Category Archives: Baseball
Baseball is here! It has been for weeks. Due to the blog bogs, it’s been a while since my last baseball post. It’s high time to rectify that!
One problem is that the Twins don’t give one a whole lot to talk about. They rarely earn many headlines on the hardball pages. (This is at least partially due to not earning many runs on the baseball fields.) We’re not dead last in any key stat, and we’re even doing pretty good in some areas. That’s relatively good news for Twins fans!
Today I want to talk about baseball, old school versus new school. It’s a choice you make — or one that’s thrust upon you — and which you adopt often informs many of your other views on the sport.
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9 Comments | tags: Brian Kenny, designated hitter, For The Record, Harold Reynolds, instant replay, Jim Thome, MLB, MLB channel, MLB Network, MLB Now, new school, old school, umpires | posted in Baseball, Life
I will confess that, by the end of a 162-game season, baseball starts to wear just a little bit. If your team, or even another team you like, makes the playoffs, that can make it exciting again. And even if not, the playoffs usually feature some pretty good baseball; last year’s were really fun to watch, for example.
But at that point it’s been six months of baseball. I have the Fox Sports North cable channel, and between them and Fox Sports, it is possible to watch almost every single Minnesota Twins game. And I do try. (Some weekday day games I can’t watch, of course, but MLB has a Flash app that provides a way to monitor a game in near real-time.)
The flip side is that, come spring I’m cravin’ me some baseball!
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28 Comments | tags: Alexi Casilla, Ben Revere, Billy Beane, Jeremy Brown, Minnesota Twins, Moneyball | posted in Baseball, Movies
(Click on pics for full-size.)
The new job has continued to really suck up my creative juices, which has made it very hard to write blog posts. It’s not for lack of ideas, I have months’ worth of those in the pipeline. The problem is that my job now consists of writing lots of formal documents and endless emails to try to get others to implement designs.
That makes other writing seem like more of the same; just another day banging out thoughts and ideas. Not fun. I miss the fun. Unless this job stabilizes somehow, I may have to all but give up blogging until I retire. (Fortunately, that could be as soon as this June… I’m very tempted!)
Anyway, for now, a post from last year from my all-but-defunct baseball blog:
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9 Comments | tags: Alexi Casilla, Minnesota Twins, Target Field, Toronto Blue Jays | posted in Baseball
So there was a small happy hour thing after work where I got to see a couple of friends I haven’t seen in a long while and eat some tasty appetizers. It was at a place I’d never visited, so that was an added plus. The onion rings were very tasty, the deep-fried cheese ravioli and the jalapeno cheese curds were pretty good, and the wings weren’t bad.
Then I got a speeding ticket on the way home. Had me dead to rights, so I can’t complain. Gonna be expensive, but such is life. Considering I’d had a couple of beers, it could have gotten sticky, so I’m really not complaining. Two beers, lots of food and three hours, so I’m very sure I was fully sober and legal, but the cop could have made it ugly.
Then there was some sort of political debate thingy on TV I felt compelled to watch before I could turn to what I really wanted to watch… The Giants winning the NLCS!
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8 Comments | tags: Detroit Tigers, NLCS, onion rings, San Francisco Giants, speeding ticket, St. Louis Cardinals, World Series | posted in Baseball
After another long day at work, I’m watching the Detroit Tigers take on the New York Yankees in game 3 of the ALCS. The Tigers won both earlier games, and I understand no team has come back from an 0-2 start. With Justin Verlander on the mound, the Tigers have a very good shot at winning, which would put the Yankees in an even deeper hole.
Putting a little icing on my oatmeal cookie, the San Francisco Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals last night, so those two are tied 1-1 in the NLCS. Dare I dream that the World Series will be Giants vs Tigers? (I do, I do!) The Championship series is best of seven, so — assuming the Tigers win tonight — they just need to win one more game.
Tonight I’m republishing an article I wrote earlier this year on my baseball blog. This is about some of the reasons I’ve come to love this sport so much.
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24 Comments | tags: ALCS, baseball is boring, Detroit Tigers, Minnesota Twins, MLB, New York Yankees, NLCS, World Series | posted in Baseball
Oops!
To My Subscribers: you just got an email saying I’d published a new article, but if you followed the link it won’t (shouldn’t!) work. I’m sure we’ve all done it: clicked the big blue [Publish] button rather than the harder-to-notice white [Save Draft] button.
I was working on an article for later, got as far as I wanted to today, and meant to save it as a draft for later. But the Big Blue was just too easy to click!
Fortunately, WordPress allows you to put a published post back into draft status (and I set it to Private just to be sure).
So, oops, my bad! Cat got out of the bag early, but kitty is kenneled again until later!
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Leave a comment | tags: ALCS, Delmon Young, Derek Jeter, Detroit Tigers, Doug Fister, Joe Girardi, Miguel Cabrera, MLB, New York Yankees, Prince Fielder | posted in Baseball, Writing
Well, it wasn’t unexpected, but the (damn) Yankees beat the Baltimore Orioles today in the fifth game of their ALDS series. And yesterday the Detroit Tigers beat the Oakland Athletics in their fifth game. The Division Series is best of five games, so now the Yankees (can we just assume there’s always a “damn” in front of that name?) and the Tigers move into the next round, the ALCS.
Yesterday the San Francisco Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds in the fifth game of their NLDS series. This has all made for some exciting playoff baseball. It’s painful to see a team lose 1-2-3 (such as, say, a certain Minnesota team did to a certain New York [cough, spit] team in 2010). It’s much more exciting to see the series go to 2-2. That way you get the maximum number of games, and that fifth game breaks the tie and wins the series. And that fifth game is very intense.
But wait! Astute readers may be thinking, aren’t there four Division Series games? I count only three. Indeed you do, but did you notice the title of today’s post?
The Washington Nationals are playing the St. Louis Cardinals as I write this!
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2 Comments | tags: ALDS, Detroit Tigers, MLB, NLDS, Oakland Athletics, San Francisco Giants, St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers, Washington Nationals | posted in Baseball
It’s been another very disappointing season for the Minnesota Twins and their fans.
They managed to do better than last year, but that’s not saying much. Depending on how you look at it, 2011 was the third (or second or fifth) worst season in franchise history (which began in 1961). The equivocation comes from whether you look at the win percentage, games lost or games won.
This season is the sixth (or fourth or seventh) worst season in the 52-year history of the Minnesota Twins. It’s also only the second time they’ve such a bad win percentage two years running (and many don’t expect next year to be stellar, either).
I’ll explain about this and more, but regardless of how you look at it, it was an awful year!
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62 Comments | tags: ALDS, American League, Central Division, meteor strike, Minnesota Twins, MLB, NLDS, Texas Rangers, World Series | posted in Baseball
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was…”
Many of you will recognize that as the first words of John 1:1 in the Christian New Testament Bible. There’s also a cross-reference to the very first words of that Bible (Old Testament in this case), “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
This is about words and about beginnings.
Others might recognize it as a conflation of the lead-in to a Moody Blues tune, OM, from In Search of the Lost Chord, and the title of a song from another album, In the Beginning, from On the Threshold of a Dream.
(Yes “album.” I’m old!)
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23 Comments | tags: brain, brain mind problem, computationalism, computer guy, human brain, human mind, logos, Marriage, Moody Blues, rational mind, René Descartes, Theory of Consciousness, theory of mind | posted in Baseball, Basics, Books, Computers, Life, Movies, Opinion, Philosophy, Politics, Rant, Science, Society, The Interweb, TV
Logos con carne 