That Time of the Year

It is now less than a month until opening day, which means it is time for every Cubs fan to get their hopes up and think this could be the year. Spring Training games started off terribly with 15 errors in the first four games and a dugout scuffle between Carlos Silva and Aramis Ramirez, but things have certainly started to look up despite the team's slow 2-5 start.

First off, the pitching looks good. Zambrano has yet to give up a run and if he can stay anger free, he could be a very valuable asset. Dempster has only made one appearance, but it was a strong outing as well. newcomer Matt Garza was a bit rusty in his first appearance, but had several good innings the second go around. Randy Wells and Carlos Marmol are also in top form.

Second, all of the big bats have shown up so far. Ramirez, who struggled last year, appears healthy and is driving in runs. Sophomores Starlin Castro and Tyler Colvin are both doing excellent and even Fukudome is doing a great job of showing why he deserves to be a leadoff hitter. The biggest surprise, however, is Alfonso Soriano, who in recent years has watched his offensive productivity dwindle, but this year things are so far, so good for the Cubs' left fielder.

It is, however, just Spring Training, but if this production can continue into the early months of the season, I honestly feel that this Cubs team can compete. As long as Sean Marshall stays as dominant as he has been and Kerry Wood stays healthy, the bullpen has the possibility to be along the lines of last year's San Diego bullpen squad, or even the Cubs bullpen of the last month of the 2010 season.

The Cubs may not be on anybody's list to take the NL Central this year, but nobody expected the Reds to take it last year, or for the Giants to go all the way. In fact, since when has baseball been so predictable? This may not be the Cubs' year, but if the Cubs ever do go to the world series again, it seems like it would come when it is least expected. I think San Francisco would agree with that.

A Tale of Three (Baseball) Cities

The Los Angeles Dodgers have an ownership wrapped in a bitter divorce. On the other side of the country, the New York Mets have an ownership marred in scandal. Bad business moves that have little to do with baseball have left the players, coaches, and fans of both teams to watch and pray that things turn around fast.

Somewhere between the rain clouds covering Dodger Stadium and Citi Field, a failing Texas Rangers team struggling to be relevant amongst fans in a market dominated by The Dallas Cowboys has for years tried to succeed. After season after season of low attendance and minimal success, former player and legendary pitcher Nolan Ryan, along with his business partner Chuck Greenberg take control of the talented team and watch as they cruise to the World Series. Having Ryan never been able to get the Rangers to the fall classic as a player, but as an owner of only a few months may have had more to do with the current players on the roster than any business decision he did might be true, but it didn’t stop the Dallas area from getting excited.

Ryan’s newfound ownership is something that all MLB teams should take note of, or at least potential owners. With the Mets and Dodgers both in financial disarray due to poor management from owners who seemed more concerned with profits and lucrative lifestyles than running the team to win as much as possible and please the fans, it would seem like a no brainer that this type of business management should throw up a red flag. Instead, Donald Trump’s name has been thrown in for potential buyers of the New York Mets.

Whether Trump’s name being thrown in the mix is rumor, pure speculation, or a serious threat of new management is beside the point. Whether Trump is a real fan of baseball also has nothing to do with the ridiculousness of this premise of his as the next owner of the Mets. Trump has had a well-publicized history of rough business results. In 2009, Trump’s own Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for bankruptcy. Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago even failed to pay a loan in 2008. Why is a man like this interested in taking over an already troubled baseball franchise?

The only thing that would make this potential scenario salvageable would be if he were to bring on a dedicated person with a longtime history with the MLB as a business partner. Whether it be a former player, manager, or coach it doesn’t matter. Just as long as it is someone to steer him clear of making the same past mistakes the Mets have been put through and puts them on the right track to earn the faith back in the lost fans.

Baseball should not be run as if the games are played on Wall Street. It should have the same heart and soul put into it from the business side, as it does on the field, behind the plate, and on the mound. If this is done, the profits will come, or it will fail for all the right reasons: because it is not a viable market for baseball. Clearly Los Angeles and New York are not places where a baseball team should be struggling. Texas, however has always been a tricky market for the baseball crowd, but having a Hall of Fame former player running things has seemed to work just fine, At least for one season.

MVP?

Today it was announced that Joey Votto of the Reds won the National League's Most Valuable Player award in Major League Baseball. One of the men he beat out was The Cardinal's Albert Pujols. As a Cubs fan, I could care less who got the award between these two players, as both of them are players for Central Division rivals of the cubbies. The problem I have is how by awarding Votto the MVR, they have taken away the integrity of this year's Silver Slugger and Golden Glove awards for First Base.

Albert Pujols won both of those awards, showcasing that he was considered the best offensive and defensive player at first base among all national league first base players. Hold up, Pujols was voted the best offensive AND defensive player of the year among all national league first baseman, but Votto, another first base player, won the MVP? He must have stole 60 bases then to counter those and win MVP! Nope.

It appears that the awards were decidedly split to give Pujols a "second place" trophy, which just diminishes the value. The voters should have given all three awards to votto, or split the slugger and glove awards between the two, because now the league has just created a glaring contradiction in the forms of the three shiny trophies.

I'm going to bed

A different kind of nerd

I haven't posted on here in forever, but that doesn't mean I have forgotten about this blog. Recently I saw a commercial on ESPN where two jock looking high school students wearing letterman jackets are sitting in the cafeteria discussing baseball statistics. To be more specific they are arguing about the ERA difference between San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum for home games versus away games. Then several geeky looking kids are seen standing over the jocks and one of the dorks says: "Nerds."

No, this article isn't about the stereotypes of the commercial, but rather how much truth there is to that commercial. I have always been a sports fan. When I was in junior high I watched basketball. In high school I started watching football and more recently for me, I have gotten into baseball. One of the things that the people I work with and talk baseball with have noticed I have become a fan of the stats side of baseball and I believe this is one of the main reasons I have really connected with the sport as of late. More than any other sport, baseball allows me to bring my nerdiness and use in a sport!

When basketball fans talk, they reminisce of the spectacular jam. Football players talk about an amazing hit, or great touchdown run. Baseball players talk in numbers. Pujols went 3 for 5. Zambrano lasted 6 and 2/3 innings with only 1 earned run. While I have never been good at math, exploring different formulas and ways of calculating a player's worth has kept me fascinated well past the final inning of a great game. So much that I actually went to a SABR meeting!

Baseball. The sport of nerds...unless you count chess.

Big Brother is always Watching

Bear with me for a second, I promise this isn't a video game spiel...

Recently, Conan O’Brien announced that he will be returning to TV with his new show on TBS. Before he settled with TBS, he was in negotiations with several different offers, the most surprising negotiation being with Microsoft.

Microsoft was in talks with Conan to bring his show to the software giant’s Xbox 360 subscription based online service, “Xbox Live.” If the deal went through, Conan’s new show would have been streamable from any xbox live subscriber’s xbox 360 video game console and could be watched at anytime if they happened to miss the live broadcast.

ESPN recently announced that ESPN 3 would be coming to Xbox Live in an instantly streamable format, showing that Microsoft is heavily looking at bringing more than videogames to its live subscribers.

This type of media broadcast is nothing new. The internet allows users to stream content live or watch pre-aired programs from their computers and this type of video streaming may be the future of television programming.

One thing this type of broadcasting does much better than television, is it opens up a much more accurate rating system. The current rating system for television is not nearly as accurate as you might think. For one, college students are not taken into account in this system, as no rating boxes are offered for kids living away from home. Another thing that leaves this sytem inaccurate is that the at home rating boxes don’t account for when the television is on, but nobody is paying attention and telephone surveys leave the information to trust that the person being interviewed is being honest about what they watch.

Accurate ratings are important to broadcasters. The more people watching a program, the higher they charge for advertising spots. Low ratings can mean a show gets cancelled. In Conan O’Brien’s case, he had low ratings, but a large part of his audience was believed to be in the ignored demographic of college age kids, mainly males.

Xbox live and most other online game services already constantly monitor the user’s interaction with the service. For gaming, it is used as a way to gather information and discover glitches for the games people are playing. Say, a game developer looks at last month’s game statistics they compiled through xbox live and notice that in, say, halo 3, the use a certain weapon shot up 300% from the last month.

This monitoring systemlets the developers know there is either a glitch being exploited, or possibly the weapon is overpowered and needs to be fixed. This type of “rating” system lets developers monitor the gameplay and make adjustments where they see fit. Gone are the days where if a game ships with a few glitches, it is overlooked. Now, games can constantly be tweaked and updated, correcting overlooked problems during the game’s development.

Using this type of program monitoring on broadcasted programming seems like it could correct the problem of unreliable ratings, but it has one huge draw back: privacy concerns.

Gamers don’t mind constantly being monitored to offer the chance of helping developers find the bugs, but programming viewers may. Knowing that what programming a person is watching is traceable by the developers seems a little bit like “Big Brother” is watching. Maybe the viewer is watching something he doesn’t want others to know they are watching. Maybe sometimes unreliable is the best that can be done.

Except in the case of World Cub Soccer officiating and for blown “perfect game” baseball calls.

Everything that happened happened (sort of)

I haven't been on here in ages, but I aim to get back to writing on here as regularly as possible.

Recently, I came into a lot of free time. Lost just aired its series finale and that has led me to not only gain an hour that I would normally be spending, but has also saved me time from looking up theories online. I am one of the 50% of the fans out there who actually loved the ending, but that is way off topic and is to be discussed somewhere other than here.

However, one way that Lost will continue on with me is through its influences. Show runners Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse have included references or flat out inclusions to their favorite literary works. One of those books is Kurt vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. I had friends who discussed Vonnegut before, but I was always hesitant to read it, because for some unknown reason I always thought his writing style would be way above my head. That is not the case. Vonnegut is accessible, yet still very intelligent. Much like Chuck Palahniuk.

What drew me in even more is the content in Slaughterhouse-Five. It is a somewhat autobiographical accounts of Vonnegut's World War 2 experiences, but rather than make an accurate re-telling, he decided to throw realism out the door and mix his real-life events with Sci-fi elements. I absolutely love that! Maybe that would have been a better route for all the memoir authors out there who seem to fudge their life story (like the A Million Little Pieces author).

In the first chapter, Vonnegut recalls a professor asking him if his book is an anti-war book, as it may as well be an anti-glacier book. Because you can't stop a glacier just like war. Global Warming seems to be stopping the glaciers, but can it stop the war?

Even Deeper

Bare with me for a bit. Let's say In thirty years from now an amazing artist will create a painting that will rival the Mona Lisa itself in popularity and become an iconic work of art. This same artist follows it up with another amazing painting. A guitarist records the world's most amazing guitar solo. A filmmaker creates the world's next Citizen Kane. All three take a sense of pride in the fact that this will make them immortal. They may die the very next day, but those paintings, songs, and movies will live on forever, or so they think.

That painting will last until a star light years away explodes into a supernova, sending gamma rays towards Earth. This is if the Earth isn't first swallowed by the Sun when it goes into its next phase as a red giant (contrary to popular belief, the sun will not explode into a supernova, it isn't powerful enough). of course, this too is if we aren't struck by a meteor the size of Canada. Even if mankind doesn't nuke itself to death, there is always the threat of a supervolcano going off. I'm not even talking about just a small earthquake that sends California into the ocean, creating Arizona Bay. I mean worldwide devastation.

There are millions of ways the Earth can end at any second, which is why the Monks who create works of art by blowing sand have the right idea. They know that the next great threat is around the corner, so why bother being naive enough to believe that their artwork will be their legacy. So, they just sweep it up after everybody takes their pictures, thinking they've captured the moment for eternity. When in reality, once the Earth's core stops spinning and the magnetic field stops deadly rays from destroying, that picture and the person who captured it will be fried (ok I admit I stole that from the terrible movie, "the Core," but so far everything else has been scientifically accurate.) Or in a couple thousand years we could collide into Venus, which IS a possibility.

Nothing lasts forever. Even Jupiter's red spot is getting smaller after all. There was no real point to this story, except I just saw the History channel's 3 hour special on the 7 signs of the apocalypse explained scientifically, while I was trying to create a clever graphic. Which explains why I mixed art with the Earth's total annihilation.