I Thought You Had It!

Retrosheet is a pretty awesome site. The mission of this non-profit organization is to collect and digitize play-by-play accounts of all major league baseball games into a database. The format of the record structure in the database is published and they make the raw data from the database available for download in three different formats. This permits other developers to develop applications to leverage this goldmine of data.

They have implemented a basic, no-frills website to surf through all of this data. Talk about an easy way to kill 3 or 4 hours! Addictive stuff. For a future blog post, I have started compiling a list of all the major league games I have attended, with references to the Retrosheet box score and some personal recollections of those games.  

Sunk Costs and a Can of Deodorant

While I was getting ready to head to Greensboro last Saturday afternoon. I had a little issue with my new can of deodorant. As I yanked it off the bathroom closet shelf where my other toiletries reside, I accidentally slammed the nozzle off the wood trim on the door to the closet, completely ripping the nozzle off of the can.

I had just bought that can Friday night. ($3.99 at Food Lion).

Rather than just writing off that money as sunk costs and moving on, I was determined to see if I could still salvage it. So for the next 5 minutes, I messed around trying to see if I could perfectly align the notch on the broken nozzle with the rest of the valve system. My persistence paid off and I was able to actually dispense the product. Same thing on Sunday, but this time it only took me a couple of minutes. Kind of a pain, but it works.

On Monday morning, I wasn’t quite as lucky. I was getting a bit impatient, unable to align the broken nozzle, when I must have applied too much pressure to the valve system. As a result, the seal in the valve assembly apparently got stuck in an open state and the pressurized gas inside the can was going to town.

The first blast hit me in the right eye (didn’t yet have my contacts in). Foolishly, I spent a couple of seconds trying to replace the nozzle to stem the leakage. In hindsight that was pretty retarded (sorry Sarah, I can’t think of a better word at the moment). Then, I covered the leak with my thumb, but the crap was still oozing all over the place. At this point, I am starting to feel like those poor schmucks at British Petroleum.

So I book it down the stairs and out the front door and hurl this can of weezing and spewing propellants onto my yard. Standing there and watching this thing spin around and around for minutes, I felt like some sort of reverse eco-terrorist or an angry Tea Partier giving Al Gore the big middle finger.

Mea Culpa

After bragging about the new commenting system I added to the blog, wouldn't you know there was an issue that was prohibiting the comments from displaying correctly?

I was able to see the comments (thanks Rich and Chris), but no one else was. I have patched that issue up now - I had to change timestamps though on some of the comments. Hopefully these technical difficulties have been addressed for good. Be sure to let me know if you make a comment and it doesn't appear in the blog.

Grasshoppers Vs. Suns – July 31

Minor League Baseball certainly provides good value for your entertainment dollar. Ticket prices and parking are very reasonable and while concessions seem to steadily increase in price every year (especially for beer), the overall expense is worth it (especially if you enjoy baseball).

The quality of the play of course depends on the classification and one of the better gauges of that is the quality of the defense played. Having attended probably 50-60 AAA games at the DBAP, it is my experience that it is almost impossible (for me at least) to distinguish between the quality of defense played in AAA and in the Major Leagues – they are that good. In the game I attended in July, there were 5 or 6 superb plays that were made to look almost too easy.

New Blog Commenting System

You may have noticed that I recently incorporated a new commenting system into my blog. The built-in commenting system from blogger.com is pretty basic, so I thought I’d spruce it up by incorporating the code to use the Disqus Commenting System.

I have received many kind words and compliments from family on my blog for which I am very appreciative. The comments have come in a variety of forms. Some have been posted to my Facebook profile or sent directly to email or just dispatched using the tried and true interface of face-to-face. I did want to mention that comments can be made directly in each blog posting as well.

Glutton for Punishment

On the Fourth of July, while channel surfing ESPN, you might have stumbled across the controversy at the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest in Coney Island. In the competition, Joey Chestnut (San Jose, CA) won his 4th straight Nathan’s title, consuming 54 hot dogs with buns in 10 minutes. Chestnut has won that title every year since he dethroned the famed Japanese eater Takeru Kobayashi in 2007.

The controversy centered around the absence from the competition of Kobayashi, who had won the Nathan’s from 2001 through 2006, but was unable to compete in this year’s event because of a contract dispute with Major League Eating. Kobayashi was arrested for trespassing after storming the award’s ceremony and wrestling with some NYPD.