A Fine Day By The Bay

We went on an wonderful outing today to the Giants game in San Francisco, escaping the heat for a pleasant sunny SF day with the fog content to hang just outside the Gate, taking a lovely ferry ride from Vallejo direct to the ballpark, meeting up with our friend Barbara at the game and returning back to Davis with her, and best of all, watching the Giants come from behind and beat the Cincinnati Reds 4-2 in convincing fashion! The bullpen was solid, unlike last night’s meltdown.

I hope everybody’s Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbors’ Porch Day went according to plan.

What To Do About No Run Support

One of the things I love about baseball is the way quirky events occur with regularity. Today the Milwaukee Brewers were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates with the young pitcher Yovani Gallardo on the hill for the Brewers. Gallardo pitched extremely well, allowing only 2 hits with 11 strikeouts over seven innings. He was however getting no help from the Brewers’ offense and the score was 0-0 in the seventh. So Gallardo takes things into his own hands and hits a solo home run in the bottom of the seventh. Nobody scores any more runs, and the Brewers win 1-0.
We had dinner this evening at the taqueria and were watching ESPN Baseball Tonight there who had a story about Gallardo’s day. One of the stats they flashed was that only two other pitchers in the modern era had struck ten or more batters and had hit a home run to win the game 1-0: these would be Early Wynn for the White Sox in 1959 and Red Ruffing for the Yankees in 1932. These are the sort of figures that the various stats agencies take pride in pulling out of their databases, but I’m amazed at how much of this detail is available on the web through sites like Baseball-Reference.com. Here for instance is the complete play-by-play action for that Early Wynn game in 1959 (White Sox 1, Red Sox 0, with Wynn striking out 14).

New Band and Some Beisbol

I’m on my holiday break now and am among things doing some radio. I just got the necessary bits to get my Buddipole antenna to work on the 80 meter ham radio band and tonight was the first chance I had to try it out. Success! I had two contacts on 80 meters Morse Code, one to Idaho, another to Banning, California, the latter signals being especially strong.

Tuning up from there, I heard what sounded like a baseball game in Spanish on Radio Rebelde on 5025 kHz. Pica confirmed my identification of the sport. Cuban baseball! Very cool to hear, especially since we are deep into the off-season here in the United States.

Local Boy Makes Good, Part 2

Last year around this time we reported that Dustin Pedroia, Yolo County native who graduated from Woodland High in 2001, won the AL Rookie of the Year award. This year he did one better and won the AL Most Valuable Player award, hitting .326 with 17 home runs and 83 RBIs for the Red Sox. At a height of 5’9” at best he’s not your typically-sized ballplayer, either.

One of these months I’m going to have to browse through archives of Woodland’s local rag, The Daily Democrat, and read about some of Pedroia’s high school batting feats.

Soggy Victory

The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series this evening, resuming Game 5 of the series after a two-day rain delay, conditions getting too wet on the field in the middle of the 6th inning in the game on Monday. The Phillies have been around as a team for 126 years and have only won the World Series once before, in 1980. Indeed, the Phillies have lost more games over their history than any other professional sports team (something like 10,098 games at last count).

I am happiest most of all for Jamie Moyer, the soft-throwing Phillies pitcher who after 22 seasons in the majors finally gets a World Series ring. Age and guile beats youth and strength and all that — Moyer is just about to turn 46. He grew up a Phillies fan near Philadelphia, and when the team won the series in 1980, he skipped out on school to go to the victory parade! Now he will be in the Phillies’ second such parade.

It's All In The Name

The Tampa Bay Rays are going to the World Series, having clinched the American League pennant by beating the Boston Red Sox 3-1 in the seventh game of the ALCS Sunday. This game was quite a pitching matchup, and ended in thrilling fashion when the Rays brought in a young pitcher named David Price who had only seen action in five previous major league games to get out of a bases-loaded jam in the 8th inning and get the final four outs.

Not only was this the first time Tampa Bay has made it to the World Series, it’s the first time they’ve had a winning season, the team having finished in the cellar of the AL East 9 out of the 10 years the team been in existence. (The one year they weren’t last, 2004, they finished second-to-last.) It must have been their name: in all those prior years they were the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. This season they dropped the devil from their name, and major success follows.

On the other side of the theological divide, the Angels’ name has gotten clunkier over the years. Initially they were the Los Angeles Angels, then in 1965 they changed their name to the California Angels, then became the Anaheim Angels in 1997, and most recently changed their name in 2005 to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Ka-chunk. I suppose that’s to differentiate them from their cross-town rivals the Los Angeles Angels of Fontana. :)

Front Row Seats

We took our friends Fernando and Belen to their first baseball game ever this evening. Fernando is a postdoc from Spain I’ve been working with this year, and Belen is his sweetie; they’ll be headed back to Spain at the end of the month so we wanted to make sure they had the cultural experience of seeing a baseball game.

The game we went to was the Sacramento River Cats playing the Salt Lake City Bees in the first round of the Pacific Coast League playoffs. We ended up with seats in the very first row, on the right field foul line about 100 feet back from first base. It couldn’t be better for a field level view of the action.

It was hardly a pitcher’s duel though. There were many hits and a good number of home run — by the time we left the River Cats were losing 9-13. We were cheated though: our plan was to stay through the seventh inning stretch but they replaced “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” with “God Bless America” played on the sax. The horror of it all. That was very unfair to our guests.

One-Nil

Lots of sports action these past couple of days decided by the score of one to zero. In Oakland last night, the San Francisco Giants beat the Oakland A’s 1-0 behind the stellar pitching of Tim Lincecum who struck out 11, giving up 5 hits. The Giants only produced two hits, but that was enough to win. Lincecum’s record is now 9-1 with an ERA of 2.38.

Also last night, the L.A. Angels lost to the Dodgers 1-0. The Dodgers however never got a hit in the game. The only run came on a fielding error by the Angels’ pitcher. This is only the fifth time since 1900 that a major league team has won a game without getting a hit. The Angels however made up for it this afternoon and beat the Dodgers 1-0. Both teams got hits.

Best of all, Spain beat Germany today 1-0 in the finals of Euro 2008. We watched the match over at Mariachi’s. About 25 others were paying attention to the match in our favorite taqueria, most of them rooting for Spain. The decisive moment of course was striker Fernando Torres getting by defender Phillipe Lahm and getting his foot on the ball just before the arrival of goalie Jens Lehmann. Torres is 24, Lehmann is 38, playing in his last European championship — we thought that the age difference might have been a key factor, Torres having just more speed than the goalie. Pica has been thrilled the whole rest of the day by the result; the Spanish team just achieved something which hasn’t happened since she was growing up in Spain. And the team is young and talented — what’s next?

Baseball Movie All-Stars

What would be the best lineup one could come up out of the fictional players in baseball movies? Here is one view on the topic.

Hmm, one of these years we’re going to have to see Major League.

Batting Average With Delegates In Play

Over this primary season a blogger going by the name of Poblano has been producing some remarkably accurate predictions of the election results based on some sophisticated demographic modelling.
Today Poblano outed himself. It turns out his name is Nate Silver, and he is a whiz baseball statistical analyst by profession. He is a managing partner of the publication Baseball Prospectus, and developed the PECOTA system for projecting players’ future performance based on historical pattern. As a data geek I am delighted to see such overlap between baseball and political analytics.

Closer to home the UC Davis Aggie baseball just won its first NCAA Division I playoff game! They beat Stanford 4-2 on a complete game pitching performance by Eddie Gamboa. A few years back the UC Davis students voted to move the athletic program to the highest NCAA division. The 2007-2008 academic year has been the first year since the move that the UCD sports teams have been eligible for the playoffs, and the baseball team has done very well for itself this year.