Infinitive Splitter

The air is cool enough in the mornings now that I can finally resume wearing sweaters over my too-small, collared shirts. To kick off the season today, I chose my favorite: a thin, Navy V-neck over a blue-and-white striped shirt.

It’s Wednesday, so I haven’t shaved in about a week, which in the summer makes me look like your standard Lazy Liberal Arts Major. With the sweater, I might very well be a graduate student.

On my way out of the building for lunch this afternoon, the security guard caught my attention and asked, “Hey man, you eat tofu?” He and his associate were dubious of a cube-shaped food item at the bottom of a container of soup; I examined the substance for them and confirmed that it was edible.

Before I got to the local sandwich shop — at which, despite my appearance, I did not order anything containing tofu — I dropped by a Borders bookstore, where a patron asked if I worked there. (I don’t think I’m alone in considering this kind of confusion among the higher forms of flattery.)

These things never happen to me in the summer; I look smarter when the days get shorter.

Jesus Christ stopped off in my apartment building this afternoon on his way from somewhere to somewhere else.  It won’t be a long trip, apparently, since he’s only taking a small backpack, a few bottles of water and a sleeping bag.

And this doesn’t seem to be his gameday crucifix: the mounted wheel might make it difficult to plant the thing on a hill.

Just in time, too:

The Pirates this morning fired general manager Dave Littlefield near the end of his seventh losing season.

He will be replaced on an interim basis by Brian Graham, the team’s director of player development.

Littlefield, 47, took the post July 31, 2001, and his teams went a combined 442-581 in his tenure, never approaching .500. That included 67-95 finishes in 2005 and 2006, and the current edition’s 61-79 record.

Matt Morris, Littlefield’s final acquisition and the highest-paid player in Pirates history, makes the case for Littlefield’s ouster:

• 24 earned runs in 41.7 innings (5.18 ERA, 85 ERA+)
• 19 walks, 20 strikeouts
• 1.608 WHIP

(Stats through yesterday.)

So long, Dave. Thanks for nothing.

It’s been a while, I’ve got nothing to say, and I did it last year, so here’s my 2007 NFL fantasy team roster:

Number in parentheses is the overall draft order.

1. (8) Frank Gore, RB - San Francisco
2. (13) Willis McGahee, RB - Baltimore
3. (28) Marc Bulger, QB - St. Louis
4. (33) Reggie Wayne, WR - Indianapolis
5. (48) Deion Branch, WR - Seattle
6. (53) Santana Moss, WR - Washington
7. (68) Chicago Bears DEFENSE
8. (73) Adrian Peterson, RB - Minnesota
9. (88) Santonio Holmes, WR - Pittsburgh
10. (93) Jon Kitna, QB - Detroit
11. (108) Jason Witten, TE - Dallas
12. (113) Tatum Bell, RB - Detroit
13. (128) Ronald Curry, WR - Oakland
14. (133) Jeff Wilkins, K - St. Louis
15. (148) Selvin Young, RB - Denver

Like last year, this will be the season’s only fantasy football post.

I am in New York’s Adirondack Park for the week, in a lake-front cottage a mile outside of a small town that has, I believe, one stop-sign. There is a business in the town that quadruples as a bar, restaurant, video-rental store and internet cafe. The food and drink are lovely, the video selection is disorganized and wanting for new releases, and 30 minutes of internet time costs $5.

Across the street is the town’s public library, which broadcasts a free, strong, unsecured wireless signal at all hours of the day. Crucially, though, there are no electrical outlets within range of the benches outside; the nearest public juice is in the bar.

It’s possible to plug in at the bar and connect to the free internet across the street, but that’s a bit too dishonest for me. It’s true that $10 for 60 minutes is theft of its own kind, but the superior view of the lake, the access to cheap alcohol and the free-flowing alternating current combine to help me justify the cost.

(And once I’ve spent my hour and charged my battery, I go back outside to finish my reading and blogging and electronic-mailing, for free, from the relative discomfort of my car.)

There’s nothing funny about the dogfighting and other crimes with which Michael Vick has been charged.

But this is different.

Embattled NFL quarterback Michael Vick, facing federal charges related to his alleged participation in dogfighting, has been hit with a “$63,000,000,000 billion dollar” lawsuit filed by a South Carolina inmate who alleges the Atlanta Falcons star stole his pit bulls and sold them on eBay to buy “missiles from Iran,” FOX News has learned.

Emphasis added. By my calculation, “$63,000,000,000 billion dollars” works out to “63,000,000,000,000,000,000 (dollars^2),” or “63 quintillion square dollars.”

UPDATE: As I should have expected, Fox News got it wrong.  The three-page, handwritten complaint (pdf) includes a demand for “63,000,000,000 Billion dollars backed by gold and silver,” but there is no dollar sign; the wronged inmate seeks a mere $63 quintillion.

It seems that I wasn’t alone on Tuesday in finding a lot to wonder about in newly acquired Pirates pitcher Matt Morris’ stats. Since then, ESPN has called Pirates GM Dave Littlefield’s decision to trade for Morris “bizarre” and “inexcusable.” Yahoo! said, “Matt Morris? Really?”

Just for fun, here are some Matt Morris charts that don’t have downward trendlines.

WHIP. A pitcher with 1 or fewer “Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched” is doing really well.

How about another with an upward trajectory?

One more thing: according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Dejan Kovacevic, Morris is the highest-paid player in Pirates history.

Go Steelers!

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.”