brainwagon

The All-Star game is going to the bottom of the 13th in a 3-3 tie. Both teams are 3-27 with runners in scoring position. There have been something like 19 pitchers used. Gadzooks. Addendum: Uggla just committed his third error, a new player record for the All-Star game. Addendum: Michael Young gets a sacrifice fly, […]

Didn’t catch the Friday win for the Athletics over their Bay Area rivals, but found out that the sprinklers came on during the ninth with two outs and Houston Street on the mound. It didn’t help the Giants. YouTube – Oakland A’s Get Wet and Wild

Slugger Frank Thomas got let go from Toronto, and got resigned to come back to Oakland and smack some balls around for us. I couldn’t be more tickled. It’s the first inning in the A’s versus the Angel, and big Frank comes up and smacks a ball to right that Vladimir Guerrero misplayed, and Frank […]

The Sabernomics blog has some suggested rule changes that might serve to speed up the game. I haven’t blogged about a baseball related topic in a while, so I thought I’d toss my two cents worth in. First of all, I’m not certain there is a pervasive problem with baseball games taking too long. How […]

Today, I realized that I had written some scripts to dig out information on the web and present it to me in a nice, concise format a couple of years ago, but that they had not been updated. I tinkered them back into fighting form, and then worked on a new one: one that would […]

Want to know why baseball is the greatest sport? Check out this article from philosopher John Rawls on the magic of baseball. (Thanks to Matt for bringing this to my attention.)

One stop shopping for the 2008 MLB schedule in .csv format: wget -r -A.csv -l1 -H -np -nd -erobots=off http://www.mysportscal.com/ I’ll probably make a merged version of them all eventually, but this might be useful in the mean time. Addendum: Merging the data wasn’t completely straightforward. Not sure that I’ve got it exactly right… but […]

It’s the third game of the World Series, and the score is tied 0-0. If you can’t find any enjoyment in the reality of the game, perhaps the theoretical niceties of the game might provide some distraction: 11011110: Batting averages Me? I enjoy both. [tags]Baseball, Mathematics[/tags]

David Cortesi has a nice page on scoring baseball games.  I haven’t done this myself, but I think it might be a cool way to record games that you enjoy and keep you focussed on the action around you.  David uses the Project Scoresheet way, which records more information than traditional scoresheets do, and are […]

My recent purchase of the book Baseball Hacks has made me dust off some my (I must admit impossibly rudimentary) knowledge of statistics and probability and think about baseball in that context. I think it was several years ago while reading Lewis’ Moneyball that I first became aware of Bill James’ Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball. […]

One of the most famous games in all of baseball history must be Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which pitted the Mets against the Red Sox. The Red Sox entered the game leading three games to two, and after nine innings, the game was tied 3-3. The Red Sox scored twice in the […]

After a shaky opening day performance, Barry Zito came back and pitched six innings, giving up only one hit against the Mariners. Relievers Calero, Kennedy and Street shut the Mariners down the rest of the way, giving up no further hits and giving the Athletics their first shutout of the season. This follows a 2 […]

I often listen to sports talk shows while commuting (especially now that I’m on hiatus from my commute time podcasts and baseball season is coming up) and today the AM waves were all atwitter with news of the Sports Illustrated cover story excerpting the upcoming book by Chronicle sportswriters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams presenting […]

It begins today, with Korea playing Chinese Taipei at 6:30ET on ESPN. I don’t expect much from this particular game, but I must admit that I’m fairly interested in the World Baseball Classic. Teams to watch? Well, the U.S. of course.  As much as I really don’t like Roger Clemens, he’s an amazing athlete and […]

Well, even though he’s no longer an Athletic, I’d like to wish Arizona Diamondback Eric Byrnes centerfielder a happy birthday. I loved to watch Byrnes’ flat out style of play. The last game I saw him play in Oakland, I had seats out in left field, right above where he was playing in left field. […]