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PRESIDENT BUSH HAVE A HOTDOG WITH ME
Jun. 30th, 2008 11:59 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 18. High today: 22.
After a lot of soul-searching, I have informed management that I will not be waiving my no-movement clause, because my heart is here in Toronto with the team that wishes I'd go away. Which reminds me that Roy Halladay is a Mormon, and thinks he makes too much money. Like Mats, Roy doesn't say much. Actually, Roy says even less than Mats, and since he became a Grizzled Veteran, he usually seems a bit grouchy. But I think I may someday love Roy as much as I love Mats. Come to think of it, actually, Roy Halladay is the only individual player I have ever bought a ticket specifically to see--his last start of his Cy Young season. Payin' homage to the jeen-yus, man.
Further to the question How Poor Are We, Anyway?: I was walking up past the big old highschool (Central Tech?) at Bathurst and Harbord the other night, seeing how that thing is built like a castle, thinking how--I guess--you couldn't build a highschool that expensive today ... and why is that, anyway? (This is in the same ballpark as questions like, why is it we could do things like build subways four or five decades ago, but massive public works projects seem impossible today? And: why have train stations gotten progressively, and drastically, uglier over the last century? Actually, my favourite recently gathered example of this kind of thing is the beautiful old room at U of T, with little gothic hand-carved faces around the windows and stuff, which has a screen attached to an unfinished two-by-six bolted to the wall above the blackboard. But then, it's hard to tell whether that's not having any money or not giving a damn. But then again, not giving a damn and not having the money really aren't two different things. It's all a matter of what you care enough to spend your money on.) Why is it that we seem to have so much less money for things that we used to have so much money for? Well, because we've got so much other stuff to spend money on, right? (OK, as far as schools go, it's because our governments have so much health care stuff to spend money on. (For American governments, subsitute ... so many stadiums?)) Doesn't it seem like we have so little money because we have so much stuff to spend it on? But how can that be, when, theoretically, ideally, the money supply is supposed to track the supply of real goods--but, actually, these days, the money supply is supposedly outstripping the supply of real goods at a dangerous rate?
For the record, by the way, I e-mailed StatsCan a few months ago and asked why they haven't adjusted the LICO formula in an abnormally long time; they e-mailed me back and said (without elaboration) that it's because they don't think the proportions (i.e., the percentage of average income spent on food, shelter, and clothing) have changed significantly.
On today's episode of Fun with StatsCan, I decided to look up the aboriginal populations of various portions of Canada. I was surprised, or rather shocked, to discover that the are more self-identified aboriginal persons in Ontario than in any other province, and by a fairly wide margin (over B.C.). I was also surprised that "census metropolitan area" with the largest population of self-identified aboriginal persons appears to be Montreal, with about 85 000. Winnipeg appears to be second, with about 76 000. Of course, since there are more than five times as many people overall in Montreal as there are in Winnipeg, Winnipeg blows Montreal away for aboriginals as a percentage of its population, 11.1%, to 2.4%. Toronto has about 26 500, which is about 0.5% of the overall population of just over five million. Edmonton seems to have the third-highest raw number of aboriginal persons, followed by Vancouver--but Vancouver's percentage, at 2.8, is the same as Fredericton's.
I've seen a couple of articles in the Star in the last couple of weeks concerning the fact that although people think they're driving less because of the Exploding Price of Gas, they don't actually seem to be. (Anecdotally, no one I know is driving any less, and this includes people who have negative net worths. But I know a very small sample of people.) It's pretty clear, anyway, that gasoline sales to The Average Driver are not yet in any significant decline. (A couple of weeks ago I was looking at some StatsCan gas sales figures that seemed to indicate a halting decline over the last several years, but they didn't differentiate between business and personal sales. It would stand to reason that higher gas prices would inevitably cut into sales to businesses, which can't afford to have their profits eaten away, but not necessarily to consumers, who are generally irrational.) Which finally prompted me to realize, today, how this really puts the lie to the widespread belief in The Great Gas Price Conspiracy (championed, in these parts, by Dan McTeague, an MP who has basically made a career of Fighting the Gas Price, but who seems, interestingly, to have fallen off the face of the earth during the recent run-up in gas prices). It's now evident that people will pay, oh, 50% more than they were paying when a lot of them were howling about price fixing--so, either the price fixers were complete idiots and used to fix prices way too low (and are probably still fixing the price too low--at any rate, the price of gas still hasn't tested the limits of demand), or the reason the price of gas always goes up and down in lockstep at neighbouring stations really is that profit margins are very slight and competition is extremely fierce.
While I'm waiting to get the Internet Tube back from L., here's something on Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting: last week, I went to a semi-pro game with a friend of mine from highschool, who I last went to a game with at Tiger Stadium in approximately 1994, maybe 1993. (Don Mattingly went 4-for-4, and the Yankees won something like 8-0.) First thing I noticed about these semi-pro players: they seem to average about three inches shorter than major-leaguers. That's always the way in any sport, it seems: NFL players dwarf CFL players; Team Canada towers over Team Germany in international hockey, and so on. What separates the men from the boys is that the men are built like supermen and the boys are built like men. But that's not the thing about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, which is, rather, this: my friend said, around the fifth inning, that the score in this game was a lot lower than your standard sandlot baseball game--and I said, that's because these guys are competent. They may not be anywhere near as strong and fast and whatever else as big-leaguers, but they're competent. They know what to do and they're well-practised in doing it. So, the pitchers don't walk the park and innings aren't extended on and on by errors. In baseball, as in hockey (as I was saying around here recently), competence favours the defence; if everybody's incompetent, the hitters just have to stand there with their bats on their shoulders and runs will score, as often happens in little leage games. Which gets me to wondering: are there sports in which competence doesn't favour the defence? I guess basketball is the most obvious one--if everybody's incompetent, nobody ever scores. In North American football, it seems, at first glance, like offenseive and defensive (in)competence would cancel each other out--except that all you need to do to score is hold on to the ball and run straight forward. If ya can't stop the running game, yer toast. So, probably, competence favours the defence there, too.
Anyway, the bottom line about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, it seems to me, is that there are conceivable pitches that are so fast or have so much movement (gyroball!) that skill as a hitter couldn't help you to hit them; the only way you could hit them would be to throw the bat out there and hope the pitch hits it in a good place. The question is, how close do actual pitchers and hitters come to that situation? What I can't figure out offhand is whether the question is hopelessly complicated by the fact that a good hitter gets out most of the time against an average pitcher anyway. (There's also the additional complication that a large part of good hitting is guessing what kind of pitch is coming before it's thrown.) Given that, what is the question? One possible question is: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that no actual hitter can ever actually hit them? But the answer to that question is: obviously not. So the question has to be something like: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that the best actual hitters can only hit them x distance from the sweet spot, with y bat speed, z% of the time? But how could you meaningfully fill in those variables?
After a lot of soul-searching, I have informed management that I will not be waiving my no-movement clause, because my heart is here in Toronto with the team that wishes I'd go away. Which reminds me that Roy Halladay is a Mormon, and thinks he makes too much money. Like Mats, Roy doesn't say much. Actually, Roy says even less than Mats, and since he became a Grizzled Veteran, he usually seems a bit grouchy. But I think I may someday love Roy as much as I love Mats. Come to think of it, actually, Roy Halladay is the only individual player I have ever bought a ticket specifically to see--his last start of his Cy Young season. Payin' homage to the jeen-yus, man.
Further to the question How Poor Are We, Anyway?: I was walking up past the big old highschool (Central Tech?) at Bathurst and Harbord the other night, seeing how that thing is built like a castle, thinking how--I guess--you couldn't build a highschool that expensive today ... and why is that, anyway? (This is in the same ballpark as questions like, why is it we could do things like build subways four or five decades ago, but massive public works projects seem impossible today? And: why have train stations gotten progressively, and drastically, uglier over the last century? Actually, my favourite recently gathered example of this kind of thing is the beautiful old room at U of T, with little gothic hand-carved faces around the windows and stuff, which has a screen attached to an unfinished two-by-six bolted to the wall above the blackboard. But then, it's hard to tell whether that's not having any money or not giving a damn. But then again, not giving a damn and not having the money really aren't two different things. It's all a matter of what you care enough to spend your money on.) Why is it that we seem to have so much less money for things that we used to have so much money for? Well, because we've got so much other stuff to spend money on, right? (OK, as far as schools go, it's because our governments have so much health care stuff to spend money on. (For American governments, subsitute ... so many stadiums?)) Doesn't it seem like we have so little money because we have so much stuff to spend it on? But how can that be, when, theoretically, ideally, the money supply is supposed to track the supply of real goods--but, actually, these days, the money supply is supposedly outstripping the supply of real goods at a dangerous rate?
For the record, by the way, I e-mailed StatsCan a few months ago and asked why they haven't adjusted the LICO formula in an abnormally long time; they e-mailed me back and said (without elaboration) that it's because they don't think the proportions (i.e., the percentage of average income spent on food, shelter, and clothing) have changed significantly.
On today's episode of Fun with StatsCan, I decided to look up the aboriginal populations of various portions of Canada. I was surprised, or rather shocked, to discover that the are more self-identified aboriginal persons in Ontario than in any other province, and by a fairly wide margin (over B.C.). I was also surprised that "census metropolitan area" with the largest population of self-identified aboriginal persons appears to be Montreal, with about 85 000. Winnipeg appears to be second, with about 76 000. Of course, since there are more than five times as many people overall in Montreal as there are in Winnipeg, Winnipeg blows Montreal away for aboriginals as a percentage of its population, 11.1%, to 2.4%. Toronto has about 26 500, which is about 0.5% of the overall population of just over five million. Edmonton seems to have the third-highest raw number of aboriginal persons, followed by Vancouver--but Vancouver's percentage, at 2.8, is the same as Fredericton's.
I've seen a couple of articles in the Star in the last couple of weeks concerning the fact that although people think they're driving less because of the Exploding Price of Gas, they don't actually seem to be. (Anecdotally, no one I know is driving any less, and this includes people who have negative net worths. But I know a very small sample of people.) It's pretty clear, anyway, that gasoline sales to The Average Driver are not yet in any significant decline. (A couple of weeks ago I was looking at some StatsCan gas sales figures that seemed to indicate a halting decline over the last several years, but they didn't differentiate between business and personal sales. It would stand to reason that higher gas prices would inevitably cut into sales to businesses, which can't afford to have their profits eaten away, but not necessarily to consumers, who are generally irrational.) Which finally prompted me to realize, today, how this really puts the lie to the widespread belief in The Great Gas Price Conspiracy (championed, in these parts, by Dan McTeague, an MP who has basically made a career of Fighting the Gas Price, but who seems, interestingly, to have fallen off the face of the earth during the recent run-up in gas prices). It's now evident that people will pay, oh, 50% more than they were paying when a lot of them were howling about price fixing--so, either the price fixers were complete idiots and used to fix prices way too low (and are probably still fixing the price too low--at any rate, the price of gas still hasn't tested the limits of demand), or the reason the price of gas always goes up and down in lockstep at neighbouring stations really is that profit margins are very slight and competition is extremely fierce.
While I'm waiting to get the Internet Tube back from L., here's something on Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting: last week, I went to a semi-pro game with a friend of mine from highschool, who I last went to a game with at Tiger Stadium in approximately 1994, maybe 1993. (Don Mattingly went 4-for-4, and the Yankees won something like 8-0.) First thing I noticed about these semi-pro players: they seem to average about three inches shorter than major-leaguers. That's always the way in any sport, it seems: NFL players dwarf CFL players; Team Canada towers over Team Germany in international hockey, and so on. What separates the men from the boys is that the men are built like supermen and the boys are built like men. But that's not the thing about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, which is, rather, this: my friend said, around the fifth inning, that the score in this game was a lot lower than your standard sandlot baseball game--and I said, that's because these guys are competent. They may not be anywhere near as strong and fast and whatever else as big-leaguers, but they're competent. They know what to do and they're well-practised in doing it. So, the pitchers don't walk the park and innings aren't extended on and on by errors. In baseball, as in hockey (as I was saying around here recently), competence favours the defence; if everybody's incompetent, the hitters just have to stand there with their bats on their shoulders and runs will score, as often happens in little leage games. Which gets me to wondering: are there sports in which competence doesn't favour the defence? I guess basketball is the most obvious one--if everybody's incompetent, nobody ever scores. In North American football, it seems, at first glance, like offenseive and defensive (in)competence would cancel each other out--except that all you need to do to score is hold on to the ball and run straight forward. If ya can't stop the running game, yer toast. So, probably, competence favours the defence there, too.
Anyway, the bottom line about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, it seems to me, is that there are conceivable pitches that are so fast or have so much movement (gyroball!) that skill as a hitter couldn't help you to hit them; the only way you could hit them would be to throw the bat out there and hope the pitch hits it in a good place. The question is, how close do actual pitchers and hitters come to that situation? What I can't figure out offhand is whether the question is hopelessly complicated by the fact that a good hitter gets out most of the time against an average pitcher anyway. (There's also the additional complication that a large part of good hitting is guessing what kind of pitch is coming before it's thrown.) Given that, what is the question? One possible question is: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that no actual hitter can ever actually hit them? But the answer to that question is: obviously not. So the question has to be something like: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that the best actual hitters can only hit them x distance from the sweet spot, with y bat speed, z% of the time? But how could you meaningfully fill in those variables?
