One Week To Go

The Giants have 8 or 9 games left (depending on if they have to make up a game with the Mets next Monday), and are trying to stay sharp before they start the playoffs. Meanwhile, the Seattle Mariners are not rolling over like they’re supposed to be, having taken the first two of a three-game series from the A’s at Oakland. Boston lost to Cleveland, which means that the Mariners are now only 1 1/2 games behind Boston in the wild card race: the A’s aren’t doing their job to flatten the Mariners at this juncture! The playoff permutations are still complicated, though not as much so as a couple of weeks ago.

River Cats Win The PCL

The Sacramento River Cats just won the Pacific Coast League championship, beating the Nashville Sounds 8-1. They were undefeated in post-season play. The team has been in Sacramento four years, and has made the playoffs three times, but this is the first time they’ve won the championship. I listened to most of the game on the radio; the crowd was quite into it. Were we more mobile nowadays, it would have been fun to have been at the game ourselves.

Yolo County now has their very own championship baseball team!

The RealAudio Jinx

We finally got around to subscribing to the MLB Audio deal where you can listen to live streaming RealAudio of the radio broadcasts of any major league baseball game. (It’s $10 for the whole season.) This lets us listen to the Red Sox games over the computer. Tonight’s game turned into a miserable Boston bullpen collapse, and we’re now 0 for 2 in games listened to via RealAudio. Have we started something for ill here?

At least tying up the phone line like this is a good way to shoo off telemarketers.

Laptops At The Game

According to a report in Wired News, fans at Raley Field, home of the Sacramento River Cats, next year will be able to use a free wireless network to order food, beverages, and check email during the game. We really ought to get out to more games next season: the River Cats have played superbly this season and are about to start playing for the Pacific Coast League championship.

Back East, the Red Sox routed the Yankees in the Bronx today 11-0. We are thrilled.

A Team For The Statheads

The Oakland A’s beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 4-3 today, winning their ninth game in a row. This has become an A’s trademark, to come on strong in the second half of the season, often after Biilly Beane has made a clever trade just before the July 31st trading deadline. I have just finished reading Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, which is an account of how Billy Beane, general manager of the A’s, has turned the A’s into a successful franchise through superior wiles and a deep statistical understanding of the game despite having a rock-bottom budget. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if you aren’t enamored of statistical analysis or particularly interested in baseball. (Tim O’Reilly, the renowned tech publisher, is one of the latter, writing about the book: “I’m not much of a baseball fan, but Michael Lewis’ Moneyball has been a revelation. Not only has it given me understanding of why people like baseball so much, it’s given me a real impetus to rethink how I approach my business.”)

The book gives an excellent account of how a set of passionate fans and writers, most notably Bill James, started doing novel quantitative analyses about the game. They questioned the traditional statistics used in baseball, such as RBIs or win-loss records for pitchers, and began to come with better metrics for individual performance, such on-base percentage. These fans were all outsiders to the baseball managerial system, but their ideas started to percolate.

Enter one Billy Beane. He started out as a baseball player who had the burden of being marked for greatness. But rather becoming the All Star everyone expected him to be, he floundered in the majors, and at the age of 27 made the unusual decision to quit playing the game to take a front office job. Here he excelled, and a few years later became general manager of the A’s. Because of his experiences as an unsuccessful player, he was skeptical of traditional baseball methods for evaluating prospects, and quite receptive to the statistical approach of Bill James and his followers. With little money to spend, Beane soon calculated he was far better off stocking his team with unheralded up-and-coming players rather than paying top dollar for established stars (noting that once stars reach free agency, they are usually old enough that their performance starts to decline).

Good baseball quote for the day:”Baseball is a fat Victorian novel, replete with colorful minor characters and discursive subplots, into which a fan can disappear for months; football is a series of quick- cutting TV cop shows.”

One Down, Two To Go

The Red Sox beat the Yankees this evening 10-5 in the first game of a key three game series at Fenway. I checked out the score early on and saw that the score was 2-0 Yankees in the first inning and thought oh no, it’s going to be one of those games. But the Red Sox rallied twice from behind to win the game.

David Halberstam has an excellent piece in today’s Boston Globe about the state of Red Sox Nation.

Beavers Go On Rampage

19 out of 20 players on the Portland Beavers, the Triple-A team for the San Diego Padres, were suspended yesterday after an incident in a game in Las Vegas last month where they chased and got into a scrum with a Las Vegas fan who heckled and threw a stress-relief ball at one of the Beavers’ players. The one remaining player, a pitcher, will have his work cut out for him if the team wants to make the playoffs.

Three-Way Tie

The Boston Red Sox concluded a four game sweep of the Seattle Mariners today, making the playoff picture with about 31 games to play very interesting. The Mariners, Red Sox, and Oakland A’s all have identical records (76-55) and are completing for two playoff spots between each other (assuming the Yankees don’t collapse), the AL West division lead and the American League wild-card spot. The A’s are playing well, the Mariners are slumping, and the A’s may be about to claim the AL West lead, after trailing the whole season.

Meanwhile, the Central Division races in both leagues are quite tight. Unlike Aaron Gleeman, who’s quite excited to see a real race in the AL Central, I have basically no interest in what happens in either of these races. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Cubs win the NL Central, but that’s about it.

In Memoriam Bobby Bonds

Growing up in the Bay Area in the early 1970s, I remember three names in particular from the San Francisco Giants: Mays, McCovey, and Bonds. That would be Bobby Bonds, who died this morning of cancer. Last Wednesday he saw his final baseball game, watching from a luxury suite in Pac Bell Park his son the great slugger Barry play against the Atlanta Braves.

Accounts of today’s Giants game at Pac Bell Park are very moving. After a long silence in tribute, and videos of Bobby’s career and life, the Giants played their heart out, and won 3-2 against the Marlins. And people left the park with smiles, just as Bobby would have wanted.

Catching Up On The Baseball

Pica is reclining on the couch right now, left leg elevated, and is happily scoring the Boston Red Sox-Oakland A’s game. This is a key four-game series between the Red Sox and the A’s, since the two teams are very close in the AL wild card race. It’s always a matter of conflicted loyalties when these two teams meet, since Pica is a Red Sox fan and I grew up following the A’s, but I’ll have to admit my loyalities have shifted so that I root for the Red Sox in such matchups. After all, the Red Sox have a longer history of disappointments to overcome.

On the day of our wedding yesterday, one of the rarest of baseball events occurred: an unassisted triple play. Rafael Furcal, the shortstop for the Atlanta Braves, turned the play in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. This is only the 12th unassisted triple play in major league history. This surely must be a portent for us, or at least the answer to a good trivia question.

Pica will be headed in for surgery on her ankle early Wednesday morning. I don’t think we’ll be catching the rest of the A’s-Red Sox series in person, alas.