Top-5 Favorite Active Baseball Players

1. Felix Hernandez
2. Pedro Martinez
3. Curtis Granderson
4. Ichiro
5. Alfonso Soriano

Just missing the cut were Prince Fielder and Mike Cameron. Clearly I like me my rangy outfielders. Bonus points if they wear their socks high.

This list is subject to constant change.

New Digs

Yes, my new URL is my name. I know, I know, it's a bold move.

The reasons for the move are threefold:

1) With every at-bat that Jose Vidro steals from Jeff Clement I fear that I am closer to sullying OSU's good name with an obscenity laced tirade on this blog, previously hosted on OSU machinery.

2) There are some cool Blogger features that I couldn't use with the previous set up.

3) My new URL is my name.

Ease of Metaprogramming with echo

program:
> echo Hello World!

metaprogram:
> echo echo Hello World!

metametaprogram:
> echo echo echo Hello World!

In General
metaⁿ program:
> echoⁿ⁺¹ Hello World!

Eat your heart out Lisp!

Go Minaker, Go!

For those of you not from Lynnwood, WA, allow me to introduce Chris Minaker, Mariners minor leaguer and local hero. Chris and I were friends in middle school. We went to different high schools but kept in contact intermittently for the next few years, culminating in a tag football game where my lanky friends and I defeated Chris and his much-more-athletically-accomplished friends.

As a baseball player, he's an easy guy to cheer for. By all accounts he's smart and affable. And, for me at least, he's the kind of guy that makes you think you could have been a professional baseball player too, if only you had worked as hard as he did. He played baseball at Stanford, graduating with both bachelor's and master's degrees. His master's thesis, a study on steroid use in collegiate sports, has garnered some attention from the media. I followed his collegiate career pretty closely, then in 2006, went all giddy when he was drafted in the 10th round by the Mariners. Imagine, to have beaten a Mariner in tag football!

Signing quickly, Minaker started his professional career off very nicely in 2006, putting up solid numbers in a half season split between short-season Everett and low-A Wisconsin. His performance earned him an aggressive promotion to AA West Tennessee in 2007, where he really struggled. For the 2008 season he was sent back to high-A High Desert, and finally we get to the point of this post.

My good friend Andy, who follows baseball more closely than Bill James, sent me an email today with the following fact: Chris Minaker is second in all of baseball with 37 doubles so far this year. Trailing only Darin Holcomb of low-A Asheville (39), and ahead of major league leaders Brian Roberts and Ian Kinsler (34). A sorted list of all minor leaguers, across levels, can be found here.

Further research, courtesy of Andy, reveals that the California League record for doubles in a season is 55 (Richard Wilson, 1951). Minaker is on pace for about 53 right now.

Chris is a bit old for the California League and High Desert is possibly the best hitters' park in all of baseball, so scouts will take his success with a grain of salt. But still, there's nothing like breaking a 57 year old record to put you back on some prospect lists.

I'll make sure to check back in on this from time to time, as it's probably the most exciting thing going on in Marinerdom, but in the meantime, keep raking in those doubles, Chris! We're pulling for you!

Some Tips on Walking Efficiently

What is the fastest way to get from point A to point B when the constraints of city blocks prevent you from taking that hallowed "straight line"? The diagram below is a to-scale representation of part of my walk to school. The arterial on the left is NW 36th St., the arterial on the bottom is Harrison Blvd. The goal is to get from the blue circle (36th and Fillmore) to the blue star (32nd and Harrison) as quickly as possible.



The red and orange lines show two possible routes I could take. The orange path more closely approximates the optimal hypotenuse to the red path, but it's not really any shorter, since I can still only walk due south and due east, right?

No, actually. If each intersection were a point, and each street a one dimensional line segment, then it would be no different. But in fact, each street is a narrow rectangle, and being sleepy residential streets, I can walk their diagonals, thereby saving precious distance. In other words, my optimal route actually looks something like this:



Scoff though you might, even in this small example the optimal route is about 80 meters shorter than the naive route. Try telling this guy that's not a significant savings.

In this part of Corvallis, each block is 60m in the east-west direction and 80m in the north-south direction, estimated from Google Maps. A street, from the outer edge of the sidewalk to outer edge of the opposite sidewalk is approximately 15m. So the distance of the naive route is, 4 north-south blocks + 4 east-west blocks + 6 intersections interspersed throughout.

Naive route = 4*80m + 4*60m + 6*15m = 650m

For the optimal route we must calculate the diagonal of one block of an east-west street, and the diagonal of one block of a north-south street. These are just the hypotenuses of 15x60 and 15x80 right triangles, respectively.

sqrt(15^2 + 60^2) = approx. 61.8
sqrt(15^2 + 80^2) = approx. 81.4

Optimal route = 80m + 3*61.8m + 3*81.4m + 60m = approx. 570m

If we ignore the first and last blocks and only count the portions of each route that differ, the difference is 510m to 430m, more than a 15% distance savings over that portion of the route. Or put another way, a perfect diagonal would be 363m (a 29% savings), so we are actually closer to the hypothetical perfect route than the naive route.

Of course, with longer blocks or narrower streets, the relative improvement of this technique over a naive route will be smaller, while with shorter blocks or wider streets it will be greater.

An additional advantage to this technique is that by zigzagging through side streets you increase your chances of finding a corner parking lot, empty lot, or city park allowing you to cut even more meterage off your trek through diagonalization.

I hope this has been as enlightening for you as it was time-wasting for me. May you all get where you need to go more quickly and less sweaty.

New Dinosaur Discovered!

Badlands, SD - The scientific community is abuzz with news of a revolutionary finding made earlier this week. A new addition to the fossil records suggests that humans may not have been the first species on the planet to catalog lists of synonyms. The precise location of the find are being withheld from the public, but involved paleontologists are confident that the specimen is a new species of dinosaur in the Theropoda suborder, of which Tyrannosaurus Rex is also a member.

Philanthropist Eric Walkingshaw commissioned a rendering of the creature by Chris Chambers, world-renowned technical and scientific illustrator. Chambers' drawing, below, is based on photos of the site, paleontological descriptions and conversations with scientists.

Anniversary Duel: Update

The anniversary duel turned out to be as epic as the billing promised. As reigning first session champion, Allison got to select the terms of the fight: 7:00pm, first to 15 (win by 2), on the strip, under the covered basketball court outside Lincoln Elementary School (the premier fencing domain in Corvallis).

First I'll give a quick glossary of fencing terms, then a prelude in which I discuss our brief history fencing each other and how it influenced our strategies going in, and finally a description of the action. It should be pretty excitingly long-winded.

Glossary

beat - To strike the opponent's blade in an attempt to put them out of position.

deceive - Any move in which you attempt to avoid the opponent's parries prior to an attack.

disengage - To drop the sword slightly to either break blade contact or as a deceive while moving from one attack line to another. A double or triple disengage is to do this action two or three times quickly in succession.

coupé - A deceive in which you attempt to pass over the opponent's parries.

fleche - A risky running attack.

lunge - To lunge forward while you attack.

parry - A defensive move intended to block an opponent's attack. There are many different types of parries which are usually numbered, e.g. parry 2, parry 4, parry 6, etc. If a parry includes a circular follow-through, it is called a "circle parry" e.g. parry circle-4.

riposte - A quick thrust after a parry. Usually an easy way to score after a clean parry.

Prelude

In the first session championship Allison was getting me over and over with flamboyant double and triple disengages. "Flamboyant" meaning that they were much larger movements than you would normally do. Supposedly this is a bad thing against an experienced fencer, but against me it was extremely effective and she absolutely slaughtered me.

In our matches last week I was finally able to counter these consistently with parry 2's (a low-line parry not really intended to block that sort of attack), and I scored a lot of points on ripostes.

Going into the match I was planning on being much more aggressive than usual. My lunge and reach are longer than Allison's and when we free fenced the week before, I noticed that she was caught off guard a bit by my aggressiveness.

After the duel, Allison told me that she had been planning on playing more defensive, since I scored so many points on ripostes off of her aggressive attacks the week before.

The Action

My aggressive play paid off big in the early going as I jumped off to a quick 3-1 lead. At least one, maybe two of those points were on really clean circular deceives with no blade contact at all.

I could tell that Allison was caught a bit off guard by my aggressiveness so I only pressed harder, extending the lead to 6-3. I think all of Allison's points up to this points were off ripostes, as she wasn't being very aggressive and I wasn't giving her any time to think about attacking.

At this point I thought I was going to run away with it, as I had both a pretty good lead and a lot of momentum. I thought about toning it back a bit to avoid any hurt feelings, but Allison quickly forced me to reconsider. Deciding that the best way to combat aggressiveness was with aggressiveness, she started attacking like crazy. She scored two quick, clean points into my preparation (basically, she stabbed me while I was doing an elaborate attack), and pretty soon it was something like 8-7.

From here it gets a little harder to describe the action as it got pretty sloppy. We were both attacking like berserkers, moving back and forth on the strip. There was a lot of blade contact as our parries got wide and we tried to make up for lack of precision with lots of beat attacks. Our blades got bound up multiple times, I lost a tip (the little plastic thingy on the end of the sword), and things were basically just messy. Lots of simultaneous attacks, tons of off-target hits, and not a whole lot of scoring for the effort.

The most egregious point I scored was after an attack which Allison deflected so that my sword was flat against her side, I went into a sort of sawing motion and managed to catch her with my tip before she got in a riposte. It was ugly.

With the score approximately 11-10 or so, I decided drastic measures were in order if I was going to get the momentum back. I saw an opening and went for the fleche. Bad move. Allison avoided it easily and stabbed me on my way by to even things up. She said after the duel that I've never scored against her on a fleche, and looking back, I think she's right.

So it's all tied up and our instructor is desperately trying to get us to tone things down a bit and recapture our form. Surprisingly, we were able to do so. The next few points were all relatively clean (for us, anyway). I scored on a coupé into a low-line attack. Allison got me with a deceive. We both scored on a parry-riposte or two.

Pretty soon it was 14-13, advantage me. We're in en garde and I'm thinking about my final attack. Allison backs me up a bit, and then I attempt to recreate my beautiful coupé-to-low-line from a couple points before. Allison lunges as I coupé, a bold move and a really nice, clean point into my preparation.

So we're 14-14, about a half hour into the duel and it looks like it could go substantially longer. But I score a point relatively quickly on a double disengage to bring me one point away from victory for the second time. On the next restart, Allison goes into full attack. She had me pressed all the way back into the last couple yards of the strip and I'm frantically defending with nary a chance to think, let alone attack. We had to restart at least four or five times as Allison hit me off target or I bound her up just to slow her down.

Finally, there was a lot of frantic action that ended with us both standing there stabbing each other and it came down to the judge's decision. After some deliberation, the ruling was that I successfully parried the first attack and scored on the riposte, giving me the point and the duel. We took off our masks, shook hands, and Allison vowed vengeance.

Conclusion

All in all I'd say it was a wildly successful duel. It was definitely our most fun, long, and strenuous fencing match to date. And since we're both still kind of bad and sloppy, it's really fun to try to find the holes in each other's game. I think we may have an anniversary tradition on our hands.

Richie Sexson: Bailing Betancourt since 2005

USS Mariner, has consistently described Richie Sexson as "a terrible defensive first baseman" and even "the worst defensive everyday first baseman in baseball". While I normally agree with most of what they have to say, and acknowledge that they know a bit more about evaluating defense than I do, on this point I'm going to disagree, partly on the basis of new evidence, and partly because I've always liked the guy, and want to clear his name a bit as everyone celebrates his departure. I'm not here to argue that Richie Sexson was Doug Mientkiewicz with the glove, just that he wasn't quite as bad as a lot of people think.

The first and best information at my disposal is the PMR ratings from the last three years (2005-2007). PMR stands for Probabilistic Model of Range and, while no defensive measure is perfect, supposedly it's the best tool available right now. Unfortunately, the data on the other side of that link is pretty painful to sift through, but fortunately for you, I've already done the sifting. In all three years, Richie Sexson appears almost exactly two thirds of the way down the list. In 2006, he converted 98.84% of the outs PMR expected an average first baseman to make. In 2007 he converted 95.61% (2005 data doesn't include this relatively user-friendly stat). So clearly, Richie Sexson is a below average defensive player. But compared to Jason Giambi's 81.05% in 2006, and observing all the players below Sexson on the list, he's pretty clearly not the worst either. (Just for fun, Albert Pujols is the highest scoring regular in both years, converting 115.21% and 113.01% of expected outs into outs--that dude is amazing.)

And now for the new information. Today USS Mariner linked to this study about throwing errors saved by first basemen per 1000 throws from 2000-2007. It was linked to as evidence of John Olerud's defensive prowess (he finishes 5th with 4.2 errors saved per 1000 throws). Not mentioned, however, was the surprising name at #2, just below Doug Mientkiewicz and his vacuum-equipped glove: 6'8" Portland-native Richie Sexson saved 5.2 errors per 1000 throws. From 2000-2007, Sexson's extraordinary reach saved his infield from throwing errors at a higher rate than anyone in baseball, save Minky. Not only that, but he had the largest sample size of anyone in the top-10, likely making him the error-savingest first baseman of the decade thus far.

That is real value, right there. The difference between an out and a runner on either first or second is huge. The author of the study claims each error saved is worth about .75 runs, but if I understand linear weights correctly, that's the difference between an out and a single. If the runner ends up on second base, that number jumps over 1.

If my napkin calculations are correct, then based on the PMR numbers we figure Sexson to be a -5 to -10 run first baseman with the glove, and then we can give about 3-5 runs back to him for saving Betancourt and Lopez from about 5 errors per year. In the end Sexson comes out as a slightly below average defensive first basemen, not nearly the abomination he's made out to be.

Thanks for the good times, Richie. You'll always have a place in my heart, and at my Three True Outcomes altar for your overswinging ways.

Patrick Sheehan, My Biggest Fan

Well, faithful readers, I had been on the internet less than 24 hours before the first of undoubtedly many fan blogs appeared:

Some of My Best Friends Are Blogs

Clearly my charm and charisma are taking the internet by storm. If I am unable to keep up with posting links to every single fan site that is created, I trust you'll all take to the search engines and find them yourselves.

On a more technical note, I'm not sure I fully understand the complex nature of interblog relationships. As a post about a blog about my blog, is this post a meta-meta-blog post, or a meta-blog post, once removed? And this comment would then qualify as something like a meta-meta-blog meta-post, no? Classifying Mr. Sheehan's response is a dizzying proposition indeed.

Anniversary Duel

Allison and I have been taking fencing lessons for the last 3-4 months. I was a little wary at first because our classmates are all in middle school, but it's turned out to be a ton of fun and a pretty good workout. Allison and I have a vicious rivalry going. I'm up in the lifetime series about 5-2, but the two matches she won were in the spring session-ending tournament, knocking me out of the running and winning it for herself.

So, fencing is on Monday and Wednesday but next Monday is also our first anniversary. At first we were considering skipping out on fencing in favor of anniversary festivities, but then I had the best idea I've had all week: Anniversary Duel!

A normal match in fencing is to five points, a duel to 15. It's going to be epic. It'll be like Inigo Montoya vs. the Man in Black. Or Master Yoda vs. Count Dooku. Or that kid in the new Indiana Jones movie and that guy who was trying to kill him, but without the monkeys (unless we can find some monkeys). The winner will be forever immortalized in anniversary lore, and the loser will have to wait a full year for a chance at revenge.

Inaugural Post

Hello everyone, and welcome to my new platform for self-aggrandizement. If you don't know who I am already, frankly I'm a bit surprised, but in the interest of getting you up to speed, my name is Eric. I'm a computer science grad student at Oregon State University, bent on world domination. I am married to a really cool horse-tamer named Allison and have two cats, Klaatu and Gort. This blog will mostly be about what's going on in our lives and will probably be pretty boring unless you're into that sort of thing (hi, mom!). Occasionally it may feature posts of broader interest about baseball, programming or board games.

About the Title
I fretted about what to name this blog for about a week, then in the absence of any better ideas, went with the first name I thought of. It is inspired by the title of Kid Koala's album, Your Mom's Favorite DJ. I like Kid Koala, but mostly I just thought it was a funny name for a blog.

However, I recognize that this title is likely to be inaccurate for all readers (potential or actual) except for: me, my sister, my parents, Allison, my future children, and Patrick. To the rest of you, I apologize for implying anything untoward about your mothers.