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Here Come Your Nuts!

I went to Modesto this past Friday to watch my first Single-A baseball game between the local Modesto Nuts of the Seattle Mariners organization and the San Jose Giants, creatively named after their parent organization, the San Francisco Giants. The environment reminded me of a mid-season high school football game, complete with inexpensive food vendors, large groups from local church and youth sports organizations, and season ticket holders who maintain conversations from several rows away. There are angry dads, town heroes, and four-dollar hot dogs. I adored it.

The local sponsorships were charming. Here’s one I’ll never forget, repeated each time a Nuts pitcher struck out an opposing batter:

This strikeout is brought to you by Aspire Public Schools. Don’t strike out on your education; enroll in Aspire Public Schools todayyyyy.

Another, when a Nuts batter walked:

Nice take! Donatello’s Take and Bake!

I purchased a hat with one of their mascots, Wally the Walnut, on the front.

I heard good-hearted banter about the players and a couple of mean-spirited comments from fans directed towards the umpires that led to a guy in front of me nearly being ejected. Instead, the umpire thought the chirping was coming from a bench, and one of the Nuts’ coaches got tossed.

I kept score as usual. Heading towards the gate after the game, I saw a small group of kids against the fence along the left field line where the Giants players were walking. A six-foot-seven-inch Bryce Eldridge, the top pick by the Giants in the 2023 draft, towered over them. I walked over on a whim and, once all the kids had balls autographed and selfies secured, asked him to sign the scorecard along his batting line.

As with many experiences this past year, I regret not jumping at the opportunity earlier. I had immense fun watching baseball in such a casual environment, with each part driven by the community. I’m eager to return to Modesto and visit San Jose to see the Giants play at home. Minor League Baseball reminds me of my time playing in town ball leagues around Minnesota at the end of high school, and it more appropriately embodies what baseball can mean to a city. It sends me back to the nostalgic times I never experienced when baseball was the country’s pastime.

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Making MLB Team Scatter Plots

You may have seen any number of scatter plots on the internet that show data comparisons among players or teams in a given league. These are part of my daily experience on the /r/baseball community, and I finally decided to scratch my statistical presentation itch by making my own. This post isn’t to cover what statistics to compare, just the process I’ve settled on for now to turn a table of comparisons into precisely-designed charts suitable for sharing on the internet.

Continue reading “Making MLB Team Scatter Plots”
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Holding Onto Yourself

Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project is an excellent collection of pithy and useful observations about the world. They range from the purely practical, to the advisory, to the somewhat absurd. It’s worth a read.

I follow a Mastodon Bot that posts something from the document every six hours, and save any that catch my eye. This one resonated with me:

Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.

Merlin Mann

This message is increasingly acute in a world where it’s easy to externalize experiences, activities, and values. We’re encouraged to create horcruxes across social media which changes our self-perception and ability to fully understand who we are beyond what we share. This is accelerated among those whose livelihood requires them to be online, particularly if their mainly compromises their daily lives.

But the situation doesn’t need to be nearly this extreme to be impactful. If we define our worth in this world solely by factors that others nominally control, we have no sway over how we view ourselves. While we can hope to surround ourselves by well-meaning friends and lovely individuals, it’s still unhealthy to lose that sense of self by spreading it around. We each need ways to focus on ourselves and gain a better understanding of who we are independent of those around us. We can often define much of our lives by how we relate to others, but the way those relationships pan out are a product of who we intrinsically are.

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I Just Learned What BBCOR Means

In early high school, I remember all the hubbub about requiring metal baseball bats to align to the BBCOR standard. Given the pronunciation of this (“Bee-Bee-Core”), I always assumed it was a regulation about what specific materials must be used to make the bat. That’s only true insofar as the standard actually defines a material property.

BBCOR stands for “Batted Ball Coefficient of Restitution”. In other words, the standard tells you how elastic the collision between ball and bat is allowed to be. This standard was designed to dull metal bats in an effort to protect pitchers, the most likely players to be grievously injured by a batted ball. It was adopted by the NCAA in 2011, and most youth leagues that I’m aware of followed their lead. I used BBCOR-certified bats throughout high school, and continue to do so in my adult league.

You can read through the NCAA protocol for BBCOR, where the most fascinating part is the testing procedures starting on page 5. There is a table defining what the moment of inertia must be a distance of 6 inches from the knob of the bat—where the batter grips the bat—to ensure the bat isn’t “too easy” to swing. Then they use a ball cannon—that’s the term they provide—with a muzzle velocity of at least 150 mph which imparts spin at a rate of less than 10 rpm to fire fresh baseballs at clamped-down bats.

They perform six consecutive valid trials to measure the restitution of the bat using three sensors placed along the trajectory of the ball (which must be accurately placed to a tolerance of 0.005 inches.) After all that, the average measured BBCOR must be no more than 0.500.

I loved reading this, and I now want this to be a physics problem in some college class.

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ASCIImoji

If you grew up around the plain-text internet and pre-smartphone texting, you may be aware of the distinction between emoticons and emojis. The latter are separate unicode characters that are increasingly-detailed artistic renderings of various faces and items, like a Ferris wheel: 🎡. The former are clever constructions of non-emoji characters, which provide some intangible level of whimsy and cleverness that never fails to delight.1Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.

Consider this shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Or someone flipping a table in frustration: (ノ ゜Д゜)ノ ︵ ┻━┻

If you enjoy this and want to add some flair to your writing, consider the wonderful ASCIImoji site. It has a near-complete table of these emoticons from which you can copy, a Chrome extension, and a .plist file you can import to macOS to create text replacement shortcuts which subsequently sync to your iPhone if desired.

Every time I see one of these, or recognize an opportunity to use one myself, I find myself grinning. It’s a simple joy of playing on a computer, and I’m glad I finally got these replacements working.

(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)

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    Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.