Baseball As Context (Part VI)

The final installment (Part VI) of Baseball As Context...

As I reached high school age I had become an outfielder and pitcher. At the time I was playing both on the junior varsity team and on a Babe Ruth league team in our town for which my Dad served as a coach. Although I didn’t get to play much on the JV team as a freshman (1 at bat and 2 innings in the outfield, for which my old coach should be ashamed by the way), my parents dutifully took me to each game in both leagues, which totaled between 50 and 60 games in each of those summers. On more than one occasion I remember playing a double header in Babe Ruth league, followed by eating and changing in the car on the way to the JV game.

I did, however, get to play regularly in the Babe Ruth league and patrolled centerfield and pitched on occasion. Our team was not bad and our fiercest rivalry was with a town team from about 40 miles away. They were a good team but what really made us shudder was the presence of "Big Al", the hardest throwing pitcher I’d ever seen armed with a blazing fastball that sometimes exceeded 90 miles per hour. Fortunately, his curve ball was poor and hittable although I typically completed my swing long before it reached the plate. In all, I was content with my strikeouts and occasional walks (his control wasn’t great) and felt fortunate that I was never killed by one his fastballs.

My sophomore season in JV was markedly better and I played centerfield there as well as pitched and even began acting as a reserve for the varsity team. At that time my control and curve ball (to which I and legions of other pitchers who’s arms did not contain the magic to throw a good fastball, will be eternally grateful to Candy Cummings its inventor now justly enshrined in the Hall of Fame) were really coming along and I felt that I had the ability to at least hit regions of the strike zone on command. I recall having concentrated on control after reading the book by Ferguson Jenkins, a master of control during his career and particularly while racking up six consecutive 20-win seasons for the Cubs in the late 60s and early 70s. In fact, in 1971 Jenkins walked only 37 men in 325 innings of work while striking out 263. In 1982 the Cubs reacquired Fergie where he spent his final two seasons, the first a resurgent season where he pitched over 200 innings and won 14 games. He also recorded his 3,000 strikeout in 1982, a game played early in the season in San Diego. I distinctly recall watching his previous start in Los Angeles while scoring the game and marveling at his masterful use of the corners.

Unfortunately, the low light of the season (which ended with the Cubs defeat at the hands of the Padres) was the fact that our coach was insane. And I do mean insane. Some of his more outrageous antics included getting thrown out of at least two games for arguing balls and strikes, cursing at insects while hitting fungos during infield practice, and berating players by calling them "society zeros" when they didn’t play well enough or made errors in the field. Fortunately, the game can survive even the destructive presence of behavior reminiscent of John McGraw or Ty Cobb, and we continued on mostly having fun while out on the field anyway.

Finally, by my junior year things began to click and I became a regular starting pitcher and left fielder on a team that would win the conference championship the next two seasons. My senior year culminated in a 9-0 record as a pitcher and a batting average good enough to earn All-Conference and district honors. I even hit a couple homeruns, the first of which was off of a left hander and which just cleared the left field fence as I raced head down furiously for second base.

Baseball, however, as is often said "is second only to death as a leveler" since it is ultimately a game based on failure (for anyone not named Barry Bonds anyway, he of the over .500 on base percentage in 2002 and thus a man that does not fail more than he succeeds, when he walked a record 198 times). The final game I pitched as a senior was a sub-state tournament game against a larger school. The first batter smashed a line drive to center field that happened to be right at our center fielder while the third batter of the inning hit a hard one hopper right back to the mound. I got out of the inning with no hits and no runs but felt that it might be a long day. However, I used my control to nibble at the corners and with some good defense, I pitched a shutout and we won 8-0. It was the best pure pitching performance of my life and it was in the most important game we had played. Our next tournament game however, certainly leveled me. In left field this time, the first opposing batter hit a line drive directly to me which I promptly dropped. I went hitless and to make the failure complete, gave up a couple of runs in relief in the game that would end our season and my high school career.

After high school I attended Iowa State University, majoring in computer science where, despite my recent disappointment, I still loved baseball. As Robert Adair showed in his book The Physics of Baseball and as I subsequently learned, physics is a deeply fascinating subject. However, I recall that it was far from my first priority in the fall of 1986. While ostensibly paying attention to my professor in the corner of a crowded lecture hall, I listened to the Astros Billy Hatcher put Newton’s laws of motion (F=ma) into practice.

Although not good enough play at a division I school like Iowa State (my fastball topped out around 75mph), I and a good friend played for two summers during college for the Muscatine Red Sox, a team made up of young and not so young players that played other town teams during the hot and humid Iowa summers. What was interesting about the Red Sox, however, was not the players so much as the manager, George Long. George had started the Red Sox in the 1930s and ran the team longer than Connie Mack managed the Philadelphia A’s. I recall him telling us, as I’m sure he enjoyed doing to each new crop of players, the story of when Babe Ruth came to the area to play an exhibition game. However, by the time I played for the Red Sox, George was well into his 80s and his "managing" consisted of encouraging the players with random chatter from the dugout and positioning his 5'5" 120 pound frame behind the pitchers mound with an old catcher’s mitt during batting practice. If you were pitching batting practice you had to be sure to throw the ball on the inner half of the plate so that your teammates wouldn’t inadvertently kill their coach. The real managing was done by his son, a “young man” in his 50s.

My two memories of playing for the Red Sox included throwing a 5 inning no-hitter in Muscatine, Iowa in which the only batter who reached base did so when the first baseman dropped an easy pop-fly (but I’m not bitter). The second was when George was closing in on his 1,000th win as a manager and I was given the ball to pitch as he was sitting on 998. While I don’t recall the details, we won the game and I got win number 999 for George. After his 1,000th there were stories both in the local newspapers and a small blurb in Sports Illustrated. I’m not sure how long George continued to manage or when he died but I’m certain that he loved baseball perhaps more than any other person I’ve ever met.

After those two seasons I thought I’d hung up my glove for good. However, after getting married, landing a software development job with Chevron and moving to Houston I once again got the urge and played for one season in a league in the Houston area for a team called the Orioles. While I pitched a little and played a little outfield, my arm began to get sore (a condition I attributed to playing in softball leagues for Chevron and making outfield throws without properly warming up). However, after moving to Kansas City in 1994 I played one more season with a local team and enjoyed a little success on the mound as well as the plate (I specifically recall an 8 inning shutout that I was particularly proud of). Alas, that proved to be my last season as a child soon followed accompanied by the increased busyness that a full family life entails.

These days I root for the Cubs and the Royals and attend as many games as possible (17 in 2003) and follow the ups and downs of the long season. And so now as I write this, still deep in the shadow of the Cubs most recent collapse, I’m comforted that baseball will continue to provide context in my life, sometimes even coming to the forefront in great hope as it has this October, but even in disappointment always enriching it. You never know, next year might be the year.

Data Logic Patterns

Here is my latest article on data access patterns you can use in .NET Framework applications. The code developed for this article is based on the patterns discussed in Fowler and that I discuss in our Atomic .NET Patterns and Architecture Course.

Baseball As Context (Part V)

This is part V of my essay "Baseball As Context"

Like Sandburg (Carl, not Ryne), during these years I read and collected everything I could get my hands on that was baseball related. Ted Williams’ The Science of Hitting and a book on pitching by Ferguson Jenkins stands out. In particular, and like any red blooded American kid, I collected baseball cards. My first card was a 1976 Walt Williams, fondly nicknamed "No-neck" because his head seemed to sit directly atop his shoulders. From that auspicious beginning my brother and I collected over 10,000 cards, many of which I still have and the most cherished of those hang on the walls of my office as I write this. Unlike kids who today put cards neatly into plastic holders to protect their value (although I could never understand the interest in putting cards in bicycle spokes, which would ruin their appearance), we valued them primarily for the wealth of statistics on the back. We poured over the cards daily and gleaned all sorts of important facts like the following gem. The Topps 1974 Richie Hebner card informed us that Hebner dug graves in the offeason in order to keep in shape (remember that this was the era before the reserve clause was upended and in which players often had to work during the offseason)[1].

Our favorite activity, however, was attempting to put together full teams and then arranging the cards in their respective positions. Of course, our biggest concern was building a team of Cubs and much to our disappointment we could never seem to find a shortstop. It turns out that neither could the Cubs until DeJesus secured the position from 1977-1980 after coming over in a trade along with Bill Buckner for Rick Monday (one of the better Cubs trades I might add, falling in behind the deal for Ryne Sandberg with the Phillies, and the trade with the White Sox for Sammy Sosa). At that time, however, we had Jerry Morales in right, Rick Monday in center and Jose Cardenal in left (for which I paid one of my friends the princely sum of $1.75, far more than its worth), Bill Madlock at third, Manny Trillo at second and Pete LaCock at first. Catching was Steve Swisher or Brian Hosey. The shortstop we were looking for was the extremely light hitting Mick Kelleher. Over an eleven year career Kelleher would bat 1,081 times without hitting a homerun. His only semi-regular season was with the Cubs in 1976 when he hit .228. His career average skirted the “Mendoza line” at .213.

Although I was spending my spare time getting a baseball education, baseball returned the favor by increasing my fondness for numbers as no other game is so rich in statistical tradition. Although this is partly due to the fact that the tradition now stretches back over a century and that the relative continuity of the statistics allow for comparison[2], it is also due to the fact that in no other sport are the statistics (especially for batting and pitching, fielding is another complex and sadly problematic story) so linked to a player’s performance. As a result, when looking at a line like so:


AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO AVG SLUG OBP
505 81 125 17 0 40 94 85 85 .248 .519 .357


a baseball fan can almost visualize this player and narrow down the owner from a field of over 10,000 to under 10. In fact, it would come as no surprise if some readers, upon reviewing the line, immediately conjured up an image of Darrell Evans, the husky Braves, Giants, and Tigers first baseman who played from the late 60s to the late 80s. Because of this close association with individual players, some of the individual statistics then take on identities in their own right including 755, 73, 511, 56, and 4,257[3]. In this, baseball statistics (in the words of Bill James) have acquired the "power of language", which makes them endlessly fascinating since they tell stories as much as they reflect accomplishment.

The lure of these numbers and their rich tradition drove us to scoring games, computing batting averages, and calculating statistics which in turn created an ease with numbers, fractions, and percentages as well as learning to do quick sums in my head. In a direct way, this impacted my fallback career choice, software development.

Ultimately, the love for statistics led to more "serious" pursuits that included playing baseball simulation games in which we created our own leagues and tracked the statistics. After cutting our teeth on Cadaco All-Star baseball (invented by former big leaguer and Yale baseball coach Ethan Allen) and other less precise games, the ultimate expression of this pursuit was the replaying of the 1983 National League season by four of us including my brother using a popular simulation game known as Strat-O-Matic (still advertised I noticed in Baseball Digest, the monthly magazine I subscribed to from 1976 through the mid 1980s). Each of us managed three teams, scored each game, and tracked the statistics as we replayed the entire 1,000 plus game schedule, complete with off days over the course of almost a year.

Although none of my teams won their division and one, the Padres, even lost 112 games due to no fault of the manager, I still today keep a copy of the statistics from that make-believe season and look at them from time to time remembering the comradery of good friends. As I peruse the stat sheets the attributes of the players come to life through the language of the statistics in a unique way that is reminiscent of, but truly distinct from, the real players on which the simulation was based. Only in baseball can the numbers tell so much of the story.


Notes
[1] Hebner played for the Pirates in those days but would go on to play, and contribute, on the 1984 Cubs team.
[2] Yes, there has been continuity as evidenced by league batting averages fluctuating around .260 since the 1940s, but in many instances it has been a continuity forced on the game by subtle changes of the rules. The lowering of the mound in 1969 is one prominent example. Only when Babe Ruth saved the game from financial ruin brought on by the Black Sox scandal, did the powers that be choose to let the game move in a different direction, which produced the rift between the "dead ball" and "lively ball" eras. Interestingly, this common nomenclature is likely misleading as documented by Bill James in the Historical Baseball Abstract, who argues that the outlawing of the spitter and its variants along with the more frequent introduction of new baseballs into games had more of an effect than any change in the balls being used.
[3] Hank Aaron’s career homeruns, Barry Bonds single-season homerun record, Cy Young’s victory total, Joe Dimaggios’s hitting streak, and Pete Rose’s hit total.

Salary Arbitration

Nice piece on salary arbitration in MLB. Interesting that players have lost a growing number of cases:


Period Cases/Decided Player Win%
1974-1980 212/92       47.8%
1981-1993 1564/267     43.4%
1994-2002 725/87       36.8%

Why might this be? Certainly, the fewer cases that make it to arbitration represent only those where the two parties are far apart. One might guess that in many of those cases the player is asking for a salary commensurate with a recent block-buster free agent signing, which the arbitrators don't consider realistic. Are there better reasons?

Also, there have been a decreasing number of cases making it to a hearing. This probably shows a stabilization of the process whereby players and owners know what to expect and since the winning percentage of either side is not that high, they would rather compromise than take the risk of losing.

Tramplings for the Holidays

Great column by George Will on the trampling of a shopper at Wal-Mart on their way to purchase a $29 DVD player. About the trampling Will writes:

"Conservatives, in their simplistic way, will blame the Florida trampling on facets of human nature to which the Christmas story pertains -- mankind's fallen condition, meaning original sin. Liberals, being less judgmental and more alert to the social causes of things, will blame Wal-Mart. They already blame it for many flaws in creation, from low wages in Asia to America's "loss of community," by which liberals mean the migration of shoppers from large-hearted Main Street merchants to the superior variety and lower prices at the Wal-Mart on the edge of town."

Will then goes on to poke fun at our modern Christmas celebration noting that one of today's problems "in addition to the toll taken on the body by seasonal wassailing and gorging, is shopping that includes stocking up on 'retaliation presents.' They are used to counter unexpected gift-giving by persons not on your list, which by now includes family, friends, the stockbroker who got you out of Enron in time and the person who cleans your gutters."

Great stuff. This reminded me of C.S. Lewis' essay Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus where Lewis tells the tale of the island of Niatrib where islanders celebrate two concurrent holidays, one of which sounds an awful lot like what Will is describing.

Corporate-speak

Sorry to post the contents of a circulating email but I couldn't pass this one up. I'm sure most people in the corporate world hear all of these phrases more and more...


Frank Lingua, president and CEO of Dissembling Associates, is the nation's leading purveyor of buzzwords, catch phrases and cliches for people too busy to speak in plain English. Business Finance contributing editor Dan Danbom interviewed Lingua in his New York City office.

Danbom: Is being a cliche expert a full-time job?

Lingua: Bottom line is I have a full plate 24/7.

D. Is it hard to keep up with the seemingly endless supply of cliches
that spew from business?

L. Some days, I don't have the bandwidth. It's like drinking from a
fire hydrant.

D. So it's difficult?

L. Harder than nailing Jell-O to the wall.

D. Where do most cliches come from?

L. Stakeholders push the envelope until it's outside the box.

D. How do you track them once they've been coined?

L. It's like herding cats.

D. Can you predict whether a phrase is going to become a cliche?

L. Yes. I skate to where the puck's going to be. Because if you aren't
the lead dog, you're not providing a customer-centric proactive
solution.

D. Give us a new buzzword that we'll be hearing ad nauseam.

L. "Enronitis" could be a next-generation player.

D. Do people understand your role as a cliche expert?

L. No, they can't get their arms around that. But they aren't incented
to.

D. How do people know you're a cliche expert?

L. I walk the walk and talk the talk.

D. Did incomprehensibility come naturally to you?

L. I wasn't wired that way, but it became mission-critical as I
strategically focused on my go-forward plan.

D. What did you do to develop this talent?

L. It's not rocket science. It's not brain surgery. When you drill down
to the granular level, it's just basic blocking and tackling.

D. How do you know if you're successful in your work?

L. At the end of the day, it's all about robust, world-class language
solutions.

D. How do you stay ahead of others in the buzzword industry?

L. Net-net, my value proposition is based on maximizing synergies and
being first to market with a leveraged, value-added deliverable. That's
the opportunity space on a level playing field.

D. Does everyone in business eventually devolve into the sort of
mindless drivel you spout?

L. If you walk like a duck and talk like a duck, you're a duck. They
all drink the Kool-Aid.

D. Do you read "Dilbert" in the newspaper?

L. My knowledge base is deselective of fiber media.

D. Does that mean "no"?

L. Negative.

D. DOES THAT MEAN "NO"?

L. Let's take your issues offline.

D. NO, WE ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE MY "ISSUES" OFFLINE.

L. You have a result-driven mind-set that isn't a strategic fit with my
game plan.

D. I WANT TO PUSH YOUR FACE IN.

L. Your perspective on this topic is very important to me.

D. How can you live with yourself?

L. I eat my own dog food. My vision is to monetize scalable supply
chains.

D. When are you going to quit this?

L. I may eventually exit the business to pursue other career
opportunities.

D. I hate you.

L. Take it and run with it.

[From an email currently being circulated among some of the less
employable elements in Silicon Valley.]

Cubs Catcher?

So, it looks like the pursuit of Ivan Rodriguez might have started. At his age I wouldn't want to sign him for more than 1 or 2 years but at his likely price tag of $15-16M I doubt he'll get more than 1. Perhaps he'll take 2 years around $10M for another chance to play in the post season. I'm a little torn between Rodriguez and Javy Lopez. Lopez should command less I would assume and offensively he's the better player.

Relativity Demystified

I just finished reading Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson, professor of physics at Middlebury College. This small book (240 pages) is written for the non-scientist and does a great job of explaining both Einstein's theory of special relativity and his later theory of general relativity.

I really like the way the author tells the story in the first 5 chapters of scientific discovery from a historical perspective starting with Aristotle's conception of the natural state of motion (at rest), on to Galileo's and Newton's views and the idea of Galilean relativity (physics works the same as long as your in a uniform state of motion), and finally to a brief overview of electricity, magnestism and their synthesis by James Clerk Maxwell around 1880.

He then starts his exploration of Einstein's special relativity with a discussion of the Michelson-Morley experiment and how it showed how the speed of light is the same for all observers (the basis of relativity from which all else follows) although Michelson and Morley didn't believe their own results. His explanation of special relativity then consumes the next 8 chapters and is presented in a conversational tone that plays on your natural questions (which I'm sure are driven from his teaching experience) and assumptions, many of which are of course wrong in a world described by relativity. One of the points the author touches on is the same one I made in a previous post, namely that the way we think about nature is based on our everyday experience confined to an area of weak gravity and moving at a relatively very slow speed (what Bacon called "Idols of the Tribe") and it is that experience which makes it impossible to intuitively understand relativity. We can understand it intellectually and mathematically but can never know it "in our bones".

The only math in the entire book is an explanation of the time dilation equation which explains how time is relative for different observers travelling at different speeds (the famous "twins paradox"). An appendix covers the details but the math is no more difficult than 10th grade geometry. Although time dilation is the most well known result of special relativity he also explains the relativity of distance and the order of some classes of events for two different observers. For me, those sections were by far the most challenging and interesting in the book.

One of the great features of this book is that the author constantly reminds the reader of correct relativistic terminology and thinking. For example, it is relativistically incorrect to say that in the case of the twins paradox that "moving clocks run slow". They only run slow from the perspective of an observer in a different frame of reference.

The last three chapters touch on Einstein's general relativity and how it describes the nature of gravity as the curvature of spacetime. Since the mathematics involved in general relativity (non-Euclidian geometry for starters) are complex, he does not attempt to describe any of it but merely describes the axoims of general relativity; that spacetime is curved and that curvature determines the natural state of motion of objects, and that the curvature is gravity, the nature of which is determined by the amount of mass+energy present. He has a great analogy of a basketball sitting on a taught rubber sheet and how marbles or other objects rolled on the sheet mimics in 2 dimensions what is happening in 4 dimensional spacetime in general relativity.

The book has plenty of diagrams and the chapters are short enough to read in a single sitting, which is important for a book like this where you need to digest a complete argument before moving on.

Wolfson also has some lectures available from the Teaching Company which follow the same lines as the book. However, I enjoyed the book more since you really need the diagrams to better understand the concepts. I've also attempted to read other short books on relativity but none are as clear and incorporate the historical perspective, which I always enjoy. A highly recommended book.

Baseball As Context (Part IV)

Here is the 4th installment of my essay Baseball As Context...


I was born in 1968, which fans will instantly recognize as the year of the pitcher which saw Bob Gibson of the Cardinals compile his microscopic 1.12 earned run average, Carl Yasztremski lead the AL with a .301 batting average and which, as a result, the mound was lowered. So it should come as no great shock that eventually I became a pitcher (although I was also born on April 8, exactly six years before Hank Aaron would hit is 714th homerun to eclipse the Bambino). My brother and I began playing baseball at the age of seven, a full three years younger than Pete Rose, as I had read and constantly reminded myself in hopes that I could make the big leagues.

From that time on my memories of spring, summer, and early fall are dominated by playing baseball. In those years in our small town the neighborhood kids would play ball almost every day. Our town was fortunately a "baseball town" and so there seemed to be more interest in the game perhaps than in other places. As fortune would have it we lived only a block from the little league and men’s softball park and only rarely had to resort to playing in empty lots without fences where broken windows were a danger. We would begin at 9 am each morning (in the summer and Saturdays if school was still in session) with the ritualistic calling of the players. My brother and I would get on the phone and call all the kids we thought would play. Of course, we concentrated our efforts on brother combinations like the Fullers and Fratzkes, which was particularly effective since it was a two for one deal. The minimum needed to make a game was six, three on a side, although eight was much better and ten was considered ideal. We played at a Little League park, but to enhance the action we located home plate at a spot in the shallow outfield and put out our own bases with gloves or trash or sometimes even real plastic bases that one of the kids would bring. Of course the big draw for playing in the outfield was that it presented fences that were within our reach.

With six or eight players we played "pitcher’s hand" which meant that the pitcher acted as a proxy for the first baseman and if he received the throw while still in contact with the pitcher’s mound before the runner reached first the out was recorded. We also employed the time honored tradition of "ghost runners", necessary if a team of thee or four ended up with all of their men on base and who occupied the lead base or bases and could only advance as they were forced to by the next batted ball. We threw overhand but the pitching was not paramount. Indeed, like early forms of baseball, the pitcher’s job was to throw strikes so that the hitter could put the ball in play.

Even then I was a classic good field no-hit player. It’s not that I couldn’t hit but that I didn’t hit for power, which is what truly counted ("chicks dig the long ball" as I later learned). I would play the critical shortstop/left field position and hit leadoff. My brother had the power. We never kept track of innings but would play until it was time to go or perhaps until one team got so far ahead we needed to start over to make it interesting. I do know we played enough ball so that my brother collected over 40 homeruns one summer and I stole over 70 bases (although we didn’t always allow steals, which depended on how many fielders were available). The statistics weren’t formal but we tracked in our heads what was important.

Some of those games were wild, many were contentious, and some were pure joy, like the time I scaled the chain link fence ala Tori Hunter to rob one of the Fratzke boys of a homerun. Along with the statistics our own collection of legends grew up around the "lob ball" games as we called them, including Doug Miller’s mammoth blast that cleared the street beyond center field and nailed the lawn mower then in operation much to the surprise of its operator, or the Kingman-like wallop of my brother’s that sailed in a majestic arc between the house and garage behind the street in right, our own Sheffield Avenue.

Apart from the fun of it all, however, and with the perspective of almost 30 years, the facet of these games I treasure most is our good fortune at having lived in a time and place that allowed the games to go on unsupervised and unstructured. In the end it was kids learning to get along (sometimes not so successfully) and making up their own rules playing a game that they loved. It is primarily for this reason that I feel some sadness for my daughters, who I know will not have the opportunities to experience an unstructured sport (let alone almost any other activity) in today’s world of jam-packed, over extended schedules. My experience of baseball played in this way will immediately ring true to legions of American males as I was reminded recently by the words of Carl Sandburg.

"On many a summer day I played baseball starting at eight in the morning, running home at noon for a quick meal, and again with fielding and batting until it was too dark to see the ball. These were times when my head seemed empty of everything but baseball names and figures. I could name the players who led in batting and fielding, and the pitchers who had won the most games. And I had my opinions on who was better than anybody else in the national game."

So why the good field, no hit tag? As a rookie in pee-wee league just after I had taken up baseball, I do recall that I couldn’t catch the ball and I was an even worse hitter. After being relegated to the purgatory of kids baseball – right field – for the season and barely fouling off a pitch, I decided to apply myself to serious training.

I was fortunate to have a good friend, the aforementioned Doug Miller along with an older brother that I could pester to help me improve. The next season, beginning as early as possible, which in eastern Iowa is typically mid March, Doug and I played catch and threw each other grounders and fly balls every single day and sometimes more than once per day. I diligently practiced backhanded stops and coming up to throw to first like my idol, Cubs shortstop Ivan DeJesus, did after receiving the relay from the second baseman on a double play. In fact, after the next season, in which some improvement was evident, there were tryouts to be promoted to Little League. I went to the tryouts not expecting much but after dazzling the other players and coaches with a nifty backhanded stop of grounder in the hole at second, I got the call. Consequently, and because of that single play, I became a left-handed second baseman in Little League and subsequently played on our town’s All-Star team in several local tournaments. As there was no future in being a left-handed second baseman, I also started doing some pitching. Although I distinctly recall hitting a couple of guys in the head (they were left-handed and were likely crowding the plate) I did start to achieve some control and pitched quite a bit in my last Little League campaign.

My fielding was also improved by my brother, who never ceased to hit me fly balls and ground balls in the neighbor’s empty lot out behind our house. He would throw the ball up and hit it and I would track it down. He would hit them over my head so I could practice going back and would hit liners so I’d have to judge the distance. This continued through several years and I eventually became a competent outfielder.

My hitting was another story, however. I am left-handed but as far back as I can remember I’ve always batted right-handed. Since there are natural advantages to batting from the left side including being a step closer to first base as well as taking advantage of the angle of a right hander’s delivery, it is rare that left handed throwers bat right handed. In fact, in the major leagues it is ten times more likely that the situation is reversed. Two of the most prominent to do so were both first baseman, the slick fielding Hal Chase, who played primarily for the Yankees and Reds from 1905 to 1919, and a Yale first baseman who went on to relieve Ronald Regan in the oval office. In modern times, certainly Rickey Henderson has been the most effective lefty swinging from the right side.

Like the origin of baseball itself, the origin of my right-handed swing is lost in the mists of time and likely due only to the contingency of history. My theory is that as a five or six year old I picked up some golf clubs with a friend and we began to hit balls around an empty lot. After doing that for a full day the swing stuck and my course was set. From then on hitting the right-handed curveball and hitting for power were not to be. Had I remained a left-handed hitter I might have developed a Ted Williams like swing, or better yet I may have become a switch hitter in the mold of Mickey Mantle. C’est la vie.

Royals Bag Santiago

Well, the Royals got their catcher. $4.3M over two years is a hefty price to pay for a 38 year old and there is a good chance this deal won't look very good next year. Still, the last 2 years have been Santiago's best since 1996 and if he can hit in the high .270s then he'll certainly be above replacement level.

His percentage throwing out runners suffered a bit last year so I hope that's not a portent of things to come (although at 38 I wouldn't blame him). He also had 1 more PB, 7 less DPs, and 1 more error in 160 fewer innings.

Royals and Cubs Signings

The last couple days have been busy for both the Royals and the Cubs. The Cubs signed Grudzlienek and Goodwin to contracts, the former to a one year deal with a team option for a second at around $2.5M and the latter to a one year deal, hopefully for not more than $500K.

I would rather the Cubs have gone after Vina to fill the gaping leadoff hole but Grudz is certainly above replacement level and hit with some pop (38 doubles). I hate to see him hitting high in the order, he would be a good number 7 guy. Goodwin was good pinch hitter last year, can pinch run, and play a little defense so a good guy to have around.

I recently read an interesting review of a study in a professional journal of heuristics that attempted to determine the optimum batting order. Basically, the conclusion was that if you classify players as "table setters", "all around hitters", and "runner advancers" (or something like that), then your best strategy is to construct a lineup with all your players in order by group and in descending order by ability within each group. Of course, the trick is in how you classify players but not having the article, I can't speculate on the system they used to do so. Grudz to me is more of a "runner advancer" than a table setter since even his best OBP years are going to be around .340 and his potential for moving players via doubles is pretty good. He only hits high in the order since the Cubs don't have ANY table setters. Patterson is an ideal 5 or 6 hitter and Gonzales is 8 hitter.

The Royals signed Matt Stairs, who had a great year last year hit 20 homeruns in just over 300 at bats. He should be a good platoon with Harvey at first and see some action in left field and pinch hitting. I assume its a one year deal. They also signed Scott Sullivan to a 2 year deal to solidify the bullpen. He also had a good year last year splitting time between a couple clubs. Earlier in the week the Royals resigned Grimsely for one year at $1M (a good deal for the Royals I think). He was certainly overworked last year and became totally ineffective after the break. Hopefully, Pena won't try and go to him so often that he fries his arm early again.

So the depth charts are:
Cubs
1B - Lee, Simon as backup and pinch hitter
2B - Grudz
SS - Gonzales, Martinez
3B - Ramirez
RF - Sosa
CF - Patterson, Goodwin
LF - Alou
C - Miller (hopefully still looking at Lopez)

SP - Prior, Wood, Clement, Zambrano, Cruz
RP - Borowski, Hawkins, Remlinger, Farnsworth, Wellmeyer

Royals
1B - Harvey, Stairs
2B - Relaford
SS - Berroa
3B - Randa
RF - Guiel
CF - Beltran
LF - DeJesus, Stairs
C - Nobody (Looking hard at Santiago)
DH - Sweeney

SP - Anderson, May, Asencio, Appier, Snyder (maybe Affeldt)
RP - Affeldt, MacDougal, Leskanic, Grimsely, Sullivan, Carrasco

Domain Logic Patterns

A new article I wrote for builder.com has just been published covering common Domain Logic Patterns in .NET Framework applications. It follows the terminology from Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, a book I really like.

The follow-up article on Data Access Patterns should be published soon.

Baseball As Context (Part III)

This is part III of Baseball as Context...


Although the Cubs have brought me much joy and more than a little sorrow, baseball also made its way into my life in other ways. The first major league game I actually attended was as a five year old in the Astrodome in 1973. My family made the game since a pitcher for the Mets, Jim McAndrew, had been a few years behind my mother in school. McAndrew was a pretty decent spot starter and reliever with good control for the Mets from 1968-1973 on a staff already loaded with talent. He went on to play one more season with the Padres. Although I still have the autographed program and have seen pictures taken at the game, my only recollection is discussing with my brother how small the players looked on the field from our vantage point in the upper deck. Later, when my wife and I lived in Houston for a few years after college I was able to confirm this recollection by sitting in almost that same upper deck spot when the Rangers' Nolan Ryan played an exhibition game in Houston before the start of the season.

The most prized piece of memorabilia from the visit, however, was the autographed team ball that McAndrew presented to my mother. All of the players and coaches from that pennant winning team (they went on to lose the World Series to the A's of Charlie Finley) signed it in either regular or blue pencil and it includes the signatures of Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, Yogi Berra, Jerry Koosman, Rusty Staub, and Tug McGraw. A few years ago my parents decided to disperse some of these heirlooms to their children and a drawing was held between my brother and me for the ball. I lost but as a consolation prize received a ball my mother had inherited from her uncle, who at one time ran a hotel in Florida frequented by the St. Louis Cardinals during spring training. The ball dates from the 1940s and includes the signatures of Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, Harry Brecheen, Joe Garagiola, and Solly Hemus. Not a bad consolation prize and it sits proudly above my desk in a place of honor.

Another of my earliest intersections with baseball is the 1975 World Series. During the series I stayed over night at a friend's house and we watched the historic sixth game. I rooted for the Red Sox, a move that would seem quite out of character shortly thereafter since I became a National League guy, since my friend was rooting for the Reds. I can't honestly say I remember seeing Fisk hit the game winner in the bottom of the 12th but I do remember being enthralled with the game many judge as the best ever played and think that it was probably the first time I realized how exciting baseball could be.

Once I and my brother had caught the baseball bug my family indulged our passion by scheduling our summer vacations (typically 2 week road trips in the big green van complete with stickers on the back window from each state we visited) around our own baseball seasons (about which more is to follow) and coinciding with big league games in other cities. Two particular games in St. Louis stand out, the first a Sunday matinee in July of 1979 or 1980 in which a Bill Buckner homerun curving around the right field foul pole, secured the Cubs victory, and the second, a 17 inning affair (my mother fortunately brought a book) with the Pirates in 1982 which saw the Cardinals threaten in each inning past the 10th but ultimately lose the game in the wee hours of the morning. Without much money of my own I was dependant on my father for food during the game. He shut off the spicket around the 2nd inning (we had arrived in time for batting practice and ballpark food was not cheap even then) and so by the time the game ended after midnight I was ravenously hungry but had to wait until the following day. Legend has it, for I admit to being dazed by hunger, that my brother and I went 17 hours without food (quite a feat for teenage boys), fittingly matching the Cardinals futility. It was this game as well where we witnessed Willie "Pops" Stargell in his final year with the Pirates, pinch hit and swat a line drive that nearly took off the second baseman's head before hitting the right field wall on the fly. Stargell, then of substantial girth, ambled to first with a single before being immediately pinch run for.

The most memorable two week car trip, for both its relation to baseball and because we visited several Civil War battlefields including Gettysburg (I was also a Civil War buff) was the year I was fifteen (1983) as we traveled east from Iowa. In addition to games seen in Montreal (remembered as very clean with fans who were quite polite but quiet) and Pittsburg (very dirty and with fans that cursed and threw batteries at their own Dave Parker), the ultimate experience was the afternoon spent in Cooperstown, the high and holy shrine of baseball. The feeling of awe and the connection with history in viewing the Babe's bat and Willie Mays' New York Giants jersey was truly thrilling. My brother and I were even permitted to peruse the library where we searched for statistics on lefty/righty breakdowns , then a difficult thing to secure before the "democratization" of baseball statistics through the discovery (assuredly not too strong a word) of sabermetrics and the wide publication of wonderful books such as the Bill James Baseball Abstract and the Elias Baseball Analyst not to mention the Internet.

These trips are remembered not only for the intersection with baseball. As I now look back on them I find that their ultimate value lies in the sense of geography (we also took several trips west where baseball was more difficult to come by) and history that ultimately bred perspective. They helped shape in me a view of America as a beautiful, vast, a richly complex nation that I still carry today. For that, as for the more traditional things for which children should be thankful, I'll always be indebted to my parents.

In specific and concrete ways, then, baseball can and often does connect us to history. A visit to old Comiskey Park, Fenway Park or Wrigley Field allows us to relive moments gone by and feel in a very visceral way the events that transpired there. In one early visit to Wrigley, for example, I was awestruck by the thought that Babe Ruth stood at that very home plate just a few feet away and called his shot against Charlie Root in the 1932 World Series. Of course, at that time I was not aware of the legendary nature of the "called shot" incident since the children's baseball book I read from cover to cover many times over simply recounted the legends of the game. Unfortunately, in all likelihood Ruth was merely gesturing towards the jeering Cubs dugout. I'm glad that at the time I didn't know the factual, but infinitely less interesting, truth.

I liken experiences like these to the one enjoyed very recently when I viewed for the first time, along with my seven year old daughter, Jupiter and four of its moons through a small starter telescope. In that moment we were immediately connected with Galileo across a span of 400 years, whose own crude telescope gave him a view very similar to ours in 1610.

Baseball As Context (Part II)

This is part II of "Baseball as Context"...


Growing up in eastern Iowa just a few miles from the Mississippi River, my first memory of baseball was listening to the Chicago Cubs on radio 720 WGN while driving in the car with my Dad. We had a green Ford station wagon and I can remember the call of Lou Boudreau, the Hall of Fame shortstop and manager of the Cleveland Indians who guided his team to the pennant in 1948, and Vince Lloyd (who Boudreau referred to as "good kid") the play-by-play man. Even though the specifics of the games are lost, the feel and rhythm of the game (and interestingly even some of the commercial jingles) stuck. Thus we were always Cubs fans, a condition I attribute to the dual causes of a maternal Grandfather and father who always rooted for them, and that few folks in eastern Iowa were or are White Sox or Twins fans. For my Grandfather ((who we grandchildren referred to as Papa - pronounced "paw-paw"), I can only surmise that baseball helped "Americanize" this immigrant from Denmark who landed at Ellis Island in 1910 and who, unlike his siblings, wanted very much to assimilate into the culture. His desire to be an American was so complete that he worked very hard to lose any trace of his Danish accent, a feat he accomplished by his early 20s.

I can also recall the visits to Papa’s farm every Sunday after church in the early to mid 1970s where we would eat pancakes he prepared, followed by listening to or watching the Cubs in the afternoon accompanied by the smell of Papa’s pipe (remember that in the dark days before cable TV and ESPN only one major league game per week was accessible to us on TV, and that was on Sunday afternoon). In later years we would visit him in the nursing home and immediately park beside him in his brown leather recliner to watch the exploits of Dave Kingman as he led the National League in home runs with 48 in 1979, the summer of my 11th year and the year that Papa died, all the while eating butterscotch candies, Papa’s favorite. I can vividly recall one particular Sunday when Kingman hit two prodigious homeruns accompanied by Jack Brickhouse’s signature call of "Hey Hey" as the balls sailed in majestic arcs onto Waveland Avenue and we all rejoiced in his little room. Although Papa is gone, my connection with him through baseball remains something visceral that I can instantly recall when watching the Cubs on a Sunday afternoon.

"King Kong" Kingman, although he only played three seasons in Chicago hitting 28, 48, and 18 homeruns in those three years (data at my fingertips thanks to the trusty Total Baseball, which sits on my desk in a place of prominence since you never know when you might need to study the career of Steve Swisher to discover that his lifetime average was a dismal .216), my brother, who is 18 months my senior, and I often speak in hushed tones of his singular strength as epitomized in two vignettes etched in our collective memory. In the first, with a gale blowing out to left, Kingman lofts one of his high arcing shots down the left field line that catches the jet stream, passes over the 355 marker in left, out of Wrigley Field, over Waveland Avenue, and finally comes to rest between two houses somewhere on the next block. The ball surely must have traveled 700 feet, although wind-aided to be sure (this scene also calls to mind an almost identical shot by Glen Allen Hill in 1998 or 1999). The second scene is of Kingman, having been fooled on a pitch, reaching out in front of the plate as his bottom hand releases the bat. He makes contact around his ankles with one hand on the bat and although the ball looks like a popup, it proceeds to land softly in the center field bleachers.

Yes we were, and I remain, a loyal Cubs fan, although I’ll here confess a brief affair with the Yankees in my junior high years that fortunately dissipated soon after, as infatuations are apt to do. Although pulling for the Yankees in the mid 1980s was not like doing so from the 1940s to the early 60s when it was said that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel (in fact the Yankees did not taste postseason play from 1981 until 1995), they have in recent years returned to dominance. This is in large part thanks to the inequitable and archaic economic situation that virtually ensures that teams from Kansas City (my current home), Pittsburg, and other metro areas with small television revenues, will not generally be competitive. Although some argue the point, the Twins and A’s of 2001-2003 actually bolster the argument since both teams caught "lightening in a bottle" by enjoying success with players not yet eligible for free agency and therefore won’t be able to retain in the coming years. However, the A’s (and now the Blue Jays and Red Sox as well) have at least finally recognized the utility of using the new knowledge of baseball statistics termed "sabermetrics" to more correctly value the contributions of players as documented in Michael Lewis’s fascinating book MoneyBall. The term is a play on the acronym SABR which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in the early 1970s and to which I proudly belong. Sabermetrics includes nontraditional ways of evaluating the performance of players through analyzing statistics including Runs Created, OPS (on base plus slugging), range factor, Total Average, and other measures developed by gurus such as Bill James and Craig Wright. Using this approach, small market teams might be able to gain a competitive advantage until this "new knowledge" spreads throughout baseball. For now however, with a payroll a fifth that of the Yankees, it is all but certain that even if the Royals had not made several bungling front office moves in the last three years they could not hope to achieve post season success (although Royals fans, and I am one since they balance out my portfolio being in the American League, were momentarily given hope when the team started on a tear at 16-3 in 2003 but quickly lost 27 of their next 41 and fell back to .500 by mid June).

I, along with countless other Cubs fans, like to believe deep down that being a Cubs fan is a badge of honor worn bravely. We’ve come to this belief through hard years of spring hope followed by summer blossoming and ultimately culminating in autumn collapse. The two earliest and most lasting impressions of this pattern occurred in my formative years of 1977 and 1978 when both seasons saw the Cubs in first place near or after the All-Star break only to sink to perfect mediocrity in 1977 (81-81) and a bit below (79-83) in 1978 well out of contention. Fortunately, the penultimate disappointments would not come until I was more mature in 1984 and 1989, when having won the National League East, the first Cubs championship since 1945, the Cubs were beaten by teams from San Diego and San Francisco thanks to bad bounces (and Leon’s Durham’s legs) and timely hitting by a pair of veteran first baseman named Garvey and Clark. Oh, but I do remember the joys of that magical 1984 summer, epitomized by the June 23rd game against the Cardinals in which Ryne Sandberg hit successive homeruns off of former Cub Bruce Sutter with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and tenth innings, both shots into the left field bleachers tying the game that the Cubs ultimately went on to win in eleven innings (I was recently able to relive this joy as I happened to catch the broadcast on ESPN Classic). In one other late season game I distinctly recall Harry Carey exclaiming "the good Lord must be a Cubs fan", or words to that affect, after a line drive bounced off of Lee Smith, the fire-balling closer right to Leon Durham to start a double play that sealed a Cubs victory. Unfortunately, as we were soon to learn, the deity turned out not to be a Cubs fan.

And as if to give us one last moment of elation before the impending doom, there was game 1 of the League Championship series. I was allowed by the superintendent with a twinkle in his eye, to cut class (I was a sophomore) that afternoon and watch the Cubs rout the Padres 13-0 complete with a Rick Sutcliffe (who saved our bacon by going 16-1 with the Cubs after being acquired from Cleveland in May) towering homerun out onto Sheffield Avenue in right field (Sutcliffe, a right handed pitcher batted left handed).

Sutcliffe was also on the mound when the Cubs clinched the division title on a September day in Pittsburg, after which my father, brother and I danced around the living room and Dave and I got our trumpets (we played in the marching and concert bands) and announced the Cubs victory to the neighborhood.

The summer of 1989 was also memorable as the Cubs, fueled by Ryne Sandberg, Greg Maddux, Mark Grace, Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams, and a pair of rookies who would soon disappear like shooting stars in the night named Jerome Walton and Dwight Smith drove to the pennant, clinching it in Montreal. That summer I was doing an internship in Des Moines and recall many an evening spent listening to the Cubs broadcast in my little room in Ames (where I attended Iowa State University during the school year) while courting my soon-to-be fiancé in Iowa City by letter. I witnessed the final crushing blow in the student lounge at her dormitory in Des Moines that fall. I asked her to marry me anyway the next spring.

Although another near miss occurred in 1998, we Cubs fans refused to despair and so my hope was brought to the point of fulfillment this October when the Cubs, powered by a strong pitching staff with phenoms Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, a capable if overrated manager in Dusty Baker, and the ever powerful Sammy Sosa, won the central division championship by edging out the Astros in the final two weeks of the season. On a roll, they defeated the Braves in five exciting games in the division series (their first post season series win in 95 years) and then took a 3 games to 1 lead over the Marlins in the League Championship Series by taking advantage of some timely hitting and a trio of players robbed from the Pirates (Lofton, Ramirez, and Simon). However, it was at this point that the true meaning of being a Cubs fan came home to roost. I could only watch in horror and stunned silence when a fan interfered with Moises Alou in the 8th inning of game 6 and Gonzales booted a sure double play to help salt the game away for the Marlins. It was 1984 all over again. Not so strangely, on the day of game 7 I was resigned to our collective fate as sure as if the game had already been played and lost, and watched, almost emotionless, as a 5-3 lead disappeared and the Cub bats fell silent.

That having been said, being a Cubs fan has also aided in forming in me a rational and grounded view of reality. As Will said in his essay "The Chicago Cubs, Overdue" written in 1974:

"The differences between conservatives and liberals are as much a matter of temperament as ideas. Liberals are temperamentally inclined to see the world as a harmonious carnival of sweetness and light, where goodwill prevails, good intentions are rewarded, the race is to the swift, and a benevolent Nature arranges a favorable balance of pleasure over pain. Conservatives (and Cub fans) know better." [1]

Perhaps that is why I am today a conservative who believes in the fallen nature of both man and creation and that the law of unintended consequences must always be taken into account. Still, I don’t begrudge the Cubs my fate since in the end I do prefer reality to fantasy, nonfiction to fiction, and am glad the lesson was learned early. I don’t envy the feeling of despair that will someday overtake my seven year old nephew who’s favorite team is the Atlanta Braves and thus has never known a season in which the Braves did not finish first and enjoy a postseason run. His mother, my younger sister, was once too a Cubs fan whose favorite player was Bob Dernier (the first half of the "daily double" of 1984) but apparently gave in to temptation and succumbed to 140 games per year on TBS. Cubs fans however, take our lot in life in stride and so I must once again proudly wear my Chicago Cubs World Championship t-shirt, the logo of which displays 07 and one side and 08 on the other to memorialize the last world championships of 1907 and 1908.

Since that 1908 championship season in which the Cubs won 108 games (they hold the 154 game schedule record for wins with 116 in 1906 by the way, the year of the famous "Tinkers to Evers to Chance" double play combination made famous by the poem by Adams. The team also included Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown who lost half his index finger and had his pinky paralyzed in a boyhood accident. He had a devastating curve and once when asked by a reporter if having only three fingers helped his curveball he responded "I don’t know, I’ve never tried it with more."), they played in the World Series in 1910, 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938 and 1945 but lost each time. Actually, the 1945 pennant is a bit suspect since the league was depleted by the war effort. The level of play caused one Chicago writer to quip when asked for a prediction of the outcome of the World Series with the Tigers, "I can't conceive of either team winning a single game."

Joy for Cubs fans must therefore come in smaller doses. Most memorable for me were the annual or semi-annual pilgrimages to Wrigley Field where noted baseball writer Roger Angell once wrote in Season Ticket.

"Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions."

The two visits to the "friendly confines" I remember most vividly are my first, a double header with the Reds our entire family attended in 1977, and a game against the Mets in 1985.

Other than being the first game I’d attended at Wrigley the doubleheader was memorable since it was the first time I actually spoke to a big league ballplayer. My brother and I had made a sign with a pithy slogan that read "Rose are red, violets are blue, come on Cubs we’re rooting for you". While the sign left something to be desired, we did hold it up proudly at the wall before the game along the left field line down by the Cubs bullpen. As luck would have it, lefty reliever Willie Hernandez, his hat neatly perched on the top of his large afro, began ambling from the clubhouse down to the pen. I quickly grabbed a ball we had brought and a pen and promptly marched to the wall and asked Hernandez to sign the ball. Hernandez, with a chuckle I’m sure, asked me in his thick Spanish accent "Why for you want me to sign the ball?" The question surprised me since I hadn’t really thought about why I should want this marginal (at that time anyway, Hernandez went on to win the 1984 Cy Young award with the Tigers) player’s signature on a ball. However, I quickly composed myself and shot back with the quite logical response "Because I just do". I do remember using the word please after a second question from Hernandez but he must have succumbed to my piercing nine-year old logic. After a little more begging Hernandez agreed and I got my autograph, I might add, only seconds before being trampled by a herd of other kids armed with balls, pens, scorecards and other weapons. Alas, the Cubs dropped the first game and we had to leave before the second was over (our home was over 200 miles from Chicago) but listened to the Cubs furious rally in the late innings to salvage the day.

The second game in August of 1985 I remember distinctly not so much because of anything the Cubs did but because Darryl Strawberry, before drugs, bad health, and bad decisions had destroyed his immense talent and career, put on a hitting display I’ve not seen duplicated. In three times at bat Strawberry hit homeruns, each more majestic and longer than the one before (1 to center, 2 to right if memory serves). However, his fourth official at bat (he was intentionally walked in his fourth plate appearance), off of Warren Brusstar resulted in a smoked line-drive single through the right side of the infield that if it had been hit higher, might have been the longest of the homeruns.

Other Wrigley games are memorable as well, including my eldest daughter’s first trip to the Friendly Confines in 2002 where we saw five Cubs homeruns, the day in 1987 when we were almost decapitated by an Andre Dawson [2] foul ball down the left field line, and a cold spring day in the mid 1980s when the Cubs game was rained out and so our group stayed to see the White Sox/Indians game at old Comiskey with a couple thousand other fans in 40 degree weather. Although I hold no special place in my heart for its namesake, who was by all accounts a parsimonious and mean-spirited owner, I also was disappointed when the new Comiskey was renamed "U.S. Cellular Field". A good part of baseball’s appeal lies in tradition, and as I’ve been arguing in this essay, in its connection to the past. The incremental revenue gained by such a break with the past doesn’t make up for what has been lost.

Notes
[1]This essay was reprinted in The Armchair Book of Baseball, 1985, edited by John Thorn who notes that perhaps by the time the reader reads these lines Will will be transformed into a liberal by the success of the Cubs. Well, 18 years later Will is still a conservative and a Cubs fan. Enough said.
[2]Dawson hit 49 homeruns that season and was first NL MVP from a last place team. His final at bat at Wrigley that year was, fittingly, a homerun to dead centerfield.

New Links

Note that I've put some of my favorite baseball links on this site.

Baseball As Context (Part I)

This is the first installment of a multi-part blog that of an essay I wrote called "Baseball As Context". It's a bit of personal history mixed with baseball memories. I had started it early last season but was inspired to finish it as therapy after the Cubs loss in the NLCS. Enjoy...



"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."
– Educator and historian Jacques Barzun (God’s Country and Mine)

I am a failed baseball player. I’m pretty sure I lifted that line from George Will but it applies equally to me as to him and countless thousands of other American boys. Although I’m not yet considered archaic in baseball terms (being under 40) I have, through a slow and painful process, come to grips with the fact that I’ll never wear a big league uniform and never throw my southpaw overhand curveball in Wrigley Field before 39,000 screaming fans as Jack Brickhouse, Harry Carey, or even Skip Carey make the call to the myriads of fans listening and watching on WGN.

However, this realization has brought to mind how much of my own history, like that of the nation (as the character Terrance Mann played by James Earl Jones famously said in my favorite baseball movie Field of Dreams), has occurred against the backdrop of baseball.[1]

At its best baseball unlike any of the other major sports, in addition to just being a fun game to play and watch, connects us with the past and enables us to make comparisons across time. I believe this to be due to the fact that a) no major rule has been changed in over a century,[2] the closest being the abomination that is the designated hitter, but I digress, and b) the equipment remains (in the professional ranks anyway since lower leagues have succumbed to the financial advantage of aluminum bats), with some improvements and innovations to be sure, fundamentally that used by generations of ballplayers. And of course, while we are making those comparisons in the context of baseball, we can’t help associating the events of our own lives and our national life to feats performed on the field.

Having said that, I don’t subscribe, as the late Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould said to the notion that baseball "'imitates life' or stands as a symbol for larger truths in human existence."[3] In various ways I think many sports and other human activities imitate life simply because they are activities to which humans give a part of themselves and that therefore reflect at times both our best and worst inclinations. I do, however, prefer to think about baseball as context, and what follows is that context played out in my own life as the really important events; a loving family upbringing, time enjoyed with friends, a college education, a marriage to a wonderful woman, and the birth of one child and the adoption of another has occurred.



Notes:
[1]Jone’s character said in part, "This game..marks the times." The site where Field of Dreams was filmed lies roughly 50 miles from my small town and so both its baseball mythology and setting evoke special feelings. I now enjoy the film as a late winter ritual. "Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa".
[2]Baseball evolved in America from a variety of English games including “rounders” (which was sometimes called “base ball” as in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey) and cricket and was not invented by Doubleday in a pasture near Cooperstown in 1839. The year 1845 is the closest date there is to a birth for baseball when Alexander Cartwright laid out the diamond and rules that forshadow today’s. However, major changes involving strike outs, walks, number of outs, how outs are recorded etc. continued until late in the 19th century with the game essentially taking its modern form by 1893.
[3]"Baseball’s Reliquary: The Oddly Possible Hybrid of Shrine and University", an essay reprinted in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball, 2003. Gould, who was a lifelong Yankees and later Red Sox fan, wrote many interesting pieces on baseball, his most lasting perhaps his essay on the disappearance of the .400 hitter.

India Fights Back

India has gone on the offensive in terms of outsourcing. While the Indian official quoted in the article blames the US and Europe not allowing enough Indians to immigrate to the west for the growth of outsourcing, he's dead wrong. The reduced cost of labor is driving it. Bringing Indians here does nothing for the cost reduction efforts of US businesses.

I do agree that we have an aging population and so eventually a level of outsourcing will likely be required. Right now, however, that is not the problem and India is trying to reduce the backlash that might result.

Model Driven Development

Very interesting article on modeling languages and distributed applications that foreshadows what will be included in the next release of Visual Studio .NET.

Some would argue (correctly in my view) that abstraction is the most powerful productivity-boosting concept in Computer Science (and in many other aspects of life) and so tools that raise the level of abstraction result in less complexity leading to less grunt work and fewer defects in the code. This is surely the wave of the future.

After reading the article I'm still unsure as to where/if Microsoft's effort dovetails with the Model Driven Architecture of the OMG. Both ideas use models to generate code and attempt to keep the model as a living artifact in the project. However, the MDA/OMG approach is centered on UML and appears to be more focused on platform portability than on the reduction of complexity while the Microsoft effort looks like it is more domain-based, targeted at the Microsoft platform, and does not use UML. I could be wrong on all points of course, being a newbie here. However, Microsoft's document does say that "While abstraction can be used to hide platform differences, we find it much more valuable to use abstraction to reduce complexity of translating requirements into implementations."

The challenges to any model-driven development that I see right off are at least twofold:

1) How do you keep the generated code relevant to the model when changes are made to either end? This is the current problem with tools included in Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect and the previous tool based on Rational Rose in Visual Studio 6. Microsoft includes Code Model APIs in the .NET Framework that could help with this and of course the model would likely produce base classes, attributes, and delegates that are hooked to hand-crafted code although it would seem there would at least have to be some minimal interaction here.

2) How do you create models that are granular enough to support real business processes? I can certainly see broad models that support certain kinds of problems but can the models really be made specific enough to produce usable code? I suppose that the DSL approach would allow industries to create the models which would enable them to be very specific and more complex but this is certainly a key challenge.


Lots of food for thought...

Cubs Rumors

The Cubs are reportedly still talking with Kennry Lofton as a fourth outfielder and a deal with Grudzielanek has not been reached although it looks like the Cubs are pretty set on trying to sign him. I'd like to see them go after Vina at second instead since he could fill the leadoff spot. I also wouldn't mind them taking a run at Javy Lopez although his price tag may be a little high. Looks as if Cruz is now projected as the 5th starter. It would be nice to have another plan there as well. They may also resign Tom Goodwin since he is one of Dusty's favorites and did perform well last year. If they sign Lofton I would rather they looked at a reserve with more power.

MLB.com also noted that Hawkins turned down more money from the Yankees to play for the Cubs since he is a long time fan from the days of the daily-double, Leon Durham, and Jody Davis. Still, he'll get $11M over two years and has incentives that might raise it to $15M as well as an optional 3rd year.

Jackson, Sharpton, and Peter Pan

Well, the debacle that is Michael Jackson has now begun to unravel. There was a great editorial by Gerald Early in the 12/2 Wall Street Journal that made the obvious link from Jackson to Peter Pan as a man trying to stay forever young (the article is only available to subscribers online). I see that ABC news has done a piece in the same light from the medical/psychological perspective (he must be a victim, aren't we all?). The interesting aspect of the WSJ piece, however, was noting not only how Jackson has tried to transcend time by altering his appearance and recycling the style that brought him fame, but how he has tried to transcend race and gender as well in an apparent effort to appeal to everyone but in the end removing the core of his humanity and making him all but intelligible to real people. On the other hand maybe he's just weird.

Which of course makes it all the more hypocritical when his brother defends him by playing the race card ("a modern lynching" I believe was the phrase) and when Jackson played it himself several years ago accusing Sony of being racist because his records weren't selling. You would think that in a country hyper-sensitive to race (e.g. "hate-crimes" legislation, serious discussion of reparations, and campus speech codes) these kinds of baseless accusations would be revlealed for what they are. Unfortunately, bogus cries of racism from people in the favoured groups are almost never exposed and even more rarely condemned. As a great example, check out Ann Coulter's column from a few days ago where she correctly noted that:

"Sharpton libeled innocent men in the Tawana Brawley case. He inflamed angry mobs in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, leading to the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. He incited an anti-Semitic pogrom against a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem, Freddy's, ending in a blaze of bullets and fire that left several employees dead."

Sharpton is given a free pass by both the media and the other Democrats simply because he is black.

150,000 Software Jobs Lost in 2002

Here is some more disturbing news about software jobs and IT in general in the U.S. I guess the good news is that job losses in consulting companies and the like slowed in 2002 as opposed to 2001. While not all of the job loss (150,000 software jobs) can be attributed to offshore outsourcing with the economic slowdown, that has to be a major factor. It'll be interesting to see what happens if the economy continues to recover. The disturbing point in the article is the note that:

"the impact of high-tech manufacturing and services outsourcing to foreign countries remains extremely hard to gauge, as most companies refuse to detail how many positions they have shipped overseas. Until businesses are more forthcoming with those numbers or the U.S. federal government requires some form of reporting on employee outsourcing data it would be nearly impossible to estimate just how many jobs have been transferred offshore"

Hawkins

Actually, the Cubs signed Hawkins to a 2-year deal with a player option for a third year. He's in his low thirties so he should be ok for the next couple years barring injury.

Cubs pick up setup man

The Cubs today reportedly are set to sign LaTroy Hawkins to a three year deal. Great setup man the last 2 years. With Remlinger and Farnsworth they would be solid. With the Lee trade that sets up the Cubs as follows:

1B - Lee, Simon as backup and pinch hitter
2B - Grudz (free agent but likely resign although the Cubs appear to be going after Vina, which would be a good move)
SS - Gonzales (unfortunately but still has a contract)
3B - Ramirez (should try and lock him up for a couple years)
RF - Sosa (just exercised his option)
CF - Patterson (injury free and with some patience, who knows?)
LF - Alou (1 year left on contract)
C - Miller (should look hard at Rodriguez or someone else but it doesn't look like they will)

SP - Prior, Wood, Clement (Cubs picked up option), Zambrano, Need a fifth starter
RP - Borowski, Hawkins, Remlinger, Farnsworth, Cruz

Good News from KC

The Royals signed their top 3 free agents! Great news. So now the Royals look as follows:

1B - Harvey (might still be shopping for a platoon)
2B - Relaford
SS - Berroa
3B - Randa
RF - Guiel
CF - Beltran (for one more year)
LF - DeJesus (maybe looking at White or Jordan for everyday as insurance)
C - Nobody (Looking at Mayne as a backup and possibly Santiago?)
DH - Sweeney

SP - Anderson, May, Asencio, Appier, Snyder
RP - Affeldt (should be full time closer), MacDougal, Leskanic, Carrasco

Not a SABR Member

As a counter point to my previous post, the author of this article is certainly not a fan of sabermetrics. I thought it sounded just a wee-bit bitter. I especially liked "Clearly, the easiest positive statistic for mediocre hitters, one that requires keeping the bat glued to your shoulder, instead of the traditional hand-eye induced ball-whacking (which is far more exciting), is the ability to draw walks."

I think this reflects the underlying and non-thinking of so many traditionalists that walks are something the pitcher does and not something the batter has any responsibility for. I would argue that the reverse is really the case and that if you looked at the standard deviation of walks/per plate appearance for pitchers and hitters, the pitcher's spread would be smaller. Hmmm, I'll have to get to that someday....

Patience and Its Effects

Interesting article on patience on Baseball Prospectus. Basically, the author concludes that the difference between teams that take alot of pitches (Red Sox, A's) and teams that don't (Devil Rays, Tigers) doesn't really have much effect on wearing out pitchers and causing extra relievers to enter the game. Although this is the reasoning that you'll sometimes hear a manager use when talking about plate discipline. Two comments:

First, I was most impressed by the author's comment which hits the nail on the head:

"If a team's intent is to seize on the minor advantage of facing middle relief, it's important to realize that getting more pitches is never more important than hitting those pitches. And that's what good hitters do: work the count in their favor, so they can reach a favorable hitter's count and whack the ensuing fat pitch. The best-hitting teams are the ones that pile patience together with batting ability. Sounds simple, yet too many teams still struggle with the concept."

In other words, its not overall patience that matters but "patience with a purpose", i.e. to hit cripples. My brother brought this point to my attention last year when he noted that what impressed him most when sitting right behind the dugout at a major league game was the difference between good hitters taking bad pitches and bad hitters swinging at bad pitches. All major leaguers can hit pitches in the sweet zone, some hitters are simply better at getting the pitchers to throw those kinds of pitches. Ted Williams in The Science of Hitting was of course right on when he labeled the locations within the strike zone with averages ranging from .240 to over .400. Second to getting good pitches to hit (and in some ways simply a by product) is the extra walks piled up by patient hitters that serve to not consume outs and put more runners on base leading to more runs.

Second, while the overall effects of team patience don't support the idea of using it soley or even primarily as a means of wearing out a starter, the small differences between teams (3.9 pitchers per plate appearance for the Red Sox and A's versus 3.6 for the Devil Rays) are likely masked for three reasons. 1) Having some players who take alot of pitches and some players who don't take very many. 2) A high number of walks may not be that strongly correlated with seeing a lot of pitches. Some players who strike out alot see alot of pitches because of the number they swing through. For example, Jose Hernandez, who struck out 177 times this year and walked only 46 saw 3.95 pitches per plate appearance, a very high total. 3) Some patient hitters, who even though they walk alot, don't see an extremely high number of pitches since they don't run alot of 3-2 counts. Bonds of course is the extreme example since he gets intentionally walked so much and almost always puts strikes in play hard somewhere.

Isaac Newton

I recently read James Gleick's short (190 pages) biography of Newton simply called Isaac Newton. I thought it was perfect for giving you a capsule view of his life and his research that went into his two famous books, the Principia and Opticks.

Gleick paints a picture of Newton as someone who couldn't stand criticism and so hid many of his ideas about the nature of light and "the calculus" for many years. He also does a good job explaining Newton's other (and arguably principle) passions for alchemy, prophecy, and Arianism (the belief that the Trinity is an invention of the church and that God is not distinct in three persons) that were not widely known until the 20th century.

I liked the book because it didn't go into great biographical detail and doesn't try to do much psychology but concentrates instead on his research and relationship to the scientific establishment of the day (the Royal Society in England had just been formed during Newton's youth).

A couple of other things that were interesting to me included the fact that Newton was the first to propose that white light was the combination of the other colors that were separated by a prism or raindrop instead of the idea that the prism somehow created the colors. He also noted the various angles of refraction for the colors of light. I'm sure this information passed by me in some course somewhere but I had forgotten it if it did.

Also I didn't realize that the idea that the force exerted on an object was inversely proportional to the square of the distance was being discussed at the time although Newton derived it independently. But it was Newton who then generalized the idea to include planets and comets and therefore proposed universal gravitation.

Finally, Gleick lays out the controversy between Newton and Leibniz regarding the discovery of the calculus. Newton clearly had priority by over 25 years (Newton did not use calculus in his Principia even though he could have since he wanted the book to be understood based on existing and accepted mathematical principles) but failed to publish first. However, 2 small points that I found interesting were that Newton, in correspondance with Leibniz, and sensing that he was about to be scooped, wrote him a letter in which part was encrypted. Newton then took the code and dated it in a sealed letter so he could later decode it and prove his priority. Second, Netwon used totally different symbols than Leibniz but it is Leibniz's symbols (for integrals for example) that ended up winning the day by the 19th century and that we used today (another fact I probably heard before).

Now if I could just remember anything about calculus from college other than that you can use it to compute the area under a curve and rates of change........

Lee vs Choi

Well, the Cubs acquired Derreck Lee from the Marlins for Hee Seop Choi and a player to be named later. While I don't think the trade is terrible for either team I think the Marlins got the better of the deal.

Choi is younger at 24 than Lee at 28

Choi has the potential to be a 100 walk, 25 homerun player for the next 10 years

Lee is likely at or very near his peak production although his homerun totals should go up some in Wrigley Field

Lee walks a good amount which is great and is solid at 1B and to that extent the Cubs are getting a known quantity

Lee makes $4.5M and Choi $300K so what the Cubs are essentially doing is paying for a known quantity rather than taking the risk on a player that very well might be better

In the end, for the difference you're going to get between the two (Lee may outperform Choi the next year or two) it's probably not worth it in the long run. I would have stuck with Choi.

Royals Rumors

Ron Hostetter reports that the Royals may be interested in:

Brian Jordan (OF)
Robert Fick (1B)
Raul Mondesi (OF)
Matt Stairs (1B)
Rondell White (OF)
Todd Walker (if they fail to sign Randa)

I'm not too excited about any of these guys. Mondesi is overrated and Stairs can't hit lefities although he does get on base and might make a good platoon with Harvey. Fick might also be a serviceable platoon player but he doesn't walk enough or hit with enough power to make him valuable. Jordan and White are injury prone and are getting up there in years. Todd Walker is vritually the same player as Randa so I guess you would take whichever one came cheaper.

Two Slices of Bacon

In reflecting on the assasination of JFK I wondered what it was that caused people to believe in the conspiracies in the abscence of evidence. In the First Book of Francis Bacon's 1620 Novum Organum he identified several impediments, which he called idols (aphorisms 38-44), to human reasoning in the pursuit of a correct interpretation of nature. One of the idols he defined is "Idols of the Tribe" (idola tribus). These are impediments grounded in ways of thinking common to the human species. Of these Bacon says that they are "inherent in human nature and the very tribe or race of man; for man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the universe..." One might say that idols of the tribe reflect the way our brains are hard-wired to interpret our immediate environment. As a result, some things that may seem to be "common sense" may lead us down the wrong path.

One particular example of this kind of idol (discussed by Gould in several essays) is our inability to grasp vast distances and long timespans. Our minds are suited to deal in feet, miles, days, and years, not millions of miles and billions of years. As a result, we can't intuitively feel what these distances and time spans are like although our reason in some sense overcomes this deficiency and allows us to perform calculations and calibrations to deal with them numerically, for example, in space flight and paleontology. In another example, our inability to think intuitively about large numbers makes people ripe for believing in "Bible Codes".

Related to conspiracies, perhaps the most studied and well-known way that humans process information is to see patterns and make connections. My conjecture is that conspiracy theorists employ this particular idol and are trapped by it when they identify a causal relationship in a set of connections (a pattern) between individuals. For example, A) the Florida mob boss Carlos Marcello was known to have harboured ill will for the Kennedys, B) Marcello knew Guy Bannister who was an anti-Castro figure in New Orleans, C) Anti-Castro people were also generally disappointed with Kennedy for his failure to support the insurgents at the Bay of Pigs and subsequently, D) Guy Bannister knew David Ferrie, also an anti-Castro militant, E) Guy Bannister had an office in the same structure as the address printed on the flyers Oswald handed out on the streets of New Orleans (an alternate route is that Oswald was in the Civil Air Patrol at the same time as Ferrie was an instructor), F) Oswald killed Kennedy. Follow the chain and you come to the obvious conclusion that Marcello must have ordered the hit on Kennedy and Guy Bannister and David Ferrie recruited Oswald to do it since it coincided with their own hatred of Kennedy. There certainly appears to be a pattern here and common sense seems to dictate that we take the results of this view seriously. Should we?

While connecting causality with a pattern like this in a world of just a few individuals might make sense, it doesn't in a country will hundreds of millions of people. This is the so called "small world" effect that allows you to link any actor to Kevin Bacon in less than 7 films. The conspiracy theorists are thereby caught just where our idol (the ability to make connections and see patterns) runs into our inability to deal with large numbers and so a likely statistical artifact is mistaken for causality (see this site for a great version of the Bacon game for baseball players). Let me be clear that the pattern may indeed record a chain of causality. However, in order to show that it did we would need evidence. Unfortunately, there is no documentary evidence tha bridges the gaps between these facts in the case of the JFK assassination (see this excellent site for a clear thinking view of the JFK assasination.
). So we've gone from Bacon to Bacon. I wonder if my breakfast is ready....

Whidbey Enterprise Tools

Some good prelimanry information on the enterprise tools that will be going into VS .NET Whidbey next year.

Any tools that assist in writing boilerplate like code or that handle infrastructure issues are the wave of the future. Writing anything but business logic by hand is a waste of time.

Cubs prospect named AFL MVP

I see that Jason DuBois in the Cubs system was named AFL (Arizona Fall League) MVP after hitting .358 with 9 homeruns. Ken Harvey of the Royals was the AFL MVP last year. Not sure if DuBois will really get any shot next year since he is an outfielder and those spots are set. This also may just be a bit of an outlier for him since he was in AA last year and hit only .269. The AFL of course has a very short season along the lines of 35 games and so the statistics will always have a larger spread and therefore be more difficult to index.

Appier Still a Royal

The Royals signed Appier to a one-year deal for the $300,000 minimum. Not a bad deal and that still leaves room to go after Anderson.

Conspiracies, conspiracies, and not a thing to wear

Like most people I took in some of the retrospectives this week on the JFK assasination on this 40th anniversary. Although both the Frontline piece on PBS and the Unsolved History program on The History Channel were both solid and well documented, The Men Who Killed Kennedy series that the Histroy Channel ran was a farce. In Unsolved History they validated that:

A) Oswald could have gotten the 3 shots off in 8 to 8.4 seconds as the evidence now indicates was the time span (the Warren commission got the timing of the first shot wrong and was taken over 2 seconds earlier than first believed)
B) The shots were not as difficult as some believe. They had a marksman duplicate the shots and was able to do it everytime the gun didn't jam or malfunction (which was 23% of the time)
C) Oswald could have hidden the gun and proceeded down the rear stairs to the 2nd floor breakroom in 90 seconds without being winded where he was seen by a police officer
D) Oswald could have walked from his boarding house to the spot where officer Tippet was killed in under 15 minutes (they timed it at 11 minutes)
E) That other locations for the shooter were unlikely (the storm drain, the bridge) because of visibility and angle

The Men Who Killed Kennedy, however, has so many holes its hard to know where to start. In particular though I was struck by the treatment of Judyth Barker, the self-proclaimed mistress of Lee Harvey Oswald. Her story is so implausible, linking almost every character mentioned in any conspiracy theory, so as to be laughable. A quick web search produced this document that effectively debunks her delusions and adds to the list of incredible claims, many of which don't even relate to Oswald. This same filmmaker pinned the assasination on 3 french guys back in 1988 in earlier installments of the series.

In my reading Case Closed by Gerald Posner is still a great source that effectively debunks many of the leading claims of the conspiracy theorists. Many volumes would be needed to debuk them all but Posner makes a good start. Certainly, the book has been much criticized but its basic message remains intact. If just half the people were in on the murder of a sitting president as is supposed by most conspiracy theorists, then the conspiracy would have long ago been exposed and all would be known. On top of that no actual counter evidence to the lone gunman theory has ever been validated. One of the interesting facts that often gets forgotten but is documented by Posner as well as the Frontline piece is that no less than 3 people saw the barrel of the gun out the 6th floor window, one saw Oswald very clearly (he gave the description to the Police that was broadcast on the radio 15 minutes after the event), and two actually saw the gun fire. In addition, employees on the 5th floor clearly heard the shots above them as well. They were all interviewed within minutes of the assasination. Reactions of people on the Zapruder film also clearly show that the shots were coming from behind.

It makes you wonder at the psychological factors that lead people to believe such implausible theories on the basis of no evidence. In the case of JFK I've heard it said that for that generation anyway, it was hard to accept that a nobody like Oswald could kill a somebody like Kennedy without a vast conspiracy.

I don't think its quite so interesting why people like Judyth Baker and the step-daughter of John Ligget (the supposed mortician who reconstructed the Presiden'ts head in The Men Who Killed Kennedy) might make false reports. Their motives probably have to do with personal recognition, faulty memory (reading themselves into the story 40 years later based on fragmentary memories), and plain old mental problems. Its more interesting why otherwise rational people would buy into the theories and promote them (i.e. Oliver Stone). Does it simply make life more interesting? Does it fulfill a need to see larger forces at work in a world that is full of contingency? Can people not analyze and separate fact from fiction? Your guess is as good as mine.

Royals, Rob, and Rany

Check Rob and Rany for more Royals talk.

Royals Redux

Thanks to Ron Hostteter again for pointing out that Hernandez underwent Tommy John surgery at the end of last year and won't be available until 2005. Also, Ascencio was almost ready at the end of last year but the team didn't want to push him. So for the 5th starter that leaves:

Jimmy Gobble - I've not been impressed with him in the least. He's a flyball pitcher who doesn't throw very hard which is not a good combination, although maybe the deeper fences at the K this year will help him out more than the others.

Brad Voyles - Not impressive either. At least he's a power pitcher but he walks sooo many its hard to get excited about him.

Zack Greinke - Promising Royals prospect drafted out of high school. Great A numbers last year but struggled a bit in AA, except for his walks/inning which was very good. Should see him in AAA this year and probably called up at some point

Jose Lima - I doubt the Royals will resign him after injuries and the way he was shelled at the end of the year. Of course if he signs for peanuts that would help

So the core of the staff shapes up to be:

SP - Asencio, May, Snyder, Anderson (hopefully the Royals can sign him), Gobble/Voyles
RP - Affeldt (should be full time closer), MacDougal, Leskanic (the Royals need to sign him), Carrasco

Overall, the Royals aren't in bad shape financially. Getting rid of the contracts of Tucker, Ibanez (who signed with the Mariners yesterday), Grimsley, Mayne, Randa and a bunch of others leaves (see the free agent tracker on MLB.com) them $12-15 million to sign Anderson, Leskanic, and a third baseman. In my previous post I said Randa would be resigned based on the fact that I doubt he can get what he's going to ask on the market and so he'll have to come back to KC for the same or less as last year. Taking a chance on Fernando Tatis wouldn't be all that bad if you can get him cheap.

Also you could see DeJesus in CF and Beltran in LF. I don't know anything about DeJesus's arm and we didn't see Beltran's last year at all after his injury.

Around the Hot Stove

Here is some good analysis of the Cubs offseason. Great comments on Choi and Bellhorn. Dusty gave up on both way too early and was fortunate that Hendry stepped up and got Lofton and Ramirez. Probable lineup for 2004?

1B - Choi, Simon as backup and pinch hitter
2B - Grudz (free agent but likely resign although Castillo would be interesting)
SS - Gonzales (unfortunately but still has a contract)
3B - Ramirez (should try and lock him up for a couple years)
RF - Sosa (just exercised his option)
CF - Patterson (injury free and with some patience, who knows?)
LF - Alou (1 year left on contract)
C - Miller (should look hard at Rodriguez or someone else)

SP - Prior, Wood, Clement (Cubs picked up option), Zambrano, Need a fifth starter
RP - Borowski, Remlinger, Farnsworth, Cruz

Clearly catcher is the position to upgrade as well as shortstop if you could get somebody to take Gonzales.

The Royals are another story. Here's what looks probable thus far:

1B - Harvey (not great but could improve)
2B - Relaford (better as a utility man but the best the Royals have for now considering Matos, Ordaz, and Abernathy)
SS - Berroa (solid, solid)
3B - Randa (Royals will try and resign)
RF - Guiel (impressive season in 2003, could get better in 2004)
CF - Beltran (for one more year anyway)
LF - DeJesus (with Ibanez in Seattle, this makes sense. Dee Brown might slip in here once more but I hope not)
C - Nobody (Mayne and DeFelice are free agents though I'd hate to see them sign either one)
DH - Sweeney (Royals over .500, he stays)

SP - Hernandez, Asencio, May, Snyder, Anderson (hopefully the Royals can sign him)
RP - Affeldt (should be full time closer), MacDougal, Leskanic, Carrasco

Everyone else is expendable.