dr_phil_physics | Entries tagged with baseball

We're past mid-September now. NCAA college and NFL football has begun. And I guess Tuesday is the first Detroit Redwings pre-season hockey game.

But there's still baseball.

Two leagues, six divisions and as of this morning, only one team has clinched the playoffs -- the NL Central leading St. Louis Cardinals. Ah, too bad. The Chicago Cubs are also NL Central, so no Division championship for them this year. Worse, they're in third place, behind the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But...

The numbers are much more interesting than that.

z-St. Louis  --
Pittsburgh   4½
Chicago Cubs  5

So, there's only a half game behind the Pirates. And not all that far from first place -- they didn't put the key in the paper, but I think z = clinched at least a Wild Card (x = won, y = Wild Card). But even better, is the Cubs' record as of this morning:

Chicago Cubs  87-61 (.588) 5

That's better than the leader of the AL East:

Toronto       85-62 (.574)

And better than the AL Central:

Kansas City   86-61 (.585)

And better than the AL West:

Texas Rangers 79-68 (.537)

And better than the NL East:

New York Mets 84-64 (.568)

And better than the NL West:

Los Angeles D 85-61 (.582)

In other words, if the Cubs played in any other division in either league, then their record would put them in first place.

Now, of course this is a nonsense argument of statistics. But if the season ended this morning, the Cubs would be in the playoffs through the NL Wild Card:

Pittsburgh    +½
Chicago Cubs  --
Giants        10
Nationals     10

I haven't had much to say about the Cubs this year, because ever since they got sold, WGN just doesn't carry the games anymore. And Fox Sports Detroit is naturally showing the Detroit Tigers. And other TV games usually feature the usual suspects -- St. Louis, NYM/NYY, Dodgers/Giants... The hapless Cubs just don't get much coverage.

It's been a strange season. Poor Detroit is now in the basement of the AL Central, 69-78 (.469) 16½ back, where once they were leading it. The Tigers are long out of the playoffs, and today's non-page 1 headline asked the dreaded question: Can the Tigers serve as spoilers? It also looked like it would be the Washington National's year, as they led the NL East for a long time. Now they've folded, 7 games behind the Mets. And the Boston Red Sox? At the bottom of the AL East along with Tampa Bay? The Yankees are only three back, but the current Wild Card race is all the leaders -- Blue Jays, Royals, Rangers.

The word "hapless"? Well in late September 2015, it doesn't deserve to go to the Cubbies, but rather the poor All of Major League Baseball trailing Phillies:

Philadelphia  56-94 (.373) 29

But they aren't the farthest behind team, either. The Brewers are 30 games back.

One thing for certain, while there will be plenty of the usual suspects in the playoffs, there will also be some surprises. And at least the playoff games get shown on TV.

Shall the Cubbies battle cry be, not "Wait Til Next Year", but "Wait Til Next Month"?

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Look! It's Rodney!

Mrs. Dr. Phil and her mother Momcat were looking through one of the suitcases of things brought back from Atlanta. So when I got up after a nap, I found at the feet of our black bear footrest between our chairs, Wendy's collection of Rodney and Friends.

Of course, Big Rodney is still high atop the CD bookshelf.

Oh, and Wendy had a Wendy Braxton signature Louisville Slugger made at a conference once, and we've put that next to our Wrigley Field brick. (grin)

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: amused

It May Not Be The World Series We Wanted...

Okay, so the Cubs aren't in it -- it's the only baseball LJ icon I've got. (grin)

We loved the Middle of America LCS -- NO Yankees, no East or West Coast teams. Frankly we wanted the Lake Michigan Series -- Milwaukee versus Detroit. Didn't happen. Sigh. In fact we got the opposite card. But not to worry.

... But The One We've Got Is A Humdinger

We've enjoyed just about every post-season game we've seen. And it's been a terrific World Series. And with the Cardinals trailing 3 games to 2, and down two runs in the bottom of the ninth, it took some real heroic baseball to tie it. They did. Extra innings! Apparently first extra inning World Series game since the White Sox and Astros a few years ago. Then it was a nail biter until the Cardinals won it 10-9 in the bottom of the 11th inning, ending at 12:40am EDT.

First Game 7 required in nine years. That Wednesday was rained out means Game 7 gets to be Friday night. Let the kids stay up for this one.

And maybe we'll have extra innings once again. (grin)

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: thrilled

Moneyball [PG-13]

Holland 7, Theatre #7, 3:30pm

Well this will cost us more money, since we're going to have to buy the DVD when it comes out and add Moneyball to our collection of baseball movies.

I have a lot of respect for Brad Pitt, but we haven't liked a lot of his roles. We liked his Benjamin Button more than a lot of his critics. And before this, I guess I thought his manic crazy man in Twelve Monkeys was his best performance, followed by his brash young detective in Seven. But in Moneyball, Pitt has come of age.

As for the Oakland A's, while they are an American League team, they have two redeeming features. There's that whole underdog Oakland scrappy ball playing thing and the local angle. And after we moved down here, Grand Rapids started a Single-A minor league baseball team. For the first three years, the West Michigan Whitecaps were an Oakland A's franchise -- 1994-96. And in their third year, they won the Midwest League championship under Mike Quade, now manager of the Chicago Cubs.

Back to Moneyball. Brad Pitt plays Robert Redford here, or rather Billy Beane -- the general manager of the A's. Jonah Hill does a spectacular job as the new Flounder, or rather the geek economist following the sabermetrics footsteps of baseball stats guru Bill James -- SABR being the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. This is not Hollywood's first foray into such statistical measurement analysis. The late CBS TV show Numb3rs used sabermetrics in a number of episodes.

With a lot of dialogue, it's no surprise that Aaron Sorkin is involved. Yet surprisingly, it isn't all math and computers and talk -- at its heart this really is a baseball movie, with a lot of tension at key moments. Good use of real archival footage, too.

What Moneyball is about is challenging the established order. The A's budget on one hand and the Yankee's budget on the other. And all the other teams in between. How can you compete when coming close to the ALCS one year, your best players can be sucked away? So Billy Beane tries a new tact. What makes this exercise fun is that from the end credits, a lot of the crusty old guard scouts were played by the real crusty old guard scouts.

Not having read the book or having an encyclopedic knowledge of the A's, the whole movie comes off as fresh and exciting. Not your usual baseball movie, though if you think of it, all the great recent baseball movies, Field of Dreams, For Love of the Game and The Rookie, are not your usual baseball movie.

And as one who regularly jinxes his teams when I try to watch them, I can feel for Billy Beane not being able to watch his team play. (grin)

Highly Recommended

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: pleased

A PBS Crowd

In 1993, documentary filmmaker extraordinaire Ken Burns came to Allendale and Grand Rapids to talk about The Civil War. We'd only been down here a year or two, but for Ken it was a homecoming, as his father taught anthropology and photography at Grand Valley State University for twenty years. We managed to make it both his talk downtown at Fountain Street Church and at the main GVSU campus. I seem to recall we were right up front at the Armstrong Theatre, and though I cannot recall how full the auditorium was, it seemed like an intimate personal talk at the time.

In 2011, GVSU is celebrating their beginnings fifty years ago, and Ken Burns came back to be their third speaker. Ostensibly his talk Thursday night was supposed to be about the next fifty years. But come on, the man is a historian. You know he wasn't going to talk about the future per se.

During the introduction, a comment surfaced from Ken's talk with students in the afternoon. "He talks in paragraphs!" Ah, the joys of literacy. (grin)

Ken Burns regaled us for about an hour, and then they took questions. Mrs. Dr. Phil asked about the book American Uprising, about the 1811 slave revolt of New Orleans that no one seems to know about. Not sure he knew the book, but finessed a philosophical answer about us versus the other and racism in America.

Tonight our PBS station did their WGVU Newsmakers program and Patrick Center had a half-hour interview with Ken. Much as in the two talks in 1993, I was struck with how well prepared he is to talk -- which means you hear some of the same prepared talking points. But of course. If you attended my PHYS-2050 course lectures in Fall 2010 and Spring 2011, you'd hear some of the same dialog, the same examples, the same jokes. It's called being good at what you do. That Ken Burns is a good speaker and tells good stories in person, in addition to his real day job as being a documentary filmmaker, well, that's just bonus.

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: happy

We Made It

First spring training game from Hohokam Park in Mesa AZ for the Cubbies on WGN. (Cubs ahead 1-0 over Dodgers after 1st inning.)

It's a lovely sunny day here in West Michigan today, too. So glad I arrived home on Friday night, because Saturday evening deteriorated into a sloppy snow/rain/freezing sliding mess. Left us with a nice clean white coating on the older snow, so it is very pretty now.

Next signs of spring? Daylight Savings Time (Revised) next weekend. And then March Madness and the NCAA Men's and Women's Basketball marathons.

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: bouncy

A Dark Period 1997-2009

The National League has lost to the American League 13 times since the NL won the All-Star Game in 1996 -- the 2002 All-Star Game was a tie -- and the drought is now over. And for once, I managed to see the key plays.

We weren't watching the All-Star Game, they've been too depressing with the Senior Circuit's run of defeats, but at around 10:55pm EDT I tuned in to FOX and saw the Chicago Cubs' Marlon Byrd was at the plate, facing a Chicago White Sox pitcher with an 0-2 count, 2 outs, runners on 1st and 3rd and the AL league up 1-0 in the top of the 7th. This is a classic Cubs situation. The sole representative of the Chicago NL franchise in the game, Byrd managed to extend the count to 3-2 and then walked, loading the bases. Atlanta Brave Brian McCann then sent one to rattle around by the right field wall. One run in, two runs in. And then Byrd had a marvelous slide across home plate, beating the throw and the NL took the lead 3-1. And that would turn out to be the final score. With the inevitable pitching change for the AL, it was time to put the kitties to bed. So I saw the best five minutes of the game. (grin)

As for the title of this post, you can forgive a Cubs fan for taking his victories when he can. While McCann hit the ball and was named the MVP, it was Byrd who kept the inning alive and scored the last run and put the AL down by two. Why? What were you thinking?

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: surprised

Usually This Kind Of Windy Night...

... happens in the wintertime. There'd be hours of horizontal snow and we could imagine a big drift forming in front of the garage door. But it's about 52°F outside and not 12°F, and it's raining not snowing. But we're definitely getting 30-40 mph with some gusts expected to get up to 60 mph. October has dawned cool and after a September filled with sunshine, we've had a lot of gray and rainy days.

Hopefully we won't lose (m)any shingles from the roof tonight.

Can't Win For Losing

So gas prices dropped nearly a dime over the course of the weekend and on Monday, regular was $2.38.9. But I didn't need gas on Monday, I needed it on Tuesday morning. And I had a 5¢/gal discount slip from the grocery store. So naturally gas was up 7¢/gal to $2.45.9. Dammit -- too often the discount slips get me almost back to where gas had been, rather than giving me a lower price than before. I mean, okay, better to get 5¢/gal off of any price, but it never quite works out for me. (grin)

Did We Just Have The Best Play-Off Game?

So by last weekend, all but one of the Major League Baseball division and wild card winners had been chosen. But the AL Central was still a contest as the Detroit Tigers managed to keep blowing the lead they had in games. All the way to Saturday when they let the Minnesota Twins tie them. And Sunday both the Twins won and the Tigers won. And we're off to a one-game playoff.

Sunday could've been the last baseball game played in the Minneapolis Metrodome. But no, they had to changeover to play Monday Night Football with Brett Favre against the Green Bay Packers -- Vikings won -- and then change back to baseball in time for Tuesday's 4-ish CDT start.

I didn't watch or listen to the whole game, but had it on during part of the drive home and passed by it on the TV a couple of times. Tigers were up 3-1 in the 3rd, but eventually it was tied up 5-all after nine innings. Oh boy, extra value baseball.*** They took it to the 12th inning, where the Twinkies prevailed 6-5. So Tuesday's one-game playoff won't be the last baseball game played in the Metrodome either.

Congratulations, Minneapolis, you get to go to New York and play the Yankees.

Dr. Phil

*** -- I love extra value baseball. My idea of an ideal World Series is to go into the seventh game and go 22-23 innings. Long enough that there's not a single hot dog or bag of peanuts left in the park, that the vendors can just sit on the stairs and watch the rest of the game because they've sold everything and it doesn't get decided until 3 or 4 in the morning and the next day half the country is bleary-eyed from staying up all night. Man, it wouldn't get any better than that. I wouldn't care who won at that point or whether the score was 1-0 or 21-20. Maybe a second baseman could be the winning pitcher. (huge grin) All Out Baseball -- There's No Tomorrow. (triple-play-grin)

Current Mood: amused

27 0 0 0

A perfect game in baseball -- 27 outs, 0 hits, 0 runs, 0 men on base. On Thursday 23 July 2009 Mark Buehrle of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game, as the Sox beat Tampa Bay 5-0 at Bill Veeck Field in Chicago. In celebration, we watched one of my favorite baseball movies, For Love of the Game.

Ping-Pong

Gas prices earlier in the week jumped from $2.24.9/gal to $2.45.9/gal. Then dropped to $2.36.9 for Thursday, up to $2.55.9 on Friday and is now $2.49.9/gal on Saturday. I think Adam Smith's "unseen hand" has gotten the tremors...

Cooler Heads Rarely Prevail

The cool July continues. While the last couple of days have drifted up to 83°F and 85°F, it's still been in the 70s for much of the day. Lows in the upper 50s and mid 60s, though, shifted to nearly 70°F and the humidity has shot up. Naturally there are letters in the Grand Rapids Press pointing to the cool summer and either mocking the concept of global warming or, as in one case, claiming that efforts to alleviate global warming have worked too well. I'd be happy if I thought these were written in jest, but these letters all have a tone about them, an edge, which suggests that the writer is utterly opposed to global warming existing.

Sigh. The lack of science literacy in the general populace scares me sometimes.

Away

I'll be scarce myself over the next couple of days. The American Association of Physics Teachers Summer Meeting is all the way over in Ann Arbor MI -- so I have a talk to give on Monday. Probably need to spend some time putting together the PowerPoint and distilling my story down to eight minutes. (urk!) Then pack sometime, wander over sometime, etc.

OAS Project

Due Date: Thursday 20 August 2009

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: busy

Florida State - 37
Ohio State - 6

I meant to write this a few days ago, but just haven't had the time. The score above, however, tells the whole story. Well, you think it does. Until you find out that (a) the score is from 31 May 2009 and (b) the game was NCAA Division I Baseball.

Yup. That's a baseball score.

Ouch! I take it the Buckeyes were getting creamed 32-0 by the fifth inning. But, barring weather or other interruptions, a baseball game is 9 innings. So as usual, sometimes you have to play the game.

(1) Texas - 3
Boston College - 2

The day before, Saturday 30 May 2009, #1 seeded Texas managed to win by a run. Yup -- you gotta play the game. And a baseball game is 9 innings. Except of course when it goes 25 innings.

"There's no tying in baseball!"

And there's no time limit.

What a lovely, perfect game. (grin)

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: chipper

The Latest Big Food Outrage... In West Michigan!

The West Michigan Whitecaps Single-A minor league baseball team has a really nice ballpark and one helluva great park management operation. Originally named Old Kent Park, when the venerable and local Old Kent Bank was snapped up by Fifth-Third Bank, the new bank couldn't leave well enough alone and had the name changed to Fifth-Third, despite there already being another Fifth-Third park in the Midwest League.

Now they've always done great food. One tasty treat is the Loaded Pig Swimming -- a BBQ pork chop sandwich which Mrs. Dr. Phil and I usually split, rather than trying to choke them down by ourselves. But their new item...

Behold The Fifth-Third Burger

The stats: Five one-third pound patties (Fifth-Third, get it?), "with lettuce, tomato, salsa, sour cream, chili and Fritos on an eight-inch sesame seed bun" and is intended to serve four for twenty bucks. Or one person can try to eat it all in one sitting and get a T-shirt.

Need calories? Have 4889. Want some fat? We got it -- 299 grams. Sodium? 10.887 grams. No, really, not milligrams... grams. Even before the baseball season starts, this has made news -- even on CNBC. Maybe the Travel Channel's Man vs. Food guy will come here. I may be very large and fat, but I couldn't possibly consume one by myself. It'd hurt, I'd explode, I'd die.

The T-shirts don't come in my size anyway.

Dr. Phil

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It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
And It's A One Game World Series
Take Me Out To The Spreadsheet
An Evening With Ken Burns
Whew
Cubs Win The All-Star Game!
Blustering Rattling BLUSTERING
A Game Of Numbers
A Game of Numbers
Well Isn't This Healthy

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Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Those Who Lie In Wait, Dream Deep

Entries tagged with baseball

3

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

And It's A One Game World Series

Take Me Out To The Spreadsheet

An Evening With Ken Burns

Whew

Cubs Win The All-Star Game!

Blustering Rattling BLUSTERING

A Game Of Numbers

A Game of Numbers

Well Isn't This Healthy