Hey... Listen!

I've moved operations to the Hot Sign. Will see if I can set this page up with a js redirect given the opportunity.

I've registered a domain name and hired a hosting service. I plan to write a script to migrate my haloscan comments and blogger posts into wordpress format and move over there once I have make some downtime.

When I first started watching college basketball, I found the statistics kept fairly useless. Naturally, coming from a baseball background. (As a fan, the only sports I know I'm able to perform at better than the average person my age are hockey and swimming [I'm also terrible at softball].) Ken Pomeroy and Jon Gasaway, both now writers at Basketball Prospectus introduced me to tempo-neutral statistics. Traditionally, basketball players are measured by the number of events per game: points per game, rebounds per game, etc.. Tempo-neutral statistics use as the denominator possessions instead of games: points per possession, rebounds per possession, etc.. This is a major improvement in perspective because not all teams play the same style. A fast-tempo team like Texas is currently averaging 75.4 possessions per 40 minutes on the floor, their offensive philosophy can be inferred to be that the first good shot available should be taken. A slow-tempo team like (prototypically) Air Force averages 60.1 possessions per 40 minutes. They attempt to eat clock by moving the ball around until the shot clock starts to run out while denying their opponents high percentage shot opportunities on defense.

A player on Air Force could theoretically be the best shooter in the country and still not make point-per-game leaderboards, which means that the PPG statistics aren't capturing the information that you would value when evaluating top shooters. Tempo-free shooting would reveal his prowess.

The point is that in data analysis, it's important to neutralize contextual factors, when possible. This article is an egregious example offailure to perform even the most obvious context neutralization, i.e. dividing something you're counting by some other number that gives you a rate that captures the facts that you want to understand.

The article reports on a quick and dirty corpus analysis of the token '(laughter)' in White House presser transcripts to estimate how receptive the press corps is to the white house press secretary. The formula apparently chosen is laugh_count / days . I don't listen to politicians and their flacks any more frequently than they read the laws they pass, so I don't know if it is true that the press secretary speaks with the press for the same amount of time every day, but I find it unlikely in the extreme, especially when the article quotes a Washington Times correspondent with, "Robert's little digs and evasions have lost their power to amuse — particularly since we haven't had a presser since July."

If true (and it can't be) that'd be like measuring a basketball player not by points per possession, or points per game, but by points per week. Some weeks his or her team doesn't play, but that doesn't mean he's missing shots.

The moral of the story is that if you're going to do a corpus analysis, even if it's for a silly piece like that, you have to count the right things, plug them into the right formula, and report the result accurately. Presenting your source code is always a great idea.

Labels: Illini basketball, tech

As is my wont this time of year, time to make some crazy guesses about how the Cardinals opening day roster will look. Here's my first stab at it:

Rotation

The top four starters are locked in, barring catastrophe or unexpected atrophy. The fifth starter looks to be a race between K-Mac, Mitch Boggs, Rich Hill, and Jaime Garcia. I expect Garcia will get looks but won't start any games in Spring Training and that the organization would prefer to see him pitch in AAA for a while before calling him up unless he's undeniably the best of the candidates to help the Cardinals win. I like Mitch more than most Cardinals fans, believing him to have a good fastball (especially out of the pen) and a good slider (neither of which are uncontroversial beliefs), but also to have a good, if underutilized curveball. I like those three weapons enough that I think he can be effective enough in the 'pen to handle both lefts and rights and am confident he'll pitch a few meaningful ninth innings this season in the Lou. I'm a K-Mac fan when he's pitching in middle relief or as fireman. Of those four, I'd be most interested in seeing Hill start.

Rich Hill strikes me as a classic Duncan reclamation project, with plus pitches (especially the curve) and a history of high strikeouts and almost-as-high walk rates. As I've argued many times, the Duncan philosophy as I understand it is transparently DIPS-friendly: throw strikes low in the zone with movement away or down from the batters hands (sinkers and cutters) to get ground balls and avoid the home run; and throw them in the zone to avoid walks. Sacrificing the strikeouts that will happen when you pitch somewhat more predictably is worth it if you can lower your walk and home run rates by even smaller rate differentials. Walks and especially home runs are weighted sufficiently more greatly than strikeouts that the strategy works if you can get the pitcher to take something off his fastball in exchange for movement and control to hit the spots.

I guess the rotation will then be:

Carp — Wagonmaker — Penny — Lohse — Hill

Regular starters

Nothing fancy here:
C:  Yadi
1B: el Hombre
2B: Skip
3B: David Freese
SS: B-Ryan
LF: Legolegs
CF: Razzle
RF: Lud

Bench

Here's where things get interesting. Our starting lineup has two left-handed bats in it, so we need some lefty options on the bench. Preferably two: one a contact hitter who'll take a walk and one a power bat. We positionally need, at minimum: a catcher, two middle infield utility men, a backup CF, and a corner IF-OF who could legitimately fill in at 3rd for stretches if Freese gets in the doghouse.

Backup catcher is 'Stache Larue. One of the middle infielders is Julio Lugo, who may serve as Skip's platoon partner if he struggles against lefties, which makes Skip a possibility for the contact-lefty bench bat in a set of situations.

The real competitions, then, are for the corner IF-OF, the CF, and the other utility infielder. One of these men should bat southpaw with authority.

The best two candidates I see for backup middle infielder are Tyler Greene, a RH SS who hit pretty well in AAA last season and Ruben Gotay, a switch-hitter who led the PCL in OBP last year and who hits far better from the left side. Gotay isn't quite up to the task of backing up short... But neither was Miles. Gotay is on a minor-league contract with an NRI and Greene has options, so there's no contract situation to put one over the other. Purely a skill-set call: is Greene's ability to man short competently more valuable than Gotay's versatility?

To backup CF, you'd want a good defender, preferably a right handed batter in case Colby Rasmus struggles against left-handed pitching (which I'm fairly unconcerned about). The candidates are Jon Jay, Shane Robinson, and Joey Bombs. Jon Jay's the best defender by a long shot but is the only of the three to bat lefty. Shane's scrappy and played well in ST last year in a hilarious call-up from minor league camp (he's a slight fellow and was wearing a uniform that was several sizes too big in every direction in his first game. But also hit a home run and made a dazzling defensive play in left.) Joey Bombs is a behemoth who didn't look lost to me in the very small sample I've seen him play center. Joe Mather also is recovering from wrist surgery, so his batting may not be quite up to the level expected of a being his stature. My guess would take the competition down to Jay and Mather, and here it comes down to the question of whether Jay's better defense is more valuable than Mather's right-handedness to complement Colby.

For the corner utility man (the Spiezio role), the obvious in-house candidate is Allen Craig, who hasn't OPS'd under .850 since short-season, but whose defensive ability at third-base is in apparent ill-repute. I never had a chance to see him field at third so have no reason to dispute that with any credibility. Joe Mather's another possibility, perhaps more likely here than as a backup CF, as he arrived at camp last year ready to compete for third base with Glaus out before injuring himself. Another candidate who I think is still a slim possibility and would be a good fit is Eric Hinske, who signed a million dollar contract with the Braves. Hinke fits the role and bats lefty. I don't see how he fits in with the Braves this year and could see a swap possibly happening. I'll ignore the possibility henceforth and consider the competition between Mather and Craig.

So here are some possible scenarios, leaving out Lugo and Larue who won't be contested for contract reasons, barring meltdown:

Mather beats out Craig, Gotay for versatility, Greene for acceptable backup SS
Mather (CF, SPEEZE) — Gotay (IF) — Greene (SS)

Mather beats out Craig, Jay as backup CF
Mather (SPEEZE) — Greene (IF) — Jay (OF)

Craig beats out Mather
Craig (SPEEZE) — Greene (IF) — Jay (OF)

TLR likes switch-hitters
Craig (SPEEZE) — Gotay (IF) — Jay (OF)

I ordered them with respect to how likely I believe each to be: I think Mather's wrist will need a few more months of healing time, Gotay's a pretty fine replacement-level pickup who can backup third just fine to push Craig to third-string there, and Rasmus looks comfortable against LHP.

Bullpen

Franklin's installed as closer and the left-handers are locked in. The rest is somewhat wide open. I'm assuming a 7-man bullpen, which is hopefully what we'll end up with, which leaves four spots for a number of contenders. As I said before, I'm a fan of Mitch Boggs and think K-Mac will be in the bullpen. That leaves room for a middle-relief right-hander and a long-man (if it's not McClellan, especially if he stays stretched out to start in a late competition for 5th starter). I'd guess Motte and Hawksworth. Eduardo Sanchez had a great season, but walked AA batters at double the rate K-Mac did before making the leap to the MLB. I expect Garcia to start at AAA to start the year. Charlie Zink would be neat, but won't put money on the knuckleballer over the fireballer. I expect Ben Jukich to be returned once the starters get stretched out. I've always liked the Darren Oliver style lefty long-man and think if Jukich makes the roster at all, it'd be in that fashion. I incidentally think that's a pretty good way to use a Rule 5 drafted starter, who tends to see plenty of low-leverage innings.

Franklin — Reyes — Miller — Boggs — Kyle — Motte — Hawk

It'll be pretty exciting to see whether Craig and Jay can perform at the top level as well as many of use have hoped for a long while.

Labels: roster moves

Let's make fun of Bill McClellan in the style of FJM in which we mock every word of his most recent column (minus the acerbic wit that made FJM brilliant). Shall we?

Let's.

For as long as I have lived here, Cardinals fans have called themselves the best fans in baseball. At one time that claim had to do with a certain level of sophistication.

The "best fans in baseball" is a lame claim, true. I'm skeptical about whether fans are any more or less sophisticated now than they were in whatever era Bill McClellan deems to be a more nuanced and subtle age. It's likely that the subset of fans who get all their information from the radio have suffered in sophistication following Jack Buck's retirement. I love Mike Shannon as much as the next fan, but he definitely comes up short of Buck's high standard when it came to calling a game while unobtrusively teaching it.

Cardinals fans would applaud a batter who gave himself up and moved a runner to third by hitting to the right side with no outs. They appreciated a hitter who'd take a couple of pitches to give a potential base stealer a chance to run. Cardinals fans knew their baseball and appreciated effort.

How surprising that Bill McClellan, who came to St. Louis in 1980, considers his formative years in the '80s to be the Golden Age of baseball fan sophistication. Trust me, Bill: fans still appreciate stolen bases and runners advancing but are sophisticated enough now to understand how risky base stealing is and how much more valuable the out "given up" is to the advancement of that base runner in almost all situations. We might appreciate that a well placed, poorly hit ball with a runner on first and no outs is less bad than a poorly placed, poorly hit ball, but you'll have to forgive us for not exploding in joyous revelry at the marginal benefit. And as for taking a couple pitches: I may never have applauded Rick Ankiel more gratefully than after he walked to end a 17-pitch plate appearance, although perhaps McClellan shook his head at such lawyer-ball when Ank failed to ground out to the right side in that men-on, no out situation.

In fact, they demanded effort. In August 1981, when Garry Templeton didn't run out a ground ball, the fans booed, and he responded with an obscene gesture. Next thing you know, he was traded to San Diego for Ozzie Smith.

This conflates a lot of history. Templeton already had a prickly relationship with the fans. At the time (Aug. 26, 1981), he was getting on base at a .291 clip as a lead-off hitter with a .261 batting average and a below-average defender at shortstop. He hadn't walked in almost three months (with plenty of time lost to injury). His backup was a home-grown switch-hitter who'd been filling in during Templeton's lengthy stints on the DL and was sporting a .333 average on 8/26/1981.

I'm not so sure they'd boo Templeton now.

Nonsense. Of course he would get booed, just like Tino Martinez was when he was stinking it up at 1st while Pujols was stuck in left with a bum throwing arm. I'm sure Miguel Cairo was heckled back in 2003 when he'd give Bo Hart a breather, and Miguel Cairo never had any personality conflicts with St. Louis fans. (He just wasn't as good a baseball hitter as we would have liked.)

Last year, when Yadier Molina didn't run out a pop-up and announcer Al Hrabosky had the audacity to mention that fact, manager Tony La Russa was angry. He said that Hrabosky "should be ashamed of himself."

Here's the video of the play in question. Bases loaded, Molina pops up to shallow left. Theriot goes out to field it, runners stay put so they aren't doubled off when the ball's caught in the shallow outfield. Soriano botches the play and drops the ball, all the runners move up a base, but Ankiel is thrown out at 2nd. Molina is safe at first. If McClellan thinks the fans should have booed Molina for that play, he's a fool, if only because they'd all be looking to the outfield and not at Molina's hustle to pass up Ankiel on the bases. If he doesn't think the fans should have booed him, he's talking out of his ass.

It was not as if Hrabosky slammed Molina. According to a newspaper account, Hrabosky said, "Molina did not run at all. I'm not saying you've got to sprint down there, but you've got to do something a little more than this. That's terrible."

He was safe. He drove in a run. Hrabosky's a clown. McClellan's some kind of whimsy writer who's decided to do his column about sports, one of the few sections of the newspaper where reporters have set beats that they genuinely know how to research on their own (in the case of very good writers like D. Goold.)

That pales compared to what old-timers like Harry Caray used to say about players, but that was then and this is now. Criticism is no longer considered fair play.

The Cardinals had one sub-.500 team in the last decade and have been one of the most successful teams of late. The Cardinals won the World Series in 1945 1946, Caray's second season with the team and didn't make the postseason again until the memorable 1964 season. In the interim, Caray covered teams far more frustrating than the 2007 rebuilding year or the 2003 bullpen craptacular.

The best fans in baseball have evolved into the most devoted fans.

As I said, we never were the best fans in baseball, and it's silly and arrogant to claim it's so. And if you want to hear about our fan's recent devotion, give franchise saves leader Jason Isringhausen a phone call.

That's why La Russa felt comfortable in 2008 suggesting the team sign Barry Bonds. He knew Cardinals fans would embrace him. After all, he'd be a Cardinal.

Bull. Shit. La Russa knew that Barry Bonds is the second best hitter in the history of baseball (after the Babe) and I guess he trusted the anti-PED regime enough to give him a shot. The fans would have had a prickly relationship with Bonds just as we had with Templeton during his successful years prior to 1981.

There is something heartwarming about this unconditional love for all things Cardinal, but something strange, too. "The Stepford Wives" meet "Field of Dreams."

I understand. You're nostalgic for the '80s, when baseball fans weren't the non-booing automatons watching an imaginary game in the bleachers with a famous, reclusive author they'd kidnapped. What is this supposed to be except a childish insult at today's youths?

Last year, I heard normally sensible people suggesting that Matt Holliday would re-sign with the Cardinals if the fans somehow demonstrated the depth of their love. Huh? It's not all about money? No, said the most devoted fans in baseball. Love can conquer all.

I suppose it's possible that there is a non-zero-cardinality intersection for the sets of Cardinal fans, hippies, and sensible people, but this anecdote only tells me that some of your friends are dopes.

After Holliday dropped a fly ball in the playoffs, the Cardinals fans gave him a standing ovation when the team returned home.

Matt Holliday put up a 168 OPS+ after joining the Cardinals. The last time the Cardinals had a player aside from Albert Pujols put up offensive numbers that far better than league average was the great MV3 season of 2004, when Jim Edmonds had an OPS+ of 170 (Scott Rolen was at 157, a league-average player is at 100.)

Now try to follow this, McClellan: Win Expectancy measures the percentage of the time the home team wins a game given a particular game situation. Before Holliday took that line drive to the groin, we were up by one on the road with two outs in the ninth and the bases empty. 17.3% of games played from 1977 through 2006 in which the identical situation came up were won by the home team (see for yourself), so the teams that had been in the Cardinals situation went on to win 82.7% of the time. After Holliday misplayed Loney's drive, the situation was visiting team up by a run, two outs, runner on second. The visiting team won in such a situation 81.6% of the time. Holliday had gotten us to the playoffs, then cost us, historically, a little over a percentage point in win expectancy with that play. Ryan Franklin, who'd struggled down the stretch, then walked a batter, gave up a tying single on a cock-high curve to Jabba the Hutt that with a little luck would have been hit slightly earlier and been nabbed by Brenden Ryan, walked another batter, and gave up another single to send everyone home.

Two days later, do you expect fans to greet Matt Holliday at the start of an elimination game in the NLDS with a round of catcalls after the boost he'd provided in the regular season? Perhaps if the Cards had managed a lead and Tony went to Franklin to close it out you would have heard some booing, but I'd expect nervous clapping would be more widespread.

These demonstrations of unconditional love can be classy or strange.

The fans' love for Matt Holliday was surely conditional on him either getting his bat going in Game 3 of the NLDS (many fans soured on him after that series, trust me) or on him re-signing with the Cardinals (some are soured on him for the way Boras extended the negotiations and all but a small minority would have hated him if he'd gone to the Mets. If he'd signed with a NL Central team, he would be the most reviled visiting player in St. Louis in 2010 and beyond.)

I thought it was strange when La Russa was given a standing ovation by a spring-training crowd the day after being arrested for driving under the influence

The folks who show up to Spring Training are a pretty die-hard bunch. McClellan sees strange devotion and unconditional love; I see forgiveness and support. It's difficult to communicate complex messages in cheering crowd. It's just too difficult to coordinate a chant of: "You made a mistake and are getting destroyed in the press. We don't particularly respect the press because of their pack mentality. Don't screw up like this again. We hope this isn't a distraction at your job. Get past this and win some games this year."

[B]ut I thought it was classy when Cardinals fans gave Jim Edmonds an ovation when he returned as a Cub. After all, Edmonds had some big years here. Had the ovation for Holliday been of that variety — a thank you for the good half-year he had here — I'd have thought it was classy. But it seemed more about "Stay here. We love you."

Are all standing ovations either Classy or Strange? Can't there be supportive standing ovations? I was enthusiastically part of the standing ovation we gave to Larry Walker after his first plate appearance in Busch Stadium. (A strikeout). I don't know how that fit into McClellan's Bi-Modal Ontology of the Standing O, but I liked it and Larry liked it. I imagine the fans at game 3 liked cheering for Holliday after he'd had a bad game and needed a good one; I imagine he did, too. I also think cheering for a guy when's he's introduced to the field makes more sense than booing for him.

Not surprisingly, at the end of the year, the ovation meant nothing. Holliday became a free agent. He even indicated a preference for the big-market teams on the coasts, but that did not work out, and he signed a $120 million contract to come back here. That was great news for the Cardinals, but I still hear people talking about how Holliday ended up where he wanted to be.

How did he indicate a preference for the coasts? He's consistently said that he wanted a long-term contract with a no-trade clause. His agent wanted to get him Texeira money and flirted with the deep-pockets, big-market coastal teams in an attempt to shake that kind of coin loose, if only to drive the negotiations with the Cardinals. (Did McClellan take seriously the reports of the East Coast Orioles designs on Matt Holliday?) Holliday signed for one fewer year and $60 million less than Texeira's contract and includes $2 million dollars of annual salary deferred without interest, for the record. The contract is similarly a year shorter than the extension Rolen signed with the Cards after the season we acquired him via trade. He got a fair contract for a free agent of his skill and durability. I look forward to watching him play for the next several years and pity bitter nostalgists whose memories to be made will be marred by Scott Boras' posturing.

He didn't. That body of water near Busch Stadium is not an ocean. It's a river. You can see across it. That's a clue it's not an ocean.

This paragraph mocks itself.

The latest standing ovation, of course, was given to Mark McGwire at the team's Winter Warm-Up last weekend. Again, it seemed a demonstration of unconditional love.

Love for Mark McGwire is conditional on how well the Cardinals bat this season. He's done good work with Skip Schumaker and Chris Duncan (who was a potent bat in our lineup when healthy). If Brenden Ryan, who's working out with McGwire this offseason, breaks camp with some ability to take walks and drive the ball, Mark McGwire will deserve all the credit he gets.

The standing ovation, I'd wager, was largely as enthusiastic as it was after the high-horsed media coverage of his confession. My immediate reaction was similar to that of baseball's greatest active writer, Joe Posnanski. It was the Top Story on Robin Meade's show when I woke up, where the Chicago native sports reporter was glowing in his shock and disdain for McGwire. McClellan's colleague Bernie Micklasz put it well:

Never surprised by my media brethren. Step 1: moralize and demand that McGwire come clean; Step: 2: moralize and condemn when he does.

That's how it happened, let no one imagine it otherwise.

At that same event, Jack Clark was booed. The former Cardinals slugger had had the temerity to call McGwire a cheat and a fraud, and to say that all the steroid users should be banned from baseball.

Jack the Ripper's '87 season should have been enough to earn him the love of all Cardinals fans in perpetuity. I don't agree with his opinion here, though. McGwire's the whipping boy right now, but he's been more honorable about his steroids use by admitting to it late than, for example, Rafael Palmeiro, who vigorously denied using before being outed by leaked test results; or Sammy Sosa, who feigned ignorance of the English language at the hearing that turned Mark McGwire from the man who saved baseball from the strike into the butt of jokes.

I don't feel that strongly about it myself. I wouldn't even ban steroid users from the Hall of Fame. That's a subjective thing anyway — why aren't Ted Simmons and Ken Boyer in the Hall?

Everything he's written here is unobjectionable.

[S]o I'd look at the steroid users and try to figure out if they'd have been superstars without performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds and Roger Clemens? Yes.

How did McClellan come to these (certainly correct) conclusions?

McGwire? Without steroids, he was at best Dave Kingman.

This is pure horse shit. Dave Kingman walked in 8.2% of his career plate appearances. Mark McGwire walked in 17.2% of his plate appearances. McGwire slugged over .600 in ten of sixteen seasons and over .700 in four seasons; Kingman slugged over .600 once in his sixteen seasons. I don't have any reason to believe that steroids are anything resembling a magical route to hitting baseballs as well as Mark McGwire did in his career, even if you start at Kingman's level, assuming he didn't use, too. The fact that the vast majority of players who are known to have failed a drug test were, frankly, lousy players is evidence enough of that. That professional writers are perpetuating the myth that steroids are just that effective strikes me as irresponsible. For what I consider the most reasonable responses to McGwire's confession: pick a Dan, either Dan.

While I would not put him in the Hall of Fame, I would not ban him from baseball. I believe in the redemptive power of forgiveness. But to forgive is one thing and to cheer wildly is another. The most devoted fans in baseball would give McGwire a standing ovation. The best fans in baseball would not. They would have too much respect for the game.

He was an exciting player to watch and people are excited to see if he can improve our offense. Give 'em a break.

That's all. I just spent a couple of hours making fun of a crap whimsy column. Last time I'll ever read Bill McClellan.

If you need some brain-soap after reading that column, here's some good stuff.

The Illini decided recently to keep Ron Zook at the helm and bring in new coordinators and some other position coaches. The first coordinator hire is done with Paul Petrino coming on board as the Offensive Coordinator. He fits the criteria I was looking for: some experience with the NFL, some recruiting chops, and a general idea of how to work a tight end into the offense. Paul was a WR coach with the Falcons. Mark Tupper says, "Petrino has been a good recruiter with experience in Florida." His Arkansas team is graduating perhaps the best receiving TE in the class in D.J. Williams. I look forward to seeing if he can get the ball to Hubie Graham and London Davis a little better than Schulz' offense did for Michael Hoomanawanui in his injury-marred but still disappointing senior year.

I'll add that I'm not a fan of the idea of hiring a Special Teams coach. Our special teams have been terrible for years and I think we might be better off using that coaching spot elsewhere and letting the two coordinators figure out their own responsibilities and personnel assignments for special teams.

Updated: The word on the street (or at least on WDWS and the Topeka Capital-Journal is that Kansas State's Vic Koenning will be hired as the defensive coordinator. If true, that's exciting news. Kansas State had some very good special teams last year without a designated ST coach, by the way.

Labels: illini football

It turns out that men-on-base information isn't preserved in the Gameday database. I hadn't ever noticed it before, but if you load up an old game like this one between the Angels and Blue Jays from 5/7/9 and look at any plate appearance aside from the final one, you'll find that the Runners on: dialog will never change to reflect the PA you're looking at, nor will the little dots appear on the field schematic to indicate a player's occupying the base.

The only place where that shows up, in fact, is in the gameday_Syn.xml file loaded by Gameday. There's a subtree in the file containing information about the next two batters and the current (final) pitch sequence, as well as containing nodes for the three bases with Boolean attributes to indicate occupation. That came as something of a snag for me this past week, but it's an intriguing one.

In any case, I've got to do something far more interesting than table-lookup for this part of the project to work but have a plan. So far, it's looking good—should have something quite amazing built by the time I hit the sheets tomorrow night.

Update: Some more stuff I learned this week: my data indicates that there were 283,862 plays or personnel changes made during the course of the 2009 MLB season. Of those, the most frequent were assisted groundball outs at 32,655 that didn't advance a runner, followed by 31,267 fly ball outs that didn't advance a runner. The third most frequent play type was the swinging strikeout: 26,918 of them. There were 13,726 walks issued with 1st base unoccupied and 7,861 pop outs. The most common hits were bases-empty singles on line drives followed by ground ball singles at 7,830 and 7,172, respectively. There were 3,602 two-throw double plays with outs at 1st and 2nd. 1933 batters struck out on foul tips. There were 9,896 pitching changes not involving a defensive switch. One batter lined into an unassisted triple play. Six other players hit into a triple play, four on liners, two on ground balls. Fifteen players hit inside the park home runs. 862 play-types occurred only once, out of 2,300 different play-types (suppressing player and position names).

Amazingly, this information has non-trivial uses... Trust me!

(Re-ran the data set, so the numbers changed at 10:23 from an hour or two earlier.)
((Turns out those numbers were wrong, but I do have them correctly now.))

Final update: I noticed what seemed to be some odd inconsistencies with that dataset and figured it out. Those counts include spring training and WBC games, so those numbers (and some of the underlying data) are a slightly screwy.

Labels: academics, personal nonsense, tech

Looks like my last substantive post (he generously declared) was written back in early April and the last of any kind in late May. In the meantime, the sorta personal stuff has gone on Facebook and the baseball-related internet writing on Viva el Birdos.

It was a good summer: the weather was mild and pleasant and is now thoroughly missed. The cool summer terrified me after the frigid winter we'd just been through. So far, Autumn has been mild, too, although wet to a historic extreme.

I stopped taking classes this semester: I'm not currently a student, as I have more than enough credits. I'll need to register for 0 hours next semester to deposit and defend my dissertation, which is coming along pretty well now, although obviously not as quickly as anyone involved would prefer. My goal is to get the whole thing largely written before the New Year: a tall order, as I'm not quite half-way through, but the part I'm working through now is by far the most difficult. If I have it close to completion by the end of the year, I'll be very confident that the defense happens in the Spring semester. The work is very engaging and I'm fortunate my advisor hasn't abandoned me after all the time it has taken to get here.

I've been working for the same group, although as staff now instead of a student worker. My workload has been shifting away from production work a bit and more into software development and infrastructure (although I'm out in the field at least two or three times a week.) I wrote a daemon to wrap ffmpeg today in about an hour and a half that will dramatically improve our throughput speeds and, provided the right hardware, would allow us to perform campus-wide transcoding services, if requested, and it already has been for at least one large media provider on campus. I'll have the office all to myself Monday and Tuesday and have a bunch of projects that have sat on the shelf for too long ready to work on.

Over break, I'm looking forward to getting those projects knocked out and making some major progress on the research, as well as my second annual all-day Thanksgiving feast/football fest. Also happy for the Illinois Basketball season to truly get underway, as the football season was something of a let-down.

In short, things are good. Heading in the right direction. No complaints.

Labels: personal nonsense

I'm going to start writing garbage again here over the next week and see how it goes.

Labels: vacation

Snapped a few pictures of my fence that I spent the last week building. Worth the work. My backyard's a great place to hang out, now.

Labels: home improvements

The World's Best Illusion may explain why a curveball is so difficult to hit.

Labels: tech

Yikes. Proposed tax changes.

Haven't posted anything in a while. Better make it good.

Labels: comedy

Thanks to everyone who participated. We got excellent data and are looking forward to providing live streaming services to the University of Illinois.

Labels: tech

Indonesian economy soars on strength of sweat socks export industry

Labels: comedy

My ancient magnolia blooms right around April 1st each year. Last year, or the year before, a terrific storm blew through right after it bloomed and all the blossoms were torn off, which was quite a waste. This year, it snowed early in the morning on April 6th.





Here's hoping the blossoms hang tough and I can take a decent picture when the sun comes back out. If you look closely, you can see the plastic improvised greenhouses on the daffodils, tulips, and other assorted bulb plants. The snow will probably help my yard, though. I used my new drop spreader to put down some crabgrass preventer/fertilizer on Saturday and we've had mist and this light snow since then, so it should be well into the root system by Wednesday.

Labels: home improvements, personal nonsense

TLR decided to amuse himself by releasing his opening day lineup today. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

1. Brendan Ryan, 2B
2. Rick Ankiel, CF
3. Albert Pujols, 1B
4. Khalil Greene, SS
5. Ryan Ludwick, RF
6. Yadier Molina, C
7. Chris Duncan, LF
8. Brian Barden, 3B
9. Adam Wainwright, P

That Schumaker isn't starting comes as no surprise, he's no more effective against LHP's than the man he's replacing. That Freese is out in favor of Barden will cause many to question whether Tony Really Does Hate Rookies. I'll try my best to divine Tony's strategy here. I think he's expecting a low-scoring affair in the cold. I think he's concerned that Freese's achilles tendon might give him problems out in the field in said cold. I think he wants to have his core batters piled up 2-7, with good defense in the infield for all the ground balls. I think he'll want to use his bench pretty aggressively once one of the starting pitchers gets knocked out.

I expect to see, at some point, Skip PH in the pitcher's spot followed by Freese hitting for Ryan, with Skip taking over at second if the Cardinals hold a sizable lead.

I expect to see Razzle get his first MLB plate appearance. First hit would bring some beauty to an ugly day.

Of course, I expect to see the Cardinals win their home opener.

Labels: schumaker, unsolicited advice

The Giants designated Luis Perdomo for assignment, which means that he'll pass through waivers then return to the Cardinals' farm system with all his option years intact. From Chris Haft's article:

Perdomo, 24, owned a 3.48 ERA through 10 Cactus League appearances. But his lack of command in his final three outings unnerved the Giants. In that stretch, he yielded five earned runs, allowed nine hits and walked three in 1 2/3 innings. He finished with a 6.75 ERA to go with 17 hits allowed and eight walks in 12 innings. Perdomo's likely to return to the St. Louis Cardinals, who lost him to the Giants in last December's Rule 5.

I thought it unlikely that Perdomo would stick with the Giants after they overpaid for a few veteran RHRPs in the offseason, and even less likely when they announced that they'd use an 11-man pitching staff. The Giants eventually chose to take 12 pitchers North West with them, and Perdomo, fortunately for the Cardinals, will not be among them.

Perdomo's selection in the Rule 5 had caused some amount of consternation with well-informed Cardinals fans. We traded Anthony Reyes, our top pitching prospect from a few years ago, for Luis Perdomo. That Mo left him unprotected last December—with open spots on the 40-man and Matt Scherer was added after having a slightly less impressive season, albeit at a higher level—was a move worth questioning. Mostly, I think, the Perdomo drama had to do with latent frustration over Anthony Reyes' loss of fastball velocity and lack of a secondary pitch to use against right-handed batters.

In any case, Mo was right. His gamble preserved an option year for Perdomo, who will certainly be added to the 40-man next winter if he isn't traded away from the distinct depth the Cardinals farm has in its advanced RHRP corps, especially now that Jess Todd (WWDUA) has joined it. I suppose there's a chance that another team claims Perdomo, but I find it hard to imagine a team finalizing their opening day rosters and then changing their minds and stiffing one of their own prospects for the chance that this guy can make it all year.

Labels: roster moves

Matthew Leach has the rundown.

I think that I guessed pretty well. I nailed the pitching staff, except for my failure to guess that the FO would pick up Dennys Reyes as a second lefty specialist.

Everybody I guessed would be in the infield for the opening day roster was correct, except the Cards are carrying Joe Thurston as a lefty utility guy. I thought that Mather and Barton would make the team for a good one-two punch of power and on-base/running skills. I still think Barton will help the team more than, say Brendan Ryan. I think I agree that Ryan's chances of clearing waivers will be improved by a month on the major league roster and Barton will benefit from a month of everyday work at AAA. So I can sort of see the reasoning at work if I squint right.

Here's hoping my breakout candidate breaks out indeed. I'm debating whether to announce a minor-league sleeper to watch after the last one got cut, much to my surprise, while I was down in Jupiter.

Labels: roster moves

This gets us into up to the regular season, eh. I added the minor league teams that are playing big league teams this week to the script on my 'puter, but not the version I uploaded in the last installment.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Minnesota at Pittsburgh
Washington at Baltimore
Cincinnati at Carolina
Boston at NY Mets
Chicago Cubs at NY Yankees
Tampa Bay at Philadelphia
Toronto at Florida
Detroit at Atlanta
Kansas City at Texas
Cleveland at Houston
St. Louis at Memphis
Chicago Sox at Arizona
Colorado at Seattle
LA Angels at San Diego
Milwaukee at LA Dodgers
Oakland at San Francisco

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Toronto at Florida
Pittsburgh at Minnesota
Chicago Cubs at NY Yankees
Tampa Bay at Philadelphia
Detroit at Atlanta
Boston at NY Mets
Kansas City at Texas
Cleveland at Houston
St. Louis at Memphis
Seattle at Colorado
San Francisco at Oakland
Chicago Sox at Arizona
Baltimore at Washington
San Diego at LA Angels
Milwaukee at LA Dodgers

Sunday, April 5, 2009

LA Dodgers at San Francisco

Labels: gameday