There’s a Star Trek: TNG episode where the Good Guys come up with a paradoxical logic puzzle that is designed to drown the Borg Collective in a massive feedback loop, trapping the Bad Guys in a neverending attempt to solve an unsolvable puzzle. Paralysis by analysis, if you will.

I wanted to respond to Brandon Chizum’s article comparing baseball and wine. What Brandon is trying to describe is the aesthetic experience: the sensation we get when we experience a pleasurable work of art, and how this sensation can be common across separate art forms. I started to try to describe this sensation scientifically, as a function of the brain. But I didn’t realize that Brandon’s article was, for me, a Borg Logic Trap.

My response kept growing and growing until it was no longer a short blog entry, but had evolved into some kind of horrific five-volume Manifesto Of All Things Ken, with no end in sight.

So I gave up. But I just wanted to say that there’s nothing particularly unique about the link between baseball and wine. You could find similar links between Skateboarding & Flower Arranging. Or Sumo Wrestling & Opera Singing. Or Marilyn Monroe & Manny Ramirez. Or Greg Maddux & Gilgamesh. Or…

This is your brain. This is your brain on fire. Stop, drop and roll.

For you see, art is like a program fed into an automata, and the automata goes into a certain state when…

Honey, where’s the remote? Oh, never mind, I found it. Click.

So then, the information “Oakland cuts Eric Karros”, is input into my brain, and my brain outputs “Not Surprised”. First of all, Karros didn’t hit. Duh. But there’s also the fact that Oakland first basemen have a rather unique requirement in their job descriptions: with all that foul territory, they need to be able to run down foul popups. Scott Hatteberg is pretty darn good at it. Karros, on the other hand, looked like a horse trying to swim through quicksand.

BLUB BLUB BLUB BLUB BLUB. BLORP.

Late October, when pitches aren’t thrown,
Our wives don’t spend evenings alone.
Nine months after that,
While we watch batters bat,
We get babies for reasons unknown.

Congrats to Jason Barker, Christian Ruzich, John Gizzi, and (soon, we hope) Jon Weisman on their new family additions.

Did I forget anyone?

Oh, yes, a big Happy Birthday to my youngest daughter, who turns four tomorrow.

Tell me if you couldn’t see this one coming about three or four years ago.

No sooner does word begin to leak about a final decision on the Expos home than news also begins to leak about a decision on a new A’s stadium. The A’s are apparently going to try to get a new stadium built in the Coliseum parking lot.

I think what this really means is that Orioles owner Peter Angelos is not going to get a bucketful of cash for the Expos moving to the DC area. If Angelos had gotten a settlement, then that would have set a price that the A’s could have paid the Giants for moving to San Jose. No DC price, however, no SJ dice.

The whole A’s ballpark issue has always been contingent on the Expos issue. A’s owner Steve Schott had been hoping, hoping, hoping for a precedent that would allow him to move his cash registers to Silicon Valley. But now he’s stuck in Oakland. Sniffle, sniffle.

The Coliseum site was viewed as the second-best East Bay site by a city-funded HOK study. The best site, in downtown Oakland, has been designated for a housing project. It’s a shame, because that site, with an abandoned classic movie theater, would have been a really cool place to put a ballpark. The architects could have had a field day with all those ballpark quirks carved by necessity from the surrounding neighborhood.

Parking lots have no quirks. This is my biggest concern with the Coliseum site. Well, that, and the question of where the money to build this thing is going to come from, but that’s just a minor detail, right?

Like it or not, the A’s are competing with the Giants for the Bay Area baseball entertainment dollar. SBC Park has San Francisco Bay to form its quirks, complete with fabulous views. How can the A’s compete with that?

Obviously, the architect would need to emphasize the view of the Oakland Hills. The view won’t be as fabulous as SBC’s, but it would be nice.

But the A’s need to have something that’s better than SBC. To do that, they’d need to take advantage of SBC Park’s flaws.

SBC Park is beautiful, but it’s cramped. The concourses are narrow, and it’s hard to walk around. Being so cramped and crowded, it’s not particularly accomodating to families. In contrast, you’d probably want the New Coliseum to have spacious, comfortable concourses. You’d want a large New Stomper Fun Zone where the kids can be free to run around, perhaps like the “Park in the Park” in San Diego. Then you’d have something to offer baseball fans that’s better than what the Giants have.

As for the quirks, well, I don’t know how to solve that problem. In a parking lot, it would be hard to come up with quirks that wouldn’t be transparently artificial. Perhaps if you go all Frank Gehry postmodern on the place, you can get a funky style to fit into the site somehow, and give it that extra bit of coolness, the sense of place that would make people want to experience being there. But that would require a brilliant architect, and a client who cares for aesthetics beyond just the beautiful sound of a cash register.

As brilliant as the A’s are in running their finances and building their ballclub, I haven’t seen much evidence that any sense of aesthetics runs in the A’s blood. They’re an organization that’s more about science than art. I fear the A’s will make a New Comiskey-type mistake, and just start counting the luxury boxes. We’ll end up with a bland, out-of-place, run-of-the-mill retropark, and the A’s won’t be much better off financially than they are right now, because the ballpark will flop.

I sure hope that won’t be the case. I’ll be making some noise if it is. Stay tuned.

You can’t use a black hole to travel to an alternate universe, Stephen Hawking explained earlier today.

Too bad. I was hoping to vacation someday in that sexy alternate universe where Spock wears a goatee and Major Kira lies around eating grapes like some kind of Roman empress.

But at least there’s some consolation: by closing the door to alternate universes, Hawking produces baseball statistics, instead. According to CNN:

Hawking settled a 29-year-old bet made with Caltech astrophysicist John Preskill, who insisted in 1975 that matter consumed by black holes couldn’t be destroyed.

He presented Preskill a favored reference work “Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia” after having it specially flown over from the United States.

“I had great difficulty in finding one over here, so I offered him an encyclopedia of cricket as an alternative,” Hawking said, “but John wouldn’t be persuaded of the superiority of cricket.”

Smart guy, that Preskill. But while Hawking was explaining the relationship in our universe between black holes and baseball statistics, he failed to offer any sort of explanation for the Joe Morgan paradox.

The prevailing explanation for the Morgan paradox had been that Joe Morgan is caught in a multiversal quantum entanglement formed by some kind of tunnel between alternate universes.

With such a multiversal tunnel, the Joe Morgan from our universe, which has baseball statistics, could randomly flip-flop quantum states with a Joe Morgan from a universe without baseball statistics. Morgan’s statements would always make sense to him, but others will perceive his utterances as either lucid or nonsensical, depending on which universe Morgan occupies at any given moment.

But with black holes ruled out as a source of multiversal tunnels, the question becomes how a multiversal tunnel could be formed.

Some have suggested that an explosion resulting from a collision of brilliant minds such as Preskill and Ken Jennings could rip a hole in the fabric of the universe large enough for Joe Morgan to pass through.

Unfortunately, Hawking did not comment on this issue in today’s presentation. So for now, the Morgan paradox remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of science.

Was this guy, arrested while drunk, nude and covered in nacho cheese, returning from the SABR convention?

I’m not sure if Chris Mullin is insane or a genius, but for the first time in–what, decades?–the Warriors are giving us East Bay residents a reason to pay attention.

Interesting portrait of Dennis Eckersley, as he prepares to enter the Hall of Fame.

Mayobanex Santana: bad player, great name.

Getting inside information about injuries in Oakland may be possible, Will. Stephen Hawking says that some information does indeed escape from black holes.

Would it be better to write a baseball book than a mystery novel, if getting published is one of your goals?

If you’re wondering how I can write so badly, think about the fact that I spent two years studying in the San Jose State English Department, and you’ll understand.

They Might Be Giants and Homestar Runner together? When they meet it’s a happy land!

Never. Ever. EVER. EVER let Ricardo Rincon face right-handed batters, unless it’s a blowout.

A 0-0 game in the 12th inning is not a blowout. Every other option you have is better.

Rincon gets out Carlos Delgado, fine. That’s what Rincon does, gets lefties out. But then you kept Rincon in to face Gregg Zaun. Zaun walks, of course, and a rally gets started. Fortunately, Justin Lehr bailed him out.

If you’re like me and you’ve never actually met Will Carroll in person, you’ll feel like you know him a whole lot better after you read this interview of Will by Alex Belth over on Bronx Banter.

On Baseball Prospectus Radio last week, Will asked A’s beat writer Susan Slusser “what’s wrong with Barry Zito?” Today, Phil Rogers asks the same question on ESPN.com.

In both cases, I’m rather flabbergasted neither Slusser or Rogers mentioned the most obvious reason: Barry Zito changed his delivery this year from the stretch. He decided to stand more upright instead of hunched over to take pressure off his knee.

The first question to ask when troubleshooting a problem is, “what changed?” So if you ask Ken Arneson the Barry Zito question, my first guess is this: the new delivery didn’t work.

Why it didn’t work, I’m not an expert enough to say. But I think whatever other excuses you make (missing Rick Peterson, thinking too much, less deceptive changeup, loss of control, etc.) are probably cascading problems from the original one of changing his motion.

If Zito misses Rick Peterson, it’s probably because Peterson wouldn’t let Zito change his motion, and Curt Young did.

I heard that he’s gone back to the old style stretch delivery now, but I haven’t seen it yet. I hope it will help get the old Zito back. I’ll be watching tonight.

I returned from Sweden Wednesday night, went to bed, got up at 3am Thursday morning and noticed that I had tickets to Thursday night’s A’s-White Sox game. Oops, forgot about that.

I guess I could have tried to get rid of the tickets, but I also found upon returning that the police had found my stolen car while I was away. So instead of spending Thursday recovering from jet lag and trying to find some takers, I spent it working the police and insurance bureaucracies to get the car out of storage and to a repair shop. Fortunately, the car was in fine shape, except for a drained battery.

I didn’t want to let the tickets go to waste, so I decided to go to the game. Besides, I hadn’t seen so much as a baseball highlight in over three weeks. I needed some baseball.

The game started at 7pm, which is 4am Sweden time. I managed to get about a 20 minute nap before heading out to the Coliseum, which I hoped would be enough to get me through the game without falling asleep.

I arrived just in time to see the first pitch from the concourse, and by the time I reached my seat, Rich Harden had gotten three outs.

This was the best game I’ve ever seen Rich Harden pitch. He zipped through the batting order twice, facing the minimum through six. The best part was that he was doing it with ground outs instead of strikeouts. He was painting the corners, and keeping his pitches down in the zone. He ended up pitching eight innings, striking out only three, but getting 15 ground outs. He only threw 95 pitches. This was the Rich Harden that makes A’s fans drool. The game flew by.

Really, what if Rich Harden could pitch like that more often? Have there ever been any pitchers who throw 96-100 mph who were ground ball pitchers, not strikeout pitchers?

The A’s rode a Bobby Crosby double to a three-run rally in the 4th, and Eric Chavez homered in the next inning, and those were all the runs the A’s needed. Harden gave up a tip-your-hat-to-a-good-hitter homer to Magglio Ordonez in the 7th, but that was all.

I got my first look at Octavio Dotel in the ninth, and was satisfied with what I saw. He didn’t show much velocity in walking the first batter, hitting only 92 mph on the gun. I started thinking “Arthur Rhodes all over again”, because Rhodes showed up with the A’s not throwing as hard as advertised, too. Then Dotel started cranking it up to 95, and got the next three guys out.

The game was over in 2:02, and there wasn’t a happier guy in Oakland about that than me. I stayed awake for the whole game, collapsed into bed by 10pm, feeling in fine shape, except for a drained battery.

I was flipping through the Swedish TV channels one jet-lagged night, and ran across an imported American show I never watch, Once and Again. It only took a second to realize that if you want a lookalike, Billy Campbell will play Billy Beane in Moneyball, The Movie.

Jon Carroll channeled some Will Carroll in his column today.

Crossing the globe to visit relatives has its benefits, but relaxation isn’t among them. Planes, trains, buses, boats, and cars…moving from one relative’s town to the next, packing luggage, hauling luggage, unpacking luggage…when I get back to America, I’m going to need a vacation.

So an hour or two to pause and gather my thoughts here is quite welcome. Perhaps that’s why I like to blog: to relax, as mental therapy, a short respite from the sufferings of real life.

* * *

If Paul Simon had gone to Sweden instead of South Africa, would I be humming “Diamonds on the Seats of my SAAB” right now? Nah. To say those words and mean them would be to stop making sense.

Displaying luxury is the least Swedish thing you could possibly do. The Swedish Dream can be summed up in one word: “Lagom”. There’s no direct English translation for that word, but it’s an adjective that means “just the right amount or size, neither too much nor too little.”

Swedes don’t want the biggest house with the biggest cars and the most prestigious job with the biggest salary. They want a lagom house, with a lagom car, and a lagom job that pays a lagom salary. To be moderately successful is ideal; being a huge success is embarrassing. Have you ever heard a Swedish athlete brag?

* * *

Eastern philosophy holds that the path to enlightenment is to avoid desire, and thereby avoid suffering. Western philosophy holds that the path to enlightenment is to embrace desire despite the suffering that results. Swedish philosophy is a compromise: enlightenment through a moderation of desires and a moderation of suffering.

I’ve spent three years living in Sweden, but I have never been able to embrace that Swedish philosophy on a personal level. To me, it’s like preferring to hit a double over a home run. I want to either play hard, or not play at all. What’s that quote about hell being reserved for the neutral?

* * *

On this trip, I visited Köping, population 17,000, the town where I lived from the ages of 13-15. As an kid with American-sized dreams, Köping seemed like Satan’s Own Godforsaken Frozen Hellhole of Boredom. Your main choices in life seemed to be to (a) grow up and work at the local Volvo transmission factory, or (b) get the hell out of Köping.

I was baptized and confirmed in Köping’s 500-year-old Lutheran church, but it didn’t help me feel any closer to Heaven. Eventually, my prayers–please God, let my answer be (b)–were answered, and I got a chance to return home to America.

It’s been twenty-two years since I left Köping, and today, it’s the same as it ever was. The Volvo factory still dominates the town. The water is still flowing in the river downtown. The church is still the tallest building. There’s a McDonald’s now, though. That’s progress.

* * *

I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Köping. I probably would have had a lagom job and a lagom house and a lagom car and a lagom Swedish wife with lagom smart kids, and I would have let the days go by until one day I would have asked myself, “Where is my fabulous job?” And I would have asked myself, “Where is my large automobile?” And I would have said to myself, “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!”

I would have said to myself, “I have never been to Yankee Stadium” and I would have driven off in my car, taking that highway where it leads to, leaving a trail of broken hearts, suffering their lagom losses.

Sometimes I think I read too many blogs. Before I came to visit friends and relatives here in Sweden, I was a bit afraid that Europe was awash in anti-Americanism. All these blogs told me so! But here’s an interesting statistic:

American sportswear observed by a certain American tourist in Sweden:

North Carolina Tar Heels pants: 1
Boston Red Sox caps: 1
Minnesota Twins caps: 1
New York Yankees caps: 8,124,205

OK, maybe I exaggerated that last number a little. But only a little. Here in Sweden’s third-largest city, Malm

Yesterday, I arose in sunny California. Last night, I fell asleep somewhere over Hudson Bay. Today, I woke up near the west coast of Iceland. Tonight, I’m blogging from a centuries-old building in damp Scandinavia. These are the days of miracle and wonder. This is a long distance blog.

While sleeping through Greenland, a title comes to me, and hardly are those words out than a blog entry is loosed upon the world, a rough beast, body of a lion, head of a man, jetlagged into waking nightmares by a land where the pitiless sun stays aloft after 10pm and darkness will not drop. Surely some long stony sleep is at hand! Mere anarchy rocks my insomniac mind; the writer and the written turning, widening, falling apart. This entry cannot hold.

For Father’s Day, my seven-year-old daughter Linnea wrote me a joke:

Q: Why did a hot dog go to the bullpen?
A: To get warmed up!

Now there’s a girl who knows what her dad likes. I’ll take a baseball joke over a necktie every time.

Father’s Day dinner was a gathering of thirteen people at my wife’s parents’ house. The Yankee-Dodger game served as background music, but the primary entertainment was my wife’s nine-month-old niece, Julia. Julia lives in San Diego with her parents, and Sunday she made her first Bay Area appearance since Christmas. Back then, she couldn’t do much, but now she could crawl, stand, smile, and grab things and put them into her mouth.

MLB has had a century to refine its product to compete with the NBA, NFL, NASCAR, and other sports for entertainment value. But evolution has had eons to refine babies and our brains’ response to them. Nothing can compete with babies.

Julia and I played catch with a small squishy baseball for quite a while. Her scouting report reads, “DELIVERY RESEMBLES GAYLORD PERRY.” I’d hand her the ball, she’d hand it back, and somehow, the ball returned each time covered with more and more saliva.

Dinner was served. Julia took a break from playing to drink a bottle of milk, and the baseball game got some attention. The room was filled with A’s and Giants fans. Everyone in the room hated both the Yankees and Dodgers, but it’s hard to watch a game without taking sides. In general, the A’s fans rooted for the Dodgers, while the Giants fans rooted for the Yankees.

Linnea tried out her joke on the dinner crowd, and an aunt gave her a new punchline:

Q: Why did a hot dog go to the bullpen?
A: Because it couldn’t do any worse than Rhodes and Mecir.

Sad, but oh so true. When Guillermo Mota came into the game, and ESPN put up his stats, I took a cue from baby Julia and started drooling. I daydreamed about the rumored A’s-Royals-Dodgers trade that would send Carlos Beltran to L.A. and Mota to Oakland. I’m crying for a closer the way a hungry infant desperately screams for milk. Trade rumors are my pacifier.

During the seventh inning stretch, Linnea went to the piano and entertained her aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents by playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”.

It struck me that here lies baseball’s competitive advantage. Vin Scully tells us on TV about the Dodgers beating the Yankees in ’55, in ’63, and in ’81. Gagne strikes out ARod last night on the way to his 81st consecutive save, and our generation has its own memorable moment we can pass on. This interaction between young and old is so hardwired into us, even a nine-month-old can understand it. We hand these traditions and memories to the next generation, and in doing so, they give us something back, a connection to something beyond ourselves.

They may not remember perfectly what we did this night or how we felt about it as it happened; they may not play the song the way the composer intended; but it’s the interactions, not the facts, that matter. This is the game we’re designed to play. And if the ball is all covered in slobber, so what?

This will likely be my last post for awhile, as next week I am heading off to the Land of the Midnight Sun and 179,983 women named Birgitta. I want to tie up as many loose ends as possible before I go. So oddly, I’ll probably have more time to blog while I’m gone than before I leave.

I’m not sure what I would blog about from Sweden, though. This is my biennial trip to visit my kinfolk. I’m the stray cat of my family: save a few second cousins, all of my relatives live in Sweden. Blog entries about relatives probably wouldn’t be much fun to read.

One thing that might be of interest while I’m there is the playoffs of the Euro 2004 soccer tournament. I can’t get any of these games with my current cable package here in the US, so it’ll be nice to be able to watch some of these games on TV instead of having to resort to cartoons on the web. Sweden got off to a great start, beating Bulgaria 5-0. Sweden still has to play Italy and Denmark, but if they can manage at least a tie with one of them, they should advance from their group.

I’ll watch the baseball boxscores while I’m there, but that’s all. I can get so intense about baseball during the season, worried about winning, agonizing about losing, that I sometimes end up not enjoying myself nearly as much as I should. A three-week detox session every other summer is quite welcome.

So, that’s it for me for awhile. Unless you want to hear a “my mom made Swedish meatballs and potatoes for dinner” report every day, I’m not sure I’ll have much to say until after the All-Star Break. Until then, be good.

All a man’s got is the integrity of his work.
—Ralph Wiley

Any rational person could probably come up with a dozen objections to that statement, a quality that probably holds for a lot of Wiley’s writing.

Ralph Wiley passed away of heart failure yesterday at the age of 52. Wiley may not have worshipped at the altar of Objective Truth (he called objectivity “a sham”), but he did write with integrity: he was true to himself. I admired that.

Conan O’Brien said it took him 10 years just to learn how to be himself. Elmore Leonard said it took him 10 years, or about a million words, to “find his sound“. You could probably point to Ralph Wiley as an extreme example of this phenomenon. I’ve followed Wiley his whole career, as I read his columns in the Oakland Tribune as a kid, followed his later work in Sports Illustrated, and then on ESPN.com. At the Trib, Wiley wrote in a fairly straightforward, conventional style. But in the end, Ralph Wiley found his sound, and it was unique.

I can only hope, when my day comes, I will have been so fortunate.

How long do you think it will take before a fan and an athlete get into a fight because of one of these?

I write about writer’s block one day, and the next day, two stories appear about that very thing.

The New Yorker has a new article that details the history of writer’s block. It’s quite interesting, but I didn’t really need to hear that some writers never get over it.

UIWeb.com has some handy advice about how to get past the burnout. I’ll keep it in mind, but I usually find the best solution for me is not to try harder, but to wait. You never know where that inspirational spark will come from.

Wednesday night, I did my waiting at the Coliseum. I went to see the matchup between Oakland and Cincinnati. Somehow I was misinformed about the event, as I thought I was going to see the A’s and the Reds, but a football game broke out instead. The Raiders defeated the Bengals, 17-8.

Rob Neyer thinks the Oakland victory might be momentous, because it puts the A’s alone into first place. Neyer suggests it may be for good. I wish he hadn’t said that; it’s classic jinx material.

When I watched the Reds shrink the A’s 11-0 lead down to 11-8, another momentous day came to mind. In 2002, the A’s blew an 11-0 lead against the Royals in the final game of their 20-game streak, only to win the game 12-11 on a ninth-inning Scott Hatteberg home run. But this time, the A’s thwarted the comeback, and added six more runs in the seventh to avert the need for such late heroics.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into the A’s lately. 8, 13, 10, and 17 runs in their last four games? The A’s don’t win like that; their M.O. is to win 4-2 and 2-1. Really, it must be some other team I’ve been watching. I don’t really recognize them when they hit like this.

The most memorable thing about the game, though, was not that the A’s scored 17 runs, or that they took sole possession of first place. It was a battle between Rich Harden and Ken Griffey, Jr. in the sixth inning. Griffey came to Oakland with 498 career home runs. The A’s had pitched him carefully all series, and in the sixth inning, Griffey was still stuck on 498. But with the A’s ahead, 11-0, it was time for Harden to challenge Griffey.

It was a classic power-on-power battle. Harden’s best stuff against Griffey’s.

First pitch: fastball, 97 mph on the stadium gun, Griffey swung and missed. Next pitch, fastball, 98 mph, Griffey fouled it off.

Then on 0-2, Harden threw another fastball, this time at 100 mph. And Griffey fouled that one off, too! When the “100 MPH” flashed up on the scoreboard, the crowd really started buzzing.

Griffey fouled off two more pitches, a fastball at 98 and an offspeed pitch, then took a 98mph fastball off the plate inside for a ball. Then another fastball (97), and Griffey fouled it off again! Griffey fouled off five of Harden’s nastiest pitches to keep the at-bat alive. Amazing.

Harden threw a slider in the dirt for ball two. Finally, on 2-2, Harden unleashed a 98 mph fastball that got Griffey to hit a high, high popup to center field for an out.

Harden won the battle, but he emptied his tank in the process. The following five batters all reached base. Five runs scored, and Harden was done for the night.

Griffey didn’t homer, so the at-bat will likely go down in history as just a minor obstacle blocking his path to 500 homers. But to me, it was a special moment: a truly great battle I feel privileged to have witnessed.

Who’d have thought you could see a memorable popup in an 11-0 game in the middle of June? If that doesn’t inspire my creative juices to flow, I don’t know what will.

I tried but failed to adequately explain Automata and Formal Grammar in the comments to this post by Will.

You can live a perfectly satisfactory life without understanding Automata Theory. I don’t completely understand it myself. But I’m a stubborn sort; I hate to fail, so I’m going to try again here, below the fold.

I’ll try to keep it as simple as I can, and use baseball as an example, since that’s something we all understand here. I’ll show how baseball is, by one definition, a language. If you still don’t get it after this, don’t worry, be happy.

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