Doing More With Less Since 1972

Tag: baseball

Daily Reading List — September 12th

The Launch Meeting – This couldn’t be more pragmatic.

  • What are the six things most likely to go wrong?
  • What will lead us to go over budget? Over schedule?
  • How will we communicate with one another when things are going well, and how will we change that pattern when someone in the room (anyone in the room) realizes that something is stuck?

A Bunch of Kids Adorably Mistook a ‘Game of Thrones’ Character for Elsa From ‘Frozen’ – A really cool addendum to this story…

Carrie is a friend of our niece. When they left the event, she came over to our kids’ birthday party (at a climbing gym). Those little girls were so ecstatic to see “Elsa” walk through the door for their birthday.

Big thanks to Carrie for making their day really special!

4 Unavoidable Steps To Building An Entrepreneurial Organization – That’s it. Just do these four things and you’re done. Can’t argue with any of these, but they are much easier said than done for sure!

The Simple Technology That Accidentally Ruined Baseball – Not sure about this. If enforced at all levels (big “if”) batters will catch up pretty quickly. I actually like the idea of using technology to analyze umpire/referee performance after the fact, but the instant replay stuff during the game is horrid. The call is the call.

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Life – Definitely outsourcing oil changes. But I do most of my own stunts otherwise.

Tweet Activity Analytics – Twitter’s analytics tool is super cool. But…yeah…probably not going to change the way I use Twitter at all.

Kuddle – Kid-safe photo sharing app. We’ve been reading the “Little House” series, along with some biographical information about Laura Ingalls Wilder. My offspring are keen to document their childhoods. Great tool!

Cloud Storage Is Eating The World Alive – Yes please. More please. Faster please.

Daily Reading List — April 25th

Triathlon Fatalities Aren’t Going Away – Really hope someone can figure this out. Everything I've heard is that most of the people who die are fit and experienced, but have an undiagnosed heart condition.

And, uh, we also really need to do something about the number of people getting mowed down by cars when they are out training on their bikes. I stay inside the house because of that. Also there is Netflix.

Inspiration and Outrage in Boston – Outrage! If you're worried about the integrity of bandit runners, stop using your company's computer and bandwidth to try and track down bandit runners using Twitter and Facebook.

Ronald McDonald gets a makeover – Ronald McDonald now *serious* about being creepy. No more messing around.

American Teamwork–How Ryan Hall Helped Meb Win Boston – Great story about sacrifice for your teammates. Ryan Hall has smarts real good.

Why There Will Be A Robot Uprising – Some touch screen devices seem to have already achieved the desired outcome of preventing people from turning them off. #NoDisassemble

Drone Footage of a Rocket Taking off and Landing is Spectacular – The takeoff and landing is amazing on its own. Drones for the +1!

Post-Run Yoga – I blindly clicked, guessing low lunge would be the first thing on the list.

Google’s Secret Weapon To Keep Amazon And Microsoft On Their Toes – Race to the bottom of prices with a concurrent race to the top on speed? Sounds good to me!

4 Manly Lessons from the Minor Leagues – Some great stuff in here for triathletes too, even if you aren't trying to be a pro or get some sort of sponsorship. "Dominate the things you can control." and "Action without vision just passes time." are two of my favorites.

Unfollow Chocolate Milk! – It's about time someone with a louder voice than me said it. I bet Kool Ade, Tang, and every other sugary drink company wishes they'd thought of this scam before the Chocolate Milk cartel did.

Weekend warrior: mastering the art of the triathlon humblebrag – Really, there's no reason to be humble about it. If you're going out and doing ultra distance events regularly, or kicking ass in your age group in short and mid distance events, you are a bad ass. You are MUCH more of a badass than 90% of the population.

Flaunt it while you have it. You're not getting any younger.

Penn State Rugby Team Suspended – Here's the thing–college kids like to drink cold beer and, apparently, set things on fire.

When you have a problem with scholarship Division 1 athletes behavior, you can expect to have similar issues with non-scholarship club sport participants.

Ok..it's probably fair not to expect them to set things on fire because they aren't happy with their coach, but still.

Daily Reading List — March 30th

How much pee in a pool would kill you? – Still, going to keep the chlorine numbers lower this year to be safe. #dontstoppeeing

Pets Vs. Cattle: The Rising Value of Cloud Computing Skills – Digits – WSJ – “'Now you shoot servers in the head and leave them in the field,'” said Joshua McKenty, a former technical architect of NASA who co-founded a cloud software company based on his work there called Piston Cloud Computing. 'Eventually enough die and then you swap out the whole rack.'"

Wait…is he talking about servers, or sysadmins?

The Hardest Problem In Baseball – I thought this was going to be about pajama pants being allowed as part of the uniform, or players not wearing stirrups.

Still cool though.

Google And Apple—Take My Fitness Data, Please! – The first one to solve the problem of fragmented fitness data is a huge winner.

"The smartest move for Apple and Google would be to avoid creating their own fitness apps, aside from very simple data-display tools. Instead, they should use their clout with developers—the stick of app-store approval and the carrot of promotion in those stores—to encourage app makers to strive for compatibility with one another."

The Logic of Long Distance: The Running Bum as Sad and Admirable – "The running bum intuits what the rest of us also know: life is short and it will fade for us all. In the end all instrumentalities of life, all the best-made plans, lead us all into the ground. His choice is noble, as it honors the present. He throws himself deeply into it without regard for futures beyond his experience."

Why the Wallabies struggle with the ‘choke tackle’ – Step 1: Change the law to award scrum to defensive side in failed mauls to discourage offenses from mauling and speed up the game.

Step 2: Change the law to give a defender on his feet less right to the ball in the tackle in order to give advantage to the attacking side and speed up the game

Result: Defenses now have TWO incentives to force maul situations, where they now have more rights to the ball than in the tackle, and a better chance at changing possession by forcing a scrum, thus slowing down the game.

Nice move IRB.

Lance Armstrong’s Fuel Guru Reboots. His Quest? Kill Gatorade – For those who want to go faster AND care about their health.

Disney bets big on visitor-tracking technology – The technology is cool, but the scheduling of Fast Passes isn't as nice as it sounds, and may cost them some revenue. For example, it's already less likely that we will wake up and decide to head to a park after lunch on the same day because we know we don't have much of a chance of getting Fast Passes for our favorite rides. As a result, guess where we DON'T end up having dinner and ice cream treats.

Sorry…I just had to post what I saw on Twitter today:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/JoseCanseco/status/127435700441321472″]

Um…sure. Ok.

Actually, this response was much better:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/CaughtOffBase/status/127436411858194432″]

I’m reading– January 12th through January 17th

Portraits of Financial Normalcy – Some financial personality categories from @daveramsey.

Eight Crazy Constitutional Scenarios – HT @kleinheider. This reminds me of those crazy scenarios that can turn up in baseball. In baseball, they seem to actually turn up eventually too.

BMI(wife) < BMI(husband) Means a Happier Marriage – Good news for me. Barring an amputation, no danger of this changing any time soon.

Elected Official Constitutional Knowledge: Disgraceful – HT @russm. Maybe they should not only read the Constitution at the beginning of each legislative session, but also explain it as well.

Record Foreclosures in 2011? – The bright side–these properties (at least the ones I've seen) all need a lot of work. When (if) they make their way back to the market, lots of money is going to be spent to get them habitable again. Even stuff like neglected landscaping that needs to be re-done means jobs for somebody.

Hope Is Not A Strategy (Training) – I like Amanda's approach personally. Stick to the schedule, and don't be a slave to the schedule.

The 5 states where housing will recover first – At least we can be warm in Florida while we wait.

Should I work for free? – Heh

Throwback Baseball Game To Benefit Parkinson’s Disease

old_baseball

There’s a throwback high school baseball game coming to Knoxville. In April 2010, Farragut and Karns will play a game to benefit Parkinson’s research. I got the heads up from my one of my rugby buddies, Pat Dorwin. Pat played on the 1982 Farragut State Championship team and later was a fixture for the Knoxville Possums. One word to describe Pat–“wheels”.

Both Pat and his younger brother have both been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and this is a great effort to not only recognize their accomplishments as athletes, but to use it as a platform to raise money for research.

I’ll be posting more on this as the date nears, but it’s cool that they’ve been able to put this game together.

For more information on Parkinson’s disease visit The National Parkinson Foundation.

Delicious Link Dump– October 26th through October 29th

Davidson County (TN) GOP Moves To Oust Ron Paul-Supporting Vice Chair – I've quietly followed this for a while. It seems to be a classic case of "I'll push you away so I can cry when you don't love me."

Facebook Grabs For The Entire Web – All your faces will belong to us.

The Key to a Happy Marriage…. – In every instance of this article, you can exchange the word "man" for "marriage", and it still makes sense. Just saying.

We Are Living in an Ayn Rand Novel – You know I always wanted to pretend I was an architect.

AZ County GOP Pols Squash 1st Amendment Rights – Republicans just can't stand to see Democrats doing something and not jump on the bandwagon themselves.

Sprint Drops Call Forwarding Fees With Google Voice In Mind – NICE!!! Just read yesterday that Google Voice would let you port your number and I was cursing my 2 year contract. Thanks Sprint for doing more for your customers!

Gallup’s Conservatives and Libertarians – Once you know how you should be labeled, is it easier to accept the label?

Susan Finkelstein Arrested, Prostitution For World Series Tickets – Dumb idea to start with. What guy with World Series tickets is going to trade them for sex?

Toxic Chinese Drywall Creates A Housing Disaster – Good to know about when looking for houses in Florida.

Rockslide Could Close I-40 For Three Months?!?! – Wow…good thing no one was hurt.

Unassisted Triple Play – I Been Could Do That!

I don’t keep up with baseball anymore, but Michael Silence brought my attention to an unassisted triple play over the weekend.

When you’ve had an athletic career as long and decorated as mine (I’ll pause for you to finish laughing) that’s been so well documented (again, laughter) it’s sad to say the highlight, if it can be called that, occurred as a five year old in tee-ball. Yeah, I turned an unassisted triple play in tee-ball. You have to remember that when we were kids the only real rule difference between baseball and tee-ball was the tee itself.

I was playing shortstop and there were runners on 1st and 2nd. I ran into the space (is it really the “outfield” in T-ball?) to catch a pop up as the runners were heading to 3rd and 2nd. Luckily, I understood the rules of baseball at an early age, even though these poor kids didn’t. So all I had to do was run over and step on 2nd and tag the runner coming from first (h kept running right for me). Voila! Triple play!

If you played for “the orange team”–we didn’t have a sponsor–you may remember it. However, you were only 5 or 6 years old, so I’ll forgive you for forgetting.

The Big Sports Post

I’m not into watching sports as much as I used to be. Like, hardly at all. But I saw two interesting things about sports today.

First, check out the card for UFC 100–the biggest event in the history of the UFC.

  • 265: Brock Lesnar (c) (265) vs. Frank Mir (c) (245)
    UFC Heavyweight Championship Unification
  • 170: Georges St-Pierre (c) (170) vs. Thiago Alves (170)
    UFC Welterweight Championship
  • 185: Dan Henderson (185) vs. Michael Bisping (186)
  • 185: Yoshihiro Akiyama (185) vs. Alan Belcher (186)
  • 170: Jon Fitch (170) vs. Paulo Thiago (170)
  • 205: Mark Coleman (205) vs. Stephan Bonnar (205)
  • 155: Mac Danzig (154) vs. Jim Miller (155)
  • 205: Jon Jones (206) vs. Jake O’Brien (206)
  • 170: Dong Hyun Kim (171) vs. T.J. Grant (170)
  • 185: C.B. Dollaway (186) vs. Tom Lawlor (184)
  • 155: Matt Grice (155) vs. Shannon Gugerty (156)

What would you have said 3 or 4 years ago if I told you that the light heavyweight fight at the UFC’s biggest event ever would get 6th billing and would feature Stephan Bonnar as its top name?

The UFC is all about the welterweights right now, huh?

The second cool thing I saw today was in a tweet from @alyssa_milano on 11 things that have happened only once in MLB. I was shocked at how many of these are from the recent past and how many of them I actually remember. But this was my favorite:

During the September 4th, 1908, game between the Tigers and Cleveland Indians, Schaefer was on first and a teammate was on third. The Tigers wanted to do a double steal — Schaefer would break for second, and, when the Indians tried to throw him out, his teammate would steal home. But when Schaefer broke for second, the Indians’ catcher didn’t make the throw, so Schaefer stole the base without the run scoring.

That wasn’t the plan so, on the next pitch, he broke back for first… and successfully stole it without a throw. Then, on the next pitch, he broke for second AGAIN, to try to make the double steal work… but again, the Indians didn’t throw.

That makes him the only player in MLB history to steal the same base twice in one inning. (And one of only two players to ever steal first base from second.)

More Evidence That Rickey Be The Greatest

The WSJ Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik, talks about the impressive numbers that Jose Reyes is putting up this year in stolen bases and the growing success of stealing in general.

It’s no surprise that Jose Reyes has stolen 63 bases and been caught stealing just 15 times, for a success rate of 80.8% — Reyes is leading all of baseball in steals.

That is impressive, and I’m not taking anything away from Reyes. But think about this…Rickey Henderson had the same success rate as Reyes, 80.8%, over a 25 year career! Additionally, while Reyes is leading the majors this year with 63 SBs, Rickey stole 130 bases in 1982!

Rickey also holds the records for most career steals (1,406), most runs scored (2,295), most postseason stolen bases (33) and several other records.

Rickey would probably still hold the record for career walks if not for Barry’s help from “the cream” and “the clear“. Rickey earned his walks by working the pitch count, and still holds the record for unintentional walks (2129).

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again–Rickey is the greatest. If you don’t believe me, ask him.

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