DLD or Condilump Ink Bar or whatever

The New Ballpark Blog has some stuff (today’s and yesterday’s diaries) that’s news to me. Most things are news to me several days/weeks/millennia after they’ve happened, so I’m sure you already know that stuff.

That’s the only A’s/baseball-related link I’m gonna put, because if I spend more than a few minutes typing, I’ll get DLDblocked again and have to delete. :P~~~

So I’ll leave you with something that illustrates why I have noooo desire to ever perform on-air journalism… I’m absolutely positive this would happen to me:

DLD: I’m Good at Titles

But not at fun graphs/graphics, or links, or interesting prose, or damnit I don’t have anything to post. I blame the swine flu. Ok, I just looked around for a little longer. There are no links. None. If you go to **, you might notice that our secret is out… also, fk is criticized for too much spice. Here is a picture of favorite spice:

Bonus picture: Chris Jakubauskas’s gameday photo:

note to soaker: we actually tried to invite you (and WC for that matter) but were unable to find you email address, so instead the “trail of breadcrumbs” plan was adopted.

Condiment Bar: 4/17/09

Vlad’s tits hurt.

Manager Mike Scioscia said an MRI Thursday revealed a strained pectoral muscle. The 34-year-old Guerrero was to fly to Los Angeles to see team orthopedist Dr. Lewis Yocum on Friday.

Oh man, the dreaded Lewis Yocum.  You know what comes next:  Tommy John Jenna Jameson surgery.

So I’m juvenile.  Sue me.  I’m sick of staring at this f—ing thesis.  Like the last five years of my life are worth spilling over a 100 pages of electronic ink.  Nobody’s going to read this s— anyway.  Boobies.

DLD 04/14/2009

So many things about last night’s win.

Jason Varitek must have forgotten who was chugging toward the plate. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen such as a half-assed attempt at block and tag at home plate. How long before the Red Sox front office starts a whisper campaign against Captain Cambridge?

Giambi…if you didn’t get on base so damned much (.452 OBP), you wouldn’t have to run the bases. Your choice.

On the other hand, maybe Ryan Sweeney and Orlando Cabrera should just forget about getting on base at all.

Speaking of Giambi, great job going the other way twice last night. Bay was definitely caught off-guard, and while he’s not a douchebag of the highest Red Sockian order, the faceplant was a nice touch for A’s partisans everywhere.

At least the other Red Sox corner outfielder can catch the ball. Oh, wait.

• Rajai Davis and Jack Cust have a few things in common: can’t bunt, can’t play defense, can’t run the bases intelligently, will often strike out looking, can’t beat out double play grounders. But Jack Cust is huge and hits home runs and gets on base 55% of the time, and Rajai Davis is fast and…is fast.

DLD 3/13/09

Shelley Duncan is available on waivers, I believe:

DLD 4/7/09: Cahill, lineups, Hilary Duff on the run

1. Cahill tonight! Excited about that, but sad to read this:

Roy Steele, the A’s main public-address announcer since the team arrived in Oakland in 1968, is unlikely to handle PA duties the first month of the season because of poor health.

Roy Steele anchors my baseball memories in the same way Bill King does. The soundtrack of my youth, so to speak. Bill King, Roy Steele, REM, and the endless procession of guidance counselors lecturing me about the tragic gap between my “potential” and my performance. (Maybe this is premature, but I’m going to call it anyway: that D in 8th grade World History did not actually derail my hopes and dreams)

2. Wherein Bob Geren’s alleged affinity for The Book is discussed. Tango posts lots of numbers I did not read. MGL gets huffy. Etc.

3. Another tale of monkeys on the loose, this time in Oregon.

Famed Hillsboro rhesus include ANDi, the first “transgenic” primate, born in 2001 with jellyfish genes inserted into his genetic code

Movie pitch:

So there’s this monkey. Rhesus Macaques. Cute little bugger but we can make it fierce, don’t worry, that’s what CGI is for. It’s in a lab. Cages, guys with glasses and white coats, clipboards, computers. There’ll be a hot young lab assistant – I’m thinking Hilary Duff in a breakout role – and a kindly elder statesman professor-type, Anthony Hopkins maybe. With a beard. Has to have a beard. We’ll have a love interest, obviously, and an evil scientist (Magneto to Hopkins’ Professor X), maybe a slightly less hot but dependable – and wry! – girlfriend for the lab assistant.

So what do we do? We combine the monkey with a jellyfish, that’s what! So now it’s a transgendered monkey. No, wait transgenic. Shit. Sorry! It’s not a bisexual monkey. Not that that’s what transgendered is, but you get what I’m saying. It’s got jellyfish genes, is the point. In any case, the monkey is translucent and kind of glowing and it has these tentacle things sprouting everywhere. Pretty soon they have to put wet sand and water in its cage, and Anthony Hopkins is warning everyone about all the ethical dangers. Violation of nature, stuff like that.

This is where Magneto comes in. He wants to push it further. He won’t take no for an answer. Pretty soon, this monkey has giraffe genes, starfish genes, labradoodle genes, even human genes. Now it’s a wild-eyed jellyfish/giraffe/starfish/labradoodle/human/monkey beast of a thing, all the other lab monkeys are going batshit crazy, screaming, jumping around, but Magneto won’t stop. And now the Pentagon is involved, Professor X is killed in a mysterious lab accident, Hilary Duff is on the run, fleeing special ops forces and Magneto and terrorists – you don’t think al-Qaeda would want to get their hands on a mutant rhesus macaques? – and obviously the monkey itself, which has broken free from the lab and is terrorizing downtown Chicago.

We’re not sure how it ends but that’s why we need an advance – to finish the script. We know the monkey is gonna have human traits, it might even talk at some point, it’ll have emotions but it’s still a killer, maybe King Kong crossed with Deep Blue Sea crossed with Marley and Me crossed with Terminator. Hilary Duff gets captured but escapes, there’s some kind of antidote or serum involved – hey, we could do that scene from Temple of Doom where Indy gets poisoned and there’s chaos in the ballroom and before you know it they’re tumbling down a waterfall in raft and people are getting their hearts ripped out of their chests – anyway, she saves the day and gets the guy and we either kill the monkey – but in a sad, wrenching kind of way – or we un-mutate it, reverse the transgendering, transgenicing, whatever it’s called, and release it into the African wild where it rejoins its natural monkey clan. Maybe Hilary Duff moves to Africa, becomes, shit, what do you call those people? You know what I mean, like Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist, except hotter and blonder and always in a tank top, plus the love interest and the girlfriend move out there with her – they just want to get away from the rat race, right? And maybe Professor X didn’t get killed after all, maybe he was just in a coma but recovered thanks to the healing properties of that anti-transwhatever serum.

There you go. It’s gold. Last shot, camera slowly pans back, and you’ve got Hilary Duff and the love interest and the plain girlfriend all surrounding Professor X on a wooden porch in an African game preserve, everybody is grinning, the sunset is beautiful, the music is swelling, and hey, what’s that? Why it’s the monkey, goddamnit, back to normal, scuttling around gaily, eating apples from Hilary Duff’s hand. Fade to black, do not pass go, collect $300 million.

DLD 04/06/09 and Game 1 Thread

via Bullpen Baker

via LA Times

Let’s. Do. This.

Weekend DLD: Opening Day Roster

Slusser
Gio, Hannahan, Pennington, Denorfia, Barton down. Devine to 60-day DL… Gallagher, Bailey, in the bullpen.
So:
Suzuki
Powell
Giambi
Ellis
Cabrera
“HR” Chavy
Nomar
Crosby
Cust
Buck
Sweeney
Holliday
Rajai
Braden
Cahill
Eveland
Anderson
Outman
Gallagher
Bailey
Ziggy
Casilla
Springer
Wuertz
Blevins

I’m curious how Gallagher will be used. He may be the second best bet after Blevins against LHs in this pen. Slusser says:

Manager Bob Geren said he’ll use both Bailey and Gallagher in long relief and also situational relief because they throw hard and can come in and “blow a hitter or two away,” he said.

If someone wants to make this post easier on the eyes, be my guest….

I’ll take you up on that offer, mikeA:

–salb918

Is that the worst you can do?

–doctorK

Well played, doc.  Tag added. -salb918

4/3/09: Another tree-saving, newspaper-killing DLD

In 2005, when I was working for Safeway in San Rafael, I had the good fortune of getting some free-lance work with Media News Group’s Marin County edition.   Fifty bucks to write a high school football game wrap?  Great work, if you can get it. 

Later, I was able to make full-time (albeit-less-than-$14/hr) work out of it, getting hired first as the sports editor of Novato’s community weekly, and then as a sports writer for the Media News Group Vallejo edition.  But when I quit to move to L.A., I was looking forward to going back to making $50 per article with the Media News Group, L.A. edition.  Alas, that work hasn’t materialized.

So when I started up a high school sports blogspot for free, and even later when I joined examiner.com where they pay a cent per page view generated, I felt like I wasn’t competing with the newspapers so much as I was auditioning to join them.  Amidst all the voices saying Newspapers Are Dying, I keep thinking, “Well, they still pay better.”

That may be the case, but according to this article by Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield, that’s only because while the Internet may already have caught and past newspapers in terms of audience captured, the ‘net still hasn’t figured out how to translate “audience” into “revenue.”   The Internet’s practically-infinite supply just far outstrips demand.

Yeah, that about sums it up.  As (my former Ad Age colleague) Rothenberg details, “Today the average 14-year-old can create a global television network with applications that are  built into her laptop. So from a very strict Econ 101 basis, you have the ability to create virtually unlimited supply against what has been historically relatively stable demand. 

So the biggest online publishers, with all their vast overhead, have no more access to audience than Courtney the eighth-grader.  And there are hundreds of millions of Courtneys, millions of them on Google AdSense, driving the price of ad space, down, down, down.

I always feared that the future of advertising was best predicted by Minority Report, in which retinal scans and surveillance cameras allow the bastards to follow us with their direct marketing from one monitor to another.  But here’s one optimistic note in an otherwise frustrated article—maybe the ads of the future will be entertaining and beautiful rather than intrusive. 

Rothenberg also acknowledges the problem of ad avoidance, as evidenced by average click-through rates approaching zero.  Yet, for all his economic realism, he stubbornly insists there’s a solution: “Better advertising.  More informational.  More entertaining.  More beautiful.”

Anyway, the article fails to contradict the general consensus that newspapers are dying too, so I may get old and grey waiting for my next $50 per article dream job.   

[Late edit by this post’s author, mjdittmer, dismayed that other than font-formatting issues, the body of this DLD has failed to generate a single word of discussion.  I guess this is where I should have put, ‘Anybody else have any feelings/experience/opinions to share regarding the dying industry, good or ill?’]

Sorry, enough about me.  How about a Ray Ratto column (about last night’s game, no less)?

And let’s see if I can embed video.  No?  Well, the preview for Sasha Baron Cohen’s next movie, coming this summer, can be found here.  Dump away!

 

DLD 4/2/09

THT has a look at Matt Weiters and finds a beef with PECOTA:

These translations, similar to Major League Equivalencies, are just as robust looking as the projection itself. The card gives us a translated batting line of .301/.396/.513 for his High-A performance, and a translated batting line of .349/.436/.627 for his Double-A—and yes, you are reading that correctly, his translated line says he would have had a higher slugging percentage playing in the majors than he did at Double-A!

Those figures are unbelievable, by which I mean literally that I do not believe them.

…

It’s not for me to tell you where Baseball Prospectus came up with this year’s difficulty ratings – quite frankly, I can’t figure it out. What I can tell you is that they don’t appear to be supported by the data itself. To put it bluntly – they’re wrong.

It isn’t really about Matt Weiters; the article presents a very cogent criticism of BPro’s methodology.

Craig Calcaterra with a relevant anecdote about the Giants buying a stake in their San Jose-based minor-league affiliate:

Back when I was in private practice, I represented a park district that wanted to turn some old railroad lines in the middle of nowhere into a bike trail. They built about 85% of the trail, but the last little stretch was held up by this group of Mennonite farmers who lived next to the right-of-way and claimed the land where the tracks used to be was theirs. “How could that be,” I wondered? The railroad had tracks on that property since the 19th century, and they gave the tracks directly to my client. The Mennonites, however, had all manner of questionable and ancient legal documents which they claimed their great great great something or other had reserved the rights if the railroad ever left, yadda, yadda, yadda. I read these things, quickly figured out that, while it could be a pain, we could get that land for the bike trail if we were determined enough to do it.

Right before I filed my lawsuit to quiet title, the Mennonites parked a mobile home on the right of way and claimed they were home schooling a bunch of Mennonite farmer kids there, which immediately turned us into the bad guys and complicated my little lawsuit. Five years later, and I think the Mennonites have moved on to consulting with San Francisco Giants:

The Mennonite Athletics of San Jose has a ring to it…

Submitted without comment:

Now, the awe people once felt about flying through the clouds is tempered by additional fees, cramped seats and horrifying tales of fellow travelers.

Take, for instance, “Mr. Poopy Pants” — a grown man who allegedly soiled himself 10 minutes into a flight from Florida to Minnesota. And then he just sat there.