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.

I’ve been to two family weddings in the last two months: one was an evangelical service, and the other seemed to be generic, all-purpose Christianity. This biblical instruction was delivered by the religious authority at the first one (from Ephesians 5):

[22] Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
[23] For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
[24] Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
[25] Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
[26] That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,
[27] That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
[28] So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.
[29] For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:
[30] For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.
[31] For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.
[32] This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.
[33] Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

… and this was in the second (from Colossians 3):

[17] And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.
[18] Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
[19] Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.

The preacher at the second wedding tried to explain that, actually, God wants both the husband and the wife to submit to each other, but it was a pretty weak sale. The instructions to the husband and wife are very clear, and very clearly different.

I gather (from my sample of two weddings) that the “submit to your husband” stuff is a common instruction to brides, which might be more shocking to me if there were more evidence that people put any thought into anything their wedding guests will hear.

For how many more decades will newlyweds allow “The Electric Slide” to play at their receptions? What self-respecting bride- or groom-to-be could fail to specifically forbid the Macarena? Is there a “must play ‘YMCA’” clause in the DJ Union contract?

The final episode of “The Sopranos” aired 15 hours ago. If you haven’t seen it, don’t read this.

I agree with Scott Lemieux:

The concluding sequence was brilliant, and I’m baffled by people who would prefer a neat, tidy, Friends-like ending. One can read the ending as assuming that the guy won’t come out of the bathroom with just his dick in his hand, with the fade to black reflecting the recalled warning that you don’t see it coming. Or the bell ringing that concluded the show could suggest that the killer (or the FBI) just walked in. Or to represent the fact that Tony, despite Philly’s killing, will be looking up at every bell for the rest of his life. Would just choosing one of these endings be more satisfying? Of course not. The ambiguity is more appropriate.

My neighbor had texted me 15 minutes before the end to say her cable had gone out, so my antennae were tuned that way when the screen cut to black (it was not a fade, as Scott says; that would have stripped the moment of its urgency).

After it became clear that the blackout was, in fact, the intended conclusion, the “looking up at every bell for the rest of his life” read was my immediate interpretation. It’s exactly the sort of non-resolution resolution that will characterize every remaining moment of Tony Soprano’s life, whether it lasts another five seconds or another 40 years.

Killing Tony at the restaurant would have pulled the rug out from under the tension that defined the show; sparing him definitively would have had only illusory permanence.

Act I

[Tuesday, Ian and Will sit in a first-base-side mezzanine box at RFK Memorial Stadium. On the field, Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Jack Wilson approaches the plate.]

Will:
HOME RUN JACK!

Ian:
What’s that?

Will:
It’s from Hook.

Ian:
Oh, excellent.

Will:
HOME RUN JACK! [Looks at the scoreboard.] Ah, two home runs this year. He’s due.

Ian:
Nah, he’s not really amped to hit a solo home run right now.

Will:
Sure he is.

[Wilson hits a home run.]

Act II

[Wednesday, Ian and Will are in the same box. With two runners on base, Pirates first baseman Adam LaRoche comes to the plate.]

Ian:
Look, he’s calling his shot.

Will:
No he isn’t.

Ian:
Yeah, look, he’s calling it. Center field!

Will:
It’s just a pause in his warm-up swing. Look: swing, pause. See?

Ian:
He’s calling it.

[LaRoche homers to center.]

The end.

The New York Times on Saturday published a column called “More Advice Graduates Don’t Want to Hear,” a very suitable headline which, of course, prompted my parents to forward it to me.

It begins:

Last year at this time, as college graduates walked out into the world, I wrote a column giving advice on how they could save money.

In droves, parents sent the column to their children. And some of those children wrote to me to vent. What I suggested was impractical, many said. How would you like to try to live on $40,000 a year in Washington or San Francisco, several asked.

(I would love to try that!)

What I was proposing was not radical. It was mostly the simple things my mother had drummed into me. It was advice like diverting 10 percent of your income to savings before anything else and ignoring raises and putting them into savings, too. Learn to cook, I said, and never borrow money to pay for a depreciating asset.

This last rule is likely to leave most of the column’s audience on the wrong side of things, since it would seem to rule out automobiles and bachelor’s degrees.

I’m back like Girls Are Pretty!

I have moved from an old house on a four-lane boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, to an old apartment on a five-lane urban artery in Washington, DC. At the house, my four roommates and I paid all metered utilities at the rate of about $100 per person per month; the two of us who moved to the apartment will pay only for cooking gas (maybe $15 total).

Nighttime in DC is already quite unsuitably warm for sleeping, and our four-room apartment (plus kitchen and bathroom) came with three window-mounted air conditioners, each of which has a thermostat that goes down to 60 degrees.

The opportunist/economist/comfort-seeker in me thinks this situation is the tops. Sweaters indoors in June! Heavy blankets at night in July! Beers left out to cool on counter-tops in August! No consequences!

The environmentalist in me knows that this is why the earth is melting.

…hearing that someone else got the apartment you wanted after you’ve already made the scale models of your furniture to see how it could be arranged after you move.