This certainly isn’t something we can be proud of. I have no problem with the Chief, though. Don’t care much about it really, but I’d rather have a dude dressed up like a Lakota Sioux out there performing with the band than a dude dressed up like an ear of corn or something being obnoxious the whole game. I tend to think people who’d get horribly upset about something like that to be generally irritating people, so I’ve opposed retiring the Chief just from habitually opposing pains in the ass.

Of course, the Chief’s eventual retirement comes as no surprise to me since I read Mark Tupper’s blog, a most excellent source for Illini-related sporting news.

Team USA lost a four hour and twenty-seven minute game against Venezuela tonight, 12-9. They already clinched the first seed in the final round of the tournament though with their win over Puerto Rico Tuesday.

Skip Schumaker went 1-4 with a triple, two walks, and a strikeout. His numbers through the first round:

9-21 with 2 2B, 1 3B, 4 BB, 2 K, 11 R, 2 RBI
LINE: .429/.520/.619

Not shabby. Boxscore here.

Crazy, yet entertaining, Cards game tonight. Both of our catchers are hurting, so if either Michel Hernandez or Mike Rose doesn’t get called up tomorrow, I’ll be mighty surprised. Were it up to me, I’d definitely call up Rose since he’s a switch-hitter, has reasonable powah (14 HR in 267 AB), and versitility in that he can play the outfield, too. Nice to have an Eli Marrero-style catcher who can move around in double-switches again. We’ll have to option a pitcher to Memphis to set our postseason rosters anyways. Rose would need to be added to the 40-man roster. The obvious way to do that would be to move Rincon, Bigbie, Ankiel, and possibly Mulder to the 60-day DL, which we should do before rosters expand, anyways.

[Update: Mike Rose is being called up. The 40-man roster hasn't been updated yet. Hell, it lists 41 men with nobody on the 60-day, so it hasn't been updated very carefully, I'd wager. In any case, I'd guess either Wainwright or Johnson will be sent down, probably Johnson since Pittsburgh's best hitters all swing right-handed. If anyone hasn't read it, here's a copy of the ESPN: The Magazine article about Aaron Miles and his teammates in Houston's farm system, including Mike Rose. Much more detailed account than any I'd read. Hat tip: Scott]

In other news, Amaury Marti twisted his ankle last night. No word on how long he’ll be out. He’d shown some signs of getting his swing back recently.

I added a search plug-in for minorleaguebaseball to my browser. The search engine at the website requires you to only use last names as search terms, just so you know. I’ve also got the Baseballcube plug-in installed on every machine I use. Every fan should have those.

Finally, I’m trying out the Delicato Chardonnay right now. I’ve been looking for a decent boxed wine to keep in the fridge so I don’t have an excuse to polish off a bottle of wine every time I really feel like just a glass or two. This is what they had at the supermarket and so far, so good. Nice mellow wine, lacks the sharpness I’m used to from the Australian stuff I usually drink. The box is pretty compact and fits well on one of the lower shelves of my fridge where it won’t get too cold—yet the thing holds the equivalent of four bottles of vino blanco. I think this’ll work out.

Four hits, one walk, four times grounding into double play. If it weren’t for Preston Wilson’s home run in the first at-bat for the Cardinals, the Marlins pitchers would have faced the minimum 27 batters.

Mark Mulder is clearly upset with himself in the postgame interview. It’s not pleasant to see.

But pitching obviously wasn’t the only reason this game was lost. Like Kermit the Frog, the Cardinal offense didn’t have any teeth.

(Nick Vatterott does a great impression of Kermit in that video, by the way.)

Team USA won again this afternoon, beating Puerto Rico 5-2. Puerto Rico’s starting pitcher was Willie Collazo who struck out five and walked only one over eight innings. He also gave up all five runs by way of two long balls off second baseman Mark Reynolds’ bat and one from LF Billy Butler, who was 2-3 before being lifted from the game in favor of Mark Bourn. That move shifted Skip over to right-field from center. The boxscore is here.

Skip Schumaker went 1-4 and struck out once for his first K in tournament play. He scored a run on Reynold’s three-run jack.

Through the fourth game, Skip’s line:

8-17 with 2 2B, 2 BB, 1 K, 9 R, 0 RBI
LINE: .471/.526/.588

Tomorrow we play Venezuela at 1pm Central Time.

The United States clinched the first place seed in the final round of the tournament with today’s win.

I’ve been posting Olympic qualifying tournament updates at VeB, but I’ll copy-paste what’s I’ve written there to here to update things:

Game One:
Team USA won their first game: USA 9, Canada 3. The story leads off with Skip Schumaker’s 4-5 night (with a double). He also scored three of those runs, so he did the Cardinals organization proud. It would be nice if he tears up the tournament and joins the Cardinals with a hot bat to compete with So for the job of OF defensive replacement down the stretch.

Also noticed that the team’s 3rd-base and bench coach is Rick Eckstein—David’s brother and the hitting instructor for the gNat’s AAA affiliate.

Game 1 Boxscore

Game Two:
Team USA has a difficult time against Brazil, but wins 8-7 in extras. Skip went 0-3 with two walks.

Game 2 Boxscore

Game Three:

Team USA won their third game of the opening round today against a strong Mexican team, 13-5.

Skip went 3-5 with a double and must have reached on an error, because he didn’t walk yet scored four of the thirteen runs.
Boxscore here.

Current Stats

Through game 3, Skip’s numbers in the tournament:
7-13 with 2 2B, 2 BB, 0 K, 8 R, 0 RBI
LINE: .538/.600/.692

Two quality opponents coming up: Puerto Rico on Tuesday and Venezuela on Wednesday. Canada beat Venezuela today 7-5.

[UPDATE] More on Skip Schumaker’s game now that the recap has been posted: Both ends of the fourth belonged to Schumaker, as he stroked a leadoff double and scored on a Mike Kinkade single to push the advantage to 10-0. Then he made a spectacular diving catch at the wall to rob Mexico’s Luis Suarez in the bottom half.

Completely unrelated to the the tournament that determines whether the United States will play baseball in the final Summer Olympics in which baseball will be played, but the second week of classes have begun and I’m definitely going to stick out all three courses I’m enrolled in. It’s gonna be hectic, but they’re all very interesting—if I plan ahead a bit more than usual, it shouldn’t be a problem.

The first class is Formal Grammar Development with Typed Feature Logic, in which we’ll be building relatively wide-coverage grammars in HPSG using TRALE. Not to brag, but I have something of a knack for writing grammars. Unfortunately, until now at least, I haven’t known anyone who actually does it—everyone I’d known prefers to induce a stochastic grammar from several years of annotated newspaper text instead of writing it by hand.

The second class is The Speech Chain and covers the mathematical background needed to rigorously study phonetics and acoustics. So far, it’s been a matter of re-learning stuff that I’d covered in undergraduate physics classes. Today we covered harmonic systems—the Newtonian mass on a spring stuff that’s so exciting the first time you’re exposed to it. Eventually, we’ll learn how to do a Fourier transform with pencil and paper which leads into a joke I read today:

Person A) “What is this?” as she rubs her hand over an invisible level flat surface
Person B) “I dunno”
Person A) “It’s the Fourier Transform of this” as she gives him The Finger

I fully intend to share that bit at the next Ling happy hour.

The last class is Corpus Methods and Modeling for Phonetics and Phonology and looks to overlap a bit in content with the Speech Chain and also some material that I had to teach myself over the summer for a project at work. We covered signal-to-noise ratio today, and the prof mentioned the anechoic chamber at VFI where they can make true recordings with a SNR of 90 dB. I checked the most recent recording project I did for a client and the (roughly calculated) SNR was around 66 dB, which is very good. That’s cheating, though, since I run the signal through an analog compressor to remove low-amplitude noise, among other things.

Completely unrelated to anything preceding, but did you ever wonder where the Closed Captions on TV come from? I did, since I watch a lot of sports where the captioning is usually pretty unreliable (and always uninformative). Well I did and found the answer from the people who make them here and here. It’s a little disappointing that there’s so little technological wizardry involved. I figured at least there’d be some sort of a speech recognizer involved. Turns out there’s just a special keyboard that lets a trained operator type real fast, probably using a database similar to what a T9-equipped telephone uses. Ah, the keyboard uses phonetic symbols.

I’m sure that could be automated—also that it would be a fun project to work on.

Here’s an (older) enjoyable article from the RFT about the greatest newspaper in North America, the Evening Whirl. An excerpt:

“We’ve had several occasions when we’ve been looking for a guy for days or weeks, and after the Whirl comes out he’ll show up at police headquarters bitching about his photo appearing in the paper,” recounts St. Louis homicide detective Tom Carroll, better known to readers of the Whirl as “PacMan” for his knack for “gobbling up bad guys.”

I make sure to pick up the current issue everytime I’m in the Lou.

Update: I know you’re thinking about it…

The qualifying tournament for the 2008 Olympics starts at 8pm tonight with the United States playing the Canadian team (led by Stubby Clapp) in el Estadio Latinoamericano. As of now, the USA Baseball website isn’t ready yet, so there probably won’t be any live updates from the game tonight.

Baseball America has an article previewing the tournament and gives this probable lineup:

Heath Phillips – P – White Sox
Jarrod Saltalamacchia – C – Braves
Bryan LaHair – 1B – Mariners
Bobby Hill –  2B – Padres
Mike Kinkade – 3B – Marlins
Brandon Wood – SS – Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim
Chad Allen – LF – Royals
Michael Bourn – CF – Phillies
Billy Butler – RF – Royals

Our own Skip Schumaker is the fourth outfielder on the team. In the exhibition games in Florida leading up to the tournament, Skip went 6-15 (.400) with two walks against one strikeout and was hit by a pitch once. He had one RBI and scored five runs and stole a base.

If you thought a five-game playoff series was a crapshoot, this tournament would truly drive you nuts. We play in Pool A of this regional along with Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. All teams in a pool play each other once and then the top four teams advance to a single elimination round to end up with two teams that qualify for the Olympics in 2008, the last Olympic games where baseball will be played. (Don’t get me started on that…) Using this bracketing, the US team failed to qualify for the 2004 Olympics, so it’s an important tournament.

In the other pool, Cuba will have to compete with the likes of Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Panama.

Updated: Awesome! Team USA beats Canada, 9-3. Skip Schumaker went 4-5 and scored three runs.

Bad decision

Waaah, waaah! I want an oompa-loompa NOW!

He sure is. But not by me. While the 2-run walkoff homer by Beltran stung horribly, the grand slam by Delgado was worse. Matt Leach asks, “Why all the vitriol for Isringhausen yet nothing about the sloppy fifth inning?” I’m with the originator of this thread, that we should have given Delgado the unintentional-intentional walk, even with bases loaded. During that at-bat, I was pulling up David Wright’s statistics page, checking to see how often he grounds into double plays. Turns out he leads the Mets with 13 and was off last night. Terrible to let Delgado beat you like that.

Prove to dad that I’m not a fool.

Yes, today’s the start of year 24 of my education and I still don’t even know what shinola is—much less could I tell it apart from anything. I’m registered for three classes this semester, which is a lot on top of my day job. All look to be important classes, so I’m hoping to tough it out in all three. My first two are today: a class on using corpora for learning things about the sounds used in speech and another on computerized speech recognition, something I know embarassingly little about. Tomorrow’s class is one I’m very excited about—a seminar on modeling head-driven phrase structure grammars on ‘puters. Haven’t even looked at any hpsg since learning it from one of the masters many moons past.

It occurred to me that Amaury Marti’s recent slump in AA may be caused by worry over his family’s welfare in Cuba. Since Fidel Castro is nearing the end of his life and his brother, Dennis or Duane or something has “temporarily” taken over, change is coming to that beautiful island.

And Izzy: why do you hurt us so?

I wasted twenty minutes or so looking this up and thought it would be amusing to others—best to salvage the effort, eh?

I remembered Soxaholix a long time ago making fun of a sabermetrically oriented blog that was written in all lowercase. I mistakenly recalled that the comic was mocking the old curveblog (lboros’ original blog) and had been wondering lately if they ever apologized to him, seeing as VeB is widely acknowledged as being among the best baseball blogs around.

My recollection was off, though. The Soxaholix comic in question is here and the blog being mocked therein is here.

It’s almost too easy making fun of that slop. For obvious reasons, I don’t make a practice of making fun of other people’s writing, but for Pete’s sake… There’s nothing there that passes as analysis. The top post there today is this. Allow me to quote a selection before making unkind remarks:

so many hitters swing too much. jeff francoeur. swings too much. i’m watching him swing right now. he’s good at baseball, but he’s not good at playing baseball. he’s got so much talent. he could be so much more.

the goal is to walk. sometimes the pitcher refuses to walk you. that’s when you gotta hit it. but only then. you swing at crap, you get out. outs are bad.

I can honestly say that’s the stupidest piece of commentary I’ve ever read from a blogger who was, within the past two years, called out in a Red Sox themed online comic strip. It’s stupid even without the context of the excerpt, which makes it worse (the Yankees win because they’re smart). It’s stupider than all the stubborn BS that Joe Morgan famously and routinely says.

The goal isn’t to walk, it’s to score runs. Francouer’s swinging at junk out of the strike zone isn’t bad in that it keeps him from walking, it’s bad in that it puts him in pitchers’ counts where he won’t see fat pitches that he could hit to drive runs in. He bats exclusively 4-6 in the lineup—his job isn’t to walk, but to crank extra base hits. And Jeff Francoeur is every bit as good at playing baseball as he is at baseball, whatever that means. The guy’s four years removed from playing high school baseball and is going through some sophomore struggles on a team that isn’t all that well put together in the first place.

Enough being mean. I’m watching A Bridge Too Far right now. Talk about an all-star cast!

The Operation Market Garden episode from Band of Brothers was outstanding, too. I need to buy myself that DVD boxset.

Jeff’s really bringin’ the funny today. Holy cow, that’s rich.

Turns out that’s a Channel101 movie (see Kicked in the Nuts if you haven’t already) and the director made two episodes before the show was cancelled. Outstanding comedy.

Nice two-of-three from the Cubs in Chicago this weekend. The theme of the VeB gamethread essay was what sorts of moves the Cardinals ought to make this offseason, which makes sense since Rumor Monger was the guest writer. It’s a premature exercise, of course, but I like to speculate on roster construction as much as the next guy, so off we go!

It’s as obvious to me as it is to him that Jim Edmonds should be extended or had his option picked up. Thirty-eight really isn’t that old for a baseball player anymore and Jimmy Ballgame keeps himself in good enough shape that I could see another two or even three years of effectiveness out of him, albeit with diminishing playing time.

Also suggested is that the Cardinals pick up Jason Schmidt after leaving the Giants for free agency. He’s having an exceptional walk year and it’s not an uncharacteristically good year. It would definitely make the front of the rotation a whole lot better to have Schmidt pitching after Carp, but moves like that are easy to wish for. It’s harder to pick out good cheap pitching to fill out the rotation. My choice for fifth starter this past offseason was Jamey Wright, who fell out of Colorado’s rotation last season and was put in the bullpen. The Rockies’ manager said at the time that he made the move to help Wright stay in the majors as a reliever, believing that he wasn’t good enough to start for any team. I thought his numbers were pretty good for a fifth starter—too many walks but he kept the ball down and in the park—and thought he could do well as a Cardinal.

The Cardinals decided on Sidney Ponson, who didn’t work out, and later picked up a talented but unconfident Jeff Weaver. Weaver’s last three starts have been two great ones sandwiching a decent start—Cardinal Nation eagerly awaits his next start against John Maine on Tuesday against the Flushing Pond Scum. Meanwhile, Jamey Wright has had a decent season with the Giants, bringing down his walk rate while ranking among league leaders in groundball tendency. He hasn’t been as good as I’d expected pitching in front of one of the best infields in baseball.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the Cardinals end up with a rotation of Carpenter – Schmidt – Reyes – Wainwright – LAIM. My pick for that fifth spot in the rotation would be Carlos Silva, who’s given up a lot of runs in front of one of Major League Baseball’s worst defenses. He’s a pitcher with great control and after the year he’s had, I doubt his option will be picked up this offseason. If he could be signed as a fifth starter on a cheap contract, he might work out.

Another option would be simply promoting Chris Narveson from Memphis. Coming off surgery, he’s had an excellent season—2.90 ERA 25:46 BB:K—and our rotation would lack a lefthander without his promotion or Mulder/another-lefty signing on with the ‘Birds. He’s being handled carefully, rarely pitching past the sixth inning, so he’ll need to condition rigorously in the offseason to prepare for a MLB workload.

Just got back from my week-long trip to California. Chris and Val’s wedding was a blast—naturally I spun a few breakdancing moves at the reception. I’ll make a detailed post after Nïck‘s party in a few weeks. Don’t want to be telling a story there and have someone say, “Yeah dude, I read it on your blog already.” Suffice it to say that the vacation was an inspiring experience.

I have a bunch of catching up to do at work so will be putting in some long hours the next few days. I’ll be listening to the Cards-Reds game at work tomorrow and should be found in the VeB game thread.

I ordinarily don’t check my luggage, but it looks like I’ll have to today… I’m not keen on the idea of putting my laptop into my luggage to be thrown around by the cargo loaders who’ll be overworked today.

I got to hang out with my old friend Nick and another “smart young comic,” TJ, who’s got a pretty cool Jason Lee sorta thing going on. I made an unexpected appearance on a radio show and didn’t make too big a fool of myself. At one point, we talked about Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, a movie in which all the dialogue is in Yucatec Maya. If it were a different sort of show, I could have made a contribution at that point. Afterwards, we went to a bar and they did some standup in front of a drain-circling crowd.

Nick’s working on a great bit that they worked into the radio show that takes a twist on Stroop’s research in the ’30s except where Nick writes condiment names using different condiments. A poop joke, that ain’t. He’s also got a good bit going about the first few movies that came out, talking about the trailers for them: “From the team that brought you Train Comin’ Atcha and Two People Dancing, comes Dog Chasing Ball!” It’s good stuff—coupled with Nick’s energetic delivery—it works great.

Tough Cards game last night. I listened to the last two innings on a Reds radio affiliate, so they were more pleased than me when Izzy gave up that 2-run walk-off homer to Ross. Reyes had his second very solid start in a row today in a game that is still going as I write this. (5IP 2H 2BB 5K 0R)

Larry Bigbie did, in fact, leave last night’s game in Springfield due to injury. His side was sore and he’s listed as day-to-day. Dude can’t catch a break.

Chris Narveson left Memphis’ game after 78 pitches (5.2 IP) and DanUp was concerned he too’d injured himself. The sportswriters at the Commercial Appeal are seemingly too disgusted with the Redbirds’ poor play to write stories about them, though. Last night was his second start after coming off the DL for shoulder soreness and he’s recovering from Tommy John surgery, so my guess is that he wasn’t expected to go very deep. He’d pitched very well, striking out seven against no walks. The game got out of hand after he left with a 3-0 lead. Memphis eventually won on three runs scored in the fifteenth inning.

Joe Strauss penned up a piece that paints Jim Edmonds as a mistreated player left in the dark by a team he’d given so much to. It’s a debate that’s been around at least since midway through last season. Jim Edmonds certainly appears to be on the decline. Last season was his worst as a Cardinal and this season he got off to an awful start—even defensively very early on. The Cardinals have a 10 megabuck option with a $3,000,000 buyout for next year. We either pay him $10 M$ to play for us or 3 M$ not to. The article makes it sound as though the plan is to take the buyout, which strikes me as foolish.

I’d like to see Edmonds signed to an extension where we pay him something like six million plus incentives for next season with a option for 2008 worth ten megabucks that would automatically vest with 400 plate appearances in 2007. The article mentions the lead-shoulder surgery that Edmonds will undergo this coming offseason and that he’s optimistic about how he’ll come back from it. I imagine that Timothy Kremchek will be the surgeon after the fantastic job he did for Rolen. Dr. Kremchek should have some cancellations on his schedule, by the way. I think that would be a fair deal for the team and Mr. Ballgame. If he comes back from surgery to play at least as well as he has this season, then he earns 16+ million over the last two years of his career, retires as a Cardinal, and will have an opportunity to mentor the next great Cardinal center fielder, ideally Colby Rasmus if things progress the way we’d like them to. I happen to think he’ll come back better than he’s been the past two seasons. It’d be nice if his situation could be solidified in some mutually beneficial way before the end of the month. I don’t know how Strauss got Edmonds to sit down and talk about this, but I’d like to think it’s Edmonds’ opening salvo indicating that he’s interested in working out a two year extension of the sort described above.

Check it out… I’m the third a-hole to think of that unamusing title.

I’ve been busy lately and will be very busy for the next week or so. I’m sure my brilliant comments on baseball will be missed. Or my insight on breaking news of great import, for example, the signing of Manny Legace by the Blues. He was solid last year, unlike the last goaltender we picked up from the Red Wings, Chris Osgood, who won a Stanley Cup the year before in spite of Osgood’s play, not because of it.

This next week will be enjoyed celebrating my good friend Chris’s wedding. Chris has led a remarkable life so far. He’s been a professional skateboarder, pitched for the Rockies’ Pioneer League affiliate, was the lead singer of a touring and recording punk band, is now making his mark as a topological geometrist, and will soon be husband to a wonderful woman—eventually father to some talented youngsters.

In any case, I won’t be posting much, if at all, for the next week.

Good coupla ballgames there. The losing streak would have continued yesterday if not for two exceptional defensive plays in the top of the sixth. With men on first and second, no outs, and the Cardinals up by a run, Pitcher Rick Helling bunted to Pujols, who threw to Eckstein at third to force out David Bell in a rough play that upended Eck. The situation was then men on first and second with one out. If Pujols had thrown to Belliard covering first, Bell would have been at third and would have tied the game on the lineout off the bat of the next batter, Gabe Gross. Hancock walked the bases loaded and was pulled for TJ, who popped up Prince Fielder to shallow center field. Jim Edmonds made an impossible rolling catch to make the out. Had he not caught that ball, the Brewers would have scored two runs instead of ending the inning without scoring any baserunners. A few days ago, those two plays wouldn’t have been made.

I noticed something funny while reading an article about the Cubs last night in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune: Click click…

My last softball game of the season is today. If we play as well as we did last weekend, we’ll have a good chance to earn our first win.