I meant to post this awhile ago, but here’s a video I shot of the helicopter flyover at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington before Game 4 of the World Series. I overcranked my Canon 7D to 60 frames per second and then slowed it back down to normal speed in Cinema Tools. Then I felt compelled to add Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” also known as the “Apocalypse Now” music, to the scene.
Download the original video here.
I wrote thousands of sports stories for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as a beat writer covering the Texas Rangers, Dallas Stars and as a general assignments writer covering all manner of lesser sports. For four years I toiled in an effort to break news while entertaining and enlightening the reader. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I did a decent job of that.
These days, I am not a full-time reporter, but I occasionally pick up some freelance gigs. I still take pride in my work and I still strive for accuracy and expertise.
But four years ago today, the dumbest thing I ever wrote made it to print — and, unfortunately, the World Wide Web. I had a regular MLB column in the Star-Telegram. There was a week left in the season, the Rangers were terrible, I was burned out and I had a million things to do the day I wrote that week’s column. I wrote it too quickly and tried a little too hard to be clever. Essentially I questioned whether Barry Bonds was worth the money the Giants were paying him, but I did it in a fairly idiotic way using spurious statistics and a weak argument.
The now-defunct sports blog Fire Joe Morgan excoriated me, calling me out on my flawed logic and basically challenging my credentials not only as an MLB beat writer but also as a rational human being.
I received hundreds of e-mails ranging from snarky ridicule to blatant insults, and I answered them all. I never publicly responded to FJM; I just kept plugging away and vowed never again to write something so stupid.
I haven’t linked to the column — which fortunately doesn’t exist on the S-T site anymore — or FJM’s critique because to this day, you can still find it when you Google my name. One bad day at work can live in perpetuity.
So after all these years, it’s time for me to issue a public mea culpa and tell Fire Joe Morgan’s Junior that he was right. I only wish the intelligent things I wrote on a near-daily basis received such exposure.
I’ve picked up a few games for MLB.com lately and while I’m no longer making a living as a baseball beat writer, I still have some thoughts. This might be the place to share them.
Joe Siegler over at Rangerfans.com (full disclosure: I used to run that site as a college student, but I have no involvement with it anymore) compared last year’s Rangers ace Cliff Lee and this year’s surprise All-Star Alexi Ogando, who has been solid in his first year as a starter.
Joe concludes that while Lee’s numbers with the Phillies this year are slightly better than Ogando’s, Ogando is by far the better bargain salary-wise. This is true, but any analysis of Ogando’s 2011 season thus far shows a significant drop-off in the second half of the season.
Ogando has started 23 games this season, but the first 12 starts and the second 11 were of radically different quality. In his first 12 starts, Ogando was 7-0 with a 2.10 ERA, averaging about 6 2/3 innings per outing. In his next 11 starts, Ogando was 5-5 with a 5.03 ERA, lasting about 5 1/3 innings per start.
Is he running out of steam in the dog days of August, having thrown more than 100 innings more than he threw last season (and about 30 more innings than he pitched in his entire minor league career of four seasons)? That’s certainly a plausible theory.
But there’s another much more worrisome idea out there for why Ogando has dropped off: other teams have figured him out. Though he has awesome stuff, he’s not particularly unpredictable in his pitch selection. He throws hard and has a good slider, but not much else.
Ogando has faced 12 different teams this season. He has faced six of them twice and five of them three times.
In the 12 first meetings, he was 8-2 with a 2.24 ERA, 3.24 strikeouts/bases on balls, a WHIP of 0.943 and an average innings/start of 6.36 (in other words, roughly 6 1/3).
In his six starts in which teams were seeing him for the second time this season, Ogando was 2-2 with a 3.16 ERA, 3.00 SO/BB, 1.135 WHIP and 6.17 IP/GS (just shy of 6 1/3).
In Ogando’s five third meetings, he was 2-1 with a 6.67 ERA, 2.89 SO/BB, 1.630 WHIP and 5.40 IP/GS (more than 5 1/3).
In other words, in almost every single measure, Ogando was better in his first outing against teams than his second, and his second meetings were better than his third.
Another way to look at it is breaking down first meetings vs. all subsequent meetings:
1st meeting: 12 GS, 8-2, 76 1/3 IP, 55 H, 19 ER, 17 BB, 55 SO, 2.24 ERA
2nd/3rd meetings: 11 GS, 4-3, 64 IP, 67 H, 33 ER, 19 BB, 56 SO, 4.64 ERA
Chalk it up to fatigue or familiarity; either way, it’s not a good sign. If the season ended today, the Rangers’ ALDS opponent would be the wild-card Red Sox, a team against which Ogando has yet to start. (He pitched 4 1/3 innings in four games against them last season, allowing only earned run.) He’ll probably face them once this regular season — next week.
The other two AL division leaders are New York and Detroit, both of which have faced Ogando twice this year.
Don’t be surprised if Ogando is back in the bullpen in the playoffs.
Here are the raw numbers.
I’ve had a long, fruitful relationship with Netflix. I joined in November of 2002, long before anyone I knew had ever gotten a red envelope in the mail. I bought a week’s pay worth of NFLX stock shortly thereafter, at around $6 a share. I’ve moved several times, I’ve changed jobs, I’ve been far too busy to watch movies, but through it all I have remained a loyal Netflix customer.
That’s about to change. The company is raising my monthly rate by 50 percent (counting tax, I’ll go from $12.98 to $19.47) for the same service, effective Sept. 1. Essentially, Netflix is separating the streaming and physical-delivery models and forcing customers to buy each one a la carte; while I understand the move, again, in effect, it’s a rather significant price increase. I would find a new dry cleaner if my current service suddenly raised its prices by 50 percent; it goes without saying that I would do the same for my cell phone and energy providers.
So Netflix and I are done before my next billing cycle. In truth, we were done a long time ago; I sold the stock for $18 in 2007 (genius move, now it’s $300) and I barely watch discs anymore. I do use the streaming service, but mostly as “background noise” — there’s nothing entirely worth watching on there.
What’s next? I just plugged my old Roku player into the living room TV, so I guess I can watch Amazon Prime streaming videos (in SD). Maybe I’ll read more and listen to my LPs more. All I know is I refuse to be a victim of Netflix’s money grab. They can go on for awhile without this old customer.
I am willing to pay a monthly fee for music, but even I have my limits. I have, in the past, been a Rhapsody customer but have switched to MOG in light of its higher bitrates and more polished web and mobile interfaces. On the “owning” music front, as opposed to just renting it as with the aforementioned services, I’ve long been an eMusic customer. But sadly, I had to say goodbye to eMusic today as it is no longer worth my cash; the new variable pricing structure has sapped the life out of what once seemed to be the best deal in music.
I may sign up again if there’s a month in which I feel like picking up a couple of albums, but I may also just keep subscribing to MOG and say to hell with downloading music at this point. It’s an interesting moment in the evolution of digital music. I never thought I’d pay a subscription fee to rent music, but I never thought I’d have the kind of unbelievable access I have now on my phone. The key for me is good quality. With MOG offering 320kbps streaming and downloads, that’s plenty good enough for me.
It’s because of this that I’m already beginning to view my MP3 library (truth be told, it’s more of an AAC library than anything else) as a relic much like my CDs or LPs.
Netflix has me watching the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live — actually, “watching” is a bit of a stretch, but I do have them on while I’m working around the house.
So far I’m deep into Season 3 and I think one thing must be said: anyone who pines for SNL‘s “glory days” is lost in a nostalgic hallucination. Much as it is today, the average episode, even in the heyday of the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” cast, is plodding and pointless, filled with pop culture minutia that ceased to be relevant as soon as the original show went off the air.
I am enjoying getting to see some of the better music of that era (The Band, for instance) but I’m also getting to sit through entertainers like Leo Sayer. The original cast was insanely talented, to be sure, and the show was groundbreaking for its time. But I must admit I prefer the Phil Hartman era.
One sad thing about watching SNL on Netflix is that the music rights were only cleared for the first few seasons. At some point the episodes start getting shorter and a great many bands I would love to see aren’t going to be represented.
I keep these on my desk. Great for parking and sodas.
I rarely use cash, generally preferring to only pay cash when credit isn’t accepted so I can boost my airline miles account. But when I am forced to use cash, I try to use dollar coins. Normally I get quizzical looks, sometimes even excitement, sometimes unmasked derision (Richard’s Bar in Chicago, for instance). That’s because most Americans have probably never seen a presidential $1 coin and few could produce a Sacagawea or Susan B. Anthony if their lives depended on it.
For years the government has quietly produced these coins, hoping to make a bit off the seigniorage and possibly get Americans to start spending like Europeans, Australians, Canadians and the citizens of nearly every other industrialized country, none of whom have a banknote of the equivalent of a single dollar. But we love our greenbacks and the coins haven’t caught on. Most people don’t know they exist, although recent media scrutiny might help.
NPR ran an interesting story yesterday:
Politicians in Washington hardly let a few minutes go by without mentioning how broke the government is. So, it’s a little surprising that they’ve created a stash of more than $1 billion that almost no one wants.
Unused dollar coins have been quietly piling up in Federal Reserve vaults in breathtaking numbers, thanks to a government program that has required their production since 2007.
And even though the neglected mountain of money recently grew past the $1 billion mark, the U.S. Mint will keep making more and more of the coins under a congressional mandate.
The pile of idle coins, which so far cost $300 million to manufacture, could double by the time the program ends in 2016, the Federal Reserve told Congress last year.
Though NPR doesn’t mention it, some significant percentage of that stockpile could have still been beneficial to some Americans. You see, in an effort to increase circulation, the U.S. Mint will ship up to $1,000 worth of coins to a person with no shipping costs. You just put them on your credit card, like a very slow, very heavy, fee-free ATM. If your credit card happens to give you cash back or frequent flyer miles, well, you see where this is going.
Orders are now limited to $1,000 every 10 days, but in the program’s heyday, some savvy travelers realized they could order hundreds of thousands of dollars in coins, haul them to the bank before the credit card statement arrived, and fly free for awhile.
Personally, I keep a stash of coins on my desk, and I’ve always got a few jangling around in my pocket. I’m not advocating that we kill the $1 bill — although it would likely save the government money — I’m just a little eccentric when it comes to currency. I like $2 bills, too, but the Bureau of Engraving & Printing doesn’t have a great deal on twos like the Mint does with coins.
I got my first iPod on Christmas Eve 2003. Since then, I have meticulously maintained my iTunes library. At best, I’m deeply diligent in this quest; at worst, it’s full-fledged OCD. My play counts reflect more than seven years of my music listening life (for the record, “Gravity’s Gone” by the Drive-By Truckers is the most played song in my adult life).
I’ve always been skeptical that MP3 or AAC could match the quality of CDs — and I know for a fact they don’t match a nice pressing on vinyl. So despite having almost 17,000 songs on my computer, I still have a wall full of CDs and a huge cabinet full of LPs. But among the many changes that have happened since I got that first white iPod in 2003, hard drive space has grown exponentially. I now have several terabytes of external storage, and there’s no reason for me to keep all those dang CDs in a tiny condo.
It’s time to re-rip everything to Apple Lossless. It will take forever. This I know because about three years ago, I re-ripped everything to 256k AAC from the original 128k — a move that was also prompted by the availability of more hard drive space.
I’m not going in alphabetical order, either. I’m going in play count order, to ensure that the albums I listen to most are ripped first. In the end, I’ll be able to fill up my storage shed with CDs instead of my living room.
Interestingly, I’ll be one of the few Apple customers who will actually get stuck with lesser quality music from iTunes in the Cloud, which will all be at 256k. But it’s all about feeling good about getting rid of those CDs while still knowing they are represented in the highest possible quality on my computer.
And for the record, the vinyl stays put no matter what.
Here are the stats on this project so far:
Albums/songs converted to Apple Lossless: 103/1,562
Current ALAC library size: 34.8GB
Songs remaining to convert: 5,853
Estimated size of converted library: 298GB
Here’s a shot I took a few months ago from my kitchen window:
Downtown Fort Worth at night
Congratulations, you’ve stumbled upon my website. There isn’t much here, but feel free to poke around on some of my social networking sites if you’d like after you’ve exhausted the content supply.
I’ve been meaning to launch this one for a long time now. My first personal website was way back in 1996 — at a glamorous domain, ccwf.cc.utexas.edu, and the URL even had a tilde (~) in it. (Is there a more useless key on the keyboard than the tilde?) Over the years I’ve had several sites at better spots. It has been awhile, however; I shut my last site down in 2004.
Since then I’ve had a few jobs that didn’t allow me time (or the freedom) to update a personal site. When I was a sportswriter and later a speechwriter, the last thing I wanted to do was spend more time writing. Sure, it’s nice to share photos, videos and interesting links, and to write something your friends might want to read once in awhile. But that’s what Facebook is for now, right?
Well, why should Mark Zuckerberg own my photos, videos and such? And why shouldn’t I have a creative outlet now that I’m in the corporate world instead of journalism or politics?
I hope this site will help me answer those questions. I also hope you’ll come back occasionally and see what I come up with.
