Andy Roddick is in the Wimbledon finals.
Fifteen Major League Baseball games will be played tomorrow.
The forecast in my town calls for a high of 78 degrees.
I will be eating barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs.
Edit: And Joey Chestnut just defended his title by eating more hot dogs in 10 minute than I do in 10 years.
Who cares that the unemployment rate has hit 9.5%?
So far this season, I’ve seen Daniel Murphy fall over himself trying to catch fly balls, Ryan Church miss third base, Oliver Perez walk Jaime Moyer to force in a run, and Luis Castillo drop a routine fly ball to cost a game against the Yankees. These are just the things that stick out. Now I can add a sweep at the hands of the Yankees at Citi Field that ended with the 500th save for Mariano Rivera. But not before Rivera also got his first career RBI, thanks to Francisco Rodriguez WALKING HIM WITH THE BASES LOADED.
Let me repeat that. Francisco Rodriguez walked Mariano Rivera — a 38-year old pitcher with 2 career at-bats who’s played in the American League his entire career — to force in a run. You can’t make this shit up. According to Wikipedia, this has now disqualified him for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
This was after two games where the Mets were outscored 14-1 and outhit 22-4. I thought I might not actually have to put the word “embarrassing” in the title for this blog post, as the Mets were only losing 3-2 for basically the entire game. It turns out they ended up only losing 4-2, but that final run was an all-too-fitting end to this debacle of a subway series. This is what happens when the lineup is “David Wright and Friends”, and the frontman doesn’t get a hit the entire series. Johan Santana missing the series didn’t help either.
I can’t wait until this team is fucking exploded at the end of year. I wanted more done last offseason, but now that they are flailing so spectacularly, I hope it means the explosion will be that much more complete. To be clear, I want Omar Minaya to be engulfed in the all-encompassing fire. Also to be clear, I don’t want Minaya to even try to salvage THIS season at this point. The only reason this season even looks salvageable is due to the NL East being the worst division in baseball. Not only are the Phillies the only team (barely) over .500, they are the only team with a positive run differential. Even the NL West owns the East at this point. So fucking sad.
Thank you, NoMaas, for allowing me to add this picture to the post.
Hey, remember when I made that REAL TALK post, and in it I mentioned how Frank Thomas seemed forgotten? And how his OPS+ was actually fucking insane in his first 8 years? And how I compared him to Pujols? Maybe do you remember, since it was yesterday. Well, would you look at this:
Because of what has happened to power numbers and power hitters during the past decade or so Thomas is often talked about as just another great slugger from this era, but that misses the boat in a big way. Albert Pujols is the best player in baseball and surely everyone would agree that at 29 years old he’s on track to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but look at his numbers compared to Thomas’ stats at the same age:
G PA AVG OBP SLG OPS+ Pujols 1312 5696 .334 .426 .628 171 Thomas 1076 4789 .330 .452 .600 182
I really need to start getting paid for this shit. I fucking own.
- I need to start writing down stuff the minute I think of it. Larry David notebook time.
- A sign that you should turn gay: You start talking to two cute girls, and somehow end up with a dude’s number because he claims to know every poker game within 10 miles.*
- Reason #2451 the Academy Awards are a joke: Clint Mansell has never been nominated. Let’s ignore the fact that his Requiem for a Dream theme, “Lux Aeterna”, has been reorchestrated and remixed and used in approximately 100 trailers, but after THAT, the Academy still ignored his work in The Fountain. How do you not recognize this?
- The Knicks DIDN’T draft a piece-of-shit European this year? Maybe there is hope after all.
- The key feature of The Matrix on Blu-ray is Laurence Fishburne’s pores.
- I think people forget how amazing of a hitter Frank Thomas was in the beginning of his career. First eight seasons = 182 OPS+. He was Albert Pujols without the glove.
- I don’t think it’s too early to get excited about Christopher Nolan’s next film, Inception. Sci-fi plot, DiCaprio in the lead, and a $200 million budget? I am fucking there.
- I’m only halfway through it, but Freaks and Geeks is already one of the best shows I’ve ever watched.
- Half the cars on Long Island just need to spontaneously explode. We need bullet trains, goddamn it.
- Bud Light really is a terrible, terrible beer in every conceivable way. I was sitting under the sun in 85 degree heat, in jeans, and it still wasn’t satisfying.
-The Mets should start paying me to attend games. I’m now 5-0 this year. Just transfer a few thousand bucks from Oliver Perez’s contract to my checking account, please.
- Prince won.
*Replace “you” with “I”
Everyone knows David Wright has struck out a lot this year (70 times). Everyone pays attention to his now .356 batting average. A good amount are also aware of his .444 on-base percentage, now that the stat is displayed on most broadcasts and scoreboards. And of course, we all know his home run total is shockingly low (4). Combine all these and you have a high BABIP. What is BABIP, you ask? It is Batting Average on Balls in Play:
where H is hits, HR is home runs, AB is at bats, K is strikeouts, and SF is sacrifice flies. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)
After tonight’s 4-4 performance — of which no hits were a HR — Wright’s BABIP has risen to .471. For the past week, there have been numerous articles about how Wright will eventually come back down to earth. Even this very morning, Fangraphs made sure to join in on the fun, putting forward the data that shows that for whatever reason, Wright’s groundballs are finding holes. Well, that’s what happened once again tonight. Maybe Wright will be the first man to defy the BABIP gods for an entire season. Extremely rare is the season where a player has a BABIP over .400, but Wright is currently destroying that barrier, with no sign of letting up. He has shown no sign of hitting any home runs anytime soon either, but I’ll let that slide.
The most interesting part about this phenomenon has to be the continuing penetration of sabermetrical analysis into the mainstream. Never was it more evident than when I heard Gary Cohen mention it on the SNY broadcast a few days back. People knew Wright was having a strange season — who strikes out more while hitting less home runs? — but BABIP provides an easy way to quantify it. It is almost “luckiness” in number form. I say almost because there might be something more to it than that, and no one has quite figured it out. Maybe it’s just INTANGIBLE, which would explain why Derek Jeter’s career BABIP is .360. That’s how you become the Yankee captain. See, it’s not LUCK, it’s CLUTCH. Ichiro is right behind him at .357, but you could have guessed that. The guy hits line drives off of bounced balls.
I can’t say that Wright will keep this up for the entire season, because he won’t, but I don’t think he’s going to strike out at this rate for the entire season either. Maybe he will be able to keep his average this high. Maybe he’ll end up with the line of a speedy second baseman: .350, 10 HR, 45 SB (let’s ignore the RBIs). And maybe another stat will be ingrained into the collective psyche of casual baseball fandom.
Every baseball/Seinfeld/Mets fan needs to watch this short film. Keith Hernandez’s combination of cocaine, facial hair, and ability to drink Budweiser while his team is on the verge of elimination is unsurpassed.
Just a heads-up, this is NSFW. A porn clip just randomly pops up out of nowhere at the 15:08 mark.
I’m Keith Hernandez from water&power on Vimeo.
Is it me or does this narrator do voiceovers for everything?
TF2 voiceover videos are one the few things that reduce me to a little kid who can’t stop laughing. KA-BOOM! KA-BOOM! KA-BOOM! This video is better than every episode of America’s Home Videos put together. And these TF2 videos only keep getting better, as Valve adds more and more voice clips with each update. So while I may go back and forth with how much I love playing the game, I’ll always love the Heavy.
This is the trailer for 2012, from the guy who brought you Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. Where can Ronald Emmerich go from here? There are only so many ways to kill millions upon millions of people, and then come up with some deus ex machina to save the few left. I wish the entire movie was just disaster porn, but unfortunately, there does seem to be some sort of plot involving John Cusack and his family.
People love Planet Earth. Why can’t someone just make Planet Earth Destroyed, where instead of clips of a shark jumping out of the ocean to totally wreck some seal’s life, we get to watch skyscrapers collapse, asteroids rain down, and California fall into the ocean? This would all be scored by Clint Mansell. Because he’s awesome.
If you care to watch the destruction in HD, here are the direct links:
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