Emily At Large

Brenda Schmidt links to this essay by Kamilla Denman on Emily D.'s poetry (focused on her idiosyncratic punctuation). I haven't really had time to read the whole thing thoroughly, it's quite long. Here is some of what Denman has to say about poem 341 (which appears in the comments to the last Emily post here).

The poem begins with words conventionally grouped (though the punctuation marks Dickinson used were not conventional), but by the third line, the grammar of the poem begins to disintegrate with the introduction of an additional comma, leaving only the iambic pentameter as a stabilizing if relentless rhythmic force throughout the first stanza.¹⁶ The first line describes the psychological state philosophically, the second describes it imagistically, and the two make an impressive epigram. But Dickinson is not content to end the poem here: she must explore the state from a more intimate and vulnerable standpoint. She is not content to recollect emotion in tranquillity, nor to describe it in eloquent, complete sentences...

I am writing this from a public machine at a coffee shop in Charlottetown, so I don't really have time to give the essay my full attention or put down my impressions of it right now. Hopefully, I can get back to this tomorrow.

Previous Emily posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Covering Bases

All your base are belong to us. Does anyone else remember this headclogging little phrase that was all over the web a few years ago?

Here are some definitions of base.

Finally, John Hill of the Cub Reporter has written one of the better articles I've read about on-base percentage and walks:

Contrary to an all too popular belief among sceptics, on-base percentage is not so much about walks as about the rate at which you succeed as a hitter in that singular purpose of not making an out. A walk may not be as valuable as a hit in most circumstances, especially with runners on base, but it is always preferable to an out. It is that sentiment that is glaringly absent in those infamous Baker comments, that realisation that when the presented with nothing to hit, it is far better to walk than to try and hit anyway, and to inevitably fail in doing so. Drawing that walk not only gets you on base, but it adds a minimum of four pitches, and often many more, to the opposing pitcher’s pitch count and is therefore a positive step towards a steady diet of middle relievers.

In the course of research for the article Hill made an ironic little discovery about players (I'll let you find it for yourselves) who have been managed by Dusty "Hit, Don't Walk" Baker.

Code, Etc

The CodeArchive could come in handy for anyone interested in learning programming on their own hook.

The number and lengths of post are down this week because both the baseball and fantasy baseball seasons are opening on Sunday. I'm in way too many leagues and have a few drafts to do before Sunday, so I'm concentrating on preparation for those. Once the season starts, the posts will climb again, and they won't be so baseball heavy.

Sun Byrnes Away Delusions?

From Baseball Prospectus' The Week In Quotes:

"The sun was bad, but was it any worse than it's been the last 10,000 years? I'm gonna say no."
— A’s outfielder Eric Byrnes, on losing a ball in the sun, barely catching the next one hit his way, then watching two more fall in for doubles.

He may not have a firm grasp on the ball but he appears to have a firm grip on reality.

Let There Be Light

Every now and then, a pleasant surprize pops up south of the border. Today it's a tongue-in-cheek Scientific American (I guess it's only an oxymoron in lowercase) editorial that I was led to by The Gazetteer (excerpt) and Blondesense (full text):

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Them there folks at that there magazine better be careful 'cause the spirit of god might stop moving upon the face of the waters long enough to drag their faces across concrete. Might say, "Let there be a small light, a bare bulb, in their cells."

Off the (Baseball) Stupidity Scale

A lot of stupid assertions have been made over the years by baseball writers and commentators. Until today, I thought that Joe Morgan's continued insistence a couple of years ago that Billy Beane wrote Moneyball was about the height of stupidity. I'd rate that episode as about a 20 on a stupidity scale of 1 -10. I guess Morgan's is still the worst, but this assertion by L.A. Times writer Bill Plaschke in response to an AP survey of 155 Hall of Fame voters has got to have the needle quivering at 19:

``I will not vote for Mark McGwire,'' Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times said. ``It's obvious from his own statements he used some form of performance-enhancing drugs and it's obvious from his statistics he did not become a Hall of Fame-type player until he did so.''

All I can say on McGwire's statements about steroids, etc., is that he seems to be following the advice of his lawyers. That's probably a smart thing to do when confronted by witch hunters.

However, Plaschke's assertion that it's obvious from McGwire's statistics that he did not become a Hall of Fame-type player until he [allegedly] began using steroids is absolutely ridiculous and immediately refutable by a quick look at the facts. The facts in this case are McGwire's career statistics, including his minor league stats.

There is no way to prove from those statistics that at a certain point in his career McGwire began using steroids, because even as a minor leaguer his two key abilities, patience and power, were present in spades. Is Plaschke looking at stats I can't see? Because all I can see from the stats I've seen is that if McGwire used steroids it began before his minor league days.

McGwire hit 49 home runs in his rookie year at the age of 23.

Think about that: 23 years old, 49 home runs off major league pitching.

Yeah, that happens every day. It don't take a special player, a Hall of Fame-type player, to do that. No sir. Nope.

Looking at McGwire's career in the context of the offensive environments in which he played (which can be found by scrolling down his Baseball-Reference page to the Special Batting section), all we can say is that through his career his offensive stats kept pace with the inflating offensive stats of major league baseball. So what looks like a power spike in McGwire's career in his early to mid-30's is balanced by a coinciding power spike in overall MLB offense in the mid-90's to early 2000's.

Complicating any effort to separate out a performance-enhancing substance-driven late career surge for McGwire is another fact: baseball players, as a group, tend to increase both power and patience at the plate in their '30's. Yes, power and patience, McGwire's two outstanding abilities throughout his career, tend to increase with age.

I'm not saying that McGwire never used any substance that is alleged to enhance performance. I'm saying that Bill Plaschke is a complete and utter idiot for asserting that McGwire's statistics prove he used something, anything, to enhance his hitting.

Baseball Past

As the 2002 baseball season wound down, I was still relatively new to the internet. I had yet to discover blogs, and many of the baseball blogs I now frequent had yet to exist. Knowing that I would soon be in baseball withdrawal, I went looking for fixes. One of the first and best sites I found was the Netshrine Discussion Forum (a celebration of baseball). Netshrine was and is populated by true fans with a sprinkling of fine thinkers about the game. (A couple of regular posters at that time were Lee Sinins, author of the Around The Majors reports and creater of the Lee Sinins Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia, a powerful research tool, and Will Carroll, who had not long before created the injury/medical blog Under The Knife; Will now writes the Team Health Reports for Baseball Prospectus, as well as The Juice blog.)

As the fall of 2002 deepened, Steve Lombardi, the Netshrine creator and curator, asked for volunteers from among the forum membership to write a series of articles of past seasons. Each participant was given a particular season to write about and a deadline to write to. I drew the 1924 New York Giants. Researching and writing my assignment and reading the work of others was one of richer moments of my baseball obsession. The articles in that series, along with others, can be found here. I'm reposting mine below.

THERE WERE GIANTS (in New York in those Days)

There were Giants in New York in those days – John McGraw’s Giants – and they entered the 1924 season as favorites to win the National league pennant. After all, they had captured three consecutive pennants on their way to winning two of the past three World Series.

But the favorites opened the season with a 3-2 loss to the Brooklyn Robins, and would not nail down their fourth straight pennant (and McGraw’s tenth and last as Giants manger) until September 27^th with a tainted [more below] 5-1 win over Philadelphia. They ended the season with a slim 1½ game margin over the Brooklyn team before going on to face Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators in a Series that went the full seven games.

As in 1922 and 1923, the ’24 edition of the Giants would not have a 20 game winner on the pitching staff, although Virgil Barnes and Jack Bentley won 16 games apiece while Art Nehf and Hugh McQuillan each contributed 14 wins as they led the staff to a third place finish in the pitching standings with a 4.16 ERA and 641 runs allowed in 1378 innings.

Offensively though, the Giants were the class of the league. Six of their regulars batted over .300, and they finished first in batting average (.300), home runs (95), on base percentage (.358), runs (857) and slugging (.432). The result of their hitting dominance was that they scored over half a run more per game than any other team in the league; a total of 857 runs.

There were other stories, of course, in the National League that year. It was the first season for which the NL presented an MVP award. Rogers Hornsby posted the highest batting average of the 20^th century by hitting .424 but lost out in the MVP voting to Dazzy Vance of the Brooklyn Robins who won 28 games and struck out 262 batters while compiling a stingy 2.16 ERA.

Death, as always – in baseball as in life –, lurked in the background. Before the season began Boston Braves SS Tony Boeckel became the first major leaguer to die as a result of injuries received in a car accident. Pat Moran, the Red manager died of a terminal kidney ailment, Bright’s Disease during spring training (Ross Youngs, a favorite of McGraw’s and a large part of the Giants offence in 1924, would be diagnosed with Bright’s in 1926 and die of the disease in 1927).

On July 16^th, Giants 1B George Kelly became the first player to hit home runs in six straight games. It was his seventh long ball of the season. He would finish with 21.

On July 17^th, Tuberculosis Day at Sportman’s Park, Jesse Haines refused to cough up a hit as he threw the first ever NL no-hitter in St. Louis in a 5-0 win over the Braves on his way to an 8-19 record for the season.

In a July 30^th game between the Phillies and the Cards, Bill Sherdel came out of the St. Louis bullpen in the eighth inning with men on first and second and no outs. He wound up and delivered to Johnny Mokan who tried to bunt. The ball stayed in the air long enough to be caught by Jim Bottomley charging in from first. Bottomley’s peg to SS Jimmy Cooney doubled off the runner at second. And Cooney wasted no time in throwing a strike to Rogers Hornsby who had moved over to cover first base. One pitch for Sherdell, one triple play for the Cards.

Jim Bottomley soon became the first player to drive in 12 runs in a game. On September 16^th Bottomley hit three singles, a double and two home runs (including a grand slam) against Brooklyn whose manager, Wilbert Robinson, had held the old record of 11 set in 1892 when he was a Baltimore Oriole and a teammate of John McGraw’s.

The darkest day of the 1924 season for the Giants, and for baseball, coincided with the Giants clinching the pennant. After New York’s 5-1 win over Philadelphia that day, Phillies SS Heinie Sand accused Giants OF Jimmy O’Connell of offering him $500 to throw the game.

Under questioning by Commissioner Landis, O’Connell, a 23 year old playing in his sophomore year, admitted to making the offer but said he made it on behalf of coach Cozy Dolan and various players on the New York roster. On October 1^st, Landis announced that both O’Connell and Dolan were expelled from professional baseball.

With the bribery controversy barely behind them, the rest of the Giants (including 18 year old 3B Fred Lindstrom) headed to Washington to meet the Senators on October 4^th for the first game of the World Series. The game went 12 innings and the Giants eked out a 4-3 win as they beat Walter Johnson in his first-ever World Series appearance despite striking out 12 times against the 37-year-old pitching legend. Art Nehf was the winning pitcher.

Game two was decided in the bottom of the ninth on a double by Washington SS Roger Peckinpaugh that scored 1B Joe Judge.

The teams split games three and four, and in game five on October 8^th the Giants once again thwarted Johnson in his attempt to win a World series game as they touched him for 13 hits and six runs at the Polo Grounds.

In game six, back in Washington, the Senators’ Tom Zachary gave up a run on two first inning hits but held the New York squad to five hits the rest of the way as he squeaked out a 2-1 win. Art Nehf took the loss as the 1924 World Series was sent to a seventh game.

To start game seven on October 10^th , Senators player-manager Bucky Harris sent 23 year old RHP Curly Ogden and his 9-8 record to the mound. Briefly.

After Ogden struck out Fred Lindstrom and walked Frankie Frisch, Harris pulled him in favor of LHP George Mogridge (16-11) – apparently to keep Bill Terry and his left-handed bat on the Giants bench where Harris seemed to feel they belonged. Harris gave his team a 1-0 lead with a drive into the temporary seats in left field. That lead held until the sixth when a base hit by New York and two errors by the Senators combined to give the Giants a 3-1 lead which looked like it might hold up and turn into another World Championship for the Giants.

But in the eighth Washington pinch-hitter Nemo Liebold banged out a double which C Muddy Ruel quickly followed with a single. The next batter drew a walk to load the bases. That brought up Harris who hit a seemingly harmless grounder to Lindstrom which suddenly struck a pebble and sailed into left to bring home the tying run.

To open the ninth inning Harris brought back Johnson after one day of rest. Johnson held the Giants scoreless for four innings.

In the bottom of the twelfth, the game was looking as if it might never end. But with two outs, New York C Hank Gowdy stepped on his mask near home plate as he tried to field a short pop fly by Muddy Ruel. Ruel stepped back into the batter’s box and smashed a double. Johnson then reached on a error by SS Travis Jackson. Earl McNeely came to the plate and pulled a grounder to third base. And, just as in the eighth inning, the ball took a sudden hop over young Fred Lindstrom’s head into left field. Ruel scored from second to give the Senators and Walter Johnson a hard-fought victory and their first World Series title.

Yes, there were Giants in New York in those days but they never won another pennant until 1933.

Sources: Baseball Reference.com, BaseballLibrary.com, The 20^th Century Baseball Chronicle.

Branch Rickey

I don't think there can ever be enough links to this page. There was a flurry of baseball sites linking to it in the winter of 03-04 just after Paul Depodesta took over as GM of the Dodgers. It contains excerpts from an article that Branch Rickey, one of the game's great thinkers, wrote for Life magazine in 1954. A must-read for anyone interested in baseball history, and especially in fundamental truths about the statistics that should drive roster decisions.

Baseball people generally are allergic to new ideas. We are slow to change. For 51 years I have judged baseball by personal observation, by considered opinion, and by accepted statistical methods. But recently I have come upon a device for measuring baseball which has compelled me to put different values on some of my oldest and most cherished theories. It reveals some new and startling truths about the nature of the game. It is a means of gauging with a high degree of accuracy important factors which contribute to winning and losing baseball games. It is the most disconcerting and at the same time the most constructive thing to come into baseball in my memory.

Picturebook Without Pictures (Hans Christian Andersen)

Just bouncing around this morning and I came across this online edition of Picturebook Without Pictures

It is strange that whenever I am conscious of the warmest and best feelings, my hand and tongue seem to be tied, so that I can express nothing, nor utter any of the thoughts that are within me. And yet I am a painter. My eye tells me that, and all those who have seen my sketches and pictures have agreed.

I am a poor fellow; I live in one of the narrowest of streets, but there is plenty of light, for I live high up, with a view over all the rooftops. The first few days after I arrived in town I felt depressed and lonely. In place of the forest and the green hills, I now had only the dark, gray chimneys to look at. I did not have a single friend here, and not one familiar face greeted me...

A fine read. The page, which I found through this site, also has links to other Andersen works.

Fits (but not so many starts)

The obsession today is my sidebar, which holds the blogroll, archives, profile and all links to recent posts. For some reason it has decided to descend to to the bottom of the page and refuses to respond to all my entreaties for it to return to its proper place. Ran into Cynthia of iridescent spoke at the coffee shop today and she tried to help me fix it. But no go.

So between messing with that, paying the light bill (which wasn't exactly light), and working with some friends on a loose outline of an evening of poetry and music we're doing this coming Saturday night at Piece A Cake Restaurant in Charlottetown, this is the best i can do for content today.

Well, maybe not. Check out the unabridged and annotated letters of Vincent Van Gogh, a man who knew a thing or two about obsession.