Wild Weekend

Two posts in one day!

I went to Stanford's Spring Football game with Kevin on Saturday after baking in the sun for a Stanford-OSU baseball game. I've realized I'm a pretty big fan of the tactics of football since I've been watching it as a kid. After playing IM football in college, it really clues you into what the players on the field are doing and that understanding helps you figure out what is going on as a fan. Spring games are scrimmages where you can't tackle the QB, PK, or punter (who often wear special shirts) and the teams try to build hype so you buy season tickets. It is often the only time you'll get to see the backup guys playing for better or worse. You can however, get very close to the field and see the speed of the game, which I see as a very interesting part of it. If you ever are on a college campus in April with nothing to do on a Saturday, you might want to check out a spring game.

I also helped out at the CROP walk, which is a walk-a-thon like event that raises money for local and national hunger relief. If you want to donate you can do so here. It was a nice, relaxing way to spend the afternoon under some trees at Lincoln HS in San Jose. It wasn't hard work either, but I got to meet some very interesting people from the Palo Alto Running Club. I should do more events like this but I'm fine with not doing a lot of running for now since I'm swimming and playing a lot of basketball.

I guess I don't have a lot of comments about the Giants losing 3 one run games in a row in Arizona after sweeping 3 from the Dodgers earlier in the week. I have to admit, I'm much happier they beat the Dodgers than Arizona, but each of those Arizona games was winnable.

WHIP vs ERA

As I watch game 4 of the Warriors/Mavs I'll get off my rant about the game of baseball's most meaningless statistic, after "saves", relief pitchers' ERA. Please skip this post if you don't know what RBI stands for and want to keep it that way.

In today's major league game, relievers face very few batters, so the key is how many of those batters the reliever gets out. ERA is a count of how many runners owned by a pitcher score per 9 innings pitched. Since relievers don't throw many innings, ERA is badly altered by having a small denominator where a few bad innings (or other pitchers allowing their inherited runs to score) can throw ERA out of whack. Relievers need a metric that measures raw effectiveness at getting any one given batter out, not something that measures runs allowed. I believe in ERA, but just for people that have pitched over 100 innings.

WHIP is walks and hits per inning pitched. This is a much better metric for relief pitchers as it measures effectively earned runners per inning. It much better measures percentage of batters retired. A sub-1.0 WHIP is fantastic (Matt Cain's is .83 currently which corresponds quite nicely with the fact he has been by far the most dominant Giants' pitcher). A WHIP much north of 1.5 is trouble as the odds of runners scoring increase dramatically when you allow 50% more baserunners.

My favorite example of this was former Giant Tyler Walker, who was the Giants' closer for several months in spite of having a WHIP between 1.5-2.0 for most of the time. That means almost two guys were getting on each inning. He did get a lot of hype because he earned many of the most meaningless stat in baseball, saves, while being an ineffective pitcher.

This year, Armando Benitez has a 1.44 WHIP at the time of this writing. This directly corresponds with him always having the tying run on base as he saves the game this year and any fan would know he has been less than lights out.

If you are a baseball fan, and I hope you are if you've read this far, you should check out some of the alternative stats they now have in the game. For each stat, look at the formula and decide if you think this is a meaningful stat that should replace other more standard stats. More information about many of these terms can be found on the web. Things like VORP, OPS, and Quality Starts are good things to know about so you can discuss them intelligently with other fans and impress them with your in depth knowledge of the game.

Ok, I admit it, maybe I be rong

Those of you who put up with my rant about the Giants' bullpen earlier may recall I listed Jack Taschner as the absoluely worst guy in the bullpen. Of course, he has to go on a streak where he pitches every day, gets tough lefties out and become the go-to guy in the 8th inning. He's always been a left handed guy who could throw hard but now he's not missing inside the strike zone as much. I have to say I'm glad I was wrong, at least this far into the season. I also have to admit I didn't see a 7 game winning streak coming either. However, you can't win every game 2-1, so the offense is going to need to score a lot more runs.

I had a good friend tell me my blog was "cool" today. That combined with my dad telling me that I had a few interesting things to say have been the grand total of user feedback about this blog. Gene talked me into enabling the commenting feature of this blog, so if you have feedback you can use that. I guess you could call that user feedback too. At work we focus a lot on building what the customer wants and getting lots of user feedback, but this medium has the nice benefit of not having to be my source of income so I have the right to totally ignore what you all say.

I'm not sure that this blog is cool, but I think it is at least mostly genuinely me. I guess that is the benefit of all of this user driven journalism, either blogging or online video posting, the author can write or film whatever they jolly well feel like and in exchange for that freedom absolutely nobody has to read or watch what they display. I have a decision to make about if I should market this to an audience that may not actually know me personally, or just keep this full of inside stuff that only myself and my close friends understand. It may be a mix of both.

I don't think I want to have too many outrageous posts about my incredible manliness crushing tennis balls with my 20 year old racquet, but I think I just want to write something that could possibly be insightful for someone and I'd like to make everyone laugh and if not laugh at least smile once.

There also is the outside chance that writing more will improve grammar and spelling. However, I think because of Firefox's red-underlining feature my spelling will be as good as Firefox can underline text. I have noticed that by writing this, I've had to learn how to spell word's I've long since forgotten, such as racquet. Firefox underlines racquet, so its probably not in the dictionary and I am sincerely sorry if I have offended anyone by spelling it wrong. I also pledge to try to use complex sentences that don't just go subject-verb-predicate.

7 wins in a row for the Giants including the last 2 over the hated Dodgers. Its been a good week.

My forehand broke a tennis ball

I was playing tennis with Gene today and after Gene crushed one to me, I hit a huge flat inside-out forehand and the ball literally popped. When we retrieved it and tried to play with it again, the ball seemed super flat. Upon further inspection we realized the ball had been split under the felt by the impact of the forehand. I've played a lot of tennis but I've never split a tennis ball. I am definitely stronger than I've been in the past, but I didn't think much of anything could destroy a tennis ball.

The painful orange background

I know that this blog is pretty hard to read, mostly relating to the fact that I changed the background from a calming black to a bright orange. This was in attempt to have the background of my blog match that of my webpage, which also happens to be quite orange. The page was created when orange was the rage, and since it corresponds to the color of my favorite professional baseball team, I figured it would be a good idea. But I can't really come up with any complementary colors for orange, thus I'm stuck with orange, black and white, which gets kind of hard on the eyes.

I got out to the ballgame last night with my good friends from BCP, Mike, Jonathan, and Tim. I drank some Miller Lite for the first time and it wasn't half bad and came mostly as advertised. The game was quite exciting as the Giants tied the game in the 8th on a Bonds splash home run and won it in the 12 one out before we were going to leave. We had nice seats in the second row of the bleachers. If you are going to buy Giant's tickets, I would definitely recommend the Double Play Ticket Window where you can buy resold season tickets from season ticket holders and get the best seats in each section at a bit more than face. The Giants now have a 2 game winning streak and I may get a chance to watch the game tomorrow too!

Giant Choking and Dual Titles

Well, today the Giants snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The bullpen finally gave it up in a big way. Two former Giants got the big hits for the Rockies. Oh well. Tomorrow, my Bellarmine friends and I are going to hit up the ballpark to see the Cardinals and the Giants. It is supposed to be pretty cold, so I hope I don't freeze too much.

For whatever reason, I like having two topics in each of these titles. One almost always seems to be about the Giants, but the other tends to be off the wall. This could somehow be related to watching a lot of Bullwinkle and Rocky episodes as a kid where each component of an episode had two potential titles both based off of common English phrases describing potential peril that the two furry heroes could undergo. If you have never had the chance to watch the Bullwinkle show, you are really missing out on some pretty tripped out 70's/Cold War/really bad drawing based humor.

Libraries and Neil Young

So I'm going to talk about my conversion from book owner to library user. It is a very touching story filled with very small amounts of intrigue and a good amount of tightwadedness. I started out like many other middle class children of highly educated parents, I got dragged to the public library quite often as a kid. Trips to the library often meant I could play educational games on their computers and help me complete the summer reading program. However, it wasn't nearly as entertaining for me as say going to Fry's Electronics. Going to the library was what we did as a family and because of it, I am the brother of two English majors.

Then like many children, I drifted away from the library in my teenage rebellious years. I became victim of movies and athletic events. I became consumed by computer games. I moved away to UCLA and managed to avoid libraries for 4 years by being a computer science major. I didn't know a Dewey decimal system from a hole in the ground.

But then I was brought back into the congregation of library supporters by my sister, Amy. She showed me that you can rent feature DVD's for a week for free! We watched Steve Martin's "Leap of Faith" and I was hooked. I renewed my library card and I've been going back every week since then. I've become immersed in the fine cultural achievements of the world that are contained in the Sunnyvale Public Library and I haven't paid a dime for them. Books, DVDs, CDs, newspapers its all there. You all should check out your local library and maybe you can be saved too. In all seriousness, the Sunnyvale Public Library is one of the better ones in the area, so if you live here, you should check it out.

One idea I have for this blog is to maybe review a few CDs or DVDs I check out from the library (or books for that matter). I briefly talked about that Millionare book in a previous post. I saw Neil Young at the Bridge School Benefit (which is a fantastic show btw) so I figured I'd check out one of his offerings. I borrowed Glendale which features Neil with Crazy Horse. I really like the album in spite of the fact that all the songs sound the same. Its got a really chill 70's groove that's great for driving or writing code at work. I previously borrowed "Are you passionate", and this is a much better album in terms of grove and being easier to listen to.

In a total aside: One of the best moments at the Bridge School Benefit was Neil playing "Cortez the Killer" with DMB. That was pretty cool.

I hope all future reviews will be a lot more insightful than this one. Giants won again today, that 5 days without losing and consecutive wins for the first time this year!

On blogging

As this is my first serious venture into entertaining via the print medium, I can now see how hard it is to be a writer. There is something about the static nature of what you write that just doesn't evolve along with you. The things I wrote in March seem quite irrelevant now. By October, who is really going to care what I thought about the Dave Roberts signing, but at the moment it seemed worthy of talking about. I also could get things all wrong and if Dave Roberts turns into the greatest centerfielder since Mays, I'm going to look really bad.

I also now have a newfound respect for those that write blogs, and by blogs I mean consistent well thought out essays on life. That takes a lot of devotion. I would think it wouldn't be too hard to write something insightful every night, but I guess its harder than you think.

A good friend, Neal Turbow, sent me an email out of the blue this week asking what is up with life. I was actually thinking about him with respect to the BBQ we threw the last time he was in NorCal. It was a glorified excuse to get another friend, Gene Pang to eat 30 hot dogs in a hot dog eating ordeal. Anyway, apart from that aside, Neal's email sort of brought up the topic of how to keep in touch with people who are physically far away from you. It seems like a blog could offer that sort of communication, but I'd rather have thoughts on live than the play by play of my life. I have a lot of remote friends now, from Honolulu, Seattle, NYC, Atlanta, and I even consider San Francisco remote since I'm not a big fan of driving. One of the great ironies of our time is the fact that in spite of the internet its still almost impossible to keep in touch with people without just calling them every once in a while. [By the way, Facebook has some big plans to give you a "news feed" of your friends lives as a means of keeping in touch. It has some ways to go, but they may be on to something other than removing internet "privacy".] Of course, I not the kind of person that likes to call people out of the blue, so people can just sort of drift into oblivion. One of the big shortcomings in my life is that I like to have a rational reason for everything I do in life that I can tell someone if ever questioned, "Why did you do that?" Some of the most interesting things that have happened to me have no good reason.

Another interesting bug/feature is finding an audience for this blog. Part of me is inclined to define the audience to be the hard-drive of my computer and keep this as a journal, but who knows, others may find these sort of thoughts interesting thus I will thrust it into the deep recesses of cyberspace. This isn't designed to be for anyone's amusement but mine, so its likely that most of the jokes will be inside ones at least relative to some facet of my life [for example, those of you who write computer software for a living will get the bug/feature reference]. If you want I can clarify things like who Dave Roberts or Willie Mays is but I'll leave much of that as an exercise to the reader.

I think that's it for now. The Giant's haven't lost for 3 days, but mostly because they have rained out two days in a row.

Title Mis-spellings and guitar

Hmm, after reading this blog, my dad pointed out that I spelled Ken's Thoughts "Ken's Thougts". That might explain why a Google search for "Ken's Thoughts" came up completely empty. I'm tempted to keep this mis-spelling because I'm the 4th hit for queries for "Ken's Thougts". I think for the near future I'll keep this improper spelling because it gives this site some personality and lets me blow off mis-spellings in these posts by saying, "well, there are spelling errors in the two word title, so there might as well be some in the posts". Besides, I'm a terrible (but slowly improving) speller and this no longer tries to hide this from the world. I'm also vein enough that having the 4th hit on Google gives me a sense of pride, even if that is solely based on my bad spelling. BTW, feel free to link this page to build up my page-rank.

After going to Easter church service at LAUMC, I quickly realized that I can't sing much anymore. While it is a bit more challenging that "I'm a little teapot", I really struggled to find the bass line on the Hallelujah Chorus. Thus I now am more committed than ever to resume playing guitar and singing in the safety of my own room (apologies to roommates Andrew and Lindsey).

I'll save you all from comments on the Giants for a little while.

Review of the bullpen

I talked about position players, now I'll go through the Giant's bullpen in order from least confidence to most confidence.

Jack Taschner - Everytime I've seen this guy live, he's given it up big time. He's a left hander with a really straight fastball and a tendency to leave his pitches over the middle. On a confedence scale of 1-10 he gets a 2. He may be my new Tyler Walker (Reliever I can't stand to watch at any time).

Vinnie Chulk - When he was traded to the Giant's last year, people raved about his ability to "strand runners" with the Blue Jays. Confidence: 3.

Jonathan Sanchez - Another inconsistent left-handed pitcher. He throws really hard but I agree he would be much better suited to be in AAA learning to be a starter. Confidence score 4.

Kevin Correia - Electric stuff but electric inconsistency. When he is good he should be the closer, but when he is not good, he walks way too many guys. All but lead the team in WHIP last year. Confidence: 6.

Brad Hennessey - Very consistant pitcher. Good work as an average starting pitcher who can battle and get you "Quality Starts". Will fill the long role where he doesn't get the important innings. Confidence: 6

Steve Kline - 3rd left hander who is in charge of getting lefties out. Did a great job last year of putting on weight, growing his beard and getting a dirty cap. Does have a nice slider. Confidence: 7

Armando Benitez - Aging stuff but by far the best pitcher on this staff. Had a 1.57 WHIP last year with very few strikeouts for a closer. He and Kline are the two legitimate major league pitchers. Confidence: 7

Things can only get better...

Today was the opening day for the Giants and I don't think it could have gone any worse for the Giants. San Diego shut them out and they gave up 7 runs. Their new bullpen got exposed and they spread 7 singles across the game with little power. Not all of the games can go this way, but its a bad sign for things to come.