Infinitive Splitter

I prematurely wrote a post earlier today about how much I hate the Detroit Tigers for taking “Home Run Jack” Wilson away from the Pittsburgh Pirates, even though his 47 career home runs in seven seasons makes me the only person to call him Home Run Jack.

But the negotiations for Wilson failed, and the trade deadline passed at 4:00 this afternoon, so I don’t hate the Tigers yet; the post has been left in “drafts.” (Their penchant for filling their coaching staff with Pirates heroes like Jim Leyland and Andy Van Slyke is still irksome.)

Instead, we got Giants pitcher Matt Morris, and the AP article about the transaction is full of new reasons to love Pirates General Manager Dave Littlefield (emphasis added):

The Pittsburgh Pirates got pitcher Matt Morris from San Francisco on Tuesday, an uncommon deal for an out-of-contention team at the trading deadline.

Pittsburgh sent rookie outfielder Rajai Davis and a player to be named to the Giants.

Normally, teams not in the race don’t look to add an aging and expensive starter such as Morris. But the Pirates felt their young rotation needed a boost with their two top starters — Ian Snell and Tom Gorzelanny — struggling since the All-Star break.

Morris, who will be 33 next week, is a former 22-game winner for St. Louis who is 7-7 with a 4.35 ERA this season. He was rocked for 13 hits and six earned runs in seven innings in his last start, an 8-5 defeat to Florida on Sunday.

Let’s pause here to talk about Matt Morris’ statistics — with charts!

ERA+. A pitcher’s Earned Run Average (ERA) is the average number of “earned” runs (generally speaking, all of them except those caused by fielding errors) a pitcher allows per nine innings pitched. A very good ERA for a starting pitcher is under 3.00. Because all baseball stadiums are different, “ERA+” was developed to allow fair comparisons by controlling for these variations. An ERA+ of 100 is average; above 100 is good. Here’s Matt Morris’ ERA+ for his career, along with a handy, linear trendline to tell us where he’s going (the 2007 number is from the season thus far):

K/9. Good pitchers are good at throwing pitches that force batters to put the ball in play in a way that allows the defensive players to get the batter out. Some pitchers are good at forcing grounders, others are good at forcing pop-flies. But the simplest way to tell if a pitcher can overpower his opponents is to see how many of them he strikes out. “K/9″ is an average of the number of strikeouts a pitcher gets for every nine innings pitched. Solid pitchers have a K/9 somewhere above 6.00. Here’s Matt Morris:

Did I even need to add the trendlines for these?

And how psyched is Matt Morris? Let’s go back to the AP article to find out:

“It is what it is,” Morris said in a phone interview from the Giants’ hotel in Los Angeles. “I’m just moving on. It’s just a shock. You hear rumors. I never heard Pittsburgh.”

The Giants were looking for a team to take some of their high-salaried players, and the Pirates will pick up all of the remainder of Morris’ $10,037,283 contract for this season.

If we figure that there are about 60 games left in the season (out of 162), the “remainder” of that contract works out to $3,717,512. If we then also figure that a starting pitcher only appears once every five games, that’s $309,792 per game.

Let’s go Bucs!

The Columbia Journalism Review’s Gal Beckerman writes, at the end of a post noting the journalism profession’s decline in cultural nobility:

I can’t remember a positive portrayal of a reporter on film in the last few years. The first journalism movie from recent times that even comes to mind is [Shattered Glass]. Oh boy, this is not a good sign.

Shattered Glass was the first that came to my mind, too, but with a liberal interpretation of “the last few years” (let’s say 15), I can think of a few others:

• The Insider (1999) earned seven Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Al Pacino’s portrayal of 60 Minutes’ Lowell Bergman wasn’t necessarily the height of feel-goodery, but it showed some impressive commitment to telling a story that needed to be told.
• City of God (2002) gave us Rocket, the young photojournalist who (reluctantly, at first) risked his life covering a gang war in his own neighborhood. Reminiscent of the Iraqis who help foreign reporters tell the news from their country?
• Almost Famous (2000) featured a young, impressionable reporter attempting to divorce his mess of friendship with, admiration of and disdain for his subjects from his responsibility to report credibly on them.
• Anchorman (2004) exposed a television reporter’s struggle with the cultural and professional standards that his own medium helps to create and enforce. Also, there was a totally hot babe involved.
• The Paper (1994) is the reason why I stretched the timeline back so far. It’s the best journalism movie since All the President’s Men.

One interesting effect of having rated more than 500 movies on Netflix is that every resulting suggestion comes with both a “customer average” rating and a prediction of how well I’ll like it. As you can see in the screen grab above, the red stars under my “Add” buttons reflect what Netflix thinks my rating will be, not what the general population of Netflix customers has thought.

I say it’s an “interesting” effect rather than a “useful” effect because, for example, even though Netflix expects me to like “Employee of the Month” 15 percent less than the general population (which didn’t like it much to begin with), the movie still made it to the short list of DVDs I “might enjoy.”

…instead of an iPhone (and 200 songs to go with it).

Resonator pipe/muffler. With a CD player and a digital AM/FM radio built right in, my car has everything I need to play the music I want to hear. The $600 iPhone can store up to 8 gigabytes of music — enough for about five days. But the car has enough room for every CD I’ve ever owned, and the passenger seat can hold a stack of the 30 or 40 I might want to hear on any given road trip. With the new muffler and resonator pipe, the car runs quietly enough that I can hear every note.

Constant velocity joint. The iPhone’s software allows users to scroll fluidly through websites and lists of songs or contacts. A CV joint allows a car’s wheels to maintain balanced friction and pressure levels when making turns. According to Wikipedia, failure may cause “the vehicle to stop moving or lock up, rendering the car incapable of steering” — not a good thing to have happen when I’m driving around the city, enjoying the tunes.

Labor. I could have spent $200 on 200 songs, further enriching Apple and a number of record companies — and allowing a few musicians to buy some more of their rock and roll drugs — but I chose instead to hand it over to a couple of guys who may or may not have spent several hours under my car. If iTunes figures out how to make me fear for my safety if I don’t buy digital music recordings, I might go the other way next time. I’m sure the RIAA has some ideas.