Updates Weekly
Erin and I returned late last night/early this morning from visiting her brother and his wife in New Mexico. It was our first trip there. We spent most of our time near Los Alamos, and had a day trip to Santa Fe. It was glorious.
While I intend to write a bit more when I’m not running on fumes after a long travel day with several delays, here are the highlights through pictures.
This post isn’t about who does or does not deserve to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s simply this: which Hall of Fame players had the most bad seasons, or the worst seasons in general. My thanks to Sports Reference’s Stathead for existing and making this easy to find. Let’s get started.
Continue reading “Bad Hall of Fame Seasons”I received a surprise letter in the mail this week from my friendly, not-so-neighborhood California Department of Motor Vehicles, specifically the collections arm of that renowned institution. Since I didn’t do them the justice of notifying them I had moved to Connecticut, their system assumed I was illegally driving my car around California with expired registration for the last seven or eight months.
Now, let’s not worry too much about the double jeopardy implied by the fact that if I were doing that, I certainly would have received a ticket or two at this point to go with the fees I already allegedly owe.
Here’s the kicker: the letter they sent was not via USPS forwarding. They sent it directly to my Connecticut address, so there is some record, somewhere, that I live there now.
Luckily, this has been resolved relatively quickly. There was a phone number I could call to dispute the charges, and I quickly got on the line with a nice person who told me what to expect. They were going to send me an email where I needed to detail when I left California, when I arrived in Connecticut, when I first registered my car here, and a copy of the registration document.
That email never showed up, but they gave me the email address from which I should expect it. I emailed them directly and received a notice that the DMV’s records were updated—the only remaining step is to call again so they can forward me to the Collections folks and settle the record. Why I have to do that is beyond me, but hey, I’m just trying to follow the rules.
I’m frustrated by the “guilty until proven innocent” tinge to this situation. Thousands of people must be similarly caught unaware by their policy, and it falls into the vast bucket of laws and regulations, which makes it extremely easy to accidentally violate because you have to think to ask the right question to discover said regulation.
My company held its second Hackathon last week, when (most) regular work pauses or slows down, so we can instead focus on new ideas aligned to our mission.1We still need to work with customers, provide support, and generally keep the lights on. But anyone who wants to participate can always find the time to do so. We get to explore and build, play around, meet new people, and add to our general culture of inquisitiveness, curiosity, and hard work.
I used it as an opportunity to get back to my curriculum roots. I ran text adventure Math Jams in our online classroom for three years in the same fashion I do with OHAC. The main difference is I’m working with around 200 students who are voting on what to do—it gets chaotic.
It’s been over two years since I ran one of these sessions, so I took the week to brainstorm ideas with some people. The most recent adventure I ran, Casework, is full of company-specific easter eggs and takes place in a loose approximation of our old headquarters. This new adventure, Casework 2: Overwhelming Evidence, follows that up.
I’ve attached the text adventure document, along with the video I created for the final project presentation. It was incredibly fun to work on.
Effectively Wild, a fantastic baseball podcast from FanGraphs, put out the third and final installment in the scripted series Only a Woman: Ella Black, Lost and Found. It’s an excellent historical dive into the first known woman baseball journalist in the late 1800s, who is woefully not generally known and has certain mysteries hanging around her work. Each episode is thoroughly engaging and well-constructed, and I only wish they were YouTube videos with basic imagery so more people would stumble across them.
Give the series a try. Each episode is about an hour and worth your time.
In OHAC 62: Push the Red Button, we played Escape the Dungeon or Die!, a text adventure I wrote with some assistance from a coworker over three years ago. I finally turned it into a proper PDF, similar to my others.
I wanted to take a step forward from Dream Sequence and created what’s essentially a series of escape rooms, each with a puzzle to discover and solve. Per usual with my text adventures, a spiffy title captures much of the information about the world of the puzzle. It’s a double entendre—either you escape the dungeon or die, but is it a dungeon that you’re escaping or a six-sided die?
The entire map is an unfolded die, and the pips offer a canvas for crafting puzzles. You can read more details in the document below.
After several years, I’m still pleased by this adventure. Even though it ended up being a bit too difficult for its original intended audience, it’s great to play with nerds.
You can find the official PDF below, and here is Mikhail and Jack’s collaborative map from playing it for the podcast.
Just as the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A fearless leader with a torch, whose flame
Is the unleashed misery, and his name
Torment of Exiles. From his warding-hand
Burns world-wide scorning; his wild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Bring, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries he
With blazing lips. “Take back your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses undeserved to breath free,
The wretched refuse of our teeming shore.
Send those, the richest, fortified to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
With thanks and apologies to Emma Lazarus.
I rejoined SABR a couple of years ago and focused my volunteer work on fact-checking articles for the Games Project. These accounts of past MLB games are notable in some context of the author’s choice. They could be historically impactful, meaningful within a player’s career, highlighted by a rare event, or any other such factors that make an otherwise mundane day in baseball history something worth remembering.
Last month I decided to try writing one of these articles. I trawled through the archives of Minnesota Twins history for interesting seasons and landed on an early game in 2009 that defined the year for Jason Kubel.
You can read the article here.
