Flourishing

I spent the day in Berkeley yesterday, taking a class in off-hand pointed-pen flourishing. I am saturated in ink, doodles, fru-fru — yet there is something so beguiling in all this. I see the temptation. I resist it on the grounds of good sense and because of my aesthetic training — but it’s so SATISFYING...

Swoosh. Loop, press, release, curl, swoosh.

I have no idea what to do with this. I took the train down and back (no time for lunch, I missed the Berkeley International Food Festival Ron told me about), and returned in a train full of Giants fans who had witnessed the miracle of their team beating the Yankees for the second day in a row.

Swoosh. Loop. Press. Release. Curl. Yell. Loudly.

A Ride, a Wedding, and a Win

There is a ribbon around the front handlebars and stem of our tandem. It was left over from our wedding. Our plan was to ride the tandem home from our wedding, suitably bedecked. Alas, owing to the calamité at the wedding, this excursion never happened. But we finally got to ride the tandem to and from a wedding today. This was for our friends Andrea and Steve, who got married out on Putah Creek Road at the Center for Land-Based Learning farm. This is an educational farm and walnut orchard dedicated to teaching about wildlife-friendly and sustainable agriculture. All had a good time at the wedding, and the food was excellent, catered by the happily-named Magpie Caterers of Sacramento, whose t-shirts Pica was coveting.

Another auspicious event occurred today — the Giants broke up an eight-game losing streak with a win at home today in extra innings against the Yankees. We were following the game by radio on the ride out to the farm, and the Giants were down 4-1. Not so good. After the ceremony, having found a spot at one of the reception picnic tables, we started following the game again, joined by our baseball co-conspirator Barbara. The game was tied 5-5 going into the bottom of the 9th. The Giants were in fact leading 5-4 at the top of the ninth, but the Giants gave up a mammoth home run to Alex Rodriguez. It was not until the bottom of the 13th that the Giants won on a squib hit by rookie Nate Schierholtz. Barbara let out a whoop, and a fine day was made complete.

Rangers Motor On

In what is becoming an annual tradition, we brought Indian takeout to join our friend Donna this evening at a Davis Little League game. Donna’s husband Rick coaches the Davis version of the Texas Rangers. This year’s edition of the Rangers is much improved, and we witnessed a tense playoff game. It was do-or-die for both teams, and the Rangers pulled it out, winning 5-2 in the 6 inning game.

Red Sox Nation: Davis

There are lots of Red Sox fans in the Bay Area. This shouldn’t be too surprising: whenever New Englanders decide to escape their winter slush and summer mugginess, a destination of choice is San Francisco or nearby, because of plentiful work (often tech-related) and compatible politics. Whenever the Red Sox are in town to play the A’s, an avalanche of blue caps with red “B’s” on them converges on the Coliseum. We unite with A’s fans and Giants fans (and just about everyone else) in our hatred of the New York Yankees, in much the same way the rest of the world… oh, never mind.

More surprising, perhaps, is the high incidence of Boston fans here in Davis. Yet hardly a day goes by when I don’t see the familiar cap, blue long faded to gray, which gives me an immediate (and never unwelcome) opportunity to say “Go Red Sox” and launch into an immediate enthusiastic exchange of pleasantries with a perfect stranger about how the Yankees are now 12-1/2 games back.

(That’s twelve-and-a-half games back, people. It’s already Memorial Day. If they keep this up they’ll miss the playoffs. For the first time in a very great while. It’s delicious. We Red Sox Nation folks have been known to dance jigs in parking lots over this, gingerly in some cases.)

Yolo County residents have a new reason to cheer the Sox, now: 23-year-old Dustin Pedroia, the star of nearby Woodland High, hit another home run today for Beantown in the ninth inning and is distinguishing himself handily at second base. The guy who delivers the mail at work, a longtime Yankees fan but born and raised in Woodland, is having to reconsider his loyalties…

I’ll be heading to Santa Fe tomorrow for a week-long workshop. I have no idea how easy it will be for me to blog, so I’ll leave you in Numenius’ capable hands (which I have overburdened already with gardening duties) till I get back, unless you hear otherwise.

Pitcher's Duel

We listened to the Giants game this evening in and about picking up our packets, t-shirts, and gear for assisting at the Double Century this Saturday. The Giants were playing the Houston Astros on the road. On the mound for the Giants was Tim Lincecum making his third major league start; pitching for the Astros was their ace Roy Oswalt. The Giants ended up winning 2-1 in the 12th inning. Lincecum was outstanding; he went 7 innings, had one walk, gave up one unearned run, and struck out 10. Oswalt went 7 innings as well, gave up no runs, walked 2, and struck out 4. The Giants have a decision to make when Russ Ortiz, whom Lincecum is substituting for, comes off the disabled list!

Anticipation

Never mind silly things like home run record chases, there’s nothing in baseball quite like the anticipation of seeing a much-heralded prospect make his major league debut. On Sunday Tim Lincecum is scheduled to start for the Giants in their game at home against the Phillies, taking the place of Russ Ortiz who has been put on the disabled list. Lincecum was their first-round draft pick in 2006 and so far this season he has been mowing down batters at Triple-A level, allowing just one run in 31 innings pitched, for an ERA of 0.29. How well will he adjust to the big leagues? Will he get fazed on Sunday by the likes of Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins??

Baseball Accounting

The site Cot’s Baseball Contracts tracks information about Major League Baseball contracts, based on unofficial but public sources. Here for instance is the page on all the San Francisco Giants players.

Salty Balty

The Giants won one game this week. They played six games — at home. Tomorrow they set out on the road.

Giants fans are miserable, already, one week into the season. Hard to see how anyone could be more miserable than Salty Balty, who calls in regularly to the postgame wrap, bemoaning the geriatric lineup and calling for heads to roll — a refrain that was taken up by caller after caller.

Today I did more gardening than I probably should have, given how my back is feeling, but it was fun to listen to the game (though not fun to hear them lose).

Peppers, chiles, leeks, fennel, squashes — all went in today (all the melons went in yesterday). It may be a little early. Oh well. We’ll see… Maybe Salty should take up gardening.

Opening Day

None of our teams won today (the Giants open tomorrow), but the new season is underway! In this thread I learned that Detroit Tigers broadcasting great Ernie Harwell would open up the new baseball year with a verse from the Song of Songs:

For the autumn has passed and the rain is over and gone. The flowers are seen in the country, the season of the songbird arrived, and the sound of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.

Twenty-Seven

Brian Sabean, the general manager of the San Francisco Giants, has got to go. Now that we’re well into the off-season, I’ve been dabbling in a bit of sabermetrics — what can I learn from analyzing a database of player statistics that goes back to 1871. As something of a warmup, I started to look at player performance as a function of age. After concluding I needed to look at a single cohort of ballplayers, I chose all batters who were born in 1957 (all of whom have stopped playing by now).

The graph at left is a doubly-averaged concoction. The y-axis measures Runs Created, which is an estimate of the total number of runs that a batter contributes to the team over the course of the season. What I did to produce the graph was to plot for each of the batters in my cohort RC against age and then fit a linear regression model with a quadratic term against the plot. This model generates a graph that is an upside-down parabola, the maximum of it falling at the age of the batter’s peak performance. I then took the equations for the entire set of batters, and averaged their coefficients together in turn, to produce the graph here, which is a composite look at the batting performance across the entire cohort.

The peak of the graph is at age twenty-seven. After I did my little analysis, I was gratified to read that Bill James came up with exactly that value for age of peak performance twenty-five years ago. Beyond that, players start going downhill, or as Bill James put it: “most players are declining by age 30; all players are declining by age 33.”

As Steven Rubio has pointed out, the San Francisco Giants aren’t exactly in a youth movement. This off-season they have so far signed or re-signed Ray Durham (age 35), Dave Roberts (age 34), Rich Aurilia (age 35), Bengie Molina (age 32), Pedro Feliz (age 31), the pitcher Steve Kline (age 34) and of course Barry Bonds (age 42). Sigh. With that lineup, the Giants’ winning ways (this past season their record was 76 and 85, 11.5 games out of first place in the division) are surely going to continue. It’s not even 2007 yet, and my hopes for next season are pretty dim.