Year: 2007

Brett Myers

In what in my opinion is one of the stupidest roster moves in recent memory, Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie Manuel moved starter Brett Myers to the bullpen after two bad starts this year.

If there’s a picture-perfect example of “overreacting”, this seems to be it. Maybe Manuel can see something in Myers that the rest of us can’t, but that’s one of only two defenses I think he could make here.

Baseball Prospectus author Joe Sheehan argues (in a subscriber-only article) that it’s the right move:

Manuel is trying to make lemons from lemonade. He has a roster with six starting pitchers—not swingmen, not prospects, not marginal guys, but six major league-caliber starting pitchers. He has a bullpen with one reliable strikeout guy in Tom Gordon.

[…]

Manuel tried, briefly, to use Jon Lieber out of the bullpen. Lieber hasn’t pitched in relief since 1997, and as a flyball/command guy, is ill-suited for pitching late in close games.

[…]

Going through the other choices leads to similar conclusions [that the other starters are as poorly-suited for the bullpen].

Sheehan also points out that Manuel’s problem isn’t of his own making, but rather is due to General Manager Pat Gillick collecting six quality starters while letting some quality hitters (e.g., Bobby Abreu) go. While I agree with this point, I don’t think that Manuel not having created the problem has any bearing on his choosing a poor way to solve the problem.

What this move basically boils down to (for 2007, anyway) is replacing Myers’ 200-odd starting innings with (maybe) 200 innings from Jon Lieber (and whoever in the bullpen has to make up the innings he doesn’t reach), and replacing 70-odd innings from the back of the bullpen with Myers. This is only a win if you think that Lieber is a significantly better pitcher than whomever is being replaced in the bullpen, and Lieber (who, by the way, is 37 years old) was not very good last year, with a 4.93 ERA. Now it’s certainly possible that the back of the Phillies’ pen is even worse than that, but it would have to be really, really bad to make up those 120 innings of quality starting that the team is losing.

(There’s also Myers’ big contract extension, which is a lot of money to pay a guy who isn’t going to be starting for you.)

As I said, one defense Manuel might be able to employ is that Myers won’t provide quality innings from the rotation. But so far I haven’t heard of any reasons why that’s so; two bad games is such a small sample size that it’s basically worth disregarding in isolation – and there’s no additional evidence that there’s something fundamentally wrong with Myers as a starter (and two years of evidence that there isn’t).

The other defense Manuel could employ is that Myers has some correctable problem (for which there is some evidence – Myers said as much, shortly before the demotion) which he should work out in the bullpen in lower-pressure situations so he can return to the rotation. And, since baseball teams are getting cagier about what they say, that’s entirely possible, and perfectly reasonable.

Right now, though, it just looks like Charlie Manuel is making a boneheaded move which is going to hurt his struggling team (they have a 4-10 record so far, worst in the NL).

And, of course, that’s a perfectly normal thing for baseball teams to experience, too.

Vacation Time!

It seems like it’s taken forever to get here, but I’m finally on vacation today. Nope, I’m not going anywhere, instead, my Mom’s flyng out to visit me!

I decided recently that I’d had enough of the goatee I’ve sported for the last year or so, so I shaved it off this morning. Debbi was sad, since she likes the goatee. I was getting tired of maintaining it, and it’s getting a little too gray for my preference. On the other hand, it does slim my face a little, since I am gradually starting to show my age. (I joke a lot about how “I’m getting old”. I’m not really getting that old, but late-30s is an age where one does start showing those telltale signs, and I do have a few.) On the other hand, shaving off the goatee felt at the time like the return of an old friend.

This is Mom’s second visit, and we’re going to go see a few things a second time (like the coast), and go see some new things. Maybe the M.C. Escher exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art. It should be fun. And after last week’s rain, everything is still green and blooming, which will make for a different look to the area from her last visit, which was in the fall, when everything is tan and brown.

Anyway. Mom’s flight took off right on time, it looks like, and it may arrive anywhere from 30 to 60 (!) minutes early (!!), which will be nice for the both of us, but it does mean that I have less time than I’d expected to get things done before she arrives. So I’d better get cracking!

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 11 April 2007.

  • All-Star Superman #7, by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely (DC)
  • Fables #60, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham & Steve Leialoha (DC/Vertigo)
  • 52 #49 of 52 (DC)
  • Sandman Mystery Theatre: Dr. Death and The Night of the Butcher vol 5, by Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle, Guy Davis & Vince Locke (DC/Vertigo)
  • Sandman Mystery Theatre: Sleep of Reason #5 of 5, by John Ney Rieber & Eric Nguyen (DC/Vertigo)
  • Wonder Woman #7, by Jodi Picoult, Drew Johnson & Ray Snyder (DC)
  • Marvel Masterworks: Iron Man vol 77 HC, collecting Tales of Suspense #84-99 and Iron Man #1, by Stan Lee & Gene Colan (Marvel)
  • newuniversal #5, by Warren Ellis & Salvador Larroca (Marvel)
  • Nova #1, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Sean Chen & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
  • B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls #2 of 5, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis (Dark Horse)
  • The Complete Peanuts 1963-1964 HC, by Charles M. Schultz (Fantagraphics)

When the original Sandman Mystery Theatre came out, in the early 90s, I as intrigued, but had a very hard time getting into it. A lot of it was the artwork: Guy Davis is a decent artist, but he had a penchant (at that time) for drawing all his characters with huge noses, which was very distracting. (I understand that some people have larger noses. But not everyone does.) The occasional guest artist tended to be even worse. And, as it turns out, the series just didn’t lend itself well to serialization; each 4-issue story had awkward breaks between issues, which made it difficult to follow the series from a narrative standpoint.

All of which means that I’ve been buying the trade paperbacks and enjoying them a lot more than I did the original series. It’s the story of Wesley Dodds, the original Sandman, a late-1930s adventurer who is driven by intense dreams to seek out and capture the most twisted of villains. Each story features a different psychopath as its heavy, and it also chronicles the ongoing romance between Dodds and Dian Belmont, a young socialite whose father is the chief of police. The story is a little bit Peter Wimsey, a little bit Nexus, and a little bit Batman. Wes is a very fallable – but driven – hero, and Dian is smart and independent. The Sandman operates outside the law and sometimes runs afoul of the police. And, fortunately, Davis’ artwork has gotten much better by this latest volume. I’m enjoying it more than I’d ever thought I would. The series is long since defunct, but I still hope that it comes to a satisfying conclusion.

Which is more than I can say for Sleep of Reason, which updates the Sandman to 21st century Afghanistan. I’ve already commented about this series before, but I don’t like the art, the characters are flimsy, and the story seems kind of pointless. It’s a poor successor to the original.

I wasn’t going to pick up Nova until I realized it was being drawn by Sean Chen, whose work on Kurt Busiek’s Iron Man 8 or so years ago I’d enjoyed tremendously. Authors Abnett and Lanning have an uneven track record, but it might be more charitable to call it “eccentric”, and I’m usually willing to give their books a glance. Here, Nova is still an Earthman who’s inherited the mantle of the protector of an alien world, but now he’s the last such protector left, and he’s driving himself to fill the void left in the wake of the others’ deaths (which occurred in one of Marvel’s myriad crossover series – Annihilation, I think). Like Ms. Marvel, there’s potential here, but no sign at all where things are going to go. Hopefully the writers can figure it all out (and editorial won’t quash their best ideas).

Another month, another Marvel Masterworks. I’m not buying very many of them anymore, and yet I’m still behind. On the bright side, a new Peanuts volume is always cause for celebration, and I’m looking forward to devouring this one.

By the way, it looks like I’ve now been writing this weekly comics roundup for 6 months now. How time flies!

Still Quite Busy

April has been a little less busy then March, but the difference is that it hasn’t been due to a bunch of things all scheduled well ahead of time; instead I’ve been keeping busy with more spur-of-the-moment (or at least spur-of-the-week) activities.

Last weekend Debbi invited some people over to dye eggs for Easter. She likes to do this every year. Josh and his girlfriend Lisa came by first, and then Susan and Subrata came by around the time they were leaving. I’d already dyed all the eggs I’d wanted to, so Subrata and I ended up playing some Magic instead.

Before dying eggs, I went out to the nursery and picked up some plants and flowers. (While I was out I got a snootfull of the fire at the scrap yard in Redwood City which stunk up peninsula and valley air for part of the day. Eew.) Then on Sunday I turned over the dirt in my planter and put them all in. This year we have three tomato plants, a cucumber plant, marigolds and snapdragons. I was happy to get the snapdragons; it seems like I can rarely find them this early in the year, I don’t know why. I love snapdragons. We also have space for one more vegetable plant, but we’re not sure what to plant yet, if anything.

We’ve gotten some rain this week (it’s raining right now, actually) which is helping kick-start the plants. The tomatoes are taking off right away, which they always do, and the snapdragons are starting to bloom. Hopefully the looming drought won’t deep-six my growing plans this year.

Wednesday evening we had our annual homeowners association meeting, which was quite routine this year. We’ve got a few projects in the planning stages, so we were basically just talking about how they’re going, and that was it.

Debbi came home early Thursday afternoon since we had cleaners coming in. Neither Debbi nor I are very diligent about cleaning the house, especially deep-cleaning it: We keep things reasonably neat and it’s not like the place is a sty, but we do accumulate more dust and cat hair then we’d wish, and we do hate cleaning (say) around the stove. So Debbi finally convinced me to get some cleaners in, and they really did a great job! The kitchen is cleaner than it’s been in years, the bathrooms look great, and all the bookshelves are dusted. So the place is virtually gleaming for my Mom when she arrives next week. And we’re considering having them come in monthly to keep the place clean.

Thursday night we played Magic. There were six of us who gathered at Lee’s for another Time Spiral/Planar Chaos draft. At the end of the draft portion of the evening, I felt like I had a very strong green base, but mostly a big pile of cow flop as far as an actual deck was concerned. After starng at my cards for a while I realized I needed to give up on my first overall pick, The Rack and any hope of building a discard deck, and instead create a green/white/blue deck with my three Search for Tomorrows to make the extra colors work.

And boy, did it ever work.

The backbone of my deck was Verdant Embrace combined with Gaia’s Anthem, which resulted in an incredibly fast 2/2 creature generator (these are, in my opinion, two of the very best cards in the Time Spiral block so far). I had another creature generator in the Benalish Commander (the creature generators combine well with Essence Warden, too), a card drawer in Aeon Chronicler, a wacky all-purpose creature in Stuffy Doll (combining it with Ophidian Eye is just ridiculous), and a variety of good supporting creatures. I ended up winning all three matches I played, despite not drafting a single flying creature, or any creature removal. I basically just beat my opponents to death.

I got incredibly lucky to assemble this combo, really, although I do take credit for figuring out how to assemble them into a decent deck. But whether it ws luck or skill, it did result in a very fun evening of gaming for me.

That catches us up to today, where Debbi is busy at a scrapbooking event with her friends, and Subrata is hosting another Magic day. Which is not a bad thing to spend a rainy Saturday doing.

Larry Niven: Ringworld

Review of the novel Ringworld by Larry Niven.

  • Ringworld

    • by Larry Niven
    • PB, © 1970, 342 pp, Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-33392-6
Ringworld.jpg
Ringworld

When I started reading science fiction “seriously” in the mid-1980s, Ringworld had the reputation as being the most important hard SF novel before William Gibson’s Neuromancer. But as with most of Niven’s oeuvre, I’ve never read it. I tried a couple of times, back in the day, but was never able to get through it – was never able to even get as far as the characters getting to the Ringworld. But now, I have.

Given what I know about science fiction now, I think Ringworld can make a case for being the most significant SF novel between Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Neuromancer (1986). The reason for this is that I think Niven’s classic work fits perfectly between two generations of hard SF: He has a no-nonsense writing style and a logical approach to working through the implications of his ideas as part of the plot (which is very Asimovian, and to a lesser degree very Heinleinian), but he also anticipates the high-tech cutting-edge social implications of technology a la John Varley and Vernor Vinge and, well, William Gibson. And Ringworld shows this latter characteristic – and Niven’s high concept ideas content – quite strongly.

The whole premise of the novel is the Ringworld itself, a strip of habitable land which entirely rings its primary star. I’ve read a lot of “big dumb object” stories, and they all suffer to a large extent from having an ending which is a letdown: Trying to understand why an alien species would build such a large thing, and crafting a whole novel around it, it’s extremely difficult to have an explanation which is rewarding. Ringworld sidesteps this issue by presenting the Ringworld’s existence and reason for being from the outset: Why would someone build such a thing? For the living space, obviously!

The plot features four extraordinary individuals: Louis Wu, a 200-year-old man who is a little bored with life; Nessus, a Pierson’s Puppeteer, a highly advanced alien species whose culture is based on cowardice; Speaker-to-Animals, a Kzinti warrior; and Teela Brown, whom Nessus thinks might have been bred to be lucky. The Puppeteers discovered the Ringworld and want to know who built it, and whether they might be a threat, so Nessus – considered mad by his people – rounds up his team and they head to the Ringworld to explore it. Landing there, they are awed by the sheer scope of the project, and encounter many wondrous and dangerous things and creatures in their adventures.

What I like about this novel which I don’t like in, say, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, is that Niven doesn’t go for the cheap thrill of Things We Don’t Understand: Everything on the Ringworld makes sense, even if it takes a little while to figure out, and it never feels forced or contrived: It all follows from the basic sense of wonder of a giant engineering feat which has somehow been left alone for millennia, and whose builders are absent.

The really unusual thing about the book is that the outcome of the story ultimately isn’t about the Ringworld: It’s about the evolution of humanity and the role these individuals and their species have played in it. The Ringworld is just a backdrop against which this drama plays out. It’s all a little improbable (which is sort of the point), and I don’t entirely buy the “perpetual deus ex machina” approach that underlies the direction Niven sends his universe, but it does make for a thought-provoking read.

Ringworld does fall prey to the “lots of walking around” pitfall of such stories: The characters spend a lot of time just flying about and seeing things and having brief, fairly disconnected encounters with people and things on the world. Consequently, the story bogs down from time to time. On the bright side, it’s not one of the extra-long novels which pepper bookshelves today, so it’s not hard to power through the tedious stuff and get back to the good stuff.

Although in some ways the book feels a little musty today – in that it doesn’t anticipate modern hard SF staples such as cyberspace or nanotechnology – so much of what it popularized is still with us and still influencing SF: Ramjets and slower-than-light travel, the varied races of Known Space, the evolution of humanity and the consequent singularity (even if Niven’s singularity is very different from Vinge’s). Niven’s narrative strength in delivering a sense of wonder still holds up more often than not, and really, in a world where Star Trek is among the best-known forms of science fiction, Known Space still feels cutting-edge.

For those reasons, it’s still a little amazing to me that I never read the book cover-to-cover until today. It’s must reading for any fan or student of science fiction.

More:

Lineup Protection

Interesting article arguing that lineup protection in baseball exists. This runs counter to the sabermetric wisdom that lineup protection is a myth: Past research (if I recall correctly) has determined that having a better hitter on deck does not, over a significant number of plate appearances, result in a better hitting experience (more hits, walks and bases per plate appearance) than having a worse hitter on deck.

The author sums up this theory and suggests his criticism of it:

[J.C.] Bradbury’s regression analysis [in his book The Baseball Economist] attempts to measure the effect of the on-deck hitter’s quality on the current batter’s outcome (his regression model has the on-deck hitter’s OPS on the right-hand side and the current batter’s outcome on the left-hand side). This approach is intuitive; in fact, my initial instinct might be to perform similar research. However, at bat outcomes involve many moving parts (where the ball lands, reaction of the defense, and luck, to name a few), and Bradbury is trying to measure the effect of an outcome-based rate (OPS) on another outcome. Thus, if there is some noise or randomness within the data, the problem would be compounded in the findings.

Certainly this is true. But this is why a sufficiently large sample size is needed for the study. The question is: Is the set of data used to analyze lineup protection inadequate? The author seems to assume that it is, although that’s never been my impression.

He suggests examining pitch-by-pitch data to see whether batters see more “good” pitches (pitches in the strike zone, and fastballs rather than breaking pitches) with a better hitter on deck rather than a worse hitter. His analysis says yes:

The protection production function seems to tell us conflicting stories. The “input” findings show that protection exists, but the “output” evidence suggests that protection does not exist. So, which answer is correct? In addition to the potential randomness issue discussed earlier, outputs suffer from one other relative disadvantage – the mere volume of data being studied is different. Analysis at the per-pitch level (inputs) employs about four times the number of instances as per-at bat level analysis (outputs). Thus, while prior research may (or may not) point us in the right direction, I would argue that the production function’s inputs push us much closer to the truth.

I don’t buy this argument. The question at hand, as I see it, is not “Does having a better hitter on deck cause the pitcher to throw pitches to the batter that are easier to hit (i.e., more advantageous to the batter)?”, but rather, “Does having a better hitter on deck cause the batter to produce more runs?”

If we grant the result of his analysis (if not the conclusion he draws from it), though, then it does raise an interesting question: If a better hitter on deck causes the pitcher to change his approach, then why don’t batters in such situations experience better outcomes than in other situations? Are pitchers changing their approaches in a manner which is not actually useful? Is there something here that players and teams don’t yet understand and which might be exploitable?

He wraps up with a broader point:

I want to be clear about my broader argument. The sabermetric community will benefit as it moves away from its relatively strict reliance on outcomes and outputs. Events on the field of any sport involve a great deal of processes. While outcome data (e.g., much of what you find online at great sites such as retrosheet and baseball-reference) have generally been more widely available, a full picture of economic analysis in the future will rely much more heavily on whole processes and their inputs.

While both inputs and outputs can be interesting, neither is inherently more or less interesting than the other. It depends on what you’re trying to study. This fellow has failed to persuade me that the input side is as important as the output side in the case of lineup protection.

(I learned about this post through the Red Sox Mailing List. And boy does the list’s page need updating!)

One Week of Baseball

One should always be wary of drawing any conclusions based on a single week of the baseball season. However, I do often find it instructive to see which teams are struggling mightily in the first week, only because it’s a lot easier to squander a 4-game lead than it is to overcome a 4-game deficit.

Three teams are currently occupying the cellar in Major League Baseball:

  • The Washington Nationals are 1-6, 4.5 games behind the lead. The Nationals are widely expected to be the worst team in baseball in 2007, so this isn’t a surprise: There just isn’t much talent there.
  • The Philadelphia Phillies are 1-5, in the same division. The Phillies were expected to contend in their division, but instead they’ve lost 4 close games (3 runs or less), 2 blowouts, and won one blowout. They’re 4th in runs scored, but next-to-last in runs allowed, with plenty of blame to go around on the latter score. Their pitching’s going to have to be more consistent if they’re really going to contend.
  • The San Francisco Giants are 1-5, 3.5 games back. They’re last in runs scored and third-from-last in runs allowed, which is just all-around awful. They’re also the oldest team in baseball. While there’s some reason to hope their pitching will come around (Barry Zito always seems to be awful in April), their hitting is just not that good: Beyond Barry Bonds and Ray Durham, there isn’t a real good reason to think they’ll be above average at any other position. I picked them to finish behind even the Rockies this year, and they’re off to a correspondingly poor start.

The Phillies might just be having a run of bad luck to start the year, but being 4.5 games out with 25 weeks to play isn’t exactly a way to put yourself into contention. Meanwhile, the Nats and Giants have put themselves in position to be the worst teams in baseball.

Over in the American League, the Indians and Mariners have each only played 3 games, thanks to a goodly dose of snow in Cleveland over the weekend.

No one in the AL is looking really awful so far: Even the teams with the worst offenses have shown good pitching so far, and vice-versa. But that just means that no one’s separated themselves from the pack. I figure Baltimore, Kansas City and maybe Seattle will start declining before too long. The difference between these three teams being that KC is arguably on the way up, while the other two seem stuck in neutral (and I think the Orioles removed their clutch sometime around the year 2000).

Me, I’m still hoping this is the year that the wheels come off of the Yankees’ pitching train.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 4 April 2007.

This week’s 52 may be the most muddled issue of the series. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, or why I should care. Didn’t they finish up the Intergang stuff months ago? Bleah.

My Dad I think summed up my feelings about Jack of Fables best in an e-mail: “When it was dealing with the group that captured him, it was pretty good, but when it’s just about his jerky self, not too hot.” Jack really is a jerk, and actually no one in the series is really someone you can root for. And the art is pretty so-so. I don’t think I’ll be buying it much longer.

“Planet Hulk” ends this month, and it’s just interesting enough that maybe I will pick up World War Hulk this summer.

I’ve been curious about Invincible for a long time now. The premise is that the hero is the son of a Superman-type figure who got married and had a kid, and Invincible inherits Omni-Man’s powers. (I’ve been spoiled and know that there’s more to it than that, but that’s the crux of the premise.) I did the math and it turns out that buying the Ultimate Collection hardcovers is about the same price as buying the trade paperbacks, and the hardcovers are, well, hardcover, not to mention using larger pages. Hence I went for the hardcover.

I’m about 4 issues into the volume so far, and it’s quite good. Robert Kirkman’s wry sense of humor brings a welcome levity (and reality) to what in many ways is a silver age comic series updated for the modern day. On the downside, the characters are pretty thin: The heroes are defined almost entirely by their powers, and the supporting cast have basically no personality. There’s no depth. Maybe that will change over time (I think the series has run more than 30 issues so far). Considering the series so far feels like a father/son series mixed with a coming-of-age story (and fortunately without the wacky hijinks that often accompany the “teenager discovers he has super powers” yarns these days, such as those which plagued Spyboy), it could benefit greatly from deeper characterization (but then, what story couldn’t?). Artist Cory Walker has a great sense of form and dynamism, but he could use an inker who could lend some complexity and (there’s that word again) depth to his layouts, as the art is often too spare for my tastes.

But overall, this one looks like a winner. The second collection is already out, and the third is due out this summer, so they ought to keep me busy for a while. Hopefully it gets better as it goes along.

A Little Light Poker

Thursday night Lee hosted a small-stakes poker game at his house. (Lee is one of my new friends whom I’ve mainly gotten to know through playing Magic.) There were 7 of us all together, and we started off with a little tournament: $10 per person in the kitty, top three spots paid. We started with $6000 in chips.

I had a pretty good session. My most memorable hand was one where three people called my $100 big blind, and I checked with 6-5o.

And the flop was 2-3-4. I’d flopped the nut straight.

Action was checked around to me, and I made a bet of around $200. Jamie (a new player I hadn’t met before) folded, and Daniel raised to $1000. Lee folded. It was a social game so there was a lot of chatting going on, but I thought for a bit and finally went all-in. Jamie folded, and Daniel thought for a lo-o-ong time. Finally he called.

And he winced when he saw my straight. Then I winced when I saw he had two pair – he had 2-3 – so he had 4 outs against me. But the turn and river didn’t help and I crippled his stack.

That as pretty nifty, though Daniel didn’t think so. He thought I had either top pair, or an overpair. I wouldn’t have gone in with top pair, and I would have been reluctant with any overpair less than 10s. But obviously he didn’t expect me to have a straight, he just ran into my moment of supreme luck. So I guess it was not a bad call on his part. I arguably could have just reraised rather than gone all-in since he probably would have folded anything less than two pair, but I felt the pot was already valuable enough that I wanted to take it down then.

I ended up getting knocked out in fourth place when I went all-in with Jacks, and Adam made the runner-runner wheel straight to beat me with his A-5. Gah.

We played a cash game after the tournament was over: $10 buy-ins, and nickel-dime blinds. So it was small stakes, but it was a good learning session. The cash game was basically Lee’s game as he won a couple of huge pots. I was pleased (on one hand I wasn’t in) that I correctly guessed that he had a set when he went all-in. I think he was surprised I had figured it out from his betting, alhough he may have figured I was just BSing him. I do make correct assessments like that from time to time, but it’s far from a consistent skill, unfortunately.

I checked out around 11:30 pm, but I had a great time. I’ve been enjoying getting to know these new friends of mine!

Ten Pounds!

The scale made it official this morning: I’ve lost ten pounds since the beginning of the year! That’s three pounds since my last update, and this despite basically pigging out for a weekend when Karen visited a few weeks ago.

I know weight fluctuates from day to day (today’s reading was 5 pounds lighter than it was on Monday, which was a local maximum), but it’s still cool to see numbers on the scale that I haven’t seen in several years.