Author: Ken Arneson
Annoyances
by Ken Arneson
2004-06-08 1:45

My creativity ebbs and flows, and lately my well has been dry. When I hit a drought, I tend to forget what creativity even feels like. A door closes in my brain, and blocks me from accessing my muse. I always fear that the door may never reopen. Without a creative outlet, my emotions end up feeling shallow and superficial. I’m left with my annoyances.

I’m annoyed that I have resorted to talking about annoyances.

I’m annoyed that Will said “terror is barely a noun“. What does that mean? That “terror” is 51% noun, 23% verb, 17% adjective, 8% preposition, with just a trace of adverb? Here, Will, go read this.

I’m annoyed that Garfield has a movie.

I’m annoyed at all the hype that this DidYouReadIt.com crap has been getting.

I’m annoyed that the USS Mariner guys called the Moneyball draft “a disaster” and “a flop“. Joe Blanton is by most accounts a top pitching prospect. Bill Murphy was flipped for Mark Redman, and is pitching very well in AA for the Marlins. Brad Knox is still in low A, but he has a 81/11 K/BB ratio in 66.1 IP. Nick Swisher, after a very slow start in AAA, is now hitting .254/.376/.480. Mark Teahen just got promoted to AAA after hitting .335/.419/.543 in AA. Brant Colamarino is now hitting .355/.412/.645 in AA after his promotion from Modesto, where he was hitting .355/.460/.601. John Baker is hitting .324/.391/.512 in AA. I don’t see anything discouraging about any of those numbers. Sure, some of the picks look poor now, like McCurdy, Fritz, Brown, Obenchain, and Stanley. The draft may have been suboptimal, but “suboptimal” is not a synonym for “disaster” and “flop”.

But even if they’re right and all the draft picks fail, I’m still annoyed at them for mentioning Moneyball. Michael Lewis has turned Moneyball into a philosophical war, going to Sports Illustrated and radio and TV talk shows to ridicule the people who disagree with it. That makes people defensive and angry, and back and forth we go. In reality, the difference between the A’s draft philosophy and other teams is a difference of degree, not of kind. The A’s picked a high school pitcher in the fourth round this year. It’s not the first time a false conflict helped sell books, and it won’t be the last. But please, can we take a nice, long Moneyball timeout?

Maybe Will ought use the same polarizing name-calling strategy to promote Saving the Pitcher. Those coaches who abuse the arms of their players: they’re criminals! They’re a brainless, lower form of life! They’re primitive Neanderthals! Forget discussing reasonable degrees of risk. We need a War On Pitcher Abuse and we need it now!

Pitcher. Abuse. Two nouns, no verbs.

Ghosts in Me
by Ken Arneson
2004-06-02 2:26

For the last few days, I’ve been sick as a dog. Poor dog. As a result, my brain hasn’t been my brain. Go droop.

Strange thoughts come to mind when minds come to thinking strangely. Palindrome-like sentences aren’t sentences like palindromes.

So this weekend, I’ve been sick, my car was stolen, the A’s bullpen lost three games in a row, and my brain is was has been will be having been possessed by ghosts from outer space. I’ve had better weekends.

Perhaps, this ghost is was having suggested to me, my car isn’t having been stolen after all: it is just spontaneously has been leaped to a different quantum state where it is no longer will be visible in my local space-time continuum. Meanwhile, there’s another universe where my car is still parked outside, my sinuses are clear, my brain is unburdened by poltergeists, the English language gets along fine with only two grammatical tenses, and Arthur Rhodes actually gets people out.

Or perhaps I could just use a nice orbitofrontal cortical lesion, so I would no longer regret eating that spicy chicken pilaf at IKEA on Friday, just before Jim Mecir hung a screwball and all hell starting breaking loose.

Tom Hicks might want one of those lesions, too, if he finds out that IKEA now has ARÖD on sale for just $23.99. A warning though, if this tempts you: you might run into an IKEA shopper buying this. If you do, you might want to go find one of these as protection.

One good thing happened this weekend. For a moment, in my alien state of mind, I came to understand the source of conflict between the sabermetrician and the traditionalist: the fact that 73% of the universe is dark energy. Only 27% of the universe is observable and measurable, and the rest stays hidden until it feels like messing with your calculations. I found this to a general truth: no matter how you slice the universe, you can only shed light on 27% of what’s really going on. This means, basically, that the sabermetrician is 73% full of crap. Meanwhile, the traditionalist can’t see where he’s going, and falls into a black hole.

I’m going to the A’s-White Sox game this afternoon: Mulder vs. Buehrle. These two Marks matched up three times last year. Time of games: 1:54, 1:49, and 1:53. That means there is a 73% chance the game will leap into an alternate universe where Mark Mulder is possessed by the spirit of Mike Moore, Miguel Olivo gets taken over by Carlton Fisk, and we’ll be stuck out at the Coliseum until all the dark energy has been absorbed into the full moon of the midnight sky.

What was that pitch count again?
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-31 3:46

Kristen Schmidt of LSU threw about 350 pitches yesterday in the women’s NCAA softball College World Series. (I didn’t catch the exact number.) She pitched two complete games, and then 6 2/3 innings of a third game before her team was eliminated by California.

I watched the second and third games she played yesterday on ESPN2. By the fifth inning of the third game, she was clearly completely exhausted.

Will, is the underhand softball pitch any less stressful on the arm than the overhand baseball pitch? What is the baseball equivalent of 350 softball pitches?

Cal vs. UCLA tonight for the championship. Go Bears!

Dude, Where’s My Car?
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-31 2:31

Eating breakfast Saturday morning, I took a peek out my front window. Then I stood up, walked over to the window, and stared out.

“Um…um…” I stammered. “Where’s my car?”

My car had been parked out on the street overnight, and now she was wasn’t there. Gone. Our eight years together came to an end, just like that.

I called the police and reported her stolen. But somehow it doesn’t feel like theft. It feels almost like she left on her own.

Frankly, our relationship had been rather rocky lately. I never told her, but I was secretly planning on replacing her with a younger model as soon as I landed a new job. Perhaps she sensed that. Perhaps she knew the end was near, and dumped me before I could dump her.

Or maybe it’s just one of those midlife crisis things. You know, one night you can’t get to sleep and you realize, “I gotta see the Indy 500 once before I die,” and so you just get up and leave for Will Carroll country.

The policeman said it’s not unusual to get your car back within a few weeks or so. Perhaps. But even if she returns to me, I have to face the truth. It’s been nice, I’ll always cherish the memories of our time together, but you know how it is. It’s sad, but our relationship is over.

A Hole in the Sky
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-24 22:53

It was a dark and gloomy Saturday morning, damp and windy and overcast. The ground was wet from an overnight rain. It almost never rains in the Bay Area this time of year. The view out my front window looked displaced.

All morning, one part of my brain seemed focused on finding a way to disbelieve the news of Doug Pappas’ death. It kept failing. One part of my brain kept trying to figure out why that other part of my brain couldn’t stop thinking about Doug Pappas’ death, since I had never met or conversed with the man. That part of my brain kept failing, too.

After breakfast, I drove my wife and kids out to a birthday party in Walnut Creek, on the other side of the Oakland Hills. Normally, Mount Diablo serves as a landmark as you approach, but it was missing, shrouded by fog. How do mountains disappear?

I dropped my family off at the party, then headed towards the Coliseum for the A’s-Royals game. As I drove, I almost felt nauseous, like I had awakened inside a badly written book, or an MC Escher drawing, where I keep getting turned upside down by some logical flaw, but I can’t quite figure out where the hole in the logic is. I had an ominous feeling about the game, like something was going to go horribly wrong. Someone would get hurt, or Reggie Jackson would say something embarassingly arrogant in his number retirement ceremony, or the A’s would find a new way to lose in excruciating fashion.

Continue…

Spirit of Pappas Nominee
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-23 13:20

I propose that we create an award for writing that best exemplifies the spirit of Doug Pappas’ work. I’m not sure how such an award would work, but my first nominee is Ray Ratto, from today’s San Francisco Chronicle, in an article about the effort to bring baseball to San Jose. Money quote:

And never mind what they might have heard from Baseball Commissioner And Stadium Extortionist Bud Selig, and never mind what Peter Magowan says about territorial rights, and never mind what overmedicated civic boosters with laptops tell them about how San Jose’s perilously low self-esteem demands a baseball team.

Cash. Now. Because cash beats everything. This is baseball, after all.

To succeed with this, they come up with half a billion with no strings attached, they tell Selig they’re ready to damn the zoning laws and break ground, and then they will watch an evaporation of the territorial rights issue with the alacrity of butter on a hot brick.

Making Shoes
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-21 15:32

I was thinking about David Cameron’s post about Tim Hudson, and how a number of pitchers have been putting up excellent numbers despite low strikeout totals.

Then I came across this statement by Robert Bly, in an introductory note to some David Ignatow poetry:

A shoemaker in the Middle Ages…could be in business and yet never have to slide into statistical mentality, since he probably knew everyone who bought shoes from him, and one works on a shoe long enough so that love energy can rest in it, even for a few moments. But it’s clear that business in quantity, that is most post-Industrial-Revolution business, requires that Eros consciousness be given up, and the love energy be pulled back inside.

In Swedish, there’s a word for this “love energy”: snickarglädje, which translates roughly as the “joy of carpentry”. The word refers to the delighful little excessive details that craftsmen lovingly add to their work, not for the functionality, but just for the sheer joy of making something beautiful.

At a statistical level, there’s no such thing as snickarglädje. The quirks that rise up at an individual level get smoothed out in quantity.

If there’s anyone in major league baseball who exemplifies snickarglädje, it’s Tim Hudson. He has about six or seven different kinds of pitches he throws at different speeds with different arm angles. He seems to be making things up as he goes along, inventing new pitches as the situation calls for. Like that shoemaker in the Middle Ages, his work seems custom-made for every client. It’s a joy to watch. No formula can explain it.

Reasoning and Education
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-21 14:17

Thanks to everyone who responded to my homework question.

I asked the question as a step in helping our organization formulate an argument. I found it quite interesting that doing just that–arguing, reasoning–is the very thing that people here seem to find lacking in our education system today.

I’m going to duck explaining what our goal is, and ask some follow-up questions. (I don’t want to bias your responses so that you tell me what I want to hear.)

Suppose that our education system set as its primary task to teach people how to reason: to understand, work through, criticize, and present arguments. How would society benefit? How would the individual benefit? There are always tradeoffs, so what would we be losing with this shift in focus? How would we teach differently in elementary school? In high school? In college?

Dividing an Apple
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-21 13:49

Will might be interested in Robert X. Cringely’s new column on an Apple reorg. He hints that Apple might eventually stop selling Macs altogether. A quote:

It wouldn

Homework
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-20 11:35

I’m involved in a grass-roots organization (I’m not supposed to say exactly what kind), which has given its members a homework assignment.

My assignment is to ask this question: what do you want people to get from their education?

Lucky Me
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-20 11:25

Looks like I’ll get to witness Zack Greinke’s major league debut on Saturday.

Reggie Jackson is also getting his number retired. I *might* have some extra tickets; email me if you’re interested. I should know by tomorrow.

Old Men and No-Hitters
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-19 1:45

I cheated.

This week is “TV-turn-off” week at my daughter’s school. I’m not a big fan of holding this “event” during baseball season. I’d rather keep my TV off from November through February than go a week without baseball on TV. But I’m trying to be a good sport about it.

But when I heard that Randy Johnson had a perfect game in the ninth inning, I had to see it. Sorry, kids.

Watching the old man throw the perfect game brought back memories of the first no-no I ever saw in person: Nolan Ryan’s 6th no-hitter, thrown at the age of 43 in 1990.

For fun, I went back and checked the boxscore of that game. That prompted me to check the boxscore of Ryan’s 7th no-hitter, thrown a year later.

I noticed that these three games had something in common besides just being no-hitters thrown by men in their forties. Can you guess? I’ll post the answer in the comments.

Ken’s New Rules
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-17 1:46

I

Fantasy Baseball Haikuroscope
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-14 13:17

Aries
The pitcher you leave
out of your lineup at Coors
will throw a shutout.

Taurus
Jorge Posada’s
nose will hurt your head-to-head
totals this weekend.

Gemini
Don’t drop Brad Radke
just because he stinks it up
every now and then.

Cancer
A.J. Pierzynski’s
batting average should improve,
but you have options.

Leo
The stars have aligned
for Brandon Inge, but they’ll soon
unalign again.

Virgo
Carlos Delgado
and Vernon Wells will hit, but
doubt Eric Hinske.

Libra
Jon Lieber will get
enough run support, but not
Donovan Osborne.

Scorpio
Need a Bret Boone sub?
Recall Seattle’s good times
with Mark McLemore!

Sagittarius
Both Roger Clemens
and Kevin Brown have managed
to stay healthy. Jinx!

Capricorn
Bench Sammy Sosa
just because you have a hunch.
He’ll hit two homers.

Aquarius
Joel Pineiro
will only pitch like last year
after you drop him.

Pisces
Reject any trade
if you have to give up a
Florida Marlin.

Killer In Stinked
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-13 14:38

A’s record 2000-03 with a chance to advance to the ALCS: 0-9.
A’s record in 2004 with a chance to sweep a series: 0-5.

Sigh.

Advance Scouting Question
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-11 18:52

Ray Fosse said today on the A’s telecast that the Detroit Tigers don’t have an advance scout.

Is this just cheapskate penny-pinching? Or is it smart not to waste money on having scouts travel around, since so much video is now available? How much more can you see in person? How much is that extra information worth?

Go Get ‘Em, Will!
by Ken Arneson
2004-05-08 22:11

Right on. Irresponsible journalists like this one deserve all the public flogging you can give them.

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