I’ve given the weekend’s baseball a day or two to sink in, and now I think I’ll take the opportunity to wrap up.

The Detroit Tigers utterly destroyed the A’s, but to be honest, the home team was clearly outgunned in every arena. The Tigers pitched better. The Tigers hit better. The Tigers were coached better. I’d say that I can now emphathize with the Twins, who were swept in the ALDS by the A’s, except for one thing: the A’s actually lost to a better team, and I’m pretty sure that the Twins lost to a worse team.

Now that the A’s have been eliminated, what positives do I take away from the year?

• Frank Thomas is a blast to watch. He bounced back from a pair of frustrating and injury plagued years with the White Sox, and demonstrated that he could still hit the ball. In an A’s lineup which has had inconsistent hitting, he was always at least a threat to go deep, and I’m sure he is the cause for a lot of other hits as pitchers worked around him.
• Nick Swisher showed some power. He had 35 homeruns with 95 RBIs, pretty darned good for someone who is usually batting fifth or deeper in the lineup.
• Marco Scutaro showed that he could be a pretty reasonable shortstop. His eight infield assists and two RBI doubles in Game 2 of the ALDS against the twins were absolutely solid.
• Jay Payton was the first player in history to play each of the outfield positions 40 times in a season. His bat also benefitted from being in the lineup on a consistent basis, giving his second best season for battting average and slugging, his only better being his rookie season in Colorado.
• Zito improved from the previous three years. In 2003-2005, he had records of 14-12, 11-11, 1nd 14-13, with ERAs of 3.3 4.48 and 3.86 respectively. Zito dropped his ERA to 3.83, but a 16-10 record.

Now, some negatives:

• Zito has pitched his last game for Oakland.
• Chavez had one of his worst offensive years ever, despite his continuing dominance at third base. This year, he might have been the sixth best hitter on the As. That’s kind of hard to take for your franchise player.
• Swisher and Chavez hit right around .200 with men in scoring position. Timely hitting seemed to be a serious problem for the As.
• Harden and Crosby both spent a lot of time on the injured list. Harden has some of the nastiest stuff around, but only managed 9 starts this year. Crosby only saw 84 games in 2005, and only 96 in 2006. When you compare that to Zito and Tejada, both of whom have incredible durability and have basically never missed a start, you aren’t entirely confident looking toward the future.
• Street looked more like you expect a rookie to look than he did last year. I can’t tell whether he’s lost something, or whether people have just begun to figure him out, but he hasn’t been getting those 1-2-3 innings that you’d like to see from your closer.

Bradley, Kielty, Calero, Sarloos, Ducscherer, Scutaro, Perez, and Melhuse are all eligible for arbitration. I suspect that they will give a new contract to Thomas for two years. But you never know.

In the end, the A’s managed to win the ALDS, a feat which earlier (and frankly much more talented teams) managed to not pull off. I spent a lot of time out in
the sun, watching a game I love. Cheering the victories. Agonizing over the defeats. Talking about it with friends.

Can’t wait until spring training.

[tags]Baseball,Oakland Athletics[/tags]

Addendum: SFGate is reporting that Ken Macha has been fired as coach of the Athletics, with two years remaining on his contract. I have mixed feelings about this: I can’t help but think that perhaps many of the items cited in the article are taken out of context, but it is also clear to me that many players have issues with Macha and that in the Tigers series, we were flat out-coached by Jim Leland. Getting rid of coaches is all the rage, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Dan Lyke pointed me at a website which could tell you how many other people had your name in the United States. Below you’ll find my results:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

At this point, I’m left wondering why I pay taxes!

It’s been a while since i had anything music related, so here’s one from the Make blog for Tom:

My homebrew pipe organ

[tags]Music,Pipe Organ,Make[/tags]

This reminds me of a discussion that I had with Tom on pipe organ construction. Hey Tom, if you are reading this, can you remind me of the title of the multi-volume Dover publication on pipe organ construction and theory that you have? can you verify that this is the book that you have that gives many details on pipe organ construction? I’ve been interested in picking up a copy, but never seem to remember the title.

An interesting project that took 2nd place at the Yahoo! HackDay that I went to, but unfortunately incredibly sparse on any details as to construction. This box is cheap (target price $10) and displays a variety of feed-ish information to your TV (at least, until your TV stops handling NTSC).

YBOX

[tags]Ybox,Yahoo! Hack Day[/tags]

This hasn’t been confirmed yet, but apparently the small plane which crashed into a building in a Manhattan today wasn’t flown by terrorists, but did carry Yankee pitcher and former Oakland Athletic Cory Lidle. Another unidentified person is reported dead, and maybe two others in sporadic and confused online reporting. Lidle last pitched in Game 4 of the ALDS on October 7th.

This article sums up my sentiments pretty well. Condolences to the families of Cory and all the others whose names we don’t know.

[tags]Baseball,Cory Lidle,Tragedy[/tags]

I feel like the Knights of Ni sometimes. I get to hearing certain words, and they just make me crazy. It isn’t really the word itself that ticks me off, it is usually that it is used in a particularly inane (and usually increasingly popular fashion). This new rant is with the same word that I’ve bitched about before: conversation.

Over at boingboing, Cory Doctorow reported that Disney had apparently begun to consider piracy to be a serious competitor for their customers. The article he cites quotes Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney and her attempt to describe Disney’s approach in trying to exploit a market that could (at least potentially) be described as primarily the realm of pirates. Her primary point is that Disney is interested in creating content, because “content drives everything else”. It’s marketing-speak, but as marketing-speak goes, it’s not bad marketing-speak. The basic idea is that if Disney continues to create compelling interesting content, people will pay for it.

None of this really bugs me, but this is what Cory Doctorow had to say:

Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

I’m sure Cory thought that was clever, and indeed, it might be except for one simple, rather obvious fact:

Conversation requires two things: someone to talk to, and something to talk about. Of these two things, Disney can only manufacture one. Because it can’t manufacture the other, acting as if it is some particular failing for them not to provide it for you seems rather silly. Conversations aren’t (barring the possible exception of 976 phone sex lines) products. Acting as if it were the responsibility (or even the capability) of companies to supply them is just silly.

[tags]Conversation,Boing Boing,Cory Doctorow,Rants and Raves[/tags]

Addendum: If conversation is so important as Cory claims, then why does boingboing not allow comments?

I was trying to dust off some music for Halloween and remembered that I had used Timidity to produce a free version of Bach’s Toccatta and Fugue in D-minor that you could use as spooky organ music on Halloween.

Well, skip that. Surf to the link below and get an excellent free performance of the same recorded by somebody who can really play, on a real pipe organ, recorded as a 256kbps MP3 file. It is, in every way, vastly superior.

Bach: Toccata & Fugue in D-minor BWV 565 (free) MP3 Download: Archived Magle Int. Music Forums

[tags]Halloween,Halloween Music,Free Download[/tags]

The news is alive with the announcement from North Korea that they successfully performed an underground test of a nuclear device. Seismic monitoring stations recorded an earthquake registering 4.2 on the Richter scale. I fired up Google Earth to see what is at the epicenter. It’s pretty bleak out there.

I can’t help but think that our world just keeps getting a little more crazy.

[tags]Nuclear Test,North Korea[/tags]

Addendum: An article on defensetech.org sys that it was likely a dud. They used a formula relating yield and the magnitude of the seismic effects that yield estimates of a kiloton or less.

Even if you don’t understand the physics of superconductors (and I don’t) this still looks pretty cool.

YouTube – Amazing physics

If you want to learn more about the underlying physics on your commute, you can try listening to the final chapter of the best of the Feynman lectures as an audio book. I did. I’m not sure it helped. I kept feeling something pass over the top of my head, but perhaps some small bit of it stuck.

[tags]Physics,Science,Superconductor,Magnetism[/tags]

The Yankees are out.

Detroit is in.

The team that lost three games against the Royals to drop out of first in their division on the final game of the season, dropped one to Yankees, and then just flat out destroyed them.

The Tigers pitchers were phenomenal. I think if the A’s don’t bring their best to the park, the Tigers are going to be nothing but trouble…

Congratulations to all Tiger fans! We’ll see you next week.

[tags]Baseball,Oakland Athletics,Detroit Tigers,New York Yankees[/tags]

I had tickets for Saturday, but looks like I don’t get to use ’em: the A’s completed a sweep of the Twins today at McAfee. Coming into the game today, the A’s were 0-9 in games where they could have eliminated their opponents, but today they reverse the trend and make it 1-9 to proceed to the ALCS.

Now, I can sit back, and root for the Tigers!

[tags]Baseball,Oakland Athletics,ALCS,ALDS[/tags]

Addendum: Kenny Rogers led the Tigers to a 6-0 thumping of the Yankees in a gutsy, emotional performance. Rockin! The Tigers will try to close them out tomorrow.

Tonight is the premiere of the new season of Battlestar Galactica. I found this picture on flickr, and it made me chuckle, so I thought I’d share.

I’m tempted to act like a shill and mindlessly repeat “I live for this!”, but it seems a little bit over the top. Still, the postseason has already given the fans some awesome post season moments. I thought I’d recap.

FIrst of all, Oakland leads the Twins 2-0. Two awesome games, two solid pitching performances (by both sides really). Frank Thomas came up big in game #1 with two home runs (and narrowly missing a third which was just foul). He is the oldest player ever to have a multi-homerun game in the post season, and also set a record for the longest time between homers in the postseason (13 years). Frank came up huge.

Then, yesterdays Game #2. Loiaza looked solid, but ended up getting no decision as he gave up back to back home runs with nobody out in the bottom of the sixth, allowing the Twins to even the score at 2-2. Calero came in in relief, and no further damage was done, allowing Oakland to come to bat in the top of the 7th.

Neshek relieved Bonser for the Twins, and got Marco Scutaro to pop out to left center. Ellis then singled, but was then removed when Kendall hit into a fielder’s choice. With two outs and Kendall at first, the Twins removed Neshek and allowed Reyes to pitch. Mark Kotsay came to bat, and hit a tailing drive to center, which Torii Hunter tried to make a play on, but he failed. The ball skipped to the wall, Kendall scored, and Kotsay motored around third, scoriing an incredible inside the park home run to put the As up 4-2.

I was reading a bunch of blogs which are chewing Hunter for being to aggressive, and I find it a bit silly. Yes, this miscue probably cost you the game. If he gets behind the ball and holds Kotsay to a single, you pitch to Bradley and take your chances. With two outs, you probably have contained the damage. But you are talking about a five time Gold Glover, who batted .278 and hit 31 homeruns in 2006, known for his range and his aggression. Doesn’t it seem a bit silly to abandon your guy now? He tried to do exactly what he does every day: make the plays that win games. You can still play your best game and lose, that’s why we actually play games.

On the other hand, there was a play which made me laugh for a half hour: Kent and Drew being tagged out by Lo Duca out at home plate on the same play. Kent: you’re slow. Drew: an idiot. I’ve never laughed so hard during a ballgame.

I love this game.

The A’s come back to Oakland to play a closeout game in the post season. They are 0-9 in this situation, and I’ve been to a fair number of those games. I’m hoping for a 1-9 for their last ten. Oh, and Ellis: get better soon!

[tags]Baseball, Athletics,Torii Hunter,Post Season[/tags]

Addendum: The Yankees Lose!!!! THEEEE YANKKEES LOSE!. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys. 🙂

A deserving Astronomy Picture of the Day.

[tags]Astronomy,Mars[/tags]

It is far too elementary and unclever to even be considered a hack, but I wanted to create a map that showed the location of all the current major league ballparks. it took a side jaunt into using the python xml.dom.minidom to create (rather than parse) XML, but it wasn’t difficult. Witness the following crude attempt using the Yahoo! Simple Maps API:

Map of Ballparks

Caution: clinking on a link will probably not do what you expect. Thanks to Tom for providing me a file with the latitudes and longitudes of each park.

This uses the absolute most trivial, no programming, API that Yahoo! releases, and as such, isn’t really all that much fun. I will work on something more advanced later.

[tags]Baseball,Yahoo! Maps[/tags]