6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

KCAL 9 will launch a new HDTV channel, available at channel 409 on Time-Warner lineups. All remaining Lakers games will be broadcast on that channel, including any playoff games, and all of its Dodgers' 2007 season will be broadcast in HD. About fargin' time. Now if only we could convince FSN and Prime Ticket to do the same for the Dodgers and Angels...

Labels: dodgers, tv

This is fargin' cool, illustrating just how authoritarian life with the Mouse became after the gubmint came in and started bossing folks around. Via Opinion LA.

Which is here, and one interesting comment that came up:

BK:  We grew up in St. Louis in the 80s so we know you can win without huge power bats.  But there's been a lot of talk about the Dodgers not getting that big bat at last year's trade deadline or during this offseason.  On the other hand, the team scored plenty of runs last year and proved you can win without hitting home runs.  Does that make a big bat not as high a priority to you or just something you don't want to overpay to acquire?  Or is it that there just isn't one to be had so far?

NC:  Well, again, the number of candidates that would fill that type of role is a short list.  Secondarily, acquiring them is tough to do.  You'd have to practically blow somebody away to do it.  In our discussions with teams, those types of players are never brought up over the last year in talks with the other side.  When I bring them up, it's like, "Whoa, whoa!  Before we do something like that, you're gonna have to unload half your farm system."  They're not even thinking about moving that kind of player.

Once again, trades are getting harder to do. And then there's this, perhaps eliptically about Barry Bonds:

BK:  Regarding the recent Hall of Fame voting, without getting into the specifics of individual players but just as a baseball fan, is it upsetting to you to see the game entering an era where for maybe the next fifteen years or so, the discussion has become as much about drugs as it is on-field accomplishments.

NC:  Yeah, it does.  It's disappointing that it's evolved into that type of discussion.  But I don't sound naive here, either.  I was just talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday.  When I grew up watching baseball-- let's forget about baseball.  When I grew up watching professional sports, you rarely heard anything negative about anybody.  It was rare that anybody ever got into any trouble, or held out, or wouldn't play hard.  It was such a rarity, it was in the mind of a young person, it was almost pure.  Young people growing up today, my kids are in their twenties now, they've never experienced the "purity" of sports and athletes.  It's naive to think back when I was growing that they were all pure, because they weren't.  But that it's such a public (thing), it's so much tied to the world now and tied to life, it's kind of unfortunate that young people today, they look at players that they want to emulate, to wear their jersey or play the game in a (similar) manner, in a batting stance like their hero, shoot baskets like their hero, or skate like their hero, there's a chance that person is going to end up with a note in the newspaper that's going to be less than noble, I guess.

I guess he wasn't around in Boston when Ted Williams was working in left...

Jayson Stark seems to think the iPod is a revolution in baseball:

Until a few weeks ago, Jennings played for the team that pioneered the iPod's invasion of baseball -- the Rockies. He was one of 17 Rockies players who got swept up last season in a trend that began with an event that didn't exactly have the look of a major sporting revolution at the time:

Brian Jones, then the Rockies' assistant coordinator of video coaching, got an iPod for Christmas. Pretty earth-shattering, huh?

It wasn't even a video iPod, either. Just your basic Nano. But all it took was some initial fooling around with it to get Jones thinking there might be more to this fascinating gadget than the ability to download the Red Hot Chili Peppers on it.

So Jones and his video cohort, Mike Hamilton, did some iExperimenting to see if it might be possible to load their baseball videos on this cool little contraption. And the next thing they knew...

A future Hot Stove Heater was born.

That was just about one year ago exactly. What has gone on since might not quite rival the last 12 months of YouTube. Nevertheless, Jones says now, "it's been kind of crazy."

What this tells me is that (a) these guys are actually using the devices as hard drives, and (b) the resulting video is being displayed elsewhere, probably on a laptop or a desktop computer monitor. Later, of course, he mentions players actually taking the video versions with them out to eat, or on buses, and the like, and that's cool and all, but for the purposes of figuring out how to read pitchers (or how to eliminate tells from your own pitching), I'd think you'd still want to have a better resolution display than that offered on the tiny iPod screen.

Because:

Q. Baseball Think Factory has disappeared! What's the deal?

A1. One possibility is a domain name problem. [...]

A1a. Another possibility is the BBTF database being down. Expression Engine produces this delightfully descriptive error message that says it all.

Database Error: Unable to connect to your database. Your database appears to be turned off or the database connection settings in your config file are not correct. Please contact your hosting provider if the problem persists.

The best option here is to wait.

They are many helpful options while you wait for the BTF crew to return the site to service.

Via Slashdot, the BBC reports that British computer retailer PC World will stop carrying floppy disks once current supplies run out. Those of us who hearken back to the old 5 1/4", 360 kB media will recall what a huge improvement they were over ... audiotape storage. Apple II users used to laugh at some of the more exotic devices other computer users had to suffer through, and I say that speaking as the last generation that had to learn how to care for and feed an IBM 029 key punch.

When Apple launched its 3 1/2" floppy as standard issue with the new Macintosh computer in 1984, it seemed revolutionary at the time, eliminating the need for the sleeve. Only a few years later, everyone had switched to dual-sided, 800 kB disks, and in 1987, both were replaced by the 1.44 MB disk that has remained the standard ever since.

The last gasp for these formats were the various magneto-optical drives, all of which ultimately failed, and the Zip drive, which had a brief flowering in the late 90's; but various technical problems and the plummeting cost of CD-R drives and media (a good CD-R burner in 1993 would set you back around $5,000, but by decade's end, they were no more than $200 or so) killed all of them. The first death knell really came with the floppyless iMac, in 1998; Dell followed suit five years later by announcing the end of floppies as a standard item.

Two weeks ago, I was at Fry's in Fountain Valley, idly looking for the old drives; the pile was now a tiny corner, and I expect soon, even that redoubt of the hard-core geek won't carry them. You'll have to head over to the electronics salvage yards to get the drives, and good luck finding new media. It seems epochal; yet just the other day I was lamenting just how little storage there is on a 4.7 GB DVD-R disk. When I was in high school, a tape containing 20 MB seemed to have more than a man would ever need. In the room next door, my wife's studio has over a terabyte of storage, and even that looks tiny when one Seagate drive holds 750 GB. Zowie.

Labels: tech

Chris Constancio at Hardball Times has an interesting list of young catchers near or at their primes; included there is the Dodgers' own Russ Martin, and the Angels' Hank Conger and Jeff Mathis (but not Mike Napoli, interestingly).

I've been assured that there's nothing wrong with the SABR website by the various parties involved behind the scenes, and yet — I got what I got. But seeing as how I've been unable to subsequently reproduce the problem, I conclude that whatever was wrong was transient, grumbling a little that from my experience, denials of this sort often accompany actual site failures that have been corrected on the sly. I have witnesses, the original source HTML, and another person who was able to reproduce the problem at the time.

... as one of 10 thirtysomethings to watch next year:

Another offseason has passed and the Angels again have failed to add a player who can suitably complement Guerrero's production, or cover for him if the right fielder is hurt. And some executives and scouts who've watched Guerrero in recent years see signs of physical regression in his movement, if not his production -- he hit .329 last season, with 200 hits, 116 RBI, and 33 home runs.

"He's on the slide," said one scout. "He's turned into much more of a streak hitter than he used to be. It used to be that if you tried to pitch him inside and you didn't bury the ball inside, he'd hit it good. Now you can get away with a little more, and I think it's because there are days when his back doesn't feel so good. He seems to go through periods where any tweak in his back affects his swing."

He's a gifted athlete, but he doesn't have a great body, and he swings as hard as [Gary] Sheffield. When he's going good, he can be as dominant as always. But it's a matter of time now before he breaks down."

The Angels have a promising young hitter in Howie Kendrick, some production out of veteran Garret Anderson, and shortstop Orlando Cabrera is coming off a solid season. But they have question marks at first and third base, and catcher Mike Napoli hit .164 after the All-Star break. The Angels still desperately need Guerrero to hit; it'll be interesting to see whether he stays healthy.

Update: BTF thread.

Today's Birthdays

Pitchers And Molinas Report

Here's a fun New York Times bio piece by Jack Curry about the Molina brothers, who by themselves have provided Puerto Rico one-third of that island's major-league representation:

“Nobody thought we’d all make it,” Yadier said of himself and his brothers in a recent telephone interview. “Everybody said we were too fat, we couldn’t move fast enough and we couldn’t play this game. We shut them up.”

Vero Beach Mayor Interview

Mayor Tom White of Vero Beach on the Dodgers' now-certain relocation:

Q: Are there any other teams showing interest or are there any other new plans for filling the vacancy at Dodgertown?

A: Even if there was, I couldn't say anything. A lot of them don't want anyone to know, and I think that it kind of ruined it for the Orioles when it got out they were looking ... Dodgertown is a baseball facility, but if push comes to shove and we don't get a major league baseball team, we could use it for something else. Don't forget, many years ago the New Orleans Saints used to train here, so we could turn it into a football facility if we wanted.

Q: How soon do you think we will know what is going to happen with Dodgertown?

A: The thing is, it's still not a done deal for the Dodgers. It's close, but if something falls through in Arizona, they are still going to be here. That's what makes it difficult because we can't start negotiating things until we know when they are leaving. Hopefully, we will have the answer to when they are going by the end of this year.

Tom Meagher thinks the Mike Piazza-for-Gary Sheffield trade was actually pretty good:

All in all, I don't think the Dodgers made that bad of a deal. However, judged in context, it should be considered a lot worse because of opportunity cost. Dealing with the Marlins in the midst of a fire-sale should have yielded a much better return. Had they made a similar deal with another team, it would look better; as it happened, they ostensibly could have acquired a lot more value.

"I've nothing against stats," Stephen Smith starts a recent column about Brandon Wood's strikeouts, "but I do have something against people who abuse stats." Those of us who look at Wood's prodigious strikeout rate and wonder whether he'll live up to his accomplishments in the minors are, apparently, to be dismissed. And why? Because Mike Schmidt was a great player.

While Wood was drafted and signed out of high school, Schmidt was selected by the Phillies after graduating from Ohio University. Taken in the second round of the 1971 draft, he was a couple months short of his 22nd birthday when he reported to Double-A Reading to begin his career. In 74 games, Schmidt had an AVG/OBP/SLG of .211/.302/.350 (.652 OPS) in 268 TPA. Since we're talking strikeouts, Schmidt struck out at a rate of once every 4.06 plate appearances (4.06:1). Schmidt was a shortstop that first year, just as he was in college.

In 1972, Schmidt played the entire minor league season at Triple-A Eugene. In 131 games, he posted a line of .291/.409/.550 (.960 OPS) in 528 TPA. His TPA:SO ratio was 3.64:1. Interestingly, the Phillies moved him all around the infield that summer — 76 games at 2B, 52 games at 3B and five games as SS.

The Phillies called him up to the big league at season's end, with only 40 plate appearances. His TPA:SO ratio in that limited audition was 2.67:1.

At age 23 1/2, Schmidt began his first full major league career in 1973 that finished 71-91 and had one of the lesser offenses in the National League. Schmidt posted a line of .196/.324/.373 (.697 OPS) in 442 TPA. His TPA:SO ratio was 3.25:1.

If sabermetrics had been around then, I'm sure some of its most devout believers would have dimissed Schmidt as a “bust,” “flop,” and “dud” — all words I've seen used by some people to dismiss Wood.

Well, you certainly won't see those words around here about Wood, unless they're attached to the conditional that if he doesn't learn to cut back on those strikeouts, his chances of succeeding in the majors decreases precipitously. Speaking of abusing statistics, by using Mike Schmidt as an example, Smith falls for the trap of argument by anecdote. Schmidt may have been a Hall of Fame third baseman, but for every one of him, there are a bunch more who failed. Rich Lederer made this point most forcefully in a May, 2005 column rebutting a Nate Silver chat in which Silver made the amazing comment

Here's a secret: strikeouts are a good thing for a young power hitter.

That's an even stronger position than Smith stakes out, but whether you believe strikeouts (falsely) to be a positive, or even immaterial (as Smith does), Lederer reminds us that failure is far more common in this game than success, and high strikeout rates do not help:

Young power hitters who strike out a lot can be good players. Young power hitters who don't strike out often are almost always great players.

The major league burial grounds are filled with players such as Billy Ashley, Roger Freed, Phil Hiatt, Sam Horn, Dave Hostetler, and Hensley Meulens. I could list many, many more but limited the names to a half-dozen of the higher-profile names that have come along in the past couple of decades. More to the point, there are hundreds of unknowns out there who never even got a sniff of the big leagues because they simply didn't make enough contact to get a chance.

Look no further than active players Joe Borchard, Jack Cust, Bobby Estalella, Bucky Jacobsen, Brandon Larson, Ryan Ludwick, Eric Munson, and Calvin Pickering as further evidence of young power hitters who are having a difficult time making the transition from the minors to the majors. I'm even skeptical as to whether Dallas McPherson and Wily Mo Pena will be as good as advertised. Josh Phelps, a one-time Baseball Prospectus coverboy, has a huge hole in his swing and is unlikely to be anything more than a mediocre DH on a poor team.

While fully admitting this is hardly a scientific survey, at the same time, it's a list that makes crystal clear that strikeouts are a legitimate concern for a young power hitter. Pretending they're not amounts to a sort of willful blindness. It's not the first time that's happened for Smith; he recently made the eye-popping comment that the Angels' defense and not its offense was to blame for their second place showing in 2006. Certainly, improved D in the first month or two would have helped, but clinging to the idea that the team's defense would have somehow compensated for the Halos' terrible offense just doesn't make sense.

An easy way to show that this is the case is to notice that Oakland only surrendered 48 unearned runs last year. That was the best record in the league, while the Angels had the AL's second-worst unearned run total, with 80. If we take the A's 48 unearned runs as a sort of platonic ideal for the season, using the Pythagorean method (with a 1.83 exponent), the Angels suddenly have an 88-74 record — one loss worse than their actual record*. Meantime, the Angels' woeful sticks produced an offense that was fourth-worst in the AL.

But let's now play this game with offense. Had the Angels even put up a league average offense (804 runs), they would have been an 88-win team; had they posted a league-leading offense (930 runs as scored by the Yankees) with the defense unchanged, they would have had a 98-win team. (This is only fair, as we were considering the Angels with a best-defense team a moment ago.) Had they had the third-best offense in the league, the White Sox and their 868 runs scored, they would have been a 94-win team. That is to say, the difference between having the best defense in the league and what the Angels' had was one game; the difference between having the fourth-worst offense in the league and the best offense was about ten games. That is to say, you can get a lot farther by improving your bats than you can by improving your gloves. Pretending the Angels' well-below-average offense wasn't at fault for their second place finish in 2006 is just absurd.

*Update: it should be duly noted that the Angels were five games ahead of their Pythagorean won-loss record by the end of the season anyway.

Regarding this, I should mention two things:

1. I was not logged in at the time I started the transaction process. Having to log in during the process almost certainly was part of the issue.
2. Logging in beforehand got me a credit card page with an https URL, and so the transaction proceeded securely, or at least, the credit card data was not transmitted across the Net in plaintext.

Vin Scully has yet another trophy for his overstuffed mantlepiece, this time a lifetime achievement award at the 57th annual Golden Mike Awards, given out by the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California to recognize excellence in broadcast journalism.

Listening to the audiobook Bums, which describes his early career, it's amazing just how much fury accompanied his transition from Red Barber. Barber's summary firing by Walter O'Malley, presumably to save money, was one of a number of actions that got O'Malley in trouble with the declining number of Brooklyn fans toward the end of the team's stay in that borough.

Also: Tommy Lasorda is to be inducted into the Southern California Sports Hall of Fame.

"It is a great honor to be inducted into the California Sports Hall of Fame," said Lasorda. "To have my name mentioned in the same class as the other inductees is particularly gratifying, and I am thrilled with this outstanding honor."

Lasorda will be inducted along with Jerry West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Eric Dickerson, Rafer Johnson, Jackie Joyner Kersee, Tom Flores, Marcus Allen, Reggie Jackson, Deacon Jones, Elgin Baylor, Chick Hearn, Bill Walsh, Jackie Robinson, Bob Mathias, Wilt Chamberlain, John Wooden, Kellen Winslow, Magic Johnson and Jim Plunkett.

Here's another Nick Adenhart interview from the Herald-Mail. Nick will be in spring training, but

"They told me that I wasn't going to make the club. They just wanted me there to learn. Now they probably want to see if I'm making the step in the right direction. They might be seeing if I could become a leader. It's part of finding where my niche is. Spring was a chance to watch the big leaguers up close and see how they go about their business and see how they do what's best for the team."

Yesterday's Birthdays

Busy all day with no time to post much of anything after about 10:00...

Today's Birthdays

Troy Percival Building The UC Riverside Baseball Team A Clubhouse

Troy Percival is building the UC Riverside baseball team a new clubhouse with his own hands, according to the new Baseball America blog.

The other day, I got a call from a scout in southern California who wanted me to know about something special going on at UC Riverside. Longtime big league closer Troy Percival, a UC Riverside product, was helping to build the Highlanders a new clubhouse. He wasn’t just helping to finance the project–he was doing the heavy lifting, the actual construction.

“A lot of people would not even know this was going on, but he was putting his own money in and breaking his back,” the scout said. “He’s doing everything–wiring it, putting in all the lockers.”

The Highlanders play at 2,500-seat Riverside Sports Complex, the former California League home of Padres and Mariners affiliates. UC Riverside has been trying to upgrade the facility every year to keep pace with improved facilities at conference foes Cal State Fullerton, Long Beach State, UC Irvine, Cal Poly and Pacific. Percival, who still lives in Riverside, volunteered to help with the project, which should be completed this week. UCR coach Doug Smith said Percival has really thrown himself into the project.

“I came in early one morning to get some stuff done–6:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning–and I hear something in the other room, and there Troy is patching and painting,” Smith said. “You don’t see a lot of guys do that who have had the career that Troy has had. They may be very generous with their money, but maybe less so with their time. His time is so valuable to us–it really overshadows everything. It’s good for our players for him to hang around, so they can be accustomed to being around a big league guy and see how he goes about his business.”

Thanks to Josh in the comments for the heads-up.

Nolan Ryan Expected To Leave Hospital

Nolan Ryan was expected to leave the hospital Saturday, according to his son Reid, who said his father is "feeling great."

Roster Notes

• Jeff Weaver will make $8.325M on a one-year deal with the Mariners, the same as he got with the Angels.
• Perhaps as a result, the M's are now touting how in shape is fireballer Felix Hernandez.
• The Rockies are trying to move Todd Helton and the most likely target now is Boston — who isn't all that interested. But whatever happens, Helton wants it done quickly.

Via David Pinto, 59-year-old Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan has been hospitalized "for treatment of recurring symptoms of a pre-existing medical condition" according to his son Reid.

I think I'm about the only person who reads the Times' Opinion LA blog. Despite having inhaled former Reasonoids Matt Welch and Tim Cavanaugh, old hands at the online writing business, word from the inside is that that LA's main paper ain't cuttin' it, and editor Jim O'Shea ripped on latimes.com with great vengeance and furious anger, or something like that. Since I smell a sense of panic here, it's worth going over these a little bit:

Latimes.com was established in April 1996. Its stated strategy is to be an indispensable “information retailer” for Southern California, providing news, listings, reviews, databases and the thousands of other tidbits people need to navigate their lives.

This vision is unfulfilled. The website’s own research demonstrates that latimes.com is virtually invisible in greater Los Angeles. By some measures, the site is losing traction even faster than the newspaper. Latimes.com reports that traffic is growing and has reached 5.1 million unique visitors and 73 million total page views per month. But ComScore Media Metrix, an independent traffic monitor that uses an array of indicators, says overall traffic to the site dropped 9% in September, compared with the same month a year earlier. Visits to nytimes.com were up 10%, at Yahoo News 15%, at AOL News 11%. Overall, traffic to news sites grew an average of 4%, according to ComScore.

Latimes.com has slipped from the list of 500 most-visited websites in the world to 766th and does not make the U.S. top 100, according to Alexa Internet. By contrast, nytimes.com is ranked 95th in the world (21st in the U.S.), and washingtonpost.com is 264th (54th in the U.S.). Even in Southern California, the reach of latimes.com is dwarfed by that of sites such as MSNBC, Yahoo News and the New York Times. A 2005 study by outside consultants concluded that few in Southern California consider latimes.com a source of news or entertainment.

The keys to unraveling this is to immediately note that latimes.com

1. has much less traffic than its competitors
2. is reporting about a drop in traffic reported by Media Metrix and Alexa Internet despite their own numbers showing an increase during the same period.

First off, forget Alexa. Their numbers are the proverbial one-eyed-man sort; who the hell runs an Alexa toolbar for the purposes of allowing them to snoop on their web travels? I know I don't. Alexa represents a self-selecting group that's far from a reliable scientific sampling, so citing these numbers as even remotely credible tells me O'Shea is in over his head. (It also makes me wonder whether the "outside consultants" were doing anything besides cashing a paycheck.)

Furthermore, the discrepancy between latimes.com traffic numbers and those from Media Metrix — not just a discrepancy in value but in direction — leads me to suspect something that hit my day job about six years ago when we, too, started hyperventilating about the numbers being reported by Nielsen Netratings. As I found out then, the dirty little secret of the online traffic measuring business is that error bands are generally much worse because the Net is so fragmented to begin with. The coup de grâce comes when you try to measure traffic for a small(ish) website: suddenly you're looking at a random number generator. Worse, error bands are almost never reported unless with great screaming and kicking from the rating agencies, whose word is supposed to be both authoritative and impartial. It's hard to imagine that the situation has improved appreciably over the intervening years; sampling costs money. For latimes.com, it reminds you of Groucho Marx's quip "who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?" There are other, better ways to get solid, impartial traffic data for the purposes of selling advertising, and latimes.com should be investigating them.

The article goes on to describe the internecine war that Tribune Corp. has set up between Spring Street and the honchos in Chicago, a conflict that has led to the understaffing of latimes.com, which in turn seems to be taking most of the blame for how poorly the site has fared of late. Some of this is no doubt true; the Times wish to improve web services without additional manpower seems doomed to fail, though, given the sprawling nature of the site. The proposal to reintroduce calendarlive.com as a paid site amounts to a timid step in the direction of charging for content. Given that newspapers used to live or die on their classifieds, Craigslist has utterly kicked the wheels out of that revenue stream, and probably will for the forseeable future, too.

As a result, it's fairly clear that the Times will ultimately need to charge for latimes.com, however divisive that turns out to be; the question is, can they sustain the kind of reporting they currently have even with an online subscription base? Unprivy to the balance sheet, it is a question I cannot answer. Nonetheless, I offer up the following obvious suggestion: $110 a year for latimes.com, $137.80 for the print edition (with free access to the online version), leave the opinion section free, and close the rest of the site off.

(You can read more reactions to the latest fusillade by following the links in this summary post.)

• J.D. Drew has finalized his deal with Boston. He'll get a five year deal with three years guaranteed; there is also a club opt-out clause at the end of the third year if he has playing time problems associated with his shoulder in 2009.
• The Mets have signed former Angel and Dodger Aaron Sele to a minor league deal.
• Jack Lang, the Hall of Fame sportswriter who cut his teeth on the Jackie Robinson-era Dodgers, passed away Thursday, from "a variety of ailments". (Also at MLB.com.) His was the job of collecting the Hall of Fame ballots during his tenure with the BBWAA, as well as calling the players to let them know they'd made it in; he called 44 such players, from Red Ruffing to Steve Carlton.

It's time. We know it is because baseball has started. Maybe not the pros just yet, maybe not even spring training, but soon, very soon — Saturday, even — the players hit the field, when the world is mud-luscious.

So we heard Jered Weaver speak at the Dirtbag baseball season kickoff dinner; what he lacked in public speaking skills he certainly made up for in sincerity, delivering what turned out to be a heartfelt thank-you to his former coaches, teammates, and most of all, parents. He talked briefly about his learning disabilities, and what a struggle it was for him to stay eligible to pitch on the team. He donated some of his signing bonus to the school, and so there is now a facility (with his name?) dedicated to helping student-athletes keep up with their academics.

He talked a fair amount about his brother, how excited and happy he was to be on the same team, and then upon being called up the second time, how he didn't know he displaced Jeff until after he had arrived in the bigs. He waxed emotional as he recalled October 27, after the madness had quieted some in St. Louis, running out to the field, embracing his brother, "sharing tears" on the field in perhaps the crowning achievement of Jeff's career. (Jeff, he also told us, is now a Mariner.)

Towards the end, he mentioned how he got yanked from the rotation and put into the bullpen, and working toward the goal of returning to the rotation made him a better pitcher. It was a recurring theme, overcoming personal limitations, and he advised the incoming Dirtbags to work hard, not to let up — lest they end up in his situation, in which he was having a hard time once more; the room fairly gasped. What he meant by that, I cannot say. But, he will get his old college number 36 back next year.

Thanks to a pleasant happenstance, we got to sit next to Bobby Crosby and his lovely fiancee, with whom Helen chatted throughout the evening. At a table or two away from us, Abe Alvarez, Jason Vargas, Troy Tulowitzki, all of whom we chatted with briefly. We finally got to meet Coach Weathers and his wife, as well as Bob Wuesthoff, who arrived in an electric scooter; the latter thanked us for the support of the scholarship in his name.

And so, the preseason starts Saturday. I can't wait.

I forgot to renew my SABR subscription last year, and was in the process of renewing it, when I got to the page where you have to enter your credit card:

https://store.sabr.org/sabrstore.cfm?a=co&co=cnf

Then, Seamonkey bitched at me when I tried to send my data: I was actually sending my data to an insecure site! That's crazy talk, I thought at first, but then I read the generated HTML:

<form name="frmOrder" method="post" action="http://store.sabr.org/sabrstore.cfm" onsubmit="return fValidateOrder('frmOrder');">

So there's my credit card data, including the "security" number on the back and the expiration date, about to get shipped across the Internet in plaintext. What was shocking was the customer service lady informing me that they'd never had a problem with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Well, of course... after all, security isn't exactly their first priority up at Redmond. But I had her render the page on IE and look for that form... sure enough, it was pointed at the same insecure page there, too. It doesn't get much worse than that.

I've dropped the site designer a line, and hopefully he'll get this cleared up straightaway, but it's just unbelievable how IE still doesn't get basic security right.

Joe Sheehan plays devil's advocate on the news that Extra Innings won't be available on cable anymore:

MLB is going to tick off a subset of that group: EI subscribers who either have Dish Network or cable. However, they’re not going to lose that group of people as fans of MLB as a whole. Some of those people will switch to DirecTV, others will make do with MLB.tv, still others will not purchase a package and live without the extra games. The number of fans that MLB will lose because of this decision, however, could fit in my living room. You simply don’t go from being such a big fan of baseball that you would purchase 1200 games a year on satellite to a non-fan based on one decision.

I don't know about that. DirecTV is generally much worse about rebroadcasting local TV. They're still playing the buy a seperate antenna for local broadcasts game, and now that it's becoming increasingly clear that terrestrial broadcast HD is about to go cable-only, that's a bad way to bet in even the short term.

Another point that Sheehan makes is that this is a niche product; only the extremest of fans buy it. Fair enough. And, it's not like an alternative doesn't exist in the form of MLB.TV, however slow that is; try switching between games. (MLB.TV will offer a new product this season called MLB.TV Mosaic, which allows you to watch up to six games simultaneously.) But even so, those are substantially worse products. Regardless of whether this makes short-term sense for MLB, I just don't think annoying any large segment of your customer base is worth it.

Update: David Pinto adds his two cents, which amount to DirecTV being a better deal than cable anyway, so what's the big fuss?

In 2009 when the FCC has mandated total NTSC phaseout and all terrestrial broadcasts switch to HD, you may or may not have a way to receive such broadcasts. Certainly, you'll have to do so with an exterior antenna. With the exception of LA and NYC residents, for whom this is not a problem, if you want local HD, you're stuck with cable or terrestrial HD broadcast; the latter is much spottier than NTSC, and has far more problems with weather.

Finally, there's ISP services. Time-Warner was a welcome sight when they came to our neighborhood; we were totally fed up with Pac*Bell and their ongoing excuses for poor service quality and uptime on our DSL line. While there's nothing that says I'd have to switch from cable, I'd most likely have to increase my monthly payment if it were divorced from a cable bill.

By Kevin Goldstein:

1. Brandon Wood: The Good: Skinny frame belies outstanding power and offers scary projection for what is already a plus-plus skill. Remarkably strong wrists fire the barrel of the bat through the zone in whip-like fashion, and balls fly off contact with outstanding backspin and loft. Improving approach led to career-high walk total. Excellent fundamentals in the field and on the basepaths. Above-average arm.
The Bad: Wood's swing is designed for one thing: power. Strikeouts will always be an issue, but he has enough raw hitting skills to bat .270-.290 in the majors. Average runner who positions himself well in the field, but might be a little short range-wise to stay in the middle of the infield.
2. Nick Adenhart, rhp
3. Erick Aybar, ss
4. Sean Rodriguez, ss
5. Hank Conger, c: Potential impact bat at catcher with switch-hitting skills, plus-plus raw power and a refined approach. ... there are worries that he'll have to move to first base if he continues to fill out....
6. Stephen Marek, rhp
7. Jeff Mathis, c
8. Terry Evans, cf/rf: Everything clicked in 2006 ... so completely out-of-nowhere that few trust [his ability] yet.
9. Hainley Statia, ss
10. Jose Arredondo, rhp
Sleeper: Ryan Mount

Today's Birthdays

Bryan Smith Ranks The Top 75 Prospects, And An SI Tech Hint

I'll post his top 75 list on Baseball Analysts. For the Angels:

49. Erick Aybar, 23, SS, Los Angeles Angels
30. Nick Adenhart, 20, SP, Los Angeles Angels
5. Brandon Wood, 22, SS, Los Angeles Angels

For the Dodgers:

37. James Loney, 23, 1b, Los Angeles Dodgers
20. Scott Elbert, 21, LHP, Los Angeles Dodgers
18. Andy LaRoche, 22, 3b, Los Angeles Dodgers
16. Clayton Kershaw, 19, SP, Los Angeles Dodgers

His original posts about the players are available at SI.com:

Honorable Mentions
Prospects 75-61
Prospects 60-46
Prospects 45-31
Prospects 30-16

Tech: How To Make si.com Pages Load Faster Under Firefox

Finally, I wanted to pass along a little hint that seems to make SI pages load a lot faster. For those of you running Firefox and Adblock Plus, make sure to block the URL

http://i.a.cnn.net/si/.element/ssi/js/2.0/main.js

This contains a lot of needless navigation Javascript, not to mention popup control code (boo, hiss), and also has some load/unload code that I suspect is bogging down pages on entry and exit. At least, that seems to be the case under Firefox; Jon, who is using IE, reports no problems. Use the sidebar (ctrl-shift-B) to find the URL, or (easier) pop the URL above into the Adblock Plus prefs window (Tools -> Adblock Plus...) and then hit the Add Filter button, paste the URL, and hit OK.

Labels: minors, tech

Comedian/writer Scott Long, who's taken over The Juice Blog, recently got my hackles up on the second of his "Please Explain" posts, this one about Kirsten Dunst. Long slags her acting ability, and I have to give him that; in the Spiderman movies, she's the vacant hero's girlfriend, played by some wholly forgettable ingenue.

That, to me, is a legitimate reason to find her lacking, because her screen presence never impressed me, nor did any of her acting ability. But Long walks right over the line with this:

I don't like to get too personal on the looks front, but if you are a lead actress, you need to be sexy. Kirsten Dunst is not. The biggest role of her movie career has been playing Peter Parker's girlfriend in the Spider Men movies. When you watch a scene on the big screen and think that even Toby McGuire is slumming it, I think you need to reconsider casting your lead actress.

"Slumming it"? Any woman crazy enough to want to get acting jobs in a fiercely competitive place like Hollywood has to start at three sigmas above the mean in beauty, i.e., about one in a 100,000 at least. Sexy she isn't — she's too girl-next-door innocuous — but it's a long slope down from there to "slumming".

Which brought me to a recent article I happened to scan in the Register about "Ugly Betty", ABC's commentary sitcom about beauty and body image and the like. The show has been adapted from a Colombian show with a similar name (Yo soy Betty, la fea, I am Betty, the ugly); versions have been exported all over the world. And yet.

The eyebrows, the glasses, and the braces were all props. America Ferrera is one dandy looking woman, which leaves me to wonder what Long might say about Dunst if she weren't in the straightjacket of being Peter Parker's girlfriend.

• Kirk Saarloos is on the loose, as the A's traded him to Cincinnati, where he'll have a chance to grab a starting spot at the back end of their rotation. Oakland got minor leaguer David Schafer in return.
• Veteran Presence vendor Darin Erstad has a one-year deal with the Chisox.
• Update: The Dodgers have signed Fernando Tatis to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training. He memorably became the first man in baseball history to hit two grand slams in one inning, in an April 23, 1999 game against the Cards; both were off Chan Ho Park.
• The Red Sox have come to an agreement with Brendan Donnelly, avoiding arbitration. He will make $1.4M on a one-year deal.

Today's Birthday

Only one!

Dallas McPherson's Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Back And Other Roster Notes

• As promised, Dallas McPherson's going under the knife to remove a herniated disk.

  "I've been in limbo for six months, having good days and bad days, wondering if I should have surgery or not, whether I would make it through spring training," said McPherson, who was limited to 101 games the last two seasons because of back problems and has been in pain — often excruciating — all winter.

  "But I get a good feeling from the doctors that this is going to work. Yeah, I'm going to miss the first half of the season, but my back has been a problem for four or five years, and I've missed a lot of time because of it. To get it fixed and to be able to move on is a sense of relief."

  During the operation, known as spinal fusion, the defective disk will be removed, and pins and screws will be inserted to hold the vertebrae in place. Scar tissue will be cleaned out, and a substance known as bone protein will be injected.

  Ooh, lovely. I would draw your attention to the part above, because it's rather important. Back injuries tend to be chronic, and the Angels knew about his condition as early as 2003 ($), when he lost time at AA Arkansas due to a bulging disk in April.

  There was a long, ugly thread on this topic at BTF in which some brat with the nick pkb33 used the disingenuous pissing that so many grade-school-level "fans" often do once they discover that some player or other isn't going to work out (and at this point, I've given up on Dallas), namely misrepresenting the value of rookies under the rubric (as quoted by Softball-Playing Human)

  Again I say: PBK, you're making the argument that McPherson would've failed if he'd played, and now that he's out for the season due to injuries, you're saying, "See, he failed! I was right!"

  This line of reasoning, of course, is the purest crap. If you were going to argue that Dallas's back problems were going to resurface and that was an issue, fine, but to complain that he was an ex ante bust generally (or specifically, because of his stupefying strikeout rate) and then cackle afterwards because his health kept him off the field, well, that's just triumphalism in action. I have no doubt but that the Glaus-loving crowd will adopt the same sort of "logic".

  Finally, our voice of Reason (well, not so much anymore):

  One issue raised way back when was dead right -- the team may be good at hoarding young talent, but its record in figuring out how/when to deploy it on the MLB level is ... spotty. There is a Stoneman/Scioscia disconnect that bugs. Also, why the hell didn't McPherson have surgery at least two years ago, if not four? Sure, it's no fun to open up on the spinal cord, but it's also not much fun to miss parts of four of the past five seasons (or whatever) with back-related injuries. I think the team's medical staff royally effed up.

  Whether they did or not is a good question for Will Carroll.
• Kendry Morales' knee has scar tissue from an earlier injury, but no new damage.
• The A's have come to terms with reliever Justin Duchscherer, for one year and $1,187,500. Duchscherer really needs to clean up those redundant letters from his last name; I propose Justin Duck, just like they did back in the good old days of Ellis Island, where ignoramus immigration clerks dropped polysyllabic and hard-to-Anglicize names into the sea, along with the rest of the baggage.
• The Marlins and White Sox are likely "winners" in the Darin Erstad sweepstakes. Erstad might still return to the Halos, but either of the above teams are said to offer more playing time. He needs as little as he can get.

Tech: Thank You, Brother!

Considering how much I gripe about Windows and suchlike, it's worth mentioning that Brother has done a really good job with their Linux support on the new MFC-9420CN I just bought. While it didn't exactly work right out of the box (unlike my Mac laptop, which found the printer and was merrily printing away first time, every time), it turned out the problem was a needed upgrade to Fedora Core 5. That fixed it, and the printer installed just fine after following the CUPS instructions. In a world where Linux support has come tooth by claw, it's a refreshing change that Brother is actively helping.

Labels: angels, dodgers, tech

Seems the idiotic rumor of MLB taking Extra Innings away from cable is about to become a reality, with the net result that Seitz is going to stop writing about the Angels, it being he won't be watching them, either. I still think this is one of the dumbest things the MLB bozos have done so far, but then, their broadcast agreements are all about short-term gain (of money) and long-term losses (of fans and fan goodwill).

Baseball America has published its projections for the Pac-10 conference, which suggest UCLA will take first place, and USC will go down fifth, after the team's second losing season in three years. In the Big West, Fullerton will again place first, despite heavy recruiting from the pros. Fullerton also sports four of the top ten draft picks in the conference projected to go in the 2007/2008 draft, while the Dirtbags have two:

Long Beach State missed regionals last year and will be hard-pressed to get back this year with what coach Mike Weathers is calling the youngest team in his six years at the helm. Three-quarters of the infield is back, including Big West freshman of the year Danny Espinosa, who continues the school's tradition of strong shortstops. But the pitching staff will be almost completely rebuilt, with sophomore righthander Vance Worley the only experienced arm returning. Worley had a 3.82 ERA last season, but it was 1.65 over the last two months of the season. With 21 underclassmen, the Dirtbags should look much more formidable in 2008.

UC Davis will join the Big West next year, making it a nine-team conference; they're playing a schedule that features many of their future in-conference opponents this year.

The Dodgers signed reliever Rudy Seanez to a one-year deal, worth $700,000 with bonuses up to $1.2M.

The Dodgers have seen him before.

Today's Birthdays

Completeness: BDD Interviews Ned Colletti

Right here.

OT: Tips For Your New Diabetic Lifestyle!

So that's what I've been doing wrong all this time: diabetes isn't a disease, it's a lifestyle.

"From a business perspective, diabetes is the perfect disease," said David Kliff, a diabetic and investment analyst who specializes in diabetes-related ventures. Diabetics "consume tons of disposable products, and there is no cure. It is a license to print money."

Well, don't be so sure there isn't a cure. All the same, I pass along the following pointer, because it shaved 60 points off my mom's blood sugar level in a week, and because it is one hundred percent free, and almost entirely painless to implement: don't eat after 7:00 PM.

That's it. (The rule is actually to avoid eating for five hours before you go to sleep.) It's a tip my doctor told me about when he put me on a modified Atkins' diet back in December. The diet, on which I've lost nearly 30 lbs. now, includes some help in a bottle, but the hardest part has been saying arrivederci to pasta, bread, breakfast cereal, and pretty much all sweets. On the other hand: cancer, heart disease, strokes, neuropathy, and amputations do a lot to focus your thinking.

The bad news, of course, is no more hot dogs at the ballpark — an extravagant luxury! And, heck, no eating anything at the park unless I get there early to begin with. Keeping my feet attached seems more important, though.

Today's Birthdays

Matt Welch Interview

In mediabistro.com. How's life in LA's closest approximation to the Gray Lady?

You definitely get your calls back quicker here, and are roughly 800% more likely to be visited in your office by Mikhail Gorbachev, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or the head of the Coast Guard, or a leetle robot controlled by Eric Garcetti. But you're also much more likely to begin interactions with readers by them screaming insults at you.

That would be me, I'm sure.

We're Number Four! We're Number Four!

The Angels have the fourth-best farm system in baseball according to Baseball America, making the Angels the only team rated in the top five for five straight years.

Dallas Is Done And Other Roster Notes

• Dallas McPherson's back problems will sideline him for all of 2007. Sorry, Dallas, I guess it just wasn't meant to be. Expect his release any day now.
• Casey Kotchman is doing well in winter ball, and says he feels "comfortable".
• Kendry Morales will have his knee looked at in the U.S. on Monday.
• The Dodgers named five players to their spring NRI list, including LHP Scott Elbert, reliever Jonathan Meloan, infielders Tony Abreu and Chin-Lung Hu, and catcher A.J. Ellis.
• Ohmigawd. The Twins signed Ramon Ortiz. Batgirl predicts a great career in blogging if that pitching thing don't work out.
• The A's re-signed Kirk Saarloos for one year and $1.2M.
• Former Angel prospect Alberto Collaspo will play some games in the outfield during spring training. Jeff DaVanon will probably keep his job as a fourth outfielder, though.

I have, over the last year, been immensely tempted to explain a number of things here, but have mostly kept my keyboard shut as a means to hide certain truths. But today there seems to be little reason for any of that now.

---

Nearly eight years ago, I signed up to work — pro bono — with a group of men who started a company almost by complete accident. For me, it started as a nighttime obsession in the middle of 1999, when I got called in to expand and replace what was then little more than a snub at a particularly conspicuous online retailer, an adolescent poke at a company whose below-wholesale pricing quickly got them into trouble with the buying public.

I worked two jobs at once while spending months on the road, running up exorbitant airtime charges absorbed by the folks at my day job (who would let me hear about it, in no uncertain terms) for calls back to my co-conspirators, staying up late over a borrowed laptop until I had to finally get sleep. And then in the morning, back to the paying gig, putting in 16-hour days for months at a stretch. Sent all over the U.S. for Year 2000 remediation jobs, at one point, I found myself working in my underwear in a Decatur, Georgia hotel that had lost its air conditioning in July and August, literally sweating over the code that was the life or death of the site.

That December, they found enough money to pay me full time.

I quit my other job, took a pay cut, lost all my benefits: what the hell, it beat train control by a mile. We were doing everything new, and the Internet was the untamed West. Any idiot with a domain name could make a fortune by reselling the right one, and companies — often, little more than vague ideas — popped up by the thousands. The Internet was suddenly the new television, radio, and newspapers, all rolled up into one, and everybody was gonna get rich. Silicon Valley venture capitalists quickly found themselves with more dollars than companies, and IPO valuations went through the roof.

That was the good news. The bad news was that our competition had deep, deep pockets. One company, backed by Time-Warner's immense purse, had a bankroll of $400 million at one point. We, on the other hand, were operating out of a termite-infested concrete tiltup on Santa Monica, and the landlord wanted us out. On the weekends, you could hear the "lawyer's office" at the end of the hallway busy with the sounds of a porno shoot. Our internet presence amounted to a single PC running Linux, attached to a mostly-working DSL line; the networking gear was a consumer-grade office switch.

By early 2000, we had moved out of the rat-trap office and, as an emergency measure, into a single room in another office park, subleased from a former co-worker who had started out on his own with a different startup. Six people crammed in to the tiny space, cheek by jowl. I telecommuted for the first four months, refusing to work in such cramped conditions.

We leased a big office downstairs in the same building, hired salespeople, some of whom were friends from college, hired more programmers. The race was on. Our roles quickly became settled: I ran the database. Cory designed site appearance and flow, and with Dan, the USC Film school student, was conscripted into writing unbelievable amounts of PHP. The results often made my eyes burn to read it — but they got it done quickly, and in the end, it worked. Corey, the technical genius whose ability to see deeply into problems far exceeds my own, provided architectural and networking advice. Christopher, our networking savant who we spirited away from a friend's failing ISP, worked his way up from waiting tables to maintaining a far-flung fleet of Cisco gear at 99.99% uptime. Graham was the genial Democrat-turned-sales manager, with whom we had many spirited yet friendly political debates over late night takeout. Above him, Kamran, constantly encouraging and motivating everyone, and planning, planning, planning, improvising a business model every single day.

But the core, in my mind, remained the two brothers, Tamim and Omar, sons of a Lebanese immigrant. Tamim was the trader, the perennial negotiator, a Plantronics headset permanently attached, always making deals. He was never a huckster or a con man, but he could spot a fat margin a mile away and know just how to knock down the other guy's asking price. Getting good deals on everything was second nature to him, like breathing. There was an apocryphal story that a sales rep for one of our vendors, a colo, broke down in tears during talks with us because she knew she'd been beaten so soundly. And yet, I've known few men so easygoing, or smiled so readily and genuinely. His undimming inner optimism was to be our north star.

Omar, on the other hand, simply did everything: making sales calls in the early days, handling customer service, managing customer feeds, generally keeping the site humming, and along the way, morphing into the company's memory bank. He became our Argus, the giant (despite his diminutive stature) with a hundred eyes — albeit one with a penchant for manufactured malapropisms that recalled Yogi Berra. Marathon games of Quake ruled the office at 6:00 PM every day, often started with his call of, "Dude -- you down?"

Yet despite the qualities of the team assembled, my doubts about our enterprise persisted; our bigger competitors spent tons of money on promotions, and here we were, a tiny speck in the online sea with a fraction of their traffic and revenue. Once, after a late night session in the new office, I remember talking things over with Graham in the parking lot, telling him, well, it's a fifty-fifty chance the company's even around in three years, but I planned on riding it out until the end. Even if the company failed, I'd learned a lot.

We stayed with open source: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, with PHP for the front end, the classic LAMP stack. Our competition outspent us by orders of magnitude for back end hardware, too, dropping millions on Sun servers running Oracle databases on Netscape webservers — all top-of-the-line stuff, all name brand, all very pricey. At one point, we thought we needed a "real" database, chased an Oracle solution for a year — and rolled back when we realized how bad it was, and how many millions in consultants' fees it would take to make it go, even on top-of-the-line multiprocessor Dell servers stuffed to the brim with memory. We dropped it, went back to MySQL, and stayed there. It worked. It still works.

For the first few years, traffic doubled every December. We kept a close eye on the daily referrals, clickthrus in our parlance; when other sites were blabbing on about "stickiness", we wanted to get people the hell off our site as quickly as possible, and on to our customers'. As a result, we were cash positive almost from the start, financing expansion internally; no venture capitalists behind us also meant no venture capitalists breathing down our necks, demanding answers, dog-and-pony shows, or accounting tricks to pretend we were making money. In March 2000, the NASDAQ hit its highest valuation; shortly thereafter, it went into a two-year-long tailspin. The big guys with their big overhead and big budgets took huge hits to their specious valuations; our traffic continued to grow, and revenue with it. Dot-coms wilted like flowers in a frost, and from their remains we scavenged furniture, office space, hardware, and employees. (I have half-jokingly said that we're the hermit crabs of the dot-com world, now having occupied expensive customized office space from two failed online businesses.)

And still, we kept meeting our numbers.

---

And so yesterday was Tamim and Omar's last day, bittersweet but not final, something like, goodbye until the next company, retirement but not really retirement, more like a sabbatical to wait for the next big idea. There is the temptation — which I barely suppressed while writing this — to go all St. Crispin's Day in this space. However rousing the speech, it's a weak analogy; we none of us have wounds to show on rolling up our sleeves, yet we know the elation of victory despite long odds.

Tamim, Omar, even though I know you won't read this, I just wanted to say that this has been the best time of my life, and its greatest adventure. Thank you. Thank you both. And for Kamran (who was secretly responsible for getting me involved in the first place), Dan, Cory, Corey, Steve, Graham, Christopher, and all the others who were also there at the very beginning, thank you too. We couldn't — I couldn't — have done it without you. For your forebearance, good judgment, humor, diligence, and keen insight, I haven't enough kind words. A fellow is blessed, unbelievably blessed, if he gets one such opportunity in a lifetime.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

Good for him. I wonder how many games he'll pitch?

Kendry Morales, okay, but ... Dallas McPherson are going to see specialists? Any hope I had of Dallas playing in 2007 just got crushed. Sorry, D-Mac.

And, good news: Troy Percival has re-joined the Angels organization as a special assignment pitching instructor, attending both major and minor league spring training camps, and will visit minor league teams throughout the year.

"The Angels have been an important part of my career and life and I couldn't be happier to be part of the organization," said Percival, who spent all but one of his 11 seasons in the majors with the Angels.

Today's Birthdays

Congratulations, Ramon

How much trouble are the Twins in? They're offering Ramon Ortiz $3M/1 year. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

For Completeness: Colletti Interview

You won't learn anything.