violin doing a quick rendition while the crowd sang along.
Interestingly, I heard this on the radio while doing dishes, and not via TV. And on the radio it was horrid…there was none of the crowd singalong audio, and whatever the radio folks used to bring in the violin sound was really low quality. While I assume the violinist was accomplished and played well, what I heard sounded much like what I hear from the BUSD 4th graders practicing.
Blessedly, my BUSD 4th grader chose the clarinet.
Um, this is the version that I liked. To be fair, I like a lot of folky type music.
I rather enjoyed Waif-Eye Girl’s rendition the other night.
Having them do It’s Raining Men would be 10000% better than anything that actually will happen.
Actually, more advanced metrics say it would only be 9847%.
You forgot to adjust for flyover-rage.
That’s been offset by the rise of the torture meme.
This has been a very entertaining game. Wonder how many innings Oswalt will go if it stays tied.
wow, great game.
I’m not ecstatic about the result, but it shows that 3 hour 40 minute games (approx.) can be pretty damned good.
I just can’t catch a break.
4 of the 5 teams I don’t hate were knocked out in the first round. Now the Phillies are going to choke this away.
Last night was a tough one for strong adherents of plate discipline. No way do the A’s, for instance, score off of Oswalt there — Posey’s hit was six inches off the plate, and Uribe’s sac fly … maybe it was just barely over the plate, but calf-high — no idea how he got enough wood on that to drive the run in.
Now hold on just a sec. If a low-run environment (facing Oswalt certainly counts, even with him coming out of the pen; and with a massive premium on a single run and zero worth to subsequent runs) lowers the cost of bunting, wouldn’t it also lower the cost of expanding the swing zone?
I was just thinking about some of the abysmal strike outs swinging out of the zone earlier in the game.
Posey’s hit showed either great thinking or lucky guessing on his part…Oswalt had worked him away the prior three pitches, so Posey was sitting on that same location to take the ball to right, and did so beautifully. One inside fastball earlier in the AB from Oswalt probably prevents Posey from being on that outside pitch.
The sac fly was Uribe getting fooled on a changeup, but still managing to maintain enough balance to keep the bat back. Good pitch from Oswalt turned into one of those “just gotta tip you cap” moments.
Posey is going to be a great player, I just worry he’s going to become the Bay Area’s Derek Jeter.
The slobbery BJs he was getting last night are a concern, and the glossing over his failure to block the wild pitches are too.
If he were on the A’s, some of that slobber would be ours.
I just worry he’ll get to the “he took that strike 3 looking like a REAL PRO” level.
The AntiCust?
part of MY problem with Krup and Kuip or whatever is their unfaltering homerism. I know Fosse gave us about a decade of that, but I’m pretty sure neither Bill nor KK ever suffered from this.
I’m just saying it’s a concern for me.
Nah, they’re fickle. No way they deify him. They don’t do that. Just look at Bonds and Will Clark and…Jeff…Kent…hmmm. You may have a point.
Ignernt ‘mercans iz ignernt.
So hey, let’s just let them be that way, because… photography and intertubes rule.
Problem solved.
I fully agree with this:
Dammit. That was going to be nmb8 in a new Grill.
I win
Maybe there’s more to this going galt for great justice idea than I thought.
Dammit.
I win twice.