More White Sox

In a recent comment on this post about the Chicago White Sox, The Gazetteer asks if my June 2 take on the team needs to be revised now that we're at the end of June and, contrary to my expectations, they still have a .676 winning percentage and lead the AL Central by nine games. I think my analysis was fairly sound, and I still think that the Sox pitchers will come back to earth sometime in the near future. Although, at this point in the season those pitchers may have outperformed their career norms long enough that even a return to those norms (or even falling below those norms briefly) might not be damaging enough to keep the Sox from winning their division.

Better math minds than mine have looked at this team and seen its performance as unsustainable. Dan Agonistes on June 20, for instance. In a sort follow-up article to that post yesterday at the Hardball Times, Dan looked at the Pythagorean formula for teams' expected winning percentages.

To The Dead Poor Man (a Pablo Neruda poem)

This is not Neruda's best poem, nor is it my favourite poem of his. It's a poem with flaws — at least, I feel there are flaws in this translation — but a good poem despite them because it still manages to stand up under its own weight. This version was translated by Alastair Reid. I'm reading from this book. Here's the text:

To The Dead Poor Man

Today we are burying our own poor man;
our poor poor man.

He was always so badly off
that this is the first time
his person is personified.

For he had neither house nor land,
nor alphabet nor sheets,
nor roast meat,
and so from one place to another, on the roads,
he went, dying from lack of life,
dying little by little—
that was the way of it from his birth.

Luckily (and strangely) they were all of the same mind,
from the bishop to the judge,
in assuring him of his share of heaven;
and dead now, properly dead, our own poor man,
oh, our poor poor man,
he will not know what to do with so much sky.
Can he plow it or sow it or harvest it?

He did that always; cruelly
he struggled with raw land,
and now the sky lies easy to his plow,
and later, among the fruits of heaven,
he will have his share, and at his table,
at such a height, everything is set
for him to eat his fill of heaven,
our poor man, who brings, as his fortune,
from below, some sixty years of hunger
to be satisfied, finally, as is just and proper,
with no more batterings from life,
without being victimized for eating;
safe as houses in his box under the ground,
now he no longer moves to protect himself,
now he will not struggle over wages.
He never hoped for such justice, did this man.
Suddenly they have filled his cup, and it cheers him;
now he has fallen dumb with happiness.

How heavy is he now, the poor poor man!
He was a bag of bones, with black eyes,
and now we know, by the weight of him alone,
the oh so many things he always lacked,
for if this strength had gone on and on,
digging up raw land, combing out stones,
harvesting wheat, soaking clay,
grinding down sulfur, lugging firewood,
if this so weighty man did not have shoes,
oh, misery, if this whole separate man
of tendon and muscle didn't ever have
justice in life, and all men beat him,
all men did him down, and even so
he went on laboring away, now, lifting him up,
in his coffin, on our shoulders,
now at least we know how much life he didn't have,
that we did not help him in his life on earth.

Now it dawns on us we are taking on
all that we never gave him, and now it is late;
he weighs on us, and we cannot take his weight.

How many people does our dead one weigh?

He weighs as much as this world does, and we go on
taking this dead one on our shoulders. It's clear
that heaven must abound in bread baking.

Wislawa Szymborska's Sky

Well, audioblogger is up and running again. And, finally, here is the last audiopost I tried to do a couple of months back:

The text of the poem can be found in this post.

The New Old Canadian Science Fiction?

Brenda Schmidt links to an article by Peter Darbyshire on Canadian SF, and to Canadian SF writer Edward Willet's blog entry about the article.

For myself, as I noted on Willet's blog, I find it hard to believe that an article on contemporary Canadian science fiction could be written and contain no mention of James Alan Gardner. Although I suppose that, given the article's premise of there being a resurgence of "classic" SF underway in Canada at the expense of the younger cyberpunk tradition, it would be inconvenient to mention that the best (IMHO) actual storyteller working in the field seems to have found a way to successfully blend space opera with cyberpunk. It might just be that Darbyshire has yet to encounter a Gardner novel , much as I have yet to encounter Karl Schroeder's work. (Am I right, Peter?)

I have read some Robert J. Sawyer (though not recently), and it was a bit dry for my taste. Of Robert Charles Wilson's work, I can say that The Chronoliths seemed to me to be the most successful as a novel, in that the characters had some fullness to them and the ideas spent less time interfering with the story than in Blind Lake or Darwinia.

Crooked Is As Crooked Does

There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

Baseball. If I allowed the business of the game to occupy space in my mind for more than an hour at a time, my enjoyment of the game itself might be choked out of its little patch of soil by the virulent stinkweed that is Bud Selig and his crooked circle of cronies.

For instance, John Brattain takes a look at the opening round of the bidding for the Washington ex-Expos. His conclusion:

It will be a happy day when Bud Selig oozes his purulent ways [sic] out of baseball.

Amen.

The Chi-Sox Charade

Here we are in the first week of June and the Chicago White Sox still lead the majors with a 35-20 record, which gives them a 5 game lead in the AL Central over the Minnesota Twins. That lead will not hold up. By the end of June I expect the Sox to be 4 games behind the Twins, and trying to hold off the Cleveland Indians for second place in the division. Why? Couple of reasons:

• The Sox are currently out-performing their expected winning percentage by 4 games. (Expected or Pythagorean winning percentage is based on a team's runs scored and runs allowed. You can find the expected WP for all teams here. The only team luckier than the Sox so far this season is the Arizona Diamondbacks.)
  

• They are out-performing their EWP by virtue of a handful of lucky pitchers: Jon Garland, Freddy Garcia and Jose Contreras in the rotation; and Dustin Hermanson in the bullpen.


• The offence is not good enough to offset the inevitable pitching decline. Their hitters simply make too many outs and hit with too little power for them to score the runs they are going to need to stay competitive in the division.
  

As far as the pitching goes, Garland especially, with his extremely low K/9 rate of 4.5 should come crashing back to earth this month — in his next couple of starts, I'd expect. Garcia and Contreras will also decline (possibly Mark Buerhle as well, but he has a track record of being successful with a low K/9), though Contreras should be the best of the three over the remainder of the season. In the bullpen, Hermanson will suffer a severe regression, Politte a less severe one. Damaso Marte will be the best pitcher in that pen by season's end.

The Forbidden Library

The Forbidden Library lists books which have either been banned or burned somewhere in the the world at some point, or which people have tried to have banned or burned. The list includes Jack London's The Call of the Wild which apparently was banned in Italy and Yugoslavia in 1929 and burned by the Nazis in 1932, if you can imagine.

Mix And Match

If anyone is still reading out there, let's play a little game. Below is the second draft of a poem I wrote last night at work. The stanzas are numbered 1 through 5. I would like people to post in the comments the order they think the stanzas should be in (e.g. 3, 1, 2, 5, 4), along with their reasoning for the re-ordering. It could be fun, really.

What Was In My Hands

1.
What is in my hands is in my heart.
The length of arms, the thickness of skin,
The density of bone, the tangled
Stretches of vein and artery,
None of these impose any distance.
Neither the skull nor the eye make a wall.

2.
What is in my heart are these, in part:
A song, a hymn, a prayer
Carved from a pragmatist's wooden throat,
A green jar of rain, lid rusting,
Against an old spruce near the shallows
As water stirs around a blue heron.

3.
What was in my hands is in my hands.
Spring's last crabapple blossom
I declined to place in her hair,
Dandelions I awoke to find arranged
In the bright yellow letters of a name
(My eyes dim, streaked, windows).

4.
What was in my hands is in my heart.
My son's wet, freshly-born head,
The weight of him all gathered
In his eyes, those blue event horizons
Through which everything falls,
Forever, towards him, his voice.

5.
What is in my hands is my heart
Under dust, under boots worn at the heel
And loose at the seams, under piles of books,
Under echoes and reflections,
Under lilacs and weeping birches
And the silent, cataracted moon.

edited to fix the "blosson" typo, and to remove the "were" which somehow crept in between "eyes" and "dim" in stanza 3.

American League East

Before the AL East leading Baltimore Orioles lost to the Blue Jays in extra innings last night they'd had a streak of eight straight wins during which time they outscored their opponents 62-28. They got all those runs in spite of having the carcass-like presences of Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro using most of their at bats to stink up the 4 and 5 slots in the batting order spending outs as easily and carelessly and with way less purpose in mind than the crazy old prospector who "tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and called for drinks for the house."

Those two venerable, but washed-up, "hitters" have been spending outs since the season began as if outs were not the most precious commodity in baseball; each out more precious than any one run can ever be, with the single exception of when the home team's batting in a tie game or down by one in the ninth or in extra innings — those are the only times that two outs should be traded for one run.

It's amazing to me that the O's not only continue to let these guys bat, especially Palmeiro, but let them punk out, hollow out, the heart of the order the way a tree sometimes rots from the heart of its trunk out. Palmeiro has nothing left. Sammy, well, if Sammy is going to play he should bat where he belongs, which is as the #7 or #8 hitter at this point in his career.

Of course, a change isn't going to happen; and what truly amazes me is that it probably isn't even going matter to the O's position in the AL East standings for the next month or so. They have a pretty soft schedule ahead of them over the next 30 days. They'll continue on their merry winning way with Roberts, Mora and Tejada getting on base and scoring, then the order farting and missing briefly like an engine with two bad plugs and revving up again when it gets to Lopez, Matos and Gibbons. And while that's going on management will continue thinking about trading their ace (this is how clueless they are, they don't even realize that Erik Bedard is for real and is the best pitcher on the staff) for a proven winner. And they'll continue win and continue to lead the division.

Why? Because the Red Sox have lost a Schilling and quite a few pounds (in the person of David Wells) to the disabled list for 3 weeks to a month each. And this while their bullpen is struggling. Luckily for the Sox, they don't have a weak spot in their lineup so their bats will keep them in hailing distance of the O's. In fact, if I were Theo Epstein, I'd take the opportunity, which has just presented itself, of just running Kevin Youkilis out there every day to play third base and getting Bill Mueller significant time at second base while Bellhorn and Vazquez are ailing. I'd do that in order to see if I could drum up a trade for some young pitching with a team in need of a second baseman. A team like the Twins, or the Cubs, or Oakland, or the Giants, the Pirates or the Royals. A lot of teams out there, including the Mets, the Yankees, the White Sox, the Indians could use Bill Mueller's bat at second. The team I'd target would be the Phillies, try to get Ryan Howard (great, young powerful 1B stuck behind Thome), Placido Polanco and the strong young struggling arm of Gavin Floyd in a deal involving Kevin Millar and Mueller along with a prospect or two and some cash.

That probably won't happen, and the BoSox don't need it to for this season because in a month and a half, when they have Schilling, Miller Wells all back in the rotation ahead of Clement and Arroyo with Wakefield bolstering the pen, they'll be ready to make the run for the division title. And they'll get it.

They Yankees will put on a surge at some point. But I don't think they're even gonna manage as much as the wild card this season. They got too old too fast over the winter. And the only thing that will fix it is more money than they'll be allowed to spend.

The Jays have started well but their lack of depth in all areas will see them fade over the next couple of months, though they may be able to fight it out with the Yankees for fourth place.

The Devil Rays? Never had a chance. They're the team that's starting Alex Sanchez and Alex Gonzalez over Joey Gathright, Jonny Gomes and BJ Upton. If they could finish lower than fifth this year, they would. But there being only 4 other teams in the division makes a sixth or seventh-place finish almost a complete impossibility for them.

I'll be back in a day or two to talk about the Al Central and the mirage that is the Chicago White Sox leading the majors in wins.

Fair To Middlin' (or is it Meddlin'?)

Politics — I tend to avoid talking about the subject (other than the occasional cheap shot at the Holey Empire to the South and its puppet president-pope non-elect). However, today the Gazetteer links to some bloggers who are embracing partisanship and polarization.

I don't agree with that approach. Yes, in our country there are and have been elected officials who I wouldn't be seen on the same street with unless I was spitting at them. Paul Martin? Frank McKenna? Ralph Klein? Jean Chretien? Brian "I don't know how I got this chin up America's ass, but ain't it a nice brown now?" Mulroney? But I suspect that in the end who we elect to govern us says more about us as electors than it does about them as electees.

Seems to me that with all the crimes perpetrated on the world by the US government* in recent years in the name of De-Mockracy for oil and money there might be more of a need now than ever before for people who'll stand firm in the middle and attempt to be objective. No matter how many other people are drawing lines which they claim define everything as left or right.

Funny, you know, I look around at politicians, media, and people I know and their stating of their positions in what they seem to see as a two banded political spectrum seems to drown out anything else they might have to say; making that "anything else" and whether it's positive or negative seem like an afterthought.

Truly, what I seem to be hearing all around me is "Left, right, left-right-left ... Left, right, left-right-left!" Everyone is marching to their own little wars (where they just end up shooting themselves in the feet, at best).

But nothing is just "left" or just "right." Politics is more like a colour wheel than a spectrum: there are socialists, conservatives, liberals, communists, libertarians, anarchists, papists, freethinkers, quakers, and monarchists, just to name a few (and yes, religion is only politics by another name). I, myself, lean in at least four of the above directions depending upon the issue.

Portraying politics as an "either-or" thing ensures only two things, two things which reinforce each other, those being:

1. that turmoil, disagreement and dissatisfaction continue over most of the world
2. that power over humanity's present and future continues to reside not in the hands of humanity, but in the golemical economic structures and processes to which we've abdicated responsibility, reason, and justice.
   

*"US government" these days is no more than a pseudonym shared by various multinational corporations which have reached a point of self-perpetuation — the people in the CEO chairs and on the boards of directors, etc., no longer matter. They are as completely replaceable as the greeters at wal-mart, and have barely any more effect on the momentum and direction of such corporations than said greeters do.