Midseason Baseball Update

I hope that you will excuse that these are a couple days late (something about priorities), but I've completed my All-Star Break ratings update, this time with a full end-of-season projection. A couple weeks ago, I added a section to my spreadsheet so that it automatically spits out rest-of-season wins for each team. All I do is add those to the actual standings and I've got easy projections.
Anyway, here first is the American League. First column is the full season rating, second column is the rating weighted for recent performance (I've found this to be more accurate for future projection and so it's bolded), and the third column is the projected full season win total.

	Rating	Weighted	Season Wins
Yankees	.618	.617	101.4
Rays	.577	.580	95.7
Red Sox	.570	.566	91.9
Rangers	.539	.558	89.9
Twins	.538	.537	86.6
Angels	.523	.527	84.1
Tigers	.512	.523	87.5
White Sox	.513	.514	87.4
Athletics	.494	.505	78.3
Blue Jays	.486	.491	88.5
Mariners	.495	.484	69.7
Royals	.459	.461	72.8
Indians	.451	.441	66.4
Orioles	.429	.418	58.5

Next are the projected final standings with only the "games back" listing. Rounded to the nearest full game, of course.

AL EAST		AL CENTRAL		AL WEST
Yankees	--	Tigers	--	Rangers	--
Rays	-5	White Sox	--	Angels	-6
Red Sox	-9	Twins	--	Athletics	-12
Blue Jays	-13	Royals	-14	Mariners	-20
Orioles	-43	Indians	-21
WILD CARD
Rays	--
Red Sox	-4
Blue Jays	-8
AL Central	-9

Mostly straightforward here. You might notice how much Texas benefits from the weighting. Their schedule has been pretty weak lately but they have taken full advantage and Vegas has been happy to give them their due. If anything, the six-game cushion I'm predicting is too low since it doesn't know they added Cliff Lee.
The other interesting thing is the predicted three-way tie in the Central. Vegas still likes Minnesota, even though they are the laggards in the real standings. For what it's worth, I think I agree with them, as their rotation is fairly solid top-to-bottom, though Morneau being out for a long stretch might be enough to kill them in a tight race. Chicago has been one team that's mystified me all year. They look mediocre at best and yet Vegas has held out hope all year until finally the last few weeks they caught fire to validate the respect (that's why you trust the numbers over your own instincts every day of the week). None of the three teams is all that good, evidenced by the fact that any of them would be fifth in the East.

National League

	Rating	Weighted	Season Wins
Cardinals	.575	.563	89.3
Phillies	.566	.552	88.3
Dodgers	.543	.542	88.0
Braves	.546	.538	92.0
Rockies	.536	.527	87.0
Giants	.524	.522	84.8
Reds	.498	.512	86.1
Mets	.497	.509	85.2
Cubs	.522	.506	75.6
Padres	.491	.502	87.2
Marlins	.509	.499	78.8
Brewers	.505	.499	76.6
Nationals	.455	.477	72.7
Dbacks	.482	.466	67.6
Astros	.444	.446	68.2
Pirates	.419	.429	61.8

Projected Standings

NL EAST		NL CENTRAL		NL WEST
Braves	--	Cardinals	--	Dodgers	--
Phillies	-4	Reds	-3	Padres	-1
Mets	-7	Brewers	-12	Rockies	-1
Marlins	-13	Cubs	-13	Giants	-3
Nationals	-19	Astros	-21	Dbacks	-20
		Pirates	-27
WILD CARD
Phillies	--
Padres	-1
Rockies	-1
Reds	-2
Mets	-3
Giants	-3

From my perspective, much more interesting here. If you'll allow me, I have to say that these ratings have been extremely prophetic so far this season. They correctly predicted the rise of Atlanta, Texas, and the White Sox. If someone had been selling shares of those teams, I could have bought them at low prices in the past couple months and them sold them right now at huge profits. Alas.
I mention this because if my numbers are to be trusted there are some changes coming in the NL standings. Cincinnati, holding a small lead, is expected to finish three game up (though with the big caveat that the Cardinals have had some curiously weak lines lately, meaning that Vegas may be about to abandon ship on their league favorite). Similarly, it took a very long time, but it looks like Vegas finally believes in the Reds as at least a worthy pennant race participant. That's nothing compared to the tightest division in baseball, the NL West. All season, San Diego has been leading the pack. All season, Vegas has considered them pretenders. Finally, enough of the season has been completed so that the difference between results and expectations is close enough to expect the Padres to stay in the race right until the end. They have the misfortune of competing against two teams Vegas likes to make a second-half run, though, in LA and Colorado. The Dodgers especially should be a feared team, coming in with a weighted rating a full 40 points higher than San Diego.
Finally, Philadelphia is currently two back in the Wild Card standings, but are favored to win it. Adding in the Mets and Giants, and more than half the NL projects within three games of the playoffs.

All Filled Up

A lot of people at work have very reasonably been asking me if I'm tired. I am a little, of course, but not exceptionally so. Our baby is really very well behaved so far in life.
It got me to thinking about being tired, though. Physically, it has been quite manageable. It's not really the lack of sleep that is the problem but the inconsistency. I think I'm still getting more than six hours per night, but it's broken up into pieces. Nothing I won't become used to in a little more time.
It is the emotional side of exhaustion and its effect on my metaphysical self that is more apparent to me. It is extremely tiring to be constantly looking out for someone else, to be constantly thinking of and caring for another's needs before your own. It is very tiring to always feel the relentless weight of responsibility.
This is something that human beings must mature into. A couple years ago, I didn't have it. Our instincts are to look out for ourselves, so that it's mostly effortless to live a life. It takes practice and an infinite level of devotion and commitment to another person to get used to behaving differently. I'm happy to be on that path, happy and proud to think about it becoming routine.
Some people live exhausting lives. They work hard, they don't sleep much, they go out and party a little too much. Burning the candle at both ends. The toll from this kind of (some might say reckless) behavior is almost wholly physical, though. You destroy your body, which is of course exhausting. But it is also fairly easy to do. You make the decisions for yourself, you live with the consequences, everything has its balance. It is your life and your life only.
Naturally, I had never known this before, but having a family brings out a unique kind of exhaustion that would better be called a comprehensive state of being, the kind that keeps your body and spirit sound. I think it is the true fullness of the human experience.

A Magnificent Forest

Let's see, what to talk about today?
The World Cup ended sorta quietly, though Spain did win me about $70 with the win, so thanks. I haven't run for a while because I'm being cautious with a chronically tight hamstring. I got some good use out of the grill yesterday and was reminded again how delicious chicken thighs are and how foolishly infrequently I buy them compared to breasts. Oh, and last Friday I became a father.
Actually, here is little Lula on her birthday:

Just spectacular, isn't it? I can hardly believe that I get to go home every day and that little beauty will be there waiting for me.
It's weird, throughout the whole birth process, being at the hospital, then bringing her home and spending a couple of nights and days just watching her get used to things, there have been a seemingly infinite number of things that would normally cause me to think: that would make something interesting to write about. I suppose that if I had let myself slip out of the moment these last few days, I would have been overwhelmed with the desire to write some of this stuff down, or at least to make a mental note to do it later.
Here I am now finally taking a couple minutes to document the occasion and I can't see how much any of it really matters. Just details, like a stock ticker constantly running and spitting out numbers which are meaningless without the context. The context is everything. The wholeness of the experience is so vast and obviously significant that all else washes away. It's the opposite of the saying, "you can't see the forest for the trees."
Probably as the days pass things will be different, but right now I can't see the trees. Quite frankly, I don't really need to.

Maybe I'm Falling Out of Love with You, NY

I've finally started to feel a little of the lame-duck effect as I walk around this city. Last night I think I committed to picking a firm moving-out date (whereas previously I had argued that we should wait to move until I have a job offer(1)). This afternoon I contacted a moving company to discuss logistics.(2) It's happening.
I've done a good job of focusing on the present with both my life and my job these last several months, so that I think not too much has suffered from the fuck-it-I'll-be-gone-in-a-few-months-anyway laziness. But now we are getting close enough so that lots of things I'm doing now I am doing for the last time. A couple weeks ago I was at Blue & Gold, our old regular spot (not to mention the "basement" of my apartment for over a year), and it occurred to me while there that since my friends don't hang out there as often that it would probably be the last time I'm there. Sara hates Williamsburg (can't say I totally disagree), and so when we got on the G train to head home from there last weekend, I felt like there was a decent chance I'd never be back. A few weeks ago at the office I had to work on rearranging the seating assignments in order to accommodate interns and the new class of employees (a rite of summer here), and of course I understood while doing it that it would be for the last time.
I hope this doesn't sound sentimental, because I surely haven't been getting misty during any of this. The point is that instead of just going about my business like always, the reality of the end has seeped into my consciousness, which thankfully feels at least as exciting for me as it does sad.
One thing that is negative about this is I have sorta stopped being excited by things happening around me in this city. There has been an empty storefront on a corner close to my apartment for a few months now. Lately it has started to seem apparent that this will open soon as a kind of diner. Normally this would make me happy on a very simple level, but when thinking about it I found myself unmoved because I wouldn't be around to enjoy it much anyway. They're expanding the waterfront park near me at the end of Atlantic, but what do I care? Apparently there is no longer a V train and the M is running differently, or some other nonsense. Usually I would be all over this news and have the new routes memorized in case of late-night re-routing necessities, but since those aren't daily trains for me, I'm not bothering to learn them.
It's not any one of the little facts, it's the accumulation of them that amounts to something, and that something is a curious but growing sense of apathy (for today), excitement (for tomorrow), and almost boredom (for my surroundings). Anymore, I'm just unimpressed, I suppose.

Guilty.


1. My prior argument being that I already have a steady income here, so why move to Chicago until I know I'll have a steady income there? On a philosophical level, it's obvious, but of course we don't live in that realm. There is real value to not living in limbo indefinitely, and as the months or even just weeks pass our future baby will be growing out of our apartment space. The last straw was when I decided that, in the event that I haven't acquired a job by our desired moving date, it would be much easier to keep looking if I'm already living in the correct city, and not forced to fly for interviews (also costly). And my lovely wife really doesn't like the idea of not knowing when we're leaving, which is important to me.
2. Almost exactly $1000 for someone else to move my stuff a thousand miles. Not terrible. Having an infant when planning a long-distance move complicates things immensely. Not to mention that it finally dawned on me the other day that when we actually drive ourselves there, we'll have to stop at least every 3 hours so Sara can feed the baby. I am the kind of person who will try to hold in a piss for hours so as to make the best time possible. Patience will be required.

Name Race

Things I learned at the doctor's office yesterday:
1. There are no physical signs that point to labor being anything close to imminent.
2. If this baby proves especially stubborn, then Sara will be induced Monday evening, July 12, so that she will be born on July 13. So at least we finally have a strict latest-possible date.
3. Through billions and trillions of babies being born, and unfathomable medical advances, and totally comprehensive amounts of information available to everyone involved, doctors still don't know exactly when a child will be born. Depending on how precise you define "roughly," doctors still don't even know roughly when a child will be born. After her examination yesterday, the doctor admitted to us that Sara could go into labor today or she could fail to as late as 19 days from now. That's almost a three-week window.
Given this knowledge, I'm not going to think about the imminent possibility of it happening for a while longer, until next weekend if possible. I'll keep myself up on the signs and keep thinking about what I need to do when the time comes, but the waiting part I'm stepping away from. In fact, mentally I'm preparing for the arrival to be about two weeks from now.

The naming process is very nearly finished, more or less on schedule, I guess. It's weird, but thinking about this process reminds of a horse race or something similar. At first we had all these potential names and then slowly some faded from the pace. Early on, we had a front-runner emerge, and in fact lead the pack almost the whole way around the track. As the field winnowed, a pack emerge behind the leader From time to time a candidate would depart or appear in this pack, but for the most part this was the group from which our name would come. (We're not saying what our choice is, but I feel like I can say without checking with my wife what some of the rejected choices were. I won't give up the last few still on the table, though). Stella joined the pack relatively late but her run with the leaders proved short-lived. Veda snuck in for a time but never really had enough momentum. Ophelia was one of the first to loose the leading pace, and her etymological cousin, Cordelia, would later suffer the same fate. Viola and Ruby made such brief appearances that I'm not even sure if it happened or if I'm making it up. Uliana, a decided underdog, hung in long enough to get a pat on the back for a good effort. Penelope was running very strong initially, and had a fair amount of staying power, but then faded fast. Vienna came out of nowhere midway through the race, shot right up near the front, and then just as suddenly disappeared from the field. Finally, Josephine, a forgotten participant at the start, picked up steam all along the way, climbing into the top four or five and holding steady, was just never able to fully bridge the gap as two contenders broke away from the field.
While all of this was happening, our lone leader was strolling along, challenged but comfortable in the front. A couple of late arrivals materializing in the trailing pack, initially not distinguishing themselves much but holding strong. Then as some of the second pack started falling away, it become apparent that the two latecomers were legitimate contenders, biding their time until breaking free together to chase the leader. Maybe it was the tough job of constant pacemaking, but the leader started to tire just enough that the two were able to join her at the front for a pack of three. They stayed level for some time, the initial leader perhaps possessing a slim advantage still, when the crowd started to get wrapped up in the excitement of the two newbies at the front. At some point, almost imperceptibly, the longtime leader broke stride and slowly allowed the other two to make the pass. Getting and nearer and nearer the finish line, these two have been neck and neck, one holding the lead only as long as her stride leads forward, as the longtime frontrunner holds her position a couple lengths back but far ahead of the rest of the field.
Even though I'm really a participant, I don't know which will win, but just like any other observer, I'm extremely excited to find out.

A Shift

According to the questionable accuracy of the due date, we're now just over two weeks from the big day. A week ago, Sara passed the milestone of officially being "full-term," which means that she could deliver the baby and it wouldn't have any premature complications. It's important in that it's the final prenatal hurdle to clear; the only things that could go wrong now are only related to the birth process itself. For someone like me, who tries very hard to keep my focus only on the things happening now that can be controlled, finally getting to a point of simply waiting is nice. For a few months, it was the constant and helpless fear of a miscarriage, along with the need for Sara to be extremely careful with basically everything she did. Then there were doctor visits and the accompanying tests, holding your breath waiting for the results to see if the baby would be born with all manner of diseases, disorders, or syndromes. Finally the much more unlikely prospect that the baby would come premature, with its attendant worries. Those are all passed now. And yet we wait more, now mostly clueless about when it will happen. We rewatched parts of the childbirth class DVD, the parts about going into labor, to refamiliarize ourselves with dropping, passing the mucus plug, effacement, breaking water, weight stabilization or even loss, dilation, and the change from Braxton-Hicks into legitimate contractions. I am confident that we will know when the big show has started in earnest, and when we need to remain patient. For now I try to remain patient.

Yesterday morning before going in to work I accompanied Sara to her weekly doctor appointment, this one with our primary obstetrician. For the first time ever I left with a palpable sense that it was actually going to happen, and soon. Sara had lost two pounds since the previous week, and three pounds in the last three weeks total. The doctor felt around quite a bit and estimated that the fetus was something around 6.5 to 7 pounds, which is almost exactly average as a final birth weight. She also took much more time in explaining to us all of the details of going to the hospital and even the prospect of having to be induced if the fetus proves stubborn. One thing that I can say is that through many of the earlier visits, the doctors will seem to answer questions on auto-pilot, not really investing themselves or sharing in the excitement of the patients, but now that we are so close, our doctor finally met us on totally equal emotional ground. This intensity was a little jarring to me. Now I finally feel the reality of what's going to happen. I understand what it's all about. Unfortunately I can't explain it quite yet, but perhaps afterward.
Going to work after all of this yesterday morning was difficult. I found it basically impossible to insert myself into the happenings of the office or even simply my own personal routines. I couldn't make sense of the business of my job compared to the active time bomb that was sitting inside my wife back at home.
Probably the fact that Monday was Sara's first weekday off for the summer magnified the sensation, but I had an extremely strong urge to be with her, and not actually to be with her to talk or whatever else but simply to be there, like standing guard. That seemed like my real job. I'm sure this will only get much much stronger after we have the baby. Here I have a wife who is more or less just sitting at home the next few weeks (?) waiting for amazing. She is not at all helpless but she is in a reduced state of ability and an increased state of discomfort. Rather like an honestly sick person. If you've ever had a wife or similarly important person to you come down with a sickness that forces her home from work, you might understand the feeling a little. You spend most of the day thinking of the little things you can do when you get home in the evening to make her feel better. It's very distracting, but a sick person is merely sick; what keeps her home is the end. A pregnant person is a prelude to something else. A pregnant person is basically the walking embodiment of empathy and anxiety.

June 15. I think I will try to forget about the possibility of Sara going into labor until at least the next doctor visit, which is June 23. At that point it would be very likely to happen within two weeks, and I can handle two weeks of being on edge. Three-plus weeks is asking a bit much.

The Perfect Bet

What would you do if a fund manager was promising you a one-time 30% annual return? Setting aside a philosophical debate about "promising" a "return," you'd give him just about all of your savings as fast as possible.
I have a tip for you. All you need is the ability to withdraw a chunk of money and be ok with not having access to it for about four months. Actually, that makes this more like a 4-month CD. A CD with a 30% yield.*
Anyway, take as much money as you can temporarily live without and deposit it at sportsbook.com. Then go to the Baseball tab and find the link for "Stephen Strasburg Props." Put a check next to the box that says NO (-1000) under the "Will He Record a No Hitter During the 2010 Regular Reason." Wager all of your deposit on this bet.
Then all you do is wait four months and collect.
-1000 gives a 10% return. Bet 100, win 10. Simple. The perfect bet is real.

But allow me to break it down for you.

The most prolific no-hit pitcher ever, Nolan Ryan, had seven in his career, which spanned 773 starts, for a rate of 0.9% of all starts.
Sandy Koufax is second all-time, with four but in just 314 career starts, so 1.27% of all starts.
That's for a career. Additionally--looking only at the far outliers, and allowing for small-sample wildness--four times a pitcher has thrown two in a single season:
Ryan, 2 in 39 starts, 5.1%
Allie Reynolds, 2 in 26 starts, 7.69%
Virgil Trucks, 2 in 29, 6.9% (amazingly he went only 5-19 that year)
Johnny Vander Meer, 2 in 29, also 6.9%

Next, and very importantly, consider that Strasburg has an innings cap for 2010 of about 160. He's already thrown 62, so he's got less than 100 to go. That equates to maybe 15 more starts. One no hitter in 15 starts is a rate of 6.67%. So they've set his line at about equal to the greatest no-hitter seasons ever. We could have a long discussion about probability if you like, but the bottom line is you can never ever predict something to be the farthest outlier on the line. It's impossible.

That out of the way, there's more. In addition to an innings cap, Mr Strasburg will have a pitch max within each of his starts. This will be slightly more flexible than his year-long innings max but even being liberal you can assume that he wont ever be throwing more than 110 pitches, and the likelihood of him throwing over 100 is low, maybe 3-4 times out of 15. Here is a little secret: to throw a no-hitter you have to complete the game. This week he dominated the AAAA Pirates, but it took him 94 pitches to get through 7 innings. To finish the game at that rate, he'd require over 120. And that is not an uncommon rate of pitches thrown. Covering all of 2009, there were 4,860 starts made by pitchers. 152 times the pitcher threw a complete game. 97% of the time, a starting pitcher failed to complete the game. Even just applying this expected rate of simply completing the game, it takes an average pitcher 32 starts to compile one complete game. Again, Strasburg has only about 15 to work with, and we're only talking about complete games, let alone no hitters. For more perspective there, since the last expansion in 1998, there have been 21 no hitters in over 60,000 starts made. That's 0.035%, one in 2,857. It's ridiculous, utterly ridiculous, to think that one guy could have anything even remotely close to a 9% chance of throwing a no hitter in his next 15 starts. I don't care if that guy is a robot.

Adding these factors together, what is required of Strasburg to cause you to lose your NO no hitters bet is for him to equal the best no hit rates of all time, but to do so with both hands tied behind his back.
Anything is possible, that is a fact. But when gambling you can't consider the fluke possibilities, you have to focus on the most likely scenarios. When the break-even point for a bet is 9.1%, and the actual chance of it happening is easily less than 1%, then you jump all over it. It's the perfect combination really: an incredibly low chance of losing (well less than 1% that he gets a no-no), coupled with a payout that is at least ten or twenty times higher than it should be.


*Via Chase, the shortest CD they offer is for six months. The return yield is 0.50%, a mere 60 times lower than our proposed bet here.

Who are these people that have the capability to be so demonstrative on their cell phones out on the sidewalks before 8:00am? Sure there are some real go-getter morning people in the world, but I'm seeing them in downtown Brooklyn coming out of apartment buildings, not downtown Manhattan outside investment banking houses. I guess some people just need to be seen right from the get-go. There is just no need for that.

I was reading something on a baby site yesterday. A few weeks ago, I moved over fully to reading about post-birth items, and one of them was titled something like this: "Caring for your newborn's umbilical cord stump." Caring for my newborn's umbilical cord stump. Obviously this is something that I'll need to remember to actually remark upon after I've experienced it, but just reading that line makes me feel like a character in David Lynch short film.

Sara asked me last night if we should take an old bedsheet and cover our couch with it, to protect against the baby's vomit. And so it begins.

We met with the fourth of five obstetricians at our doctor's office yesterday, maybe the most senior of the group. We might have been her last appointment of the day, and it's the only time we'll see her unless Sara goes into labor at a weird time and she's covering the shift, but this woman was almost jarringly blase about the whole thing. I think Sara could have told her that the fetus's hands were stabbing out through her stomach and stealing bits of food off her plate and she would have given us a glazed response: "Yeah sure, that's normal."
In a way, I like the idea of a somewhat grizzled doctor running the show, because if some shit hits the fan, then you know this woman will be ready for it, but on the other hand, giving birth is usually a long intimate process, and actually having a personality attached to the doctor is not a totally frivolous preference.

I really blanch at seeming to criticize her for this, because I'm not, and because curiosity and a zest for information are very good right now, but sometimes I wonder if she doesn't take too seriously the myriad pieces of advice or simple experiential stories offered to her by other parents. It's part of Sara's nature to really care what other people have to say, and rather not part of mine. That's ok, that's a simple difference that I hope I'm mature enough to accept (and even to accept that my approach is lesser). I guess it's the other parents that I silently have issue with. Just because you had/have a child, doesn't make you some expert. Your experience, while perhaps sometimes applicable to others, is only your experience and not the universal law. There are so many ins and outs to the whole process of making a baby into a person that I feel it's kinda self-centric to project yourself across wide spectrums of experience. (Heh. The spell-check is flagging that word "spectrums." At first I couldn't imagine why but then it dawned on me: damned Romans. "Spectra?" That, or the spell-checker's got more of a philosophical slant than I would have guessed. Anyway, I'm leaving it.)
I think people are always trying to find places where they can interject themselves and be listened to, or simply to feel like their opinion is needed or valued. It serves to glorify themselves, at least in their own eyes. Parenthood is one of those things that allows a lot of latitude for a person to feel like an expert, because every experience is unique, and because culturally it's hard to really criticize a parent, at least one that isn't leaving his kids locked in a parked car or something. But the thing most of the self-centered masses fail to consider before constantly sharing their expertise is that this extremely broad and universal uniqueness serves to undercut their preciousness. In terms of the rest of the world, there is nothing special about having or raising a child. It happens every day in all corners of the world to all types of people. It's not at all important to everyone else. It's important to you, to you it's a miracle and "the greatest and toughest thing you'll ever do" and all manner of hyperbole. To you. Not to everyone. Too few people understand this. No--too few people behave accordingly.

Simple Truth

I've interacted with a lot of people in the last few months about pregnancy and having children. And since my wife is just about 35 weeks pregnant, I've spent just about that much time thinking about it myself. Just about the most important conclusion that I've come to is a very simple one, but that really should be repeated quite often, as it tends to get lost in the hubbub.
The point of pregnancy is not to be pregnant or to tell people you are pregnant. The point of pregnancy, of having a family, of childbirth, of everything, is to raise a human being and make sure he/she is as healthy and ultimately as prepared for adulthood as possible. That is the task. Every single tiny bit of the years-long process is about the child, not about you.
If you are a parent, or are in a relationship with a pregnant person, or are considering having a kid, and your motivation or desire is remotely divergent from that, then stop. You are not prepared do be the best you can for another person.
I've said it a lot (maybe mostly to myself), but you have to get your own life in order before you can even think about sharing a life with someone else. This is many times more important when talking about a child, something truly helpless and clueless.
Are you disciplined enough to stick to a workout of diet regimen? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you responsible enough to save money, even when it's painful or inconvenient? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you a person who is ok to always let the other person in an argument have the last word? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you mentally strong enough to sit and sweat for hours in a hot room because it's preferable for someone else? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you selfless enough to always choose the more difficult path so that someone else doesn't have to? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you ok never ever being the center of attention?
Can you handle the neverending stress of approaching life like Joe DiMaggio* every moment of your life?
Believe me, it's a little intimidating thinking about all of this, and I'm not so deluded to think that I'm some kind of zen master as it comes to every one of these points. But I am aware of them, and I am fully prepared to meet them.


*Always one of my favorite quotes/stories ever: supposedly some writer asked Joltin Joe why he was so professional, why he tried so hard every day, ran out grounders, always kept his uniform pristine, why he never let himself have an off-day, and his response was: "Because somewhere in the crowd might be a little kid who's never seen me play, and I owe it to that kid to show him how great I am."

Baseball Season Projections

I'm back again with some results from the baseball ratings, and although I'm not sure how shockingly informative they will be, at least this time they're in a more accessible format: projected season win totals for every team.
As usual, these are current through right now.

AL East
Yankees -- 102
Rays -- 97
Red Sox -- 88
Blue Jays -- 77
Orioles -- 64
The Yankees continue to be the best team by a fair amount, so even though they currently trail Tampa in the standings, they should pull away at some point later in the year.
Boston is a very interesting case. They've played poorly and are already 6.5 back of Tampa and 5 back of NY. The system still thinks Boston is at least an equal to Tampa, but their early deficit plus slightly more difficult remaining schedule puts them well back. Even on May 13, their playoff chances can't be much higher than 25-30% at best.

AL Central
Twins -- 90
Tigers -- 81
White Sox -- 79
Indians -- 73
Royals -- 69
Minnesota is the best team and should cruise through the summer, because their only competition at the moment, Detroit, is playing over its head. In fact, the second-best team in this division is Chicago, and not by just a little. This shows you how important falling behind by five games is, even this early. Those games never come back.

AL West
Rangers -- 85
Angels -- 80
Athletics -- 77
Mariners -- 74
These results don't differ much from popular perception. Seattle has played terribly so far. They have one of the worst records in the AL and have played one of the easiest schedules. They are no great team, but they're better than 13-20, and my numbers don't even include much Cliff Lee. If they didn't lay an egg the first six weeks of the season, they'd have been a great darkhorse.

NL East
Phillies -- 91
Braves -- 87
Mets -- 80
Marlins -- 79
Nationals -- 75
My ratings don't like the Phillies, but love the Braves. A sharp observer would note than Philly is currently 4.5 games up on Atlanta, but my projection shows just a 4 game final edge. Yes, the system thinks Atlanta is better going forward. The same thing I just said about Seattle applies tenfold to Atlanta. They have been disappointing so far, but Vegas has not given up on them. Elsewhere, no, I'm sorry, Washington is not for real. If only they had more pitching.......

NL Central
Cardinals -- 96
Cubs -- 81
Reds -- 81
Brewers -- 81
Astros -- 68
Pirates -- 66
Here is your runaway best team in the NL, a team that is actually behind Philly in the real standings at the moment, largely because they lost three of four to them head-to-head last week. How can this be? Well, the series last week was in Philadelphia. Philly sent each of their best four starters out, while St Louis was without their ace. In spite of this, St Louis was favored in two games and was a toss-up in another. The only game Philly was clearly favored in featured their Cy Young candidate going against the Cardinals' 4th/5th starter. If the playoffs started tomorrow, I would bet large sums of money on St Louis to beat Philly.

AL West
Giants -- 84.7
Padres -- 83.8
Dodgers -- 83.4
Rockies -- 82.4
Dbacks -- 75
Easily the most exciting division, largely because it contains three solid teams, plus the one team that Vegas missed most badly on during the preseason: San Diego. Their lines from their first 18 games suggest a team that would win 76 games in a season. Their lines from the most recent 15 games suggest an 82 game winner. That is a huge difference for the Vegas folks who don't usually miss by much. The key here is not to get carried away by their 21-12 record and focus on the fact that even after Vegas has corrected their Padre lines, they're still just a .500 team. My ratings have LA and Colorado as the top teams here, with SF a notch below, and SD another notch below. The actual standings have exactly reversed that, which is why the full-season projection feature such a logjam. If I had to bet, I'd trust the numbers and go with the Dodgers.

I'm Going to Name My Baby "Cash Cow"

Or "Manipulated."
As is well-documented, I am a master of sympathy (and empathy, and apathy, and any -pathies really). I care greatly for others. So I feel like my opinion counts extra when I tell you that a lot of pregnancy symptoms are a bunch of shit, none moreso than a man's supposed "sympathy symptoms."
For those unaware, in most pregnancy literature, there are prominent mentions of an effect wherein an expectant father will experience lesser, but similar symptoms as his pregnant wife. Nausea, sluggishness, food cravings, all the fun ones. The idea, I think, is that a man's empathy will actually trigger physical reactions in his body, so that he will share the experience of pregnancy more with his wife.
This is psychological bullshit, of course.(1) Its main intent as far as I can imagine is to help prop up the very lucrative industry that is pregnancy. I fought my way through a wedding preparation last year, dodging the endless financial sinkholes endemic to weddings all along the way, and now I'm wading through the other great unnecessary money-wasting industry in this country.(2)
There are many books and many websites devoted to pregnancy. Maybe 2% of the info contained inside them is of value. If you ever find yourself expecting a child, here is a tip: attend all your doctor visits and ask many questions at them. Make sure to ask the questions in such a way as to convey that you don't know much about the process. Your doctor will tell you everything you need to know.(3) All those books are there to make money, not to inform you of anything. And the really devious thing about the whole industry is that the books/websites/etc are not only meant to make you spend money on them, they are interconnected and meant to make you spend money on all manner of loosely related products.(4) It's like all the pregnancy-type companies are in cahoots. A rising tide lifts all boats, that sort of thing, and the pregnancy tide is a biggie.
Back to the point. No a man will not have diarrhea at the same time as his wife, not unless they ate dinner at a dicey Indian place the night before. No a man will not have back pain when his wife is carrying around the bowling ball in her stomach. This should be obvious, but since it's related to pregnancy, anybody will believe anything.
To take this a dangerous step further, I'm going to say that lots and lots of the pregnancy symptoms experienced by the actual mother-to-be are bullshit, too. I'm clearly not saying that pregnant women don't have plenty of experiences for which the word symptom doesn't do proper justice, but I am saying that the industry uses the curious and captive audience of pregnant couples as an excuse to claim just about every possible human malady is caused by pregnancy. In virtually every instance, the culprit will be the same: hormones. You can blame anything on hormones. Are you pregnant? Do you sing poorly? Hormones! Do you bite your fingernails? Does your poop smell like poop? Does swiss chard taste funny to you? Hormones! Sometimes, pregnancy hormones really are to blame, and that's all it takes to become a catch-all.
I really should take a second to mention how amazing Sara has been as it relates to all of this, before I say that I've been around other pregnant people who claim to have experienced all the symptoms when that's almost an impossibility. Sara has had her fair share of discomfort and inconvenience, but she's never taken advantage of her situation and she's never made up problems and blamed them on the pregnancy. This is because she is amazing.(5) Other women are not so amazing and other husbands are not so lucky.


1. It's a placebo effect of a placebo effect. A woman suffers from nausea not because she actually has to vomit (yes of course sometimes she will--I'm talking about the many other times when she doesn't really), but because she's been told to expect to have nausea. And then because she thinks she has nausea, the man is also supposed to think he has nausea. Quite a little trick.
2. How many billion dollars are pumped into our nation's economy thanks to weddings and chilbirth? A terrifying amount. If we ever get health-care fixed, this is the next big albatross of waste in the economy.
3. Here is something that no pregnancy book will ever tell you: you don't really need to know much of anything until you're well into the third trimester. There is a somewhat obvious list of foods that you should know not to eat early on. Any medication you take you should do what it says on the package and check with your doctor first. That's it until it's time to take your hospital tour, which is free. You can even get a very informative (and pausable and rewatchable) childbirth class via DVD and $15 is a lot less than $300 to do it live. You don't need to know anything else. Actually you don't need to know the stuff from the childbirth class, either, but it's comfortable to have the knowledge. Seriously, you're insurance company will be paying a ton to send you to 15-20 doctor visits, you might as well take advantage.
4. One example of this is in the aforementioned DVD, which is otherwise devoid of riff-raff. The doctor conducting the class takes a 10 minute break from actually spreading knowledge to talk very enthusiastically about why you should bank your umbilical cord blood. Banking cord blood is an industry unto itself, with competing companies and everything. She even mentions one company by name, and shortly thereafter that company's name and phone number appears on the screen. Thanks for that. Of course what they don't tell you is that there is no certainty that you'll ever be able to use this blood, and that it costs several thousand dollars.
5. I shouldn't bury this in a footnote, but this is one of those things that makes me love her more than ever. When I decided to marry her a little bit less than two years ago, I was completely sure that she was just the right person for me, that although we aren't exactly alike, that her things would fit with my things and it would be wonderful. What I could never have imagined then is that over time, other little things about her would present themselves to me that make her even more perfect for me. Since I try not to believe too much in intuition and mysticism, I can only attribute this to blind luck.

Less than Two Months to Go

As of today, we are just 8 weeks away from Sara's due date. Only 20% of a pregnancy left. Not a lot of time, even though there is better than a 50/50 shot the baby comes late.
Someone asked me today if I was getting nervous. Somehow the question caught me off-guard, but no I'm not nervous, I'm still very excited. To do what I always do and compare something to my experience in athletics, I feel exactly like I used to before a really big race, but one in which my preparation was excellent. I'd start feeling excited and get that sensation in my chest but I'd be welling with confidence at the same time.
So you could say that I am ready, at least unconsciously. Literally, though, I am not ready. Today after work I'm stopping at Lowe's and buying the wood to build the baby dresser/shelf/changing table. Since I'm being nice to my neighbors and restricting myself to sawing on a weekend afternoon, and since I need to apply a couple coats of paint, I don't expect to be finished with it for two or three weeks. That leaves us with more than enough time, but of course Sara is unhappy that it wasn't done last month.
Another thing I have noticed about myself in the last couple weeks is that I've been more naturally industrious. I've been very easily disciplined and systematically getting things done, both at work and home. This wasn't a purposeful change, it just happened.

I can't speak for Sara exactly, but I think our name brainstorming has mostly come to an end. We have two or three names that I would be happy with, and one specifically that I seem to be settling on. I still want to be open to others, and I want to try to come up with some possibilities that aren't names in the traditional sense. Nothing blatantly absurd, but there doesn't need to be some fixed amount of sound and letter combinations that are accepted as "names." Names like Hazel or Willow or Brooke came from words that weren't just names, so why not new ones? Anything can be a name, because a name is the most arbitrary thing in the world.

Fun with the Ratings

Before I get to the pitcher factors, I'm happy to say that I've upgraded the ratings, and they are clearly the better for it.
As it turns out, regressing the ratings 50% toward preseason projections was much too conservative, so now they're only being regressed 30%. The Vegas lines, which remember are the sole inputs of my system, are so good that even just 20 games worth of lines is enough to produce a very clear picture of team value. The ratings now have a much truer look and I don't have the bunching problem I mentioned the other day.
Secondly, I was doing my opponent adjustment wrong. Not to get into it too much, but for example, I had the Yankees' unadjusted rating of about .600 being adjusted down despite the factor that their opponent rating was .530, which is obviously not right.
The last thing I've cleaned up is to finally add in opponent values for interleague games. I had debated what to do with this. Because the AL is vastly superior to the NL, some additional adjustment beyond home-field seemed necessary, I just wasn't sure what it should be. Some searching let me know that the adjustment should be between .050 and .060 per team, meaning an NL team should be deducted and an AL team given that much. This is a big number. For instance, adding in the deduction, the best NL team, Philadelphia, when playing the AL is only as good as Milwaukee. Or going the other way, Kansas City versus the NL becomes as good as the Angels. Anyway, after explaining all that, I decided not to add any adjustment at all. All AL teams play the same number of interleague games (18), so it wouldn't matter. And in the NL, twelve of the teams play 15 games, while only four play 18. Those last four teams are the only ones who'd be affected by an adjustment, and it would be just .050 per opponent over just three games, which equates to a shade under .001 per game. I decided this wasn't worth the effort. Create your own damn system if you feel otherwise.

Here then are the fixed ratings, updated through games played last night.

Yankees .619
Red Sox .574
Rays .550
Twins .538
Rangers .522
Angels .514
White Sox .510
Mariners .497
Tigers .495
Athletics .487
Indians .477
Royals .454
Blue Jays .453
Orioles .451

Phillies .5752
Cardinals .5748
Braves .554
Dodgers .550
Rockies .540
Cubs .524
Brewers .512
Marlins .5093
Giants .5092
Dbacks .506
Padres .482
Reds .480
Mets .476
Astros .447
Nationals .438
Pirates .426

The Braves are the one team that looks clearly odd. They are in last place with an 8-14 record, and have lost 9 straight games, and yet they're not terribly far behind the two best teams in their league according to my numbers (you could just as easily say "according to Vegas" here). So let's look a little closer at them.
Their lines have been coming down lately, but not hugely so. Their schedule has been very difficult, averaging .542, second-toughest in the league. In four recent games played at St Louis, they were actually the favorite in one of them. In a three game series at home vs Philly, they were somewhat large favorites in both of the non-Halladay games. I don't know what to say, other than I fully expect their rating to come down in the coming weeks.

Now, on to the pitcher factors. I say "factors" and not "ratings" because these are not ratings of each pitcher's quality, but just a measurement of how each pitcher affects his team's rating. In spite of this, the list I'll unveil in a second is still largely intuitive on its own. This owing to the fact that usually good pitchers play for good teams, and--within each team's pitching staff--there is usually a pretty similar drop-off from the top guy on down to the replacement starters, so that while Zach Greinke is awesome and the Royals are poor, so too is Dan Haren awesome but his teammates weak.
Each rating is based on 100. (Mostly for looks. They ought to be based on 1.00, really.) To adjust an individual team line, just multiply the pitcher factor (Lincecum is 1.25, not 125) by the team rating. Simple.
The top ten from each league:
AL
1. Felix Hernandez 120
2. Zach Greinke 120
3. Justin Verlander 112
4. CC Sabathia 110
5. Brett Anderson 108
6. Ricky Romero 107.5
7. Shaun Marcum 106
8. Jake Peavy 105.5
9. Mark Buehrle 105
10. Matt Garza 104

NL
1. Tim Lincecum 125
2. Roy Halladay 121
3. Johan Santana 115
4. Dan Haren 114
5. Ubaldo Jimenez 113
6. Adam Wainwright 113
7. Chris Carpenter 112
8. Josh Johnson 112
9. Yovani Gallardo 110
10. Ricky Nolasco 108
10. Cole Hamels 108

For completeness, there are four pitchers with factors below 90: Kris Benson, Todd Wellemeyer, Dan McCutchen, Chris Narveson and the worst: Dontrelle Willis. Vegas hates them some Dontrelle Willis, so much that his mere presence in the Tigers rotation increases the factors of every other Detroit starter by a point or two.

Finally, some errata from the pitching numbers.
- The Braves' opening day starter, Derek Lowe, is only his team's fourth-best. Their best is actually their youngest, Tommy Hanson.
- Barry Zito's resurgence is not lost on Vegas. His first start rated around 95, but his most recent is up to 102. Mike Pelfrey of the Mets has had a similar increase, but to a lesser extent.
- Going the other way and getting worse: Rich Harden, John Maine, and sorta Jake Peavy.
- Jon Lester has overtaken World Series Hero Josh Beckett as the ace of the Red Sox.
- Vicente Padilla, Joe Torre's genius pick to start opening day for LA, is very nearly the Dodgers' worst starter.
- The recently-demoted-to-the-bullpen Carlos Zambrano was still very clearly rating as the Cubs' best starter.
- The most balanced pitching staff is pretty obviously the Reds, with four starters rating between 99 and 101, and the fifth is a rookie who overall rates at just 94, but his most recent game scored a 100. Honorable mention to the Angels, with all five between 97 and 102.
- The biggest possible mismatch within leagues would be Roy Halladay at home facing Pittsburgh's Dan McCutchen. Philly would be expected to win that game over 83% of the time. For an interleague game, CC Sabathia at home against McCutchen would produce a win expectation of over 88% for the Yankees.

Quite the Racket

This past weekend, I got into a small argument about the lottery. It was part of a larger discussion, but the key point was me telling the other person that playing the lottery is a very foolish thing to do if your intent is to actually win money at a reasonably fair rate, and that because a lot of poor people who don't know any better play the lotto regularly, it in effect functions as a tax against the lower class. My opposition in the argument was saying how the lotto is a good thing both because it's revenues help to fund public schools, and because it gives those same poor people some hope to win.
The point about state lotteries funding schools is true--they do--but so is the fact that a huge majority of people who play the lottery are low-income, so it's sorta impossible to argue that of the lotto income that funds schools, most of it is being paid by low-income people. That's a hidden but clear tax against anyone who plays the lottery. This has been said many times before, and I don't think my fellow arguer disputed this.
The point that bothered me as an analytical thinker was the one about how playing the lotto is a losing game, that the numbers are stacked against you. My assumption had been that of all the money coming in to the state for the lotto, they skim some off the top and pay out to the schools, then they skim a little more to cover the expense of running the lotto, and then the prizes constitute the rest. This is in fact how it works. What shocked me when I did some simple investigating this morning was how small the prize money is as a percentage of the intake. I'd assumed it might be something like 80-90%. Most sportsbooks will pay out around 91% of their income, keeping just 9% for themselves. Casino games have similar pay-out rates, if usually slightly higher (more fair to the player) even. Many slot machines actually pay-out much higher, up to 99% (mostly because the cost to operate them are so low--no dealers, etc).
According to the website of Mega Millions, the largest interstate lottery in the country, they pay out a ridiculous 50%. Stop and think about that for a minute. Playing the lotto is exactly like playing a 50/50 raffle, and those pretty obviously primarily exist as fund-raising tools. People who play them know that their buy-in is going to fund the school band, or the volunteer fire hall, or whatever else.
But people who play the lottery are not doing it to help fund others, in their minds when they buy the tickets, they are trying to win for themselves. Again, remember who buys most of the tickets. These people can't afford to be so charitable. Often, what they hope they're buying are literally tickets out of poverty.
And the system is only paying out 50%.

Let's do a math exercise to fully illustrate how stupid buying a lottery ticket is.
Assume one hundred $1 lotto tickets are sold. You buy one of them. Assume then that you're chance of winning is one-in-one hundred, or 1%.* Using the Mega Millions structure, the prize available to you is $50. You have a 1% chance of winning that prize, so your expected return for each $1 investment is 50 cents. On top of that, Uncle Sam will tax the winnings up to or around 50%. So your expected return drops to just a quarter. I don't need to tell you that this is epically bad.
Indeed, when you buy a lottery ticket, you do have hope to win a much larger prize. As a one-time, isolated occurrence, this could be considered a fun and harmless act. But done repeatedly, and spread out over millions and millions of people, it's just flabbergastingly stupid.

For the record, here is where the Mega Millions website says their ticket sales revenues go:
50% -- "goes back to the players as prizes."
35% -- "support government services in the member state." Here is your school funding.
15% -- "goes to retailer commissions and lottery operating costs." Here are bodega guys getting a tiny sliver, and the funding of all those terrible commercials, and rich people getting richer.

Finally, here is another factoid I encountered when searching. According to the Ohio state lottery website, the per capita play for all lottery games was $202. Let's guess that half of all people never played the lotto, so the share for those who did rises to $404. Let's then guess that half of those who played did so for less than $50 total (that's one per week still). The share for the remaining 25% of the population rises to over $750 per. And 25% is a horribly liberal guess as to the active lotto players. If there are 10% of the population that regularly plays the lotto, then those people are spending on average over $2,000 per year, even after subtracting out scratch-off winnings. If you want to pursue it more, you could guess that of these regular players, a lot are at poverty level and make less than say $20,000 per year, so that they're spending at minimum 10% of their gross income on lotto tickets.
This is not a small thing.

*I know that in big number-picking lotteries, the odds are independent of the number of entries, that you always have X% chance of getting 6 random numbers to match. I also know that multiple people can win the same prize in them. For the sake of the example, it will be easier to do it as though it's raffle-style. Anyways, the odds in my example above are far higher, since Mega Millions' odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 175,711,536.

My Baseball Ratings

Emphasis on the "My."
You remember a post several weeks ago, the one where I described my gambling epiphany, where I extolled the virtues of a purely objective analytic approach? Yes, of course. I was happy because I had found such a system, and put it to fairly successful use during the end of the college basketball season. But that system only worked for that sport, and of course that system was completely stolen, mostly from Ken Pomeroy's ratings.
So now that college basketball is over, and I've promised not to make subjective bets, I basically have to sit on my hands until the fall, when I could try stealing another system, this time applying it to football. Of course that's not a preferred course of action for someone like me, especially with probably my favorite sport--baseball--occurring daily over the next several months.
Baseball is a tricky sport to handicap, but it does provide about 15 games per day, and its every-day nature does force books to produce lines on extremely short notice, so the chances that a rogue line appears and blesses me with a wonderful edge opportunity are high. I only needed to find a rating system to do the work for me.
This would seem an easy task, what with the proliferation of high-level statistics and statistical analysts working on the game. Alas, most all of the work being done is for "legitimate" purposes, or, more often, on the individual level, not the team level.
As I thought about it, I came to believe that I could just create my own rating system, or at least I thought I would enjoy trying. What follows is the surprisingly satisfactory result of this effort.

My first choice in creating the ratings was to use actual closing gambling lines. I get them from Pinnacle, which runs a site that is the go-to spot for intelligent gamblers (no, I don't have an account there, so I officially am still not "intelligent"), largely because their lines are so good and fair. For each game played, I convert a team's moneyline into a win%, then adjust that based on home-field advantage. I then just average all the individual game ratings to produce an overall team rating. This is pretty simple, converting to an opponent-neutral requires more work. For each team, I had to input their schedule, and add a formula to the spreadsheet to automatically adjust the opponent's rating, again factoring in home-field. Once I took the time to enter this stuff once, I never have to do it again.
All that gives me both a team rating and an opponent rating for each team. To combine the two and create the master rating, I weight the team rating twice as heavily as the opponent rating, then regress the team rating toward it's preseason projection and the opponent rating toward an average opponent (I haven't yet decided how much to regress these, but for now I'm using 50%. If that is right--and it seems pretty good--then I'll just need to lower the amount as the season progresses).

Now that that is out of the way, let me reveal the actual results. First, the National League, updated through right now:
1. St Louis .54841
2. Philadelphia .53803
3. Atlanta .53528
4. Los Angeles .53119
5. Colorado .52630
6. Chicago .51071
7. Milwaukee .50699
8. Florida .50060
9. Arizona .50055
10. San Francisco .49811
11. Cincinnati .48843
12. New York .48437
13. San Diego .48317
14. Houston .46747
15. Washington .46143
16. Pittsburgh .45581

The great thing about the rating is that it doubles as an expected winning percentage, neutralized for home-field, against a theoretically .500 opponent.
To my eye, it looks like the extremes aren't quite extreme enough. St Louis would finish a 162 game season with just 89 wins given that percentage, and Pittsburgh with a relatively robust 73 (though you'd need to subtract one or two from PIT's total there because they wouldn't face a purely .500 schedule, just because they won't benefit from playing their sorry selves. Still, the numbers look just slightly too centralized). Over time I think this will work itself out, especially after I start regressing less, and anyway, if your system has a slight bunching problem rather than an outlier problem, then you're in much much better shape.
Here is the American League:
1. New York .56907
2. Boston .55092
3. Tampa Bay .53248
4. Minnesota .52342
5. Texas .51473
6. Los Angeles .50679
7. Chicago .50555
8. Oakland .49436
9. Seattle .49213
10. Detroit .48937
11. Cleveland .48890
12. Kansas City .47113
13. Baltimore .47070
14. Toronto .46143

A quick look at these and we can get an instant sense of where our gambling opportunities lie.
- Oakland jumps out. They're currently in first place, but still I think most people think they are terrible. Their pitching is actually quite good, and bookies know this. In fact, depending on neutral pitching matchups, Oakland playing at home ought to be favored over Minnesota every time, and over even Tampa some of the time.
- The Yankees are very very good. There is necessarily some public bias in the ratings, because lines are often goosed in favor of popular teams. This doesn't happen as much at a book like Pinnacle, but it's still there. It's instructive, though, to know that they've played the toughest schedule in the AL so far, they've been the favorite in every game but the three at Boston (this includes series at Tampa and at LA), and that even their individual game lines playing at Boston produced close to 50-50 expectations.
- The Florida Marlins, Atlanta Braves, and Washington Nationals are three teams all in the same division who rate higher than expected. This despite the fact that Philly is very nearly the top team. The NL East is for real. Washington has played the toughest schedule thus far in the NL, tougher even than the Yankees mentioned above. The Marlins have played 12 road games already, but were actually favored in six of them, including one against Philly and the first two games of the season at the Mets (special wow-factor that they were favored at NY on opening day, opposing Johan Santana). I've got two eyes on them for the time being.
- Easiest schedules so far: Phillies at .450, Detroit and Toronto at .477. Compare these to Washington at .546 and the Yankees at .532. Phillies have essentially played all games against Pittsburgh, while Washington has played all games against a team like St Louis.

I still need to add a category for future schedule strength. This will actually allow me to create predicted end-of-season standings, very valuable for futures betting on division winners. (I can tell you now without even having created these that Washington at 25-1 to win the NL East, while definitely a long shot, is just as definitely a positive value bet. To be positive value, the Nats would need to have just a 3.8% chance of winning the division.)
In addition to futures, this system will of course work for individual game lines. Just take the teams' ratings plus apply a personalized factor for each starting pitcher, and you've got a perfect line to compare to the bookie's offering.
I'm actually almost done figuring individual pitcher factors, too. I'll report back in the next couple days on that, since there are some interesting results. I'll also try to report back with observations and updated ratings, plus a report on the gambling results, once I feel confident enough to start placing wagers (I'm not far away).

Fandom

The quarterback of my favorite football team was suspended six games the other day. Suspended 3/8 of a season. Suspended, essentially, for being a disrespectful, slightly sociopathic asshole.
You could argue all you want over whether this punishment was just (and, at my instigation, my friends and I have been doing just that the last couple days), but I'm not here to do that.
I'm more interested now in what it means to be a fan of a team. Jerry Seinfeld had a joke where he said that rooting for sports teams is like rooting for laundry. Of course he's got a good point. Another team's villain could tomorrow very easily become your team's hero, and your opinion of him would change accordingly. I've heard many people hope for scandalous events to befall the star player of a rival team, not so much so that the player would be distracted and then perhaps fail, but to give the fan a more tangible reason to dislike him. The cliche of a player who is hated by seemingly everyone except fans of his own team is well-known.
I think a lot of this is made possible by the simple fact that football is a team sport, and fans can have loyalty not just to a specific player or a specific team, but to a more inanimate franchise, which is of course usually tied to the fan's hometown.
A lot of Pittsburgh fans have been upset in the last few years because the team's offense has been skewed toward passing. This is because Pittsburgh has a history of being a rushing team, and its fans identify not just with say the 2008 version of the team, but with the whole history of the franchise. It doesn't matter to them that their line can't run-block, or that their top running back is no good, or that the personnel dictates passing to be a good idea, because the team they root for usually runs the ball.
Even though I think this way of thinking is completely stupid, I do have sympathy with the idea. If you don't have something tangible in your team's identity to latch onto, then you really are basically just rooting for laundry.
Back to the main point, though--the suspended quarterback (who'll be referred to as as "Fathead" henceforth).
A Pittsburgh fan such as myself has two recent championship seasons, and Fathead was instrumental to both. Thus, for the most part, Fathead is/was rather beloved by the team's fans. No surprise there. As a player, he has his flaws, but they have almost always been overcome. As a person, he also has his flaws, but they have been kept innocuous enough so as to disregard. Not anymore. In light of his recent sexual assault accusation, lots of negatives stories have filtered out about the man, so much so that even though man of these are unfounded anonymous rumors and he's never been officially charged with anything, the breadth and the consistency of them paints a pretty clear picture of an genuine asshole (if not a criminal). So much of an asshole, in fact, that unless I'm mistaken, he's the first athlete to be suspended for substantial length without charge or conviction, and without doing anything to specifically harm his team, just sorta to besmirch the league itself.(1) So, we're talking about a real prick.
How am I supposed to feel about the prospect of rooting for this man? Should I support his return, because he wears the right color laundry? Should I support him because of the good experiences he provided me with during those two championship seasons? Should I support him because I've been supporting him for 6-7 years now? Should I hate him because he got suspended and therefore hurt the team? Or should I jeer him because he's an asshole? Does it make me a hypocrite, or worse, if I don't?
I think it's those last two questions that are the most interesting. Relating only to personal judgment and not the games themselves, is there really an arbitrary line over which an athlete can pass to cause a fan base to turn on him? Of there must be, but for cases which don't include a criminal conviction, it's hard to define. If a player were exposed as a blatant racist,(2) would that do it? What if a hidden camera followed him around and found out that he never recycled, always left his lights and AC on, and constantly spit on sidwalks? What if he never reciprocated with his friends and bought a round? What if he privately sold a car or something else expensive that he knew to be a lemon? What if all of the above?
Football is intrinsically a team sport. It isn't like baseball, where you can boo the first baseman who abused his pregnant wife, while still cheering for everyone else. If you boo the quarterback during a game, you're essentially booing the whole offense. (I suppose you could do the fantasy-football thing and hope for him to have a terrible game while the team still wins.)
Ultimately, none of this matters, of course. The team will succeed or fail on their own; your support will mean almost nothing. Most of the players are mature individuals who will handle this bit of sociological justice effectively. I think as a fan, the best thing for me is to let the players sort it out. If they come to the defense of the Fathead and want to move forward as a complete unit, then who am I argue.(3) Presumably, the aspirations of the players are the same as me: to win. If you are rooting for a team for a reason other than to hope for it to win, then you're really wasting your time. If it's only about the pageantry, don't pick a side. If it's mostly about feeling good morally and ethically, don't get invested in sports. Sports at its best is a perfect capitalist structure, a perfect meritocracy. Don't be a socialist when it comes to being a fan. Most importantly, don't delude yourself into thinking you care about much of anything other than winning.

(Now, if you'd like to hear my current, personal opinion on the Fathead matter: I'm willing to forgive and to root him to help my team win, but that's only because I don't really believe that he "raped" that girl. If I did, then this would be more of a black-and-white case, and I'd want the team to get rid of him, pronto.)


1. The best comparison I can think of is Milton Bradley, the baseball player, or Terrel Owens, both of whom were suspended just for being assholes. In their cases, though, their behavior was directly disruptive to their teams, and in fact it was their teams that did the suspending, not the league. Fathead's case is closer to a steroid suspension really, because it incites the league to act and to punish to maintain a show of decorum and justice for the public. But then there is still the issue of steroids being an offense against the integrity of the game, while Fathead's actions were just an offense against human judgment.
2. John Rocker is a perfect example here. I can't remember exactly, maybe a Braves fan can refresh me. I know they were ultimately glad to see him go.

Of This World

I pass a homeless person almost every morning on my way to the subway. I'm almost endlessly fascinated by homeless people, so let me share this.
I assume she is a woman, but it's hard to tell because she wears the same layers of street-grey sweatshirts with a knit hat pulled fairly low. She pushes a shopping cart that seems always to have about four or five garbage bags stuffed full of empty cans and bottles. The garbage bags are always full, which makes me wonder if she ever cashes them in.
The interesting thing about this woman is that, just like me walking to the subway, she has a routine. In fact, she seems to stick to her routine better than I do, such that I can judge my punctuality by where on the street I see this woman. She comes from somewhere to the north of Borough Hall, stops at the bagel cart on Boerum just south of Joralemon, buys a doughnut (which I'm sorta confident is always a bavarian cream), then walks it and her bulging cart down to between State and Atlantic. She stops here, leaving her cart on the street side of the curb, because there is a large concrete stairway that juts out from the front of this building, the kind that comes out and has a landing which then itself splits down to either side and takes up half the sidewalk space. She chooses the stairs that split to the south and sits down in the shelter there on the lower steps and deliberately unwraps and eats her doughnut. When finished she goes on to Atlantic and turns east, thereby ending our fleeting cohabitation.
The time it takes her each day to pass through the same portion of the world as I do is maybe 20 minutes. The time it takes me to do the same is maybe 5 minutes, but then as I said I'm not as punctual as she is, and my appearance along that stretch of Boerum could be anywhere from 7:55am through 8:20am. There is no way that this woman is not timing her moves.
Does she have a watch? Where did she get it? How does she replace the battery? There is an obvious answer here--that she could very easily just look up at the clocktower near Atlantic Terminal and find the time--but that doesn't answer the deeper curiosity: why check the time at all?
Why does she hold to this schedule? The doughnut-seller will be at that corner for several hours, so it's not like she has to restrict herself on account of him. In the summer months, there is daylight for a very long time before 7:45am, so it can't be that she simply wakes up with the sun and gets her breakfast.
She has to be consciously regimenting her day, perhaps just for it's own sake (sanity?). I'm going to make a gross assumption here, but I don't think she has much of a reason to follow a rigid schedule on any given day. Maybe a soup kitchen serves lunch during a certain window in the middle of the day, and maybe she knows a restaurateur who gives her food at a general hour, but these aren't the kinds of appointments that must be strictly attended at exact times, nothing such that she would do the same things every morning within less than five minutes difference from day to day.
I think that this woman, when she wakes up every morning, knows from habit and experience how much time she has in that day. She must have a few things that she knows she will do, such as buy that bavarian cream doughnut, but outside of those, what happens? Presumably she collects cans, but there is hardly a schedule for that.
What I'm perhaps awkwardly trying to get at is that this woman makes a conscious effort to keep herself on a schedule. Her brain is still organizing. She hasn't totally checked out from this world. And yet there she is, utterly homeless, not the kind who exhorts people on the subway. I've never seen her with another person. Aside from the doughnut guy, I don't think I've ever seen her acknowledge the existence of another human being. This is a person who has been homeless for a long time. And yet she seems to have the same kind of approach to a day as any one of us more-fortunate people. She has her own unknown purpose, but still she has it.
I'm not really sure what the point is for me writing all this. The more I think about it, the more questions seem to pop up. Why, mostly. I guess that's what it means to be fascinated by something.

A Quote about Perspective

Apparently, Bob Feller thinks Lou Gehrig was something of a drama queen.
Years ago, Feller was asked what he thought about Gehrig's famous quote ("Today......I consider myself...........the luckiest man....on the face of the earth") and he responded thusly:
"He's wrong. I am. I'm still alive."
Well, then.

Rigorous Fealty to an Idea

This is from an article in this month's The Atlantic magazine. The whole article is basically an in-depth profile of Timothy Geithner, and it's worth reading. I'll give you the passage below mostly without comment, only saying that it's usually helpful to take a measured response to situations, especially those that are rather complex. That the current news culture in this country behaves in just the opposite manner is disappointing. That most of the population follows right along is far worse.

Geithner plainly has no patience for what he describes as the obdurate unwillingness of colleagues to subordinate their desire for superficial impact to the larger vision. “That’s exactly the dilemma,” he said. “The stuff that seemed appealing in terms of sharp discontinuity, Old Testament justice, clean break, fix the thing, penalize the venal, would have been dramatically damaging to the basic strategy of putting out the panic, getting growth back, making people feel more confident in the future—solving it without putting trillions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money at risk unnecessarily.”

All of this is extremely interesting because of what it seems to reveal about each man: Summers, whose knock has always been that he’s an academic trapped in a world of theory, has become the politically minded one, while Geithner, the savvy realist, now evinces rigorous fealty to an idea. But it’s even more interesting for what it says about Obama. At every turn, he has sided with Geithner.

In late December, the Commerce Department reported that the economy grew at a rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter, ending four straight quarters of decline. (That figure leapt to 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter.) Then, later that day, Obama told The Washington Post in an Oval Office interview that the most important thing he’d accomplished in his first year was “to ensure that the financial system did not collapse.” Then Geithner went on NPR and stated flatly that there would be no double-dip recession—by Washington standards of caution, a provocative move. Even with unemployment high and anger at Wall Street intense, the mood at Treasury is quietly exultant because the imminent possibility of another depression has disappeared and growth has resumed, all at a fraction of the cost estimates being bandied about last year when it still looked like the government might need to take over large banks.

Geithner likes to point out that after a year on the job, he’s spent $7 billion recapitalizing financial firms while private investors have put up $140 billion. TARP money is being repaid faster than anyone imagined, and if Obama gets the $90 billion tax on big banks he proposed in January, it could eventually be recouped. It’s likely that the cost to taxpayers will be much less than the 5 to 10 percent of GDP that the Cleveland Fed says is typical for a crisis, and possibly as little as 2 to 4 percent—about the cost of the much smaller savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. A recent Treasury study indicates that it could be less than 1 percent. By any reasonable standard, this would be an impressive achievement, and it would owe a great deal to Geithner’s strategy.

And yet, a year into his presidency, the overwhelming criticism of Obama is that he is taking too much control of the economy and spending too much money—which must really sting, because by avoiding nationalization and its colossal costs, he has probably saved an incredible sum. “We’re getting killed from the right and from the left on the basic strategy,” Geithner told me. “The right argues that we unnecessarily socialized the entire financial system. The left says we wasted money on things they’d have rather used to help real people directly. As you might understand, I have no sympathy with either. Neither critique is right. To the right, I would say: ‘No, the strategy we adopted was overwhelmingly designed to try to make sure that private markets came and took us out of this as quickly as possible. That was a conscious choice, a shift in strategy, and a more pro-market approach that will help us deal with our fiscal challenges.’ And to the left, I would say: ‘And that saved the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars that you can use to meet the main challenges we face as a country—health care, education, infrastructure, and our long-term deficit.’”

Hot Air

Weathermen are worthless. Something I love to do when people ask what the weather will be like today is to say: "Like yesterday, just a little different." Sure it's nice to know whether or not to expect rain, but it's extremely rare for a temperature swing from one day to the next to be at all relevant.
Weathermen know they possess minimal value, and so they have figured out over time how to make themselves seem more important. Go to the TV listings for The Weather Channel sometime. Here are some of the names of shows to be broadcast in the evening this week: "Storm Stories," "Storm Riders," "When Weather Changed History," and Joe Versus the Volcano.(1) They need to remind us constantly of those rare instances of extreme weather so that we live in enough fear that we feel compelled to ask them when to expect the next Big One. Here's a tip: expect the average.(2) Expect small changes from day to day. It doesn't take a specialized degree to record those, it takes a thermometer and at least one functioning eyeball.
I was thinking about this because it's hot today. It was also a little breezy. Why don't we ever hear reports about what the wind chill is in summer? Or the heat index in winter? It's because those would only serve normalize any extremes, whereas the way they do it of course accentuates extremes. If it's July and the temperature is 82, then that's no big deal, but if the humidity makes it feel like 94, well shit, now you can get people talking. But that's not the whole story, though. Maybe the wind is also blowing, so that if you apply the winter wind chill factors to the heat-indexed temperature, then maybe the true "feels like" reading becomes something like 84. Back to where you started, not being really concerned about the weather.
Try not to forget that weathermen are like people in infomercials: always making a big fuss about something, always try to sell you something that you don't need.



1. Yes, Joe Versus the Volcano. I'm just as amused by that as you are.
2. As someone has increasingly viewed the world in a probabilistic manner, this is yet another area where people are stupid. Did you ever notice how in the 10-day forecasts that weather.com publishes, that the temperatures on the last couple days will always return close to the average? Of course. They don't know much more than you what it will be like more than a week from now, so they just make sure their predictions are essentially copies of the historical average.

Last Trip

I spent three-plus days in Chicago this past weekend, mostly just to visit cause it's Sara's spring break but also to attend our baby shower organized by her sister. I was one of four males attending this shower, all of whom were immediate family members. Baby showers just aren't attended by men. I'm not here to argue that, but I do wonder why we as a gender have been so easily spared them. The main point of a baby shower is for the guests to give baby-related presents to the expectant mother. Since only women can actually have babies, it makes some small sense that only women will give gifts to them, but what if a woman doesn't have very many female friends, what if more than normal of her closer friends are male? Does she then forfeit the ability to receive as many gifts? And what if you are a male and one of your best friends happens to be a woman, does she even invite you to her shower, or do you attend? Being a best friend, of course you'd be both expected and happy to give your friend something, but for this case the arbitrariness of your gender seems to confuse things.
A baby shower is even more simply a vehicle for gift-giving than is a wedding shower, and naturally wedding showers are attended by both men and women. At least at a wedding shower, there is a semi-reasonable desire for guests to meet whichever of the couple that they might not know; this doesn't apply for a baby shower, which is attended by all of the woman's friends who she'd presumably hang out with anyway. The whole point is the gifts. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I were a woman with a single bank account, I think this is one double-standard that I'd actually be pissed about. Glass ceilings, sure, but we're talking about the tight financial noose of the baby shower.

In other Chicago news, this trip had an odd vibe to it in that it's the last time we'll be there together until we've moved there. (I will be making a couple solo trips out to job-hunt, but not with Sara.) There was a little more realism when we walked around a prospective neighborhood or we talked about what we liked about a place. It's also the first time I've been there since Sara got pregnant, so my perspective has changed. In both of these aspects, I'm much more fully prepared to make this move.
We've been pretty set about moving out there this summer for a long time now, but in most of those plans, it was more just an idea or a suggestion, with plenty of room for me to be hesitant or to harbor inhibitions. I guess this trip finally got me fully on board, finally sold Chicago to me.
As we talked about what aspects of a neighborhood were appealing to us, I even started to become more and more willing to live in her hometown of Evanston, rather than somewhere inside the city itself.* I'm going to be 30, with a new baby, so what's the big difference in living in a trendy neighborhood for me? Being in Evanston vs being in Lakeview or Wicker Park or Lincoln Square or wherever is basically just a difference of 15 minutes of commuting time for me to get to work. I'm not going to be going to bars with the same frequency, so moving from having 50 within a mile of my apartment to maybe 10-15 doesn't really matter to me. One of the things I've learned about NYC is that unless you're really getting after it, the bar scene here is really governed by the law of diminishing returns. The real difference between a spectacular bar city like NYC and any other only really manifests itself to someone like me in the variety of options available. You want to play bocce inside? How about sit outside in a 2,000 person (more? I don't know) beer garden? Maybe indulge in a microbrew tasting menu for dirty cheap just down the block? You want to have several different options of places to buy cheap growlers? You want to play pool for free? You want a top-scale cocktail bar? The diviest dive there is? Maybe a place with free pizza, or hot dogs, or popcorn, or cheese? Maybe pitchers for $4 and tons of sports on Sundays? Any kind of rooftop? A shoeless boardwalk bar? A Czech bar, a German biergarten, a Japanese sake house, a Puerto Rican place, a Chinese speakeasy...............this is the greatness of going out in this city, that I can have literally whatever I want. But I just listed a lot of different desires, and I'm not going to want all of them very often, maybe just once a year or less. More often, I'll just want to go to a regular place. Removing this smorgasbord of opportunity will maybe affect my life once every month or two, and that's not even really considering that Chicago isn't exactly limited to just strip-mall bars or Applebees.

Back to my point. I'm happy about our move and I'm mentally ready. I'm also extremely well-equipped for having a baby. Literally, I mean, we now have in our tiny apartment basically everything we might need to care for this baby, and we're still about three months away. There is an infant car seat in my closet where I used to keep sweaters. There is a diaper pail tucked under our table, a changing pad back behind our kitchen storage, a couple sheep's worth of clothes in the bedroom, and much more, even a stroller (currently collapsed). Three months will prove to be about enough for three people to be living in our little place.


* In some ways, this represents only a label, as Evanston is connected on the city's transit line, so it's not like some kind of car suburb. That the city line is drawn where it is as pertains to Evanston-v-Chicago, it's a wholly arbitrary. Rogers Park, the adjacent neighborhood that sits inside the city line, is actually a much less desirable place to live. The real difference in this case of city/"suburb" is that since Evanston is very traditionally liberal, the taxes are higher there, but that in turn successfully leads to better public services. Since we'll at least initially be renting, that tax burden won't really trickle down to us quite as much as it would to an owner.