Beaneball - The Blog

NBA Heavyweights

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:27:27 -0600

I've finally updated the NBA Heavyweights toy over in the right sidebar. The current top heavyweight is Boston, with a tremendous 9-1 record. Phoenix is the current beltholder, and has a 3-1 record. The next heavyweight championship bout is tomorrow, Thursday night, on TNT, against San Antonio (who came into the year holding the belt, but have just a 3-2 record in championship matches). This promises to be a knockdown, drag-out fight as the two teams play for the coveted Beaneball NBA Heavyweight Championship Belt. Phoenix, by the way, comes in having won three straight, while the Spurs have lost the same number in a row, getting beat twice by good teams (New Orleans and Utah) and once by a terrible team (Seattle).

Mucking about with the site again

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:32:37 -0600

I've undertaken a slight re-design involving adding a new left sidebar, adding some color, and cleaning up the backend to make it a little bit more readable for me (I'm bad at CSS, good at table-tags). Plus I kind of like the effect of the background grey bleeding through as "borders." That was unintentional, but I left it because I thought it looked kind of neat.

More site news

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 14:06:27 -0500

I think the site's been cleaned up. There shouldn't be any weird non-entries hanging around, the sidebar is populated, and I've pretty much got my backend configuration the way I want it. For those with RSS readers, you've got the ok to feed a feed to your aggregator now. They shouldn't be changing. By the by: note that one of Serendipity's built-in features is that you can subscribe to certain categories. So if you don't like when I write about books, movies, politics, or whatever, you can just subscribe to the baseball, or A's, category, and just get the articles that you find relevant. The page has a highly-generic look on purpose. My two to-do items are the style of the page (an A's blog ought to have A's colors, right?) and actually making my blogroll have links. If you come to the site any time soon and see weird things going on (the sidebar where it isn't supposed to be, funny colors, wacky rendering, whatever), know that it's because I'm tinkering and figuring out the page layout stuff. If I break something, it ought to be fixed in a matter of minutes. If you come to the site and repeatedly see some kind of issue (like one of those I mentioned above), email me or leave a comment, and I'll try to fix it. Thanks for your patience!

A new look? Downtime? What?

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 23:23:49 -0500

You will notice that things have changed around here. It's a longish story, but suffice it to say that I'm with a new hosting provider and new blog software. Actually, I'm pretty happy for the excuse to move to Serendipity, since it's pretty awesome-seeming so far. I've managed to get an import done of all my old b2evo entries, but there are sure to be some issues, maybe with linking and whatnot, so don't expect old posts to actually work or anything. The new host and new blog software also, of course, account for the significant downtime. They'll, finally, account also for changes in locations of RSS feeds. Sorry about that. I'd advise not changing your subscriptions just yet, because I've still got some monkeying to do behind the scenes before the dust settles for sure. I'll post again to say that things are fairly stable (as stable as they ever can be for an inveterate tinkerer) when that happens. Also, this isn't remotely what the site will look like when I'm done. This is the default template with default sidebars and everything else. Eventually, it'll probably look mostly like what it used to look like, at least as far as color scheme and stuff. Ideally, this will be done by the end of the weekend, but I make no promises that you should try to hold me to.

Site update and Adam Johnson

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 17:48:20 -0500

The new Bitty you see in the sidebar takes the Google News RSS feed for the search term "Oakland A's" and displays all the recent news it can find on the team. It's already paid dividends by showing me the story that Adam Johnson was signed by the A's out of Southern California's Golden Baseball League (the same one Rickey Henderson is playing in and, if I'm remembering correctly, the same team as well) and sent to Sacramento. Johnson's pitched in nine major league games, all with Minnesota, and hasn't really fared that well (ERA over 10, lots of homers and walks, few strikeouts), but his minor league career showed that he might have some talent (0.68 HR/9, 8.17 K/9, if a few too many walks), and he's still just 26. Besides, he must have been showing something to catch the A's attention in San Diego.

Site changes

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 04:24:43 -0500

I semi-extensively overhauled the backend of the site - ideally, the front end won't be affected at all (though you may have noticed the ugly green "blog" thing at the left - ideally, that's the start of a tab system that'll contain various sections of an expanded "Beaneball" that's more than just this blog). If your user experience is adversley affected in any way (or if your user experience sucks in the first place), don't hesitate to let me know.

Law blog

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 14:38:01 -0500

I've joined the blog of my Hampshire friend Brady, Non Compos Mentis. We're both going to law school in the fall, so the idea is to compare and contrast our experiences on the blog. Check it out!

Updated stats (finally!)

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:12:18 -0500

All of the stats listed in the sidebar have been updated through yesterday's game. I've also changed the Relievers page to only list those pitchers currently on the squad (and, hopefully, pitching out of the bullpen - hence the removal of Kirk Saarloos from the list). Notes from the stats, you ask? Sure. From the ARC reports: Rich Harden, despite missing about a month, is the A's most valuable pitcher so far, with phenom Huston Street not far behind. Street will probably actually lose value as he moves into the closer role because he won't be pitching in the high leverage "jam" situations he was in earlier in the year. Bobby Kielty holds on to the top hitter spot, with Mark Kotsay a fairly distant second. In an indictment of Oakland's offensive "prowess" so far, Jermaine Clark has been Oakland's third most valuable hitter in 2005.

Outage

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 13:01:50 -0500

Sorry for the long outage. Those of you who visited via the web got the message: I managed to exceed my bandwidth limit for the month. I thought I had 25 gigs of bandwidth available to me, but it turned out that I only had 10. I've upgraded to give myself 25 a month now, though, so hopefully this shouldn't be a problem anymore.

Updates

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 23:19:04 -0500

All the various stats and reports are being updated as we speak. Yes, finally.

A few non-baseball things

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Mon, 30 May 2005 18:09:25 -0500

On Saturday, we went and saw Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about public schools in New York City that have ballroom dancing programs. It was a pretty straightforward film, but I couldn't help but be impressed with the footage of the actual dancing competitions the kids entered. The crowd got very into it, awwww-ing at all the appropriate moments. I don't know whether it's playing widely outside of New York, but the opportunity to see 10 year-olds doing an impressive merengue and rumba should not be passed up. Last night, as I mentioned, we saw Crash, the Paul Haggis (the writer of Million Dollar Baby) film that grew out of his experience being carjacked in L.A. It was as bad as all the reviews said, unfortunately. A lot of good talent, including Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Ryan Phillipe, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, and Larenz Tate, went wasted. The theme of the movie, racism, would have been better approached in a much more subtle way. Modern incarnations of racism, after all, are more under-the-surface, more quietly insidious, than the view presented in the film, where everything, while mixed up and "not quite what it seems" (if the movie is going to traffic in so much cliche, then so will I), is quite overt: Matt Dillon is a blatantly racist cop; Sandra Bullock insists that her locks be changed again because a Latino man who she believes to be a gang-banger changed them the first time; a gun-shop owner calls an Iranian customer "Osama." We did get two great trailers, though: Hustle & Flow, also starring Terrence Howard as a pimp trying to make it as a rapper, which was all the rage at Sundance this year; and Rize, David LaChapelle's documentary about "krumping," a new dance form coming out of inner-city Los Angeles. The cinematography looks as fantastic as you'd expect out a renowned photographer and I expect that the dance moves will be as impressive as watching any extreme sports or And 1 video. Finally, I read the article in Sports Illustrated about online poker last night. As Wilson points out in this comment, it's really just an article saying, "College kids play poker online." It talks about people who made money, mentions a kid who's lost over $50k, and briefly says that colleges don't have gambling addiction programs, but that's really it. There's no real exploration of the issues of legality (that's relegated to a sidebar), no exploration of the addiction, no discussion of social and familial problems that are allowed to arise when money starts being lost hand over fist. Any or all of these themes would have made excellent articles on college kids playing online poker. Instead, we got something akin to Moneyball: a piece that was supposed to be about a larger point but devolved into a series of profiles of "interesting" people (the players were made much more intriguing in Moneyball).

Stats pages updates

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sun, 29 May 2005 21:37:56 -0500

The four major files (not the Leaderboard one) have been updated in the Stats section, finally. Many apologies for the long neglect. Interesting tidbits from those pages:

The A's offensive MVP to date is Bobby Kielty, which should come as no surprise.
The A's offensive LVP is Eric Chavez, which is also no surprise. There are only so many bases-loaded strikeouts a guy can have before his numbers really start to suffer.
The most valuable pitcher has been Rich Harden, which means his injury only hurts that much more.
The least valuable pitcher has been Joe Blanton, but that's with one huge drag due to his last game against the Devil Rays. Just above him is Juan Cruz, who's my real candidate for LVPitcher.
Huston Street, it's becoming clearer and clearer, is the A's best pitcher in the bullpen. Forget closer. Give him the ace reliever role, letting him work jams in whatever innings they arise.
The A's are on pace to lose anywhere from 99 to 105 games. No comment needed.

Ill-begotten Fame

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sat, 28 May 2005 23:32:02 -0500

So over at Superchicken.org, there's this:

In this week's Sports Illustrated, there is an article about how college students play online poker. I don't subscribe to SI to read articles about online poker. If I cared at all about online poker, I would just play online poker. Even then I wouldn't want to read an article in SI about it.in SI. Probably the best part of the article is how several times it namedrops game theory, which is probably not a direction the majority of SI readers are comfortable with going. I guess it's cool that the article was written by a former contributor to Beaneball.org, but basically SI is just crap that I throw in the recycling bin every Thursday night.

Well, ok, neat, except no, Daniel Habib isn't a contributor to my blog, nor has he ever been. Would that he were, because I think he's a good writer and one of the few forward-thinking minds that Sports Illustrated has going for them. I can see where the confusion comes, though, because I once wrote this, with the title "Daniel G. Habib," which could cause confusion. It turns out, of course, that said post is the seventh result returned by Google for the search "Daniel G. Habib". I happen, by the way, to be looking forward to reading that piece. The featured site in the artwork, Pokerroom.com, is where I do my poker playing, when it happens.

Bitty Browser

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Tue, 24 May 2005 22:56:50 -0500

Check out the sidebar for a new feature. The most recent comments left here are contained in a Bitty Browser which is scrollable and, more importantly, you can click the links and read the comments in that Bitty Browser. No popping up, no opening the link in the full window - it's all self-contained. Let me know how you like it (and watch your comments appear in the Bitty Browser! So meta!) so I can provide feedback. Interested in having your own Bitty Browser? Go to Bitty.com.

A link-up

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:49:46 -0600

I found Concerned (but Powerless) in my referer logs today and cruised over to take a look. Happily, I found this essay about ESPN that describes exactly how I feel about the site (ESPN, not the blog). We are in definite agreement about Scoop Jackson especially.