Hey... Listen!

Adron Chambers, Jameson Maj, and Joe Hage



The theory of Fielding or Defense Independent Pitching originated with Vörös McCracken's 1999 posting on rec.sport.baseball.analysis. His insight was that pitchers have no control over whether balls in play turn into outs or hits, outside of balls that he fields himself, but that pitchers have direct control over walks, strikeouts, and home runs. (The Three True Outcomes, not his term.) This caused a revolution in the way pitchers are evaluated and it's turned out to be true that the best way to predict how well a pitcher will perform in the future is by looking at these peripheral 3TO statistics.

The theory been considerably refined since 1999. Tangotiger developed the weights to normalize McCracken's DIPS theory to the current version of FIP, using this formula:

FIP = NC + (HR*13 + (BB+HBP-IBB)*3 - K*2)/IP

NC in that formula is a normalizing constant that needs adjusting for league and era—but for quick and dirty calculations, it's 3.20. Dave Studeman refined FIP to xFIP by replacing the actual count of home runs allowed to 11 percent of flyballs allowed by that pitcher, since flyballs that make it to the track and those that clear the fence by a few feet aren't something the pitcher can control—doing this removes some element of luck from the equation.

I think we can do better, though, since, contrary to McCracken's initial observation, most pitchers have ball-in-play tendencies that are predictable year-to-year. Pitchers like Johan Santana who induce a large portion of flyballs of the total number of balls in play allowed usually maintain those high flyball rates throughout their careers, same goes for groundball pitchers like Brandon Webb. Crucially, different types of balls put into play are converted into outs at different rates. Pop-ups very rarely land for a hit, flyballs are caught at a fairly high percentage, and groundballs are converted at a lower rate. Line drives tend not to be converted into outs very often at all. Fangraphs now publishes a statistic called xBABIP (explained here). The acronym expands to eXpected Batting Average on Balls In Play, and is calculated using this formula:

.15 * FB% + .24 * GB% + .73 * LD%

Per their parameters, then, flyballs are expected to be caught 85% of the time and land safely 15% of the time, groundballs turn into outs 76% of the time, and 27% of line drives should be caught in the air. Since pitchers do have some control over the type of balls in play against them to some measurable degree, and the type of ball in play allowed has consequences that effect both home run allowed rate and BABIP generally, discussed some here by Derek Carty, these factors can be modeled into an unexpected DIPS-style statistic that ought to be a better predictor of a pitcher's future performance.

Clumsy Segue

There are no "line-drive pitchers" that have any sort of success in professional baseball since line drives are clearly undesirable types of balls in play due to their being unplayable nearly three-quarters of the time. Line drives mean that the batter squared up on the pitch and hit it hard. From start to start, month to month, year to year over a pitchers' career, his line drive rate'll vary some with the quality of his stuff, the quality of opponents he faces, the hitter's background, blind luck, or any number of things in varying degrees of his control. That variability in LD%, the quality of the defense he pitches in front of, and the pitcher's strand rate—measuring in a way the clumpiness of balls in play unconverted to outs—are the primary factors that account for the unpredictability of a pitcher's ERA from year to year. Good pitchers strike out a lot of batters to reduce the fickleness of balls in play, don't walk many batters, and tend to control well how balls are put into play against them, either on the ground or in the air, but rarely squarely hit for line drives.

This brings me to my favorite pet prospect, the 45th rounder Jameson Maj who threw 5 innings of 4 hit ball tonight, allowing 2 unearned runs to score. He walked his third player of the season—all lefthanders. Maj had been giving up far too many line drives lately, but in his last game before tonight, he'd allowed none. Tonight, three batters hit liners off of him and all three went for hits, including the 3rd inning double that was the key to scoring those two unearned runs off him. He's still striking out batters in bunches and walking very few—he's at a sparkling 27:3 k:bb in 31 innings. But 21% of the balls in play against him are line drives—hitters are making solid contact too frequently. The full breakdown of balls in play look like this so far this season:

Bunts: 0.0117647058824
Popups: 0.105882352941
Groundballs: 0.458823529412
Flyballs: 0.211764705882
Gliners: 0.0588235294118
Liners: 0.152941176471

The groundball percentage is great, especially for a pitcher with this kind of strikeout ability. Popups are the best kind of ball in play you can induce, but they're hard to get—there are more ways to make a ball sink unexpectedly to get groundballs and only one way to make a ball fail to sink as expected to get a popup. I didn't differentiate college flyballs and popups, but I'm pretty sure the popup rate was higher in college than here, although 10% of balls in play being easy outs that don't advance runners is a solid, healthy rate. I suspect (straight BS'ing here) that part of the line-drive problem may come from using a riding four-seam fastball as an out-pitch and to get those popups—batters are just guessing right on them sometimes and hitting 'em hard. No way to tell from recaps.

I should note, too, that the BIP-type listed above as gliners are only those seeing-eye line drives that were caught by infielders on the fly—these aren't the worst kind of contact to give up and there's no way to tell how many of the plays classified as liners were this kind that simply weren't caught by an infielder. Gliners tend to land for singles if they aren't hit right at an infielder, and if they're caught by an infielder with a runner on base, they go for double plays fairly often—occasionally triple plays. Still, the line drive rate's going to have to get cut down going forward. My guess is he gets it under control as he learns how to use his repertoire better against pro batters. Here's hoping he does it for Quad Cities, unless the organization is committing to bringing Maj along as a starting pitcher.

Never got around to writing up a big post about the Spring Training trip, but here're a few more pictures:Yours Truly at Roger Dean




Inside of Roger Dean with the former STL Browns visiting




Brian Barton batting against the Marlins




Birds on Posts

Labels: minor leaguers

Worked all day, played softball (went 2-5, lined into a DP, struck out to end the first game of the doubleheader), finished my vegetable garden very, very late in the season, and sang some tunes:

Danzig: Mother

Blues Image: Ride Captain Ride

Joy Division: Love Will Tear Us Apart

Labels: rock out

I had a .wmv copy of Don Hertzfeld's "Rejected" animated short years and years ago. I lost the disk it was on and for a long time it was difficult to find, so it'd been a long time since I'd seen it. Now it's up on youtube and some of my colleagues at work had never seen it.

It's a brilliant work of art, in addition to being hilarious, so if you haven't seen it ever or recently, behold:



In other news, I've surfed this beach when sharks were swimming about, fins a'glintin'. Blacktips, though, and not showing off like that.

Labels: comedy

This is a very cool robot.

Check out the clip in the video when the handler kicks it.

And this is a brilliantly funny spoof.

Labels: comedy, tech

See if this works.

About three or four years ago, I'd been up all night writing a piece of software for a research project. I finished at around 4 or 5 in the morning and was very pleased with myself. Crashed for a few hours then went to get the work off my laptop. The laptop wouldn't boot, though. After about an hour of cussing and googling, I found that my hard disk had somehow platter locked itself, meaning that it had physically locked down the disk until I keyed in some password. At the time, it looked pretty much un-breakable: the disk had to be powered down after five failed attempts to guess the password so a brute-force method wouldn't have worked to crack it back open. The best I could find was a solution to get an identical, unlocked disk and swap out the platters.

Searching around just now, I came across that very simple solution that people in several online forums report to work very well. Apparently the platter lock mechanism has two different passwords, one set by the user and a master password set at the factory. If true, I'll have access again to a huge amount of pictures and music that'd been lost to me for a long, long time—in addition to that since re-written piece of software.

Labels: personal nonsense, tech

I'd argued that trading for Mike Hampton would be a smart high-risk, high-reward move in the offseason. To a mixture of irritation and bemusement for the Braves fans, he injured a pectoral muscle warming up for his first start of the season and has been on the disabled list ever since. His rehabilitation has gone well, though, aside from one bad start in the Sally league in which he wasn't helped much by his defense.

His penultimate rehab start was a masterful outing, a five inning performance with six strikeouts and seven groundball outs to two in the air. His final rehab start will be tomorrow for the Braves' AA affiliate, according to Sean Horgan in his write-up of the A+ start. I'll be keeping any eye on that start, of course.

Labels: Trade

Back in December, I picked three sleepers in the Cardinals system, unheralded players in the low minors that I thought would break out this season. Now that the 2008 draft is behind us and the short season teams have started, all three players are assigned to teams and putting up numbers that can be evaluated.

The first of these players was Juan Mosquera, who I liked on the basis of the solid batting eye he showed last year in the DSL. He's a switch-hitting shortstop who walks a lot but hadn't shown any power. Figuring he had plenty of room to grow and will be playing in his age-20 season this year, I thought some XBH ability might show up in a hurry this season. He's still listed at 154 pounds, so there's no evidence that he's filled out his frame during the off-season. Assigned to the Gulf Coast League, he's possibly behind younger middle infielders on the depth chart. He's yet to record an at-bat or play in the field, although he was used as a pinch runner in the first GCL Cards game of the year. It's also possible that he's recovering from some sort of injury that's relegated him to PR duties. Hopefully he gets into a game soon and stops making me look like a damned fool. (And recovers fully, if he's injured.)

Too early to say whether this was a bad sleeper pick or not, but early signs are not encouraging. He almost certainly will not move along as quickly as I'd optimistically hoped for. (Make it to the FSL by the end of the season.)

Non-sleeper and Cuban defector Ryde Rodriguez has yet to impress with the bat, but so far in the five games the GCL Cards have played, he's recorded two outfield assists. That's something worth noting.

The second pick was Brian Broderick, a tall RHSP drafted in the 21st round last year who had excellent control numbers as a collegian and a rookie in the professional leagues. He's gotten good results, with a 3.79 ERA through 18 games with Quad Cities. He's made one start since the tandem system was abandoned at QC, pitching 7 innings of 1-run ball on Wednesday. His strikeout rate has fallen off dramatically this year, from 7.12 per nine over two levels in 2007 to 4.29 strikeouts per nine innings this year. He's still not walking many batters: 1.36 per nine so far this season. A good number, but not the sparkling 0.94 per nine of 2007. A note I made in the original post was that he'll need to improve against lefts this season and that hasn't happened. Against right handers, he's an extreme groundball pitcher. Lefthanders hit line drives and home runs off him far too easily, something he's certainly working on improving.

In his start Wednesday against the A's Class-A team, he faced a lineup featuring six left-handed batters, including Shane Keough, whose mother might be recognizable to any ladies into "reality" television or fellas with a copy of the November 1980 issue of Playboy. He faced those six batters a total 18 times, collecting two strikeouts, five groundouts, three popups, three flyballs (one for a double), and five line drives: three for singles, one for a double, and one caught by Tommy Pham.

Broderick has yet to gain any vocal advocates in Cardinal Nation that I know of, but he's having a quietly successful campaign and emerged from the tandem portion of the season thought highly enough by his coaches to earn a spot in the rotation. My expectations of him for this season were to "dominate" at Class-A all season and to skip to AA in 2009. He's got enough season left to bring his strikeout rate up and to continue improving against lefties. A couple outings like his June 10th, 8K performance against the Cubs' A-ball affiliate would be nice to see. I'll tentatively call him a successful sleeper pick.

The third sleeper pick was Jameson Maj, the closer at Abilene Christian University drafted in the 45th round of the 2007 draft. He'd only pitched 1 1/3 innings last year after signing a contract to join the Cardinals' farm system on the last day possible, striking out two. But he was nails in the wooden-bat Texas Collegiate League and in college, although admittedly at the D-II level. Over those three levels of competition in 2007, he struck out 100 batters while walking only seven. He allowed one home run in his last season of college, in one of the first games of the year. The rest of the time, he did almost nothing but get ground ball double-play outs, strikeouts, and pop-ups. Big kid (6'4", 225), excellent control, excellent balls-in-play tendencies.

I saw him at Spring Training this year, and introduced myself to him as a Jameson Maj fan, something he seemed more than a bit amused by. Nice guy, confused that I knew his amateur peripheral statistics from the 2007 season. Says he doesn't like walking batters. He told me that his elbow came down with some soreness last year at Batavia, explaining his limited usage there as the season wound down. I didn't get to see him pitch at all at Jupiter and was worried that his elbow discomfort would spoil opportunities for him this season. He said he'd be assigned to Extended to get the elbow in shape for professional pitching.

At the time I wrote the sleeper post, I had hopes that he'd start off as closer for QC and be promoted as high as AA before the end of the season if he performed as well as I expect he can. He was assigned to short-season Class-A Batavia again and has found himself pitching in a tandem with Ramon Delgado. He's pitched in two games, starting on June 18th, putting up a line of 4IP, 2K, 1BB!, 6H, and 6R, four earned. He induced two flyballs: one caught, the other went for a single; twelve balls on the ground: one a double-play ball to end a poorly defended third inning, six more fielded cleanly, one thrown away by the 3B, and four that got through the infield defense; and one line drive for a single.

In his second outing on Monday, he pitched the last five innings, allowing no runs on three hits, striking out five and walking none. In that game, he allowed three fly balls, two of which were caught and one that went for a double; four grounders, two for singles and two that were fielded cleanly; two pop-ups on the infield; and three line-drives fielded cleanly by infielders. A very strong outing.

The coaches obviously think highly enough of Maj to put him in a tandem. I'm guessing they're keen to get him plenty of innings to evaluate what they've got in his arm instead of doing it to convert him to a starting. So far, so good. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if he's promoted to the QC bullpen very soon.

Update: Way to make me look good, guys. Maj's next outing featured far too many line drives again (and another walk), Broderick threw the worst game of his career (I'm guessing), and Mosquera still has yet to play. Fortunately, I've got a day job.

Labels: minor leaguers

I got to sub in for the Embassy Tavern softall team last night in a double-header double-asskicking, batting tenth and playing catcher. (Check out the band schedule at their website. They've got music booked every night of the week but Sunday now. [If you generously characterize my caterwauling at Wednesday karaoke as music.])

I batted the weakest 3-4 you'll ever see. The first pitch I saw was a ball that would've landed a few inches in front of the plate, but I chopped at it and hit a soft grounder to the firstbaseman, who picked up the ball a second after I ran past him to reach safely. The second pitch I saw a half-hour later was slapped under the first baseman's glove and the second baseman couldn't field it cleanly so I reached safely again on my second infield single. I took a pitch in my third plate appearance then lined softly in front of the right fielder for another single. In my fourth and final PA, I wanted to continue the incremental increase in distance I was hitting the ball and put a hard swing on a 3-2 pitch, but took my eyes off the ball and struck out. Shameful, man. I scored at least one run in there.

Defensively, I caught all two or three pop-ups to my zone and had two plays at the plate. Blue said the runner slid under the tag on the first one, but I got a quick tag on the runner for the second play. The first play shouldn't have even happened, but I foolishly threw down to 2nd with runners on first and third to try to get a basestealer. The runner on 3rd stole home after the throw. The shortstop's throw back to me was perfect, just didn't make the play.

Had a ton of fun playing, though. Unfortunately, one of our players dislocated his shoulder sliding safely in to second. His pinch-runner scored and his shoulder was re-located at the hospital and he'll be fine, so that worked out about as well as it could've.

Labels: bragging

My cable provider, Comcast, is on the verge of picking up the Big Ten Network, which will allow me to watch all sorts of Illini basketball, football, volleyball, etc., at home instead of needing to go to satellite-equipped bars (two of which are in my top three bars in town, anyways). That's outstanding.

I understood both sides of the stand-off. The BTN didn't want their channel shunted off to an extra sports-tier package where it wouldn't be seen by most of the fans and Comcast didn't want to pay through the nose for the programming. The prolonged negotiations dropped the price Comcast is paying almost in half which would certainly be passed on to the customer—and then some. The thinking around here was that no deal would get done after the football season came and went—that Comcast had weathered the storm and the BTN would fold. That would've been a lousy outcome. The network's going to be a great success now that it'll actually be seen.

Of course, at about the same time, I find out that my cable internet provider, Comcast, is considering going to a monthly 250GB cap on bandwidth usage with big charges for going over. If the big ISPs do this, I could see a serious chilling effect on content providers, with webpages scaling back on the multimedia delivered on their pages, not to mention what it could do to distance education and such that I work on professionally. They'd need to provide some kind of method for customers to check how much bandwidth they've used so far each month. I'd guess they'd implement that with some kind of shoddy spyware. If it were my job, I'd just put a section on their billing website where you could check and offer a desktop tool to monitor a secure feed from it or something.

Fortunately, most of my work from home involves nothing more than a plain-text ssh connection. I doubt I use 250GB... That'd probably mostly effect people with lots of roommates sharing a connection more than anything else. I could see the next generation of consumer routers implement caching.

Labels: illini baseball, Illini basketball, illini football, tech

Lots of projects keeping me too busy to write anything interesting here, although plenty of things have been happening lately.

I'm very pleased with the 2008 draft that the Cardinals put together. Brett Wallace was a solid pick at 13 and he looks ready to sign. Can't wait for the short season teams to start playing, although I'd expect Wallace to start at Palm Beach once he signs.

I'm a big fan of the Jason Buursma pick at 755. He was Bucknell's best player both at the plate and on the mound in 2008. He was the closer his first three years at Bucknell but started 8 games last season in 20 total pitching appearances. He pitches from a submariner delivery. I imagine he'll be part of a tandem in his first couple of years. Here's hoping he shows enough durability and an ability to get lefthanders out to stick as a starter as he advances to get the most out of his two-way prowess.

As they did last year, the researchers at College Splits posted their play-by-play derived situational numbers for all NCAA players drafted in the first six rounds. Our sandwich-round pick, Lance Lynn shows significant splits against lefthanders, walking almost 5 of every 27 he saw last season while giving free passes to rights very rarely. That's to be expected, given that his changeup and curve rate average right now. I imagine he'll improve against lefties as a pro when he'll be spending more time working on the secondary pitches and facing lefthanded batters more frequently. I like the pick and expect him to follow 2007 draftees Mortenson and Todd up the ladder as his fastball and maturity are both advanced.

I've got to say, I'm a little annoyed at the reaction among many Cardinals fan of the news that the Navy expects Mitch Harris to report for duty. Much of the confusion and misinterpretation relates to the news coverage, typically lacking in matters like this. As Jason van Steenwyck is fond of asking, "Editors, when are you going to get some veterans in the newsroom so you don't embarrass yourselves like this?" Fortunately, the Cardinals have John Abbamondi in the front office, who is perhaps the executive in baseball best equipped to deal with the situation in some way that produces an outcome favorable to Ens. Harris, RHSP Harris, the Cardinals, the USN, and the nation.

Labels: mlb draft

While reading this essay on anti-intellectualism, I encountered this sentence:

Intellectuals spray polysyllables like squid ink, to evade the democratic decencies of conversation.

Lovely prose, that.

One of my goals for the dissertation is to make it accessible. The chapter I'm almost finished struggling to complete attempts to make accessible a fairly rich body of work dating back to Aristotle... A very limited, but representative subset of it, at least.

One of my advisors is particularly skilled at making extremely dense and esoteric writing plainly understandable. It's a marvelous skill.

Labels: personal nonsense

I cleaned up some of the links in the sidebar, taking down cardinals blogs that no longer exist or are inactive like the once-promising Birdwatch and the sadly, mysteriously retired Cardnilly. Added two new ones that are off to excellent starts.

I hate carpenter bees. There's already a nest started in the cedar fascia board of my shed. I really like the way it looks unpainted, so I'm going to finish it with clear Thompson's water seal. Once it stops raining for a few days, if it stops raining for a few days.

I was on the annual weekend-after-Memorial-Day camping trip this past weekend, camping in Round Spring Park and canoing the Current River 11 miles from Aker's Ferry to Pulltite on Friday and 11 miles from Pulltite to the campground on Saturday. Not many people were down there—we saw only one other group on Friday and not many more on Saturday. Did some cave exploration and had a blast overall. There was a biblical thunderstorm on Saturday night that I somehow slept right through. Great times.

Checking to see if there were any reviews out about Nick's trip out West, I ran into this clip that's got quite a few of his bits in it. Hilarious.

Your productivity at work stands a high chance of going down due to VirtualNES.

Labels: home improvements, vacation

There's something of a media-driven furor for instant replay in baseball.

Over the course of a wide-ranging conversation I had with some friends last week,
one of the more benign discussions we had was on how instant replay could be faithfully implemented in baseball. My proposal was well received.

For instant replay to work in baseball, it needs to be:

1. Seldom used
2. Only used when no umpire ought to be ideally positioned to make the call
3. Fast

My proposal is that instant replay can only be invoked when the umpires all get together to discuss a play. If two or more umpires disagree about how a play went down during one of these fairly rare umpire conferences, they should be able to invoke a "fifth umpire" who is really three umpires sitting in an office at MLB headquarters. When called upon, those three umpires are required to review the video feed and make a definitive ruling, siding with one field umpire or the other. It'll be the crew chief's responsibility to relate the issue to the fifth umpire impartially.

The real beauty in my proposal though is meant to make such fifth umpire invocations rare. I want the umpires to wear special rings that, when touched, open up a communication channel to the fifth umpire. The crew would have to meet up, disagree, and then agree to touch rings, a la Wonder Twins, Activate!!! in order to get the decision right. That'd keep Blue focused.

While searching for that wonder twins clip, I found a pretty hilarious, yet highly obscene video that you can access via the period at the end of this sentence.

Labels: baseball fluff, comedy

The toolshed in my yard is an old metal husk. It came with the house when I bought it many years ago and always intended to replace it, but never really had the time or energy, I guess.

Lately, the shed's been falling apart since it's rusted completely through. See:





As you can see, it's got no doors, so I can't lock my lawnmower up. It's underneath that plastic tarp, chained to an old, broken lawnmower that I need to get rid of. The tarp, of course, is what keeps the mower dry since the shed's roof fails completely in that purpose.

Today, I started to build a new shed. I based the design off of this plan, although I made mine shorter so that the rear of the shed is exactly six feet tall and won't be visible over the 6' privacy fence that I'm going to install this summer. (The new shed was a pre-requisite for the new fence.) Since mine is shorter, I also gave the roof a 1/4 slope instead of 1/2 to keep the front door from being knuckle-smashingly short. The lawnmower will fit in there beautifully and all my long-handled tools fit snugly against the back wall..

Here are two pictures of the shed taken after I finished the framing work.





After these pictures were taken, I installed plywood sheathing on the front and most of the rear, plus nailed in the roof sheathing and shingled it since it may rain tonight. Tomorrow, I'll need to finish the sheathing, build and install the doors, and install the cedar trim. I'm not sure how I'm going to finish it, but I'm thinking of just painting the plywood yellow and staining the trim.

Once I get my fence in, my backyard's going to be pretty boss. I'll be keeping my grill on the slab where the old shed currently sits. (As you can see in those pictures, the new shed is in the side yard and will abut the fence and be completely out of the way.) My yards going to look a whole lot bigger, and I'll be able to use the brick fireplace out there again. It's going to be an excellent Summer and Fall. The sooner I get that fence in, the better.

Crap. Just found out it's going to rain tomorrow and Tuesday. Stupid weather. Guess I won't be able to get back on it until Wednesday. This is going to be a busy week.

The Next Day:

The weatherman was, thankfully, wrong. It sprinkled most of the morning and I worked in it, thinking that the heavy stuff would be coming later, using some plastic tarp to keep the saw and lumber dry. So I finished the sheathing and built the doors. Used some scrap material to build a little ramp that's movable and usually stored inside the shed. All that's left to do is slap on some paint:





You can see that my saw work on the left door wasn't my finest moment, but it works great. I'm pleased with and proud of the work I did on that shed. I also tore down the old shed and cleaned off the concrete slab that it was sitting on. My backyard looks a whole lot better, aside from the pile of scrap metal and wood that I'll need to take care of before the city cites me as a blight on the neighborhood.

As you can see, by the time I finished, the weather was spectacular. A little hot, even.

Let me point you to an excellent Memorial Day essay by Donald Sensing. (HT: Instapundit)

Labels: bragging, home improvements

I agree with every one of these seven things that Tom Burns wants from the Hobbit movie, especially #4 and #7.

I hadn't realized that there was a fifth move planned. It sounds like it's going to take place between the Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. I can't imagine what that story would involve. I'd always thought that Beren and Luthien would make for a successful movie, if you could pull off the talking-dog part without conjuring up the Bush's Baked Beans commercials.

Labels: personal nonsense

Nick Vatterott is in your neck of the woods and will be performing his (brilliant) No Outlet show on Saturday. I can't recommend it highly enough.

He's got a travelogue of his trip to La-La Land up. Apparently he got to meet Robin Williams. I never got to meet Robin Williams.

He's also involved with this gig while out there, which should be a great opportunity for my old friend.

Labels: comedy

I'm On Fire The Boss

Come a Little Bit Closer Jay and the Americans

What a Wonderful World Louis Armstrong

Magic Moments Perry Como

Dancin' in the Dark The Boss

Labels: rock out

Ran into this positive piece about Nick Vatterott. The set-list bit that's talked about is a great bit, even though I've never actually seen him perform it. He had it hanging on the wall in his old apartment, though, and explained it to me.

Now just who is Brian Cartie? Brought up to A+ Palm Beach out of Extended the other day, he's off to a 5-9 start with two doubles and a home run. If he keeps up that sort of hitting, we'll all know a lot about him in a coupla months.

Memphis burned through seven pitchers in a 12-inning game tonight. Conspicuously, Chris Perez was not one of them... And he hasn't pitched since Tuesday, so it's not like he wasn't physically able. I'm hoping that means that Isringhausen will be DL'd and sent to EST to work with Strom on getting himself right, with Perez filling out bullpen depth while he's getting his confidence together. A roster move is expected Friday.

Labels: comedy, minor leaguers, roster moves

has been canceled for this gal.

If you missed Rick Ankiel's two outfield assists last night: behold.

That's unreal.

Labels: Ankiel