Posts

A quote from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, pulled from the CNN coverage on the 17 players reinstated from their permanently ineligible status1: Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. This is not obvious to me. With institutions of culture like MLB, each notable player is a symbol, an icon, representing something greater than themselves. Who the institution allows to represent them fundamentally describes their standards, ethics, and beliefs as an organization. By walking back names from the—ahem—permanently ineligible list, Manfred is himself compromising the integrity of the game and claiming the reason Rose was banned was solely as personal punishment to he man, rather than a level enforcement of rules against betting on baseball that, though indeed having the effect of punishing the individual, also acts as a clear signal that the actions are not tolerated in the least. ...

What with all the moving I’ve done as an adult, my desk setup has changed dramatically over the years. I wish I had a comprehensive album, but I’ve still scrounged together a good set of pictures of various desks, culminating with my first dedicated desk space in a room separate from where I eat, sleep, and/or socialize. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.1 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. ...

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. ...

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? ...

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, ...

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. ...