Lincecum Cy

WOW! That was totally unexpected. I thought for sure Wainwright would win it, if only because he had a ton of wins and voters seem to not like voting guys in consecutive years. Awesome that Lincecum won though. He was, after all, the best pitcher this year not named Grienke. Does anyone else find it slightly exciting that the two Cy winners this year had only 16 and 15 win totals? This was the second crazy awesome year Tim has put up now, I'd feel pretty confident in saying he is the top pitcher in mlb heading into next year. Really between Tim and Doc Hallady at this point in my mind, but I'd give Tim the edge if only because he's younger and seems to be improving. I kind of hope the Giants get him on an extension soon, that poor team would be nothing without The Freak.

Bailey ROY

Normally this sort of award would warrant a happy post, but as I am in a wretched mood at the moment, prepare for the opposite. Brett Anderson deserved to win the award. Bailey was great, but Anderson was simply incredible. People are making a big deal of how Bailey skipped from AA to the bigs, well guess what guys, so did Brett fucking Anderson. Anderson was not only the best rookie pitcher, he was one of the better pitchers in baseball. He had a 3.69 FIP, 23rd in MLB. That's better than Matt Cains supposed "break out year" and over a full point better than Mr. 3rd place Rick Porcello. Retarded. Andrus was certainly good this year, but Anderson was nearly elite. Porcello simply sucked. Niemann was alrite, but I don't see much argument for him over Anderson. Baseball awards are retarded, or rather, the voters for them are. Normally wouldn't care enough to do this, but again, bad mood, anger needs to be vented somewhere. With that said I'm gonna do the unthinkable, turn in before 1 am. How long has it been since I got to bed this early, I wonder.

Life Loves to fuck with me

Summary of my weekend:

Saturday: awesome

Sunday: GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

It's a horrible cycle I'm realizing. If I didn't procrastinate, Saturday wouldn't have been so great, but then again Sunday wouldn't have been so bad. In hindsight I'm still glad I chose to take a break Saturday, but still Sunday felt like a huge step backwards.

Apocalypse Avoided

My computer crashed yesterday. I was really sad. The screen all of a sudden freaked out, pink lines crossed everywhere, and then it rebooted. Well, attempted to reboot, it simply turned off, turned on, and failed to load windows. I ran a emergency windows repair scan and managed to salvage it, except whenever I start it, the screen has horrid and indiscernible graphics, and it eventually freezes anyway and I am forced to reboot. I figured it was probably a video card issue, and pretty much assumed I was fucked. But then a stroke of genius! I remembered I specifically bought the high end model of this laptop so I could get that stupid dual graphics card switch so I could, on the fly, go from game mode to stamina mode! After 3 years I realize it was probably a stupid idea, I never use stamina mode. BUT! I thought, maybe, just maybe, the high end graphics part of the card crashed, but perhaps the stamina part still functions?! And guess what, so far so good. Man did I luck out...at least I think I did.

Fuck Curves

I'm currently failing psych 10. I don't go to class (tho i did today!) so it should be expected I guess, but I'm slightly angry. My first midterm I got a 16/30 and recieved something like a D+/C-. 2nd score that I checked just now I got a 18/30 and got a straight D. What the hell. yea the score is still shit, but come on. god, now I gotta actually study, rape the shit out of the final, hopefully get a C in the class. still cant figure out why im in psych in the first place. for a top academic school, this place has some really stupid policies.

3rd Base

Read this little guy and was a bit surprised. I kind of just figured we would plug some random dude (i.e. adam kennedy, joe dillon, etc.) in until cardenas or wallace looked ready. And hell, maybe that's what the A's mean when they say they looking to acquire a third baseman. But my reaction was pretty much just "Brandon Wood please." If Wood is available, I want us to get him. I've no idea why the Angels hate the dude so much, but he just keeps on mashing down in AAA. The Royal boys I'm not so interested, Alex Gordon is gettin expensive soon (plus hes been pretty shitty) and Josh Fields is very meh. Wood however is young, cheap, awesome (I know the bat is awesome, is the glove good too? I remember he was a shortstop not too long ago...maybe good at third?), and inexplicably hated by his organization. If they do resign figgans (pleeeeeeease do so, i'm talking multi-year bank breaker) they will pretty much have no use for Wood. Doubt it happens though, somehow I doubt the Angels would be willing to a) sign figgans to a long term deal and b) deal Wood to a division rival. I hope they do though, its gonna suck if the angels finally realize how good that kid actually is.

1 full year

on this web log. It looks exactly the same as when I made it too. Makes me kind of sad, I wanted to make a banner involving some curry I made back in the summer, but then I realized curry looks like poo. Not just any poo either, like diarrhetic poo, an lets be honest folks, not even the sickest people want to see that. So the log continues to look meek and boring. The content remains mostly the same though, lots of baseball ramblings, video game wishlists, a fair amount of school rants, a few depression posts thrown in during finals times for good measure. Been thinking about new tags to create, but I'm not sure what they would be. Kinda happy with "Indiscriminate," covers all bases nicely. Well, change is best applied slowly...or quickly if you prefer it, doesnt really matter. I'll try an spiff up the feel of this place here in year 2, try an see if that stupid fangraphs app is fixed or somthing.

MVP = Matsui? ...seriously?

I like Japanese ball players. Irrationally so, I'll defend Kaz Matsui's spot on a mlb roster any day, even if in my heart I know any AAAA scrub could do what he does. I don't care about award voting, especially not post season award voting. But seriously? Matui barely even played rite? I thought they were platooning his ass. I dunno, maybe he has been playing, I havn't followed the playoffs at all really, but I thought that A-rod or jeter or sabathia or someone who was actually like playing awesome would get the award.

Matsui winning the award isn't what really bothers me. I think this just makes me sad because, in the last few years, I've taken some enormous leaps in my understanding of how the game of baseball works. I look at a slew of different statistics when trying to evaluate players, and I read constantly about statistical analysis of the game from other sabermetric inovators in hopes of further expanding my understanding. And yet this stupid award pretty much tells me the rest of the country is still in love with rbi's. I get that most baseball fans are ignorant of sabermetrics or just dont care. I really don't care if they believe in more advanced statistical analysis or not. But the rbi bugs me for some reason, in the same way the W-L record bugs me, in that it is so obviously useless when evaluationg player talent, yet it is still used like the fucking bible.

W-L record is starting to crack, you can see even traditionalits admitting it is a team statistic, not a pitcher stat. rbi not so much though. The thing about these two stats, as a 10 year old who fell in love with the daily boxscore in the sporting green, I could see how fucking stupid they were. I used them to evaluate palyers, I didn't know any other way (well not really true, I thought ERA was the perfect pitching stat and I loved batting average, homers, and runs scored. Don't know why I liked runs scored, I think maybe because its called a fucking "run" it sounds super valuable.), but I could see that they were more circumstance then skill. And I was 10! How can full grown adults, hell how can "baseball people" who have been working in the game all their life not see what I saw as a pre-adolescent?

I hate to go this direction with this post, but heres the bomb I've been waiting to drop: RBI's are the reason I have no fucking hope for humanity. Hyperbole, maybe, but think about it for one second. There is no way a rational person could accept that rbi's are an accurate indicator of one's offensive skill. Real quick: Kurt Suzuki had 88 rbi this season. That is a nice number. I love kurt to death, but he is not a good hitter, I don't think he is even league average. Lets find someone with a lower total...say Justin Upton. Upton had 86. Not that big a difference, but my point is that in no sane world are Justin Upton and Kurt Suzuki's offensive production comparable. A baby could tell you that, everyone in the fucking world knows that Justin Upton is fucking awesome and that Kurt Suzuki is merely awesome by catcher standards(also he's Japanese, no wait for it, Hawaiian Japanese).

Why would such a stupid stat hold such a place in our hearts then? Groupthink? People are retards? Both? It's mind boggling. How the hell did rbi's become so popular? Who invented this dreadful statistic, and how did he market it so damn effectively? It's on par with Hitler brainwashing Germany into thinking they needed to off everyone without blonde hair. Completely and utterly nonsensical, yet people believe it! OK not that bad, rbi's arnt Hitler (yet), but what I'm trying to say here is, "wake the fuck up, people." It doesn't take a genius to figure out someone is bullshitting you, and the mainstream media bullshits us a billion times a day when it comes to baseball.

愛のむきだし

Wow. Really just wow, this movie was incredible. 4 hour epic, but every lasting minute is thoroughly enjoyable. Runs from hilarious to utterly depressing at the blink of an eye, and it just portrays these emotions so, well, its hard to say believably, but it is.

The strangest thing about it is that this movie starts out absurd, and it stays absurd til the very last moment. It never tries to be anything else besides completely and utterly absurd. And yet somehow that absurdity feels one hundred percent genuine and real. I feel like this is impossible to explain. You have to see it to believe, you would never know that screaming arguments over someone having a boner could be so intensely dramatic and heart wrenching. Seriously I'm convinced its pure genius. I mean all I could think during moments like this was "...wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf this movie is so fucking weird wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf..." and yet I was completely drawn into the moment. I hung on to every word, affected by every line and expression given by the actors. Without question one of the best satire movies I've seen, one of the best movies in general that I've seen in quite a while.