Daily Archives: November 19, 2009

From the Wikipedia: Old Faithful

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Sometimes you end up so deep into the Wikipedia web that you don’t even remember what started it. That’s what happened today.

From the Wikipedia: Old Faithful

Old Faithful is a geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It was named by explorer Nathan P. Langford because its eruptions happen so regularly, and because, presumably, it is quite old.

In a guide to Yellowstone Park written in 1883, Henry Winser wrote:

Old Faithful is sometimes degraded by being made a laundry. Garments placed in the crater during quiescence are ejected thoroughly washed when the eruption takes place. Gen. Sheridan’s men, in 1882, found that linen and cotton fabrics were uninjured by the action of the water, but woolen clothes were torn to shreds.

I don’t really see how that’s degrading the geyser. The geyser couldn’t care less if you threw some clothes down there. It’s just good use of a natural resource, that’s all.

I’ve been to Old Faithful and I was a bit disappointed. Not by the eruption — that part was cool — but by the geyser’s relative lack of faith.

When you get to Yellowstone, you’re all, oh man, I’ve got to get to Old Faithful in a half hour, she’s about to blow. And then there’s a buffalo on the road in your way, and at first you’re like, “Oh, hey, cool! Buffalo!”

But then in a couple of minutes you’re all, “hey, get out of the road you stupid buffalo, I got places to be.”

Because you think you need to get to Old Faithful right quick.

Not the case. You get to Old Faithful and they tell you the estimated time of eruption, and then say, essentially, “give or take 45 minutes.”

45 minutes! What is this? I came for Old Faithful, not Old Every So Often. I had been led to believe by too many science teachers to count that this thing went off every 90 minutes, like clockwork. But that’s not even close to the case.

Yellowstone Park is really cool, I should add, and there are plenty of sights to see that are way more awesome than Old Faithful. Like the big smoking puddle of yellow stuff, for example, because what is that stuff?

Did you know that Yellowstone Park is really just a giant volcano?

Actually, that understates the case. It’s often considered a supervolcano.

Supervolcanos = Awesome. Less awesome would be said supervolcano exploding. Really not awesome, actually. Like “maybe we all die” not awesome.

And it turns out, the Yellowstone Supervolcano generally erupts about once every 600,000 years, and it hasn’t erupted in about 640,000 years. So that’s a little bit frightening.

But luckily, based on what I know of Yellowstone Park’s sense of timing, it’s probably really 600,000 years plus or minus 300,000 years, so we could have up to 260,000 years left. And unless I somehow unlock the secret of immortality, I probably only need about 80, tops. My kids can deal with the whole thing with the ash blocking out the sun for years.

Some things about Bengie Molina

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You know what two words keep coming up around the Mets this offseason that really scare me?

Bengie Molina.

In his latest epic for MLB.com, Marty Noble, after firing off a few shots at out-of-touch bloggers, writes:

Bengie Molina and Rod Barajas are available and the Mets have their eyes on both. Barajas is younger and has more power. Molina has been a productive hitter with the Giants, but his thick body is 35.

OK, let’s define “productive hitter.”

In his three years with the Giants, Molina produced a 90 OPS+ over 1606 plate appearances. Over those same three years, the average National League catcher produced a 91 OPS+.

Does that make Molina a productive hitter? No. It makes him an average hitter for a catcher, which is kind of like being an average musician for a member of Nickelback.

Molina’s reasonable .742 OPS over that time is mostly fueled by his .440 slugging percentage. On one hand, it’s tempting to say that’s nice for a team that clearly lacked power in 2009. On the other hand, as Sam at Amazin’ Avenue pointed out today, a big part of the reason OPS is not a perfect stat is that it overvalues slugging in regards to on-base percentage.

And Molina’s OBP with the Giants was a miserable .302.

Not productive.

The good thing about how infrequently Molina reaches base, though, is that in the rare event he gets there, he’s an utter embarrassment. To the eye, he’s about the slowest player in the history of Major League Baseball. Statistically, he has regularly cost his team about 20 bases per season, according to BillJamesOnline.net.

Plus he’s 35, like Noble said, so he’s not getting any faster.

Defensively? Well, he moves about as well behind the plate as he does on the basepaths. Catcher defense is a tough thing to gauge statistically, but Driveline Mechanics recently put him right near the bottom of all Major Leaguers.

Here is one interesting tidbit about Bengie Molina: Five of the six players named Molina to ever play Major League Baseball have been catchers, and only three of them — The Cathing Molina Brothers — are related. The only non-catching Major League Molina was Gabe, a pitcher who wasn’t very good.

Joe Posnanski on Jeff Francoeur

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In the middle of a typically awesome blog post about the LVP (Least Valuable Player) award, Joe Posnanski discusses Jeff Francoeur’s candidacy:

I unfairly include him because:

1. He was so legendarily bad with the Atlanta Braves — .250/.282/.352 — that he was well on his way to winning the award before getting traded to the Mets.

2. He was so good with the Mets — .311/.338/.498 — that the Mets undoubtedly believe that he is back to being the guy who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. They will now be inspired to spend considerable money and effort to keep him in New York. And, hey, they could be right. He could be the player he was in the second half … and from everything I know about Francoeur, I hope that is what happens. He seems to be a great guy.

However, I would be remiss if I did not point out: They also could be wrong — after all, over his last 2,500 at-bats Francoeur has an 89 OPS+ and the defensive numbers seem to indicate that he has regressed into a below average outfielder. Francoeur could be a Riddler-like trap, and the Mets could be just about ready to fall in.

What he said.

Not that they shouldn’t bring him back for next year. They’re going to and it’s fine. It’s the locking him up for the future thing that’s concerning.

Read the post, I think I cited more of it than blogger integrity permits. Actually, subscribe to his RSS and read everything he writes.

Strong men also cry

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Man, could a bigger deal have been made over reports that Rex Ryan cried after Sunday’s loss to the Jaguars?

Look: I’m all in with Tom Hanks and “there’s no crying in baseball.” Baseball is a measured game, and features a 162-game season, so it’s certainly best the players and coaches not get too emotionally caught up in any one event.

Football, though? I don’t know. It’s different.

Maybe it’s something about the adrenaline that comes from the sheer physicality of the sport, the fact that 11 men on the field are, at any given time, trying their best to hurt another 11 men on the field. Or maybe it has something to do with how many fewer games there are, which renders each contest much more important.

Either way, I know this: I’m not a crier, but I’m certain that the hardest I’ve cried in the last 20 years was after my final high-school football game. That was a massively different circumstance than the one that prompted Rex to blubber, but there’s something about the sport, I think, that facilitates tears.

Heck, I even found coaching football — at the JV level, no less — to be a wildly emotional experience. Players used to joke about my sideline behavior when we watched the game films; I often tore down the sideline with on pace with the play if we had a long gain, and even more often blew up in the faces of referees.

And I’m really not a demonstrative guy.

It wasn’t about putting on a show or drawing attention to myself in any way, I was just caught up in the game. The players dug it, I think, because clearly I cared.

Sounds like the Jets felt that way about Ryan’s outburst, at least.

“It’s an emotional game and that just showed his passion,” linebacker Calvin Pace said. “If I was in that situation, I would’ve cried, too, man.”

“You want to win for a coach like that,” [Damien] Woody said. “Whatever the perception is outside is irrelevant. It means nothing. We know how Rex feels about this team and what he was saying.”

Members of the media can call it a sign of weakness or whatever, but, well, whatever. Let a dude show emotion over something he cares about.

Honestly, could this city’s media shoot itself in the collective foot with any more frequency? Does everyone really want to make it so that athletes and coaches never say or do anything interesting, just to avoid the nonsense that inevitably follows?

Items of note

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This is one of the most interesting things I’ve read about baseball this offseason. I have no idea who to believe — smart money says no one here is entirely accurate with his figures — but it’s certainly an important and concerning topic.

Friend of TedQuarters Eric Simon weighs in on inefficiencies in the pitching market, and saves me a lot of legwork the post I was planning on Jon Garland. Garland’s not great, mind you, but he stays healthy enough to pitch 200-some passable innings every year, and that’s a valuable thing.

The debate over whether steroid users belong in the Hall of Fame continues. My stance? Consider their achievements in context of the era’s offensive outburst, but let the deserving guys in. I outlined this here, in a column that got very few eyeballs because it came the morning of the Jeff Francoeur deal:

There’s talk that four of the very best players of this or any era — Manny, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds — should be excluded from the Hall of Fame. I like the Hall of Fame, and I fear if those men don’t make it in, the honor will someday seem like the Gold Glove Award or something, like some sort of pageant that bears little correlation to actual accomplishments within the game.

Frank Isola says Donnie Walsh might just be waiting on James Dolan’s go-ahead to sign Allen Iverson. Do it.