Today Terry and I completed a task some, including myself, thought might not ever happen again: we updated the wiffleball website. It's been about three years, but what better time than 11 days beforehand to launch the 2009 Swingin' For Santa mini-site?

The job itself of making it is a chore. A fun chore, but a chore all the same. Especially the final 24 hours. The feeling when you're done though (well, 99% done) usually makes it all worth it. So fun to finally be able to just sit back, breathe for a second, and see how it all looks.

Big thanks to Mark Montgomery for providing content, anyone who played/participated at any of the previous iterations of our SFS event, and of course our bros at Rockstar for providing the all-important funding!! We won't letcha down, guys! Rock on!

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Why yes, Derek Jeter *did* have a much better year than Usain Bolt, silly! Just ask Sports Illustrated! What the hell did Bolt do that was so impressive? Jeter hit .334! And finished 3rd in the AL in the MVP race, losing out to only some catcher whose name I can't remember and one of his Yankee teammates.

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Sometimes I chuckle* when listening to music online, especially when I realize I'm listening to something I would normally not give two shits about, but I DO simply because of some long-lost memory it provides. In any other context, this music would mean nothing to me. It's not bad music per se, but it's unremarkable music. Still, I enjoy it thoroughly because it takes me back to a specific idyllic time in my childhood.

*I hate that word, "chuckle"...if you ever hear me "chuckling", rest assured it's a big fat sarcastic laugh. Nevertheless, I'm using it. Whatever.

That specific time is the first half of the 1990s and that location is Scott Carmichael's house. Well, his parents' house, where he was living at the time without rent. And where I was a frequent guest.

I wasn't exactly a music encyclopedia in 1990. I was 10 years old, barely any chest hair to be found, and the breadth of my knowledge was more or less restricted to NKOTB and whatever my parents owned (on tape). But it's around that age that kids start yearning for more, starting to realize their parents' collection is just the tip of the iceberg*. Yet at the same time, you're constrained to whatever measly allowance money you receive (if any) for whatever measly help you provide around the house (if any), so you're not exactly able to buy the entire AC/DC catalog at Musicland. You end up beholden to, of all things, your FRIENDS' parents' collections if you want to broaden the horizons. And from the ages of 10-15, I spent far more time at Scott's parents' house than any other besides my own. Mom Carmichael was mostly an adult contemporary fan, sharing a few titles my own mom owned, so there wasn't much to be found there. But Dad Carmichael was a rock fan, like my dad, albeit a somewhat different rock fan. A bit more eclectic in variety, ranging from butt rock to some new wave and a healthy dose of modern rock. I remember hearing a lot of Sammy Hagar, Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen, Tom Petty, INXS, Dire Straits, Bad Company, Damn Yankees, Styx, etc, etc. These were the soundtrack to my most relaxed and fulfilling evenings of that era. The ones I spent at the Carmichael's, making up dopey dice football or dice baseball games, or perhaps playing Tecmo Super Bowl until the sun came up. Friday or Saturday night, not a care in the world. Sure, you have homework to do, but you can put it off considering it's a sheet of multiplication tables that will take you about four minutes to complete**.

*"Wait, you mean there are MORE Journey albums out there besides Raised on Radio?! Like...27 more albums?!"

**I was really good at the multiplication tables. Mainly thanks to the aforementioned dopey dice games.

I was old enough to appreciate the weekend, old enough to soak it in and breathe deeply. I was old enough to be able to preoccupy myself with stats, paper, and music, and I was young enough to really have zero serious responsibilities. It was my childhood prime.

So when I'm sitting at work, and Live Baby Live by INXS comes on, I can't help but listen fondly with a smile on my face, despite the fact that INXS is mostly just an average band and this album is, at best, mediocre. I don't "hear" it so much as get that freeing feeling of the weekend. It reminds me of a Friday night where I have nothing to do but hang out with a cool dude at a cool house with a cool football game we created ourselves. We've got nothing to do & nowhere to go. The night is young. The Dr. Pepper tastes better, somehow. INXS sounds better, somehow. The Damn Yankees are practically tolerable life is so beautiful right now!

Tonight it's Friday, but it's 2009 and Scott's 650 miles south. And I've gotta call BofA to see if I can get this late fee waived. And my gf and I have a new townhouse, and there's lots of stuff to be done. Gotta find a sleeper sofa for the bottom bedroom. Errands to run. Hoping to pick the scooter up from the shop tomorrow, hoping the charge isn't too excessive. The car's sunroof is leaking after heavy rain, hope it doesn't rain too hard tonight cause I still haven't figured out a solution...

...well, don't say goodnight. Thanks for the hospitality, Carmichaels!



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Cameroon—At the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, more than a dozen residents form a gallery of grief, looking on as Dorothy—a beloved female felled in her late 40s by heart failure—is borne to her burial.

[National Geographic]

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When I was a kid, baseball stats and history were context-less. Baseball players were as good as the numbers on the back of their baseball card, which only fueled the mystique that was Sandy Koufax. His career was maybe half the length of a normal pitcher, but oh how amazing he was in the half he gave us, especially his last four seasons. A record of 97-27 (avg of 24.3 wins and 7.8 losses per year), 1.86 ERA, averages of 298 IP and 307 K per season. And he did what so few athletes do, he went out on top. Sure, this was mostly due to an arm that simply couldn't be stretched any further without longterm damage, but his final season saw him top 300 IP with both his highest season wins total and lowest season ERA. On the strength of those four seasons alone he easily made the Hall of Fame and is considered by many to be the greatest pitcher who ever lived. And shh, but he was also a much better post-season pitcher than even the legendary Andy Pettitte*, with his worst start being a 6 IP, 1 ER affair in a 1966 loss. All told he was 4-3 with a 0.95 ERA in 57 playoff innings. Finally, he was my pop's favorite player of all time, as far as I knew, and when you're 8 years old, nobody knows more about baseball than your pops.

*Can we please put to bed this "Andy Pettitte is a playoff STUD!" BS? Take a moment and compare his regular season career stats with his postseason career stats:

              W    L  Win%   ERA  WHIP  K/9  BB/9  K/BB
Reg.Season  229  165  .629  3.91  1.36  6.6   2.8  2.33
Postseason   15    9  .625  3.89  1.33  5.8   2.4  2.39

I mean...PLEASE? McCarver? Buck? You reading this? He's the exact same pitcher in both settings. Please remember that when these blowhards start in on the "In the postseason, this guy is just a WINNER" (or worse, a "GAMER!") garbage the next time Pettitte does nothing more than induce a groundout to end a scoreless inning. He's about as awesome in the postseason as Derek Jeter is. Oh, that reminds me:

               BA   OBP   SLG   OPS
Reg.Season   .317  .388  .459  .847
Postseason   .312  .380  .476  .857

These stats aren't hard to find.

However, as I've grown older, I've become more and more interested in more and more sophisticated stat measuring, more and more interested in context, and more and more disinterested in unverified tall tales of greatness, grittiness, or "heart", especially when those tall tales ignore the context. And this has put a damper on the mystique of Koufax for me. For one, he pitched for the Dodgers, who had the Mt. Everest of pitching mounds, allowing Koufax a nice view of the back of the shorter umpires' necks, and a pitcher-friendly ballpark to boot. His four seasons also came in some of the grandest pitching years in all of baseball outside of the Dead Ball-era. The National League ERA from 1963-1966, Koufax's four majestic seasons, was a mere 3.49, and that's an aggregate from all games in all teams' stadiums, not just Dodgers Stadium and their mountain-top pitching mound. To contrast, the past four combined seasons of AL pitching have amounted to an ERA of 4.47, an increase of about 28%.

This is illustrated with the handy stat "Adjusted ERA+", which normalizes a pitcher's ERA for the year and park in which he played. A mark of 100 is league average; the higher the number, the more dominant he was against his peers. The highest post-1900 mark of all time was Pedro Martinez's 2000 season when he registered an absurd 291, thanks to a 1.74 ERA when the league average ERA was 4.92. An ERA+ of 291 in Koufax's era would have amounted to about a 1.20 ERA.

Sandy Koufax's best season ERA+ was the 190 he posted in his final season, 1966, when he finished with a 1.73 ERA while the league ERA was only 3.61. It's still a great number, but only the 57th-best in league history. Zack Greinke, the 25 year old with the 50-53 career record, just this year posted a 203 ERA+ (32nd all time). His ERA was worse than Koufax's (2.16), but the league ERA (4.46) implies a much more hitter-friendly context.

Which is a long way of saying that 10 or 15 years ago I would have read this book much differently than I read it now. I went in skeptical, expecting glowing praise and relentless stories of the man from a writer who probably didn't take the context much into effect. Countless people expressing how he's possibly the greatest pitcher who ever lived when, really, he's not. Repeated claims that nobody's put together a four year string like his when, actually, I've had three guys just in my lifetime alone put together better and longer stretches. I expected to roll my eyes a few times.

It's a testament to the book I think that despite all this, I closed it still much impressed by Koufax and actually not at all annoyed by the writer, who really didn't focus much effort on the "how much better than everyone else was he?" question and more on simply "what made him KOUFAX?", America's shy Jewish darling of the 60's who's kept such a low profile since retiring that many would be surprised to hear he's actually still alive. You don't see him sideline reporting or shooting the shit with Joe Buck during the playoffs. It also focuses on how he spent the "dominating" half of his career pitching with a left arm that would have placed 99.4% of today's pitchers on the 60 day DL. Which was probably what I found most impressive and allowed me to ignore all the nagging "buts" in my head. Simply put, if Sandy Koufax pitched today, he wouldn't pitch. He'd be Mark Prior, constantly going on and off the disabled list and retiring at 25, not putting together a four year string of dominance that people still discuss in hushed tones.

The book is split into two alternating sections, every even-numbered chapter being a recap of each inning during his 1965 perfect game against Bob Hendley, a game where there was only ONE hit, the Dodgers won 1-0, and it lasted only 1:43. Six minutes shorter than White Chicks. The odd-numbered chapters act as a sort of biography of Koufax and discuss how he became the legend he is.

So for half the book (the recap of the perfect game), you're not in any real danger of the author going into "Koufax=most dominant pitcher ever!!" territory since you're really only dealing with that one snapshot of his career, and let's face it, he *was* dominant that night. It's hard to overstate a 14 strikeout perfect game, no matter the context, so long as he's not facing the California State Little League champs. I mean Jack Morris is one of the most overrated pitchers of all time, but if you wrote a book about just that infamous Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, you're pretty much licensed to say whatever wonderful, overblown things about him that you please, so long as you're only referring to *that* game.

As for the Koufax book, the road that could possibly lead to "tall tales of grittiness" territory actually seem to be strongly corroborated. One of the main themes is the well-known knowledge that Koufax pitched hurt for most of the 2nd half of his career (ironically, the half in which he dominated). This is illustrated with multiple teammates and opponents coming in contact with Koufax after a game, his left elbow bloated to the size (and color) of a collegiate football, wrapped and soaking in ice. The dialogues tended to go like this:

Random teammate: Good god Sandy, that looks terrible! How long are you going to be out for?
Koufax: This? Oh this happens all the time, I'll be ready to go next time it's my turn.

It's also sufficiently corroborated that Koufax would douse his arm with a salve called Capsolin that brought tears to the eyes of anyone standing within a few feet of him and forced the team to wash his uniform separately from the rest of the team. All in order to dull the pain on days he pitched. Which would be an eye-rolling anecdote if only one guy mentioned it, but it gets brought up time and time again throughout the book by a plethora of different names.

You take these tales of pain management and glance at the 300+ innings of Cy Young ball he was throwing for his final four seasons, the last of which forced him to retire, and it's hard to insist on my pessimistic view of the context. Humility is humility, pain is pain, and 300+ innings is 300+ innings. Not THAT much has changed between 1966 and 2009.

The end to an interview with Koufax by Sports Illustrated after naming him Sportsman of the Year for 1965 (after his 2nd-to-last-season):

SI: Do you ever sit back and say to yourself, what an amazing thing it all is, your records and your achievements, that this is happening to you, that people will be talking about you 50, 100 years from now the way they talk about Cy Young and Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander now?

SK: No, I never thought of it that way. I've never thought anything's happening to me.

SI: Well, it is.

SK: I can't picture people talking about me 50 years from now, either, and I never in my life sat down and thought about Walter Johnson or Cy Young or the other great pitchers.

SI: Or yourself as one of them.

SK: That's right.

SI: And how do you feel when people say you might be the greatest pitcher that ever lived?

SK: I never even think about it.

SI: Never?

SK: Never.

Ok, you're not the greatest...but you were pretty good for a guy with a bum arm.

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A followup on the post from a few weeks ago, where we climbed into the time machine and watched a few videos I did for the wiffleball site back in 2002, showcasing a few residences from a few guys in the league.

In 2003 I was looking forward to continue the series with a hot new season...but for whatever reason I only got two of them done. And...well, here they are.




Scott's Pad was our "season premiere" for the 2003 (and final) season, and I was itchin' to get started on these, having realized how fun and entertaining the 2002 episodes wound up being. Scott was the Babe Ruth of the league, so I felt he was an appropriate subject for the premiere, and I knew he'd be ready to give the camera something to remember. I was not wrong.

What I Like:
(seriously...where to begin?)
1. Let's just start from the beginning...Scott's wig. I love Scott's wig. I think it's one of the greatest wigs I've ever seen. Part of it is because it looks, on him (and with a hat on), totally natural. I could totally picture him with that haircut. But for as long as I've known him he's always had the same close-cropped hairstyle. The wig comes out and he's suddenly in character mode, and I love it. Love the wig.
2. The whole scene with him going though "his side of the cupboard" and showing us what's in it...ending with him summing it up while the contents of his cupboard sits on the stove. Always gets a laugh, and not just out of me. "Whenever, you know, I need something to eat I just come in here and dig through and..." while we're looking at a Powerbar, a plate of christmas coconut balls, some vitamins, an empty container, and a tape measure. Best part is this was not planned at all. I had no idea what he was going to pull out of there and I doubt he did either.
3. Inarguably the best moment of any of the five Pads episode was Scott showing us the "walk-in closet" in his bedroom. I won't argue this. Many real-life Cribs subjects (mostly women) showed off their huge closets and absurd amount of clothes/shoes, so Scott, of all things, chose that to satirize, and I think it's perfect. To be honest, this took a few takes to get right because I simply couldn't stop laughing when I'd see him struggle to "walk into" the closet.
4. Using his recently-departed roommate's empty room to show off where he goes to "think about things" and get back to his roots.
5. So many things in the bathroom. The two trash cans (one on each side of the toilet, presumbaly for lefties and righties), the inconsistent leopard print and blue towel themes. So much got left on the cutting room floor too.

What I Hate:
1. I hate the opening establishing pans in the kitchen. Terrible framing and way too quick of pans and cuts. Looks really rushed and bad.
2. This would be a recurring problem, and I'd have to ask someone smarter than me on the subject (Mark?), but there's this high-pitched interference noise coming from, I think, the flatscreen TV in both this episode and the next one that totally distracts and annoys me. Which sucks because I think the whole "Scott looking for a game he has for his PS2, picking out one that's 4 years old, realizing it's just the box AND that it's a game for a completely different system" woulda been even better than it already is. Oh's well.




Dean Evans' pad was, sadly, the final one. Looking back I have no idea why I stopped at only two for 2003 and five overall. It's not like Dean sexually harrassed me during the filming, ruining the process forever. Yes, these are time-consuming to make, but even in the moment it was obvious to me that the end result was well worth it. On top of that, in May of 2003 (likely around the time this one was shot/completed), I graduated college, removing the primary excuse I may have had to cease doing these.

What I Like
1. Dean's a goof, but this lends to stuff you wouldn't typically see (in a good way), like wrestling figures on top of the refrigerator (I'm 97% sure those were not placed there for the camera's benefit but rather exist up there all the time), him trying to play his roommate's drums for us, and wiffleball bats in the freezer (a practice he did really adhere to for the whole season).
2. One of the more pathetic collections of food to be found in a fridge. Basically amounts to "condiments and pickles." I used to go to Dean's house every Monday night to watch Monday Night Raw, and only one time did I see anyone use the kitchen, and it was his roommate. Dean always had fast food. Maybe I saw him wash his hands in there once or something, I dunno, it was awhile ago.
3. The infamous Katie Holmes Shrine.
4. On his bed...where are the sheets? It's just a mattress and a Carolina Panthers fleece. Was he doing a wash? I was probably a little creeped out and never asked, sadly, and he never explained. Doesn't sleeping on a sheet-less mattress seem a little serial killer-esque?
5. Running through his NES game collection, "Baseball Stars...greatest baseball game ever made." Made me proud. If he had said "Baseball Stars, decent but far inferior to RBI Baseball" or something to that effect, I would have had to end the filming right there and start tearing down Katie Holmes posters screaming "KATIE HOLMES, DECENT BUT FAR INFERIOR TO WINONA RYDER!!"
6. As he leads us into the back yard, he gets a look at what we're about to see and emits a laugh that basically says "I haven't been back here in months and I must have stopped paying my lawn guy." Seconds later we're staring down a jungle of grass & plants as Dean lets us in on all the "partyin it up" that goes on back there, the Sarcasm Meter reaching Clint Wattenberg levels.

What I Hate
1. The high pitched interference coming from, I assume, the TV in his room. Like the Scott Pad (above), it ruins the whole scene for me.
2. Kind of minor quibble but I wish we spent a bit more time exploring that fucking backyard. As a new (town)homeowner, I can't imagine having a backyard and not using it. I'd mow the lawn every other day, I'd go shirtless and use that dusty weight bench every day, I'd probably try and build some mini-wiffleball field. He only checks it out because I strong-armed him while holding a video camera.

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The impetus to post these flashback videos was not only that I found a few I thought I had lost, but I'm hoping to film a few new editions when I get down to Chico in December. And by "few" I mean "as many as I can squeeze in." Some new guys, some updates on guys I've done before, etc. Looking forward to it. 2K10 Pads, coming soon!

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So the lady and I have been going through our CD collections, 95% of which was already on our laptops or desktops as well as backed up on various externals, and consolidating. You see, we bought a townhouse the other day, and in the interest of easing the move, we're removing the unessentials, especially those that can bring in a buck or two. So after a couple days of deliberation, we had a stack of "keep these" (homemade CDs from friends, CDs whose physical presense we weren't ready to remove from our life, CDs we were too embarrassed to take to a used CD store and basically admit to owning, etc) and a slightly larger "sell these" stack (CDs we had forgotten we even had anymore, CDs we haven't opened since 1997, etc).

We then took the "sell these" stack and split it up into two sections, the "clean" CDs and the ones with various amount of scratches and wear & tear. I then took the ~30 clean CDs to Easy Street Records. In this stack were two double CDs by George Acosta...two of his more recent albums, A State of Mind (2007) and All Rights Reserved (2006).

About 15 minutes later, I was walking back home. Easy Street took about 20 of the CDs and I got about $60 for them. A few they said were a little scratched and they're pretty picky about the CDs being like new, but they said Everyday Music is much more liberal with what they take in, since they actually have a "scuffed" section where they sell slightly worn CDs at even more reduced rates. Strangely though, Easy Street did not take either of the George Acosta albums. I got home and looked at the CDs again. Pristine. I've probably only used them both once, to rip them onto the laptop. Hmm. Oh well.

Last night after work I took all the rest (Easy Street rejects + all the "wear & tear" ones, probably about 75 all told) to Everyday Music in Capitol Hill. Their process is a little different, as I found myself browsing their CDs for over an hour while some guy ran through my stack in his own, much more deliberate way. After he was done, he brought me over and broke it down. About 10 of the CDs amounted to anywhere between $1 and $4 apiece, and then there was a big stack of about 50 that he said that, for whatever reason (scuffed, they already have a bunch, etc), he could only offer 10 cents apiece for. I scanned the stack quickly and let him take them without argue. On one hand, 10 cents was ridiculously low for some of those, but whatever, I don't need these, whatever we didn't sell we were going to give away anyway. Let the local music shop make a buck off them.

Then he handed me a stack of 10-15 CDs that he couldn't give me ANYTHING for. Not even 10 cents. Some of these I could understand, I didn't do the best job removing some of the throwaways. One 3 CD set had a CD missing while the other two were seemingly glued to the paper sleeve. Another was a random Primus CD in a random 4xCD musicology CD case I had gotten in college. But what else did I find in this stack?

BOTH George Acosta double albums.

Now, I know it's not because the CDs are in unsalvageable shape. They're practically brand new. And I know it's not because they drowning in used Acosta CDs and simply refuse to take anymore; during my hour spent browsing their collections, I found myself in the "A" portion of the Electronic section and saw they had but ONE Acosta used CD, a scuffed version of "Release AM".

For some reason neither they nor Easy Street want to sell his stuff. Not even for 10 cents. Practically brand new double CDs. They don't think somebody would hand over four bucks for either of them?

Poor Georgie, I hope he never googles himself and finds this. If he does though...hey George, less of the wimpy vocal trance and more like Release AM!!! My ipod craves it!

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ESPN likes making news items out of things that are probably not even close to being real news items, but this one is pretty ridiculous, and it doesn't even involve a NY or Boston team!

I'll sum it up for you with paraphrased quotes.

TJ Houshmandzadeh (WR, Sea): The Chicago Bears didn't pursue me in free agency last year, so I plan on playing well and showing them what they missed out on. Still, and this is somewhat irrelevant, they've got some pretty good receivers over there.

Lance Briggs (LB, Chi): This guy sounds bitter. I, too, plan on playing well Sunday!

TH: Umm, no, I'm not bitter. Briggs is a good player and can say what he wants. I can't talk much trash because my numbers aren't great.

LB: ...

[The end]

Me: Thanks ESPN, but can I have these 45 seconds of my life back?

If that is "verbal jabbing", I'd hate to see NFL guys get even more friendly and non-confrontational.

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