All posts by jeffrey

Coach's Notes

Notes on Game 13

I had officially started the Coach’s Notes blog posts on April 12, 2007, following the first game of the second season, our thirteenth overall, and a game we lost 24 to 3.

  • So, it wasn’t our best game; there is certainly a lot of room for improvement. (As Jesus said, “I’ll be back,” or whatever.)
  • Our goal for this season is six wins, which may put us in the playoffs, and I do think that that is possible. We had a lot of players miss the first game, and we will get stronger as the season progresses. Typically, teams that do well on opening day are teams that have been together for some time. This was true on Tuesday night; the Brewskis have been together for five years.
  • Walks are good. I am a big culprit of this as well, but let’s try to always take a strike before swinging away. First, you’ll get an eye for the pitcher’s delivery. Second, the pitcher may end up giving you a free pass to first base. Many teams in the league base their entire offense on walks, and although I don’t agree with that philosophy (as my saying goes, “only postal workers walk”), it is definitely better than popping out to the first baseman or grounding out to the pitcher, especially on the first pitch. (Remember, three balls gives you a walk, and two strikes and you’re out.)
  • The second baseman needs to play deeper and more towards the middle; the first baseman needs to play off the line. This is not true in all cases, e.g., a pull left-hander, but we need coverage up the middle. The throw from second to first is very short.
  • It is the second baseman’s job to position the rightfielder. The rightfielder should play up, generally, but the rightfielder will heed to the direction of the second baseman.
  • The third baseman is the captain of the infield on cutoffs. It is the third baseman’s job to position the shortstop or second baseman and let them know where to throw the ball. “ONE” = first base; “TWO” = second base; “THREE” = third base; “FOUR” = home; and “CUT” = no throw. The third baseman should shout this repeatedly and give the cutoff man enough time to catch-and-throw in a fluid motion.
  • The league-provided scorecard sucks, I realize, so I created our own branded scorecard, which we will use from now on. It includes call-outs for a single, double, triple, home run, walk, reached-on-error, sacrifice hit and fielder’s choice. All you need to do is circle the appropriate one. There is also a place to write-in the number of RBIs. (Pretty simple.) Hopefully this will make keeping score easier for the folks who claim to not know how to. One question for you folks: When you are watching a ballgame, and the announcer says the team just turned a “6-4-3 double play,” are you telling me you do not know what that means? (Just asking.)
  • I am keeping track and I have calculated the statistics, but I will not post them until the sixth game or so. Before then, the numbers are essentially meaningless. I will also post the definitions of the two statistics I’ve created — the contribution percentage (or Red-Legged Superbas Index, RLS) and the Total Run Production Index (TRP) — when the time comes. In the meantime, the explanation of all statistics is available.
  • Please don’t try to phone me the hour before the game; I am most likely warming up or whatever, and I will not pick up my phone. In all likelihood, whatever information you need is available on the blog, so print it out as necessary.
  • If you need batting practice, do it. Don’t say to me after the game, “we need batting practice.” No, you need batting practice.
Coach's Notes

A message from the coach

I think this is a perfect introduction to my “voice” as coach of the Red-Legged Superbas, or simply “Superbas” for short.

There was very often too much going on during the games for me to react sufficiently, or appropriately, and it wasn’t until afterward — the following day sitting at my computer — that I was able to digest what had occurred, and figure out how to address the team.

We were not a good team, and that fact began to wear mightily on me. During one game in the first season, I took out my frustration unfortunately on the rest of the players, some of whom didn’t deserve it. The following day, June 15, 2006, I sent an email to the team.

I prefaced the email first with another email — the subject, “Upcoming: A message from the coach.” — giving players advanced warning of the important words to follow. “Approximate run time: 10 minutes.”

Team-

First of all, I would like to briefly apologize if I was abrasive or overly aggressive during last night’s game. There is no excuse; however, I see great things for this team (actually, I don’t), and my style may be too harsh. I had a great time last night — I went 3 for 4, hit 2 doubles and scored 3 runs — and I play more effective when I am “in-your-face.” However, that may not be the case for everyone on the team and I realize that. On a related matter, I would like to win these games, and have fun, and if you would rather have fun, that is fine by me, the more beer the better, but then please do not be frustrated when we lose. (In my personal history, that is how it is. I have always had hard-leaning coaches, we always had fun, and we always won.)

I do believe we can all play harder, with more heart, and with a greater determination to become better ballplayers (i.e., learn the game, not make a mockery of it), win games and have fun as a result. It is possible. Remember team rule number 7: “Winning is more important than remaining friends.” (Maybe I take that rule too seriously.)

Alas, we are on a five-game losing streak. So it goes… [K.V.]

TEAM CAPTAINS

Now, let’s get down to business. As a means to streamline pregame activities and possible midweek practices, we will now have two captains.

The Captain of the West Side will be Brooks; the following will report to Brooks: Ted, Eric, Kevin, Jesús, Jason and Joe. The Captain of the East Side will be Andy; the following will report to Andy: Carlo, Bill, Jeff, Craig, Wright and Raphael.

The captains will report to me. I report to Jesus of Nazareth.

The responsibilities of the captains will be to run pre-game activities (soft-toss, getting arms warmed, and stretching for the older folks), being liaisons with the umps before and during the games, ensuring that base coaches are present at all times, gathering emotional support on the field and in the dugout, scheduling any mid-week practices, and assisting the coach with the lineup before and during the game (but never after).

And God saw that it was good.

KEG FUND

Wright struck out yesterday, raising money for a great charity event: the Strikeout for Beer Keg Fundraiser. For every strikeout a player records, he will donate $20 to the fund. Because of Wright’s generosity, we now have $120 in the fund, well on our way to a keg of fine beer and meat to grill. Let us all be more philanthropic in the future.

JEFF

Lastly, Jeff is a moron (although he surely can hit the ball). He wasn’t born a moron, he isn’t always a moron, but last night, he was indeed a moron (and you can substitute “a$$hole” for “moron”). He owes the team a half-dozen softballs as a result of his home-run derby showcase with the short left-field fence; what was it, 120 feet? (Jeff: these softballs are available at several locations throughout the bay area, including your hometown of Concord. Please contact Vice President of Operations, Joe, if you have questions.)

Well, that being said, we only have four more games, and we are mathematically out of the playoff. Let’s try to finish the year on a high note.

And I promise to relax more if everyone plays better.

Later.

Coach's Notes

Red-Legged Superbas

For two summers I ran a beer-league softball team. We were known as the Red-Legged Superbas. The name didn’t stick right away, but players would soon learn to honor it, and a few even came to pronounce it correctly.

We were not good by any measure. And losing was no fun. With all honesty, it was one of the most horrible experiences of my adult life.

I ran a team blog, and outside of the more typical postings (schedules, statistics and game recaps), I crafted a voice as the coach and general manager of the team, with musings on the game and, at times, even the broader sense of life.

My rein as coach was needlessly tumultuous. There was a near uprising near the middle, and I was even forced to suspend myself for one game toward the end. The players didn’t respect me for some reason. I was younger than most of them. I was a better player. And I wasn’t the most pleasant of human beings when we were losing (which was constant). None of this made for a good combination. An eruption of some sort always seemed imminent.

But I was able to keep the team together — without winning — and a lot of that has to do with the blog. It provided a narrative to our humble, grievous lives on the softball field. It brought people together.

This project collects the highlights of the blog — the posts I called “Coach’s Notes.” No one seemed to listen. And I cared too much.

Untitled 1980

Passing the EIT Exam

During the summers and winters while a student at Syracuse I worked for my hometown engineering department. It wasn’t the most difficult of jobs. Basically I drove a truck around town and watched all the construction projects going on, and I did do a good amount of surveying work, as well as some plan review in the office. In fact, I asked for a theodolite for Christmas, but never got one.

My last summer after graduating from Syracuse, and before I headed out to Berkeley for grad school, which I had never visited before (I went there on a whim; I had been to California once before, the previous spring), I had received the results of my EIT exam (formerly called the FE). The exam was a few months earlier on April 20. I remember because of the midnight celebration that surprisingly did not affect my early morning test-taking abilities. (They couldn’t have scheduled it for a more inconvenient day.)

I passed the exam, and I planned to tell my boss, the Town Engineer. He was a good guy, maybe early fifties, on his second marriage, with ties to the local mob. That is the hidden secret about Buffalo and her suburbs: the presence of the mob — however quiet — in daily life. The grocery store, the car dealership, and especially the construction companies, were mostly mob-run, or affiliated with the mob through family.

My colleague while working at the Town had his life threatened by construction workers when he made a stink about some of the work that they were doing. We were reviewing their building pad elevations with our trusty theodolite and the crew didn’t like the fact that we were on the site, let alone what we were doing. My colleague — his name was Marty Root, a son of a former powerful local politician, maybe twenty years older than I; a lost son of sorts, known for his past drunkenness; think of a young George W. Bush — filed a complaint about the incident, and I signed-off on it too. I didn’t think much of the incident when it happened, but I was a fan of the Sopranos, and I wasn’t the one being threatened.

My boss pulled me aside a day later and told me Marty was in the wrong, that we shouldn’t be reviewing the construction crew’s work, and to watch out for myself. The construction crew was part of the Cimato family, the head of which (Anthony) had emigrated to America from Italy decades earlier and made his fortune installing sewer in the northern suburbs of Buffalo. Tony started with nothing but took all the work he could (always submitting the low bid), and slowly but surely he made a lot of money, eventually owning his own business, and later he started a development company (with land that was given to him as payment for sewer work). One of his first neighborhoods was called Kingsview Estates, where I lived for the first twelve years of my life. My parents moved in a few months before I was born. My next door neighbor — the owners of the biggest house and lot in the neighborhood — was Tony Cimato, the developer himself. (Our house was tiny in comparison.)

I remember swimming in his pool with his college-age daughter Maria. There are photos that attest to this — Maria holding me in her arms in the pool — which is probably what started my youthful fondness for Italian women. My older sister (five years my senior) played with Tony’s youngest son, Francesco, around that time as well. Francesco grew up and took a role in the construction company his father built, the same company that was threatening my colleague at my summer job.

As my siblings and I grew older (and less adorable), the relationship between our neighbors and us sort of soured. At one point, we were told that we were no longer allowed to swim in their pool (it was one of the only pools in the neighborhood; my family usually went to the community pool to swim). My brother (sixteen months my elder) and I would play baseball and football in our backyard, and every now and then, an errant throw would wind up with the ball in their yard and behind their fence. We would climb the fence, a metal white picket fence, maybe five feet high with sharp points at the top, and get the ball, but they had a big scary black dog that frightened us (not a lab, possibly a Rottweiler that was chained to a big doghouse in their backyard), and we broke the top part of their fence once or twice. The mother was an old Italian woman and she did not like us young children climbing in her yard, and she would come out through the patio door yelling at us. (She looked like Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life, but more Italian and mean, like the chef from the Muppets.)

I bumped into Francesco once before on another construction site in town. The crew was installing concrete curb along a road that was eventually named Michael Douglas Drive. It was not named for the actor but for one of Tony Cimato’s grandchildren (or great grandchildren), as were many other streets being built in the residential neighborhoods in my town. Francesco didn’t recognize me, and I wouldn’t have recognized him if it weren’t for hearing someone call his name. He was the foreman for the curb installation job. Francesco was not on the other site when Marty was threatened with his life, an incident that Marty took much more seriously than I.

After Marty’s complaint was rejected, he told me that he would tell me all of the town’s secrets he knew, an unflattering account from all of his travails, secrets he knew because of his politically powerful family, including how the mob controlled construction in town and how they kept it that way. Marty and I never had the conversation as I was to depart to California, and never return, in a month or so.

I was sitting in my cube when I told my boss that I had passed the EIT as he walked from the reception area to his office, which was adorned with Republican memorabilia, including a photograph of him with then-President Ronald Reagan. My boss stopped and smiled, and said, “Well, that is like taking a shit.” And then he continued with more career advice. “And the PE — that’s like taking an even bigger shit.” He was right.

§ [insert_php] the_ID(); [/insert_php] · Originally published [insert_php] the_time(‘F j, Y’); [/insert_php].

Social Butterfly

@jayharbinger

Another even shorter Twitter experiment. October 2009 through January 2010.

2009

  • 10/14 15:38 — Checking my Lycos email account.
  • 10/20 22:00 — Ending the TiVo experiment.
  • 10/22 21:42 — Better than hot pizza? That’s insane.
  • 11/09 11:47 — What is more exciting than the LinkedIn Network Update emails?

2010

  • 01/13 19:10 — So it seems the Jay Leno experiment killed two shows: Southland, and Conan’s Tonight Show.
TBD

Scene: May 1926

May 1926

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, five friends headed to the north coast to celebrate. They would not return. Mendocino.

When California was explored by the Americans and Europeans, they left behind destruction and blood.

The native populations were eliminated.

In one region of California, the natives fought back successfully and came to an understanding with the Californians.

The Americans were not to hunt ot use the land within the region of Big River, or the truce would be nullified, and the war would continue.

Mendocino.

Big River (the Mendocino War).

on the hill films presents… [black]

[sound of boots in & out of water]

When California was explored by pioneers in the 19th century, the Americans left behind destruction and blood.

[black / water sound]

The native populations were effectively eliminated.

[black / water sound]

In one region of California however, the native tribe successfully fought back.

[ black / water sound]

The tribe reached and agreement with the pioneers.

[black / water sound]

If Californians trespassed along the Big River, the treaty wold be nullified, and the war would continue.

[black / water sound]

In May 1926, five friends graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and went to celebrate along the north coast.

[black / water sound]

They would not return.

[black / water sound]

[Camera peels back to show a man walking thigh-high in a river, he has a fishing pole. There is a valley of trees on both sides of the river. a shot is fired, the man is hit on the shoulder, falls into the water.]

[From behind, the entrance of the water is deafening. When he comes up the noise of chaos, friends hollering, birds flying, animals scurrying.]

[The man gets shot again, in the upper chest, he falls back into the water. From behind, the fall into the water is deafening, no sound. When man comes up for air, the sound of chaos, water splashing, men yelling, animals.]

[The man gets shot again in the throat, when he falls in the water, silence deafening, blood, the screengoes black.]

Mendocino. –> credits

New Scene.

Cala (?), river, immediate gunshot, view from other angle, a friend’s point of view, He looks for shooter, high in the hills overlooking river, then he takes off running. Through the woods, pushing away branches, jumping over logs. He is running towards the campground, to get his gun. The sound of two more gunshots, his friends screaming and yelling. He is running for his life.

Cut back to scene in the river, another friend grabs his shotgun, was on the shore, on a rock, looks up towards hill, where shooter apparently is, man killed in background, other friends frantic, blood in the river, friends do not know to help or get out.

The friend picks up his gun, starts shooting return fire. Two shots.

—

Cut back to man in woods running, he gets to the campsite, can see it from above on overhead shot, then stops suddenly. The look of freight in his eyes/face, death is upon him.

A quick flash of an image, an image of a native, filled with revenge, painted, adorned, ready to kill, knife in hand. The sound of knife thrown, the face of friend, he gets killed. Silence.

Cut back to river scene, man shooting gun – twice more, the other two friends go ashore, looking for items, the attack seems to be over, they don’t know it. The friend with the shotgun comes ashore, they make their way to camp. End of scene.

Baseball Junto

First Come, First Served

The A’s have tried almost everything. They offer $2 tickets on Wednesdays (along with $1 hot dogs, although they are not regular-sized hot dogs; I also believe there is a limit of 10 per person per transaction). They have an all-you-can-eat section (a true-blue value of $35). But still their seats remain empty, thousands of them. You’d be hard-pressed to find a game more than half-filled, unless the Red Sox or Yankees were in town. And when you throw in the fact that the upper deck is permanently closed, the A’s are clearly struggling to bring the fans in through the gate, and that is an understatement. (It also doesn’t help that the organization has made it clear they are leaving the city, and quite possibly, the region altogether.) So what is there left to do?

First come, first served. That is my idea. (It is now trademarked.) All tickets $20. An hour before the game, $10. Once the game begins, $5. (Feel free to increase or decrease these values as you wish, depending on the stadium, team, opponent, day of the week, etc.) Any seat that is available is free to you. What would happen? Well, a lot of people would show up early to get good seats, right behind home plate, the dugout, etc. They may show up so early, grab that seat (no savesies however), then need to get a few hot dogs, nachos and sodas to hold them over until the game starts. That is revenue for the team (on the items with the biggest profit margin).

These first come, first served games shouldn’t be when the Yankees are in town, of course, but when the Royals or Twins or Orioles are. On the television, every pitch would show a full stadium behind home plate. That isn’t a bad thing. The real fans (those that stay with struggling franchises, those that come to the non-must-see games, those that fight the colder evenings) will be closer to the game and the players. That isn’t a bad thing either. Those fans are the team’s base.

When you are the A’s — and you are struggling — how could this not work? One Wednesday a month: first come, first served.

Baseball Junto

Run Disparity

As of this morning, the Toronto Blue Jays have scored 166 runs, and the San Francisco Giants have scored 84. For those mathematically inclined, that is y = 2x – 2 (where x and y are the runs the Giants and Blue Jays have scored, respectively).

This is not a clear-cut relationship for comparison however, since the Giants have played four less games. Also, the Giants are holding their own (currently .500), allowing a league-best 91 runs (again, prefaced by the fact they’ve played four less games than some teams).

Baseball Junto

Celizic Castigates A-Rod Unfairly Over Allegations

Mike Celizic, sportswriter, today…

That last allegation [that A-Rod continued to use human growth hormone (HGH) while he was playing with the Yankees in 2004] is what kills any chance he has of joining the immortals in Cooperstown. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true.

It should be noted that Celizic is one of the “unforgiving baseball writers who vote for the Hall of Fame” (his words, not mine). It shouldn’t be that way, of course. Hall of Fame consideration should be about what was done on the field, not hurt feelings. If the stated allegations are found to be true, which they may be, then that would be something to discuss. As of now, the allegations against Alex Rodriguez are just that: allegations.

There are likely hundreds of other players who have used performance-enhancing drugs, some of whom are currently being considered for the Hall of Fame, others who may already be in the Hall of Fame, and even more, current players who are being revered by sportswriters. Just because A-Rod is the biggest star to face this problem doesn’t mean he deserves the harshest of treatment.

Baseball writers these days are looking for someone to hate. Alex Rodriguez in a Yankees uniform just happens to be an easy choice.