After returning home from Florida, I was able to watch my first Dodger game of the season (I had listened to a few spring training games on the radio), which also meant finally getting a chance to listen to the great Vin Scully announce a game. (He doesn't call spring training games anymore.) At some level, the baseball season doesn't truly begin until I get to hear Vin call a game. He is the best announcer ever! (Even though I was exhausted when I got back, there was no way I was going to miss the Dodger game, so I stayed up many extra hours just so I could catch the game. I had about 1-2 hours of restless sleep on the plane, but I had otherwise been up for 40 or so straight hours by the time I crashed. I watched the Dodger game, got ice cream, watched baseball tonight, and then talked to a friend by IM for 15 minutes before my body started shaking and I finally crashed.)
After starting the season with two straight losses to the Brewers, the Dodgers have won 4 games in a row (including a three-game sweep of the hated Giants!). We are currently tied for second place, .5 games behind Arizona. The Giants are in dead last.
My fantasy team also had a rough start, but it has started doing well the last few days. After today's games, I am now first place in my division (with 20 teams), though my 97-point lead is rather tenuous. Led by awesome starts by both Johan Santana and Kip Wells, my team I earned 355 points yesterday and gained 859 spots in the world rankings to land at number 72 out of about 11000. I have no starters going tomorrow, so I'm going to dip a bit (and likely also lose first in my division briefly unless my hitters start picking things up a bit). I am currently 200 points behind the #1 person overall. (If the season ended today, I would get $60. The cost to play was $18.) By the way, the name of my team is "Make Solitons, Not War". I'm planning to design a t-shirt with that slogan, but I haven't gotten around to it (and have other shirts I need to finish designing first anyway).
(Oh, and today I played Zelda: Twilight Princess for the first time since March 26th. Now that I am home and have enough sleep to play, I'll try to advance a bit more. I am currently flying to achieve higher ground in the twilit Lake Hylia.)
3 days ago
17 comments:
Remind me to take your complaining about a poor start with a grain of salt. Top 10% is a poor start? :)
Actually, at the time I complained, I was only in the top half.
The top 10 % was achieved after the first couple of days of finally playing well.
Ah, fair enough :) Did Thorman's home run last wednesday help you out? I remember you talking about picking him up for your team, and he's at least getting a few RBI's. It does look like he's platooning with Wilson at 1st base though. I'm sad the Braves aren't playing today, but at least the Phillies-Mets game is going well (at this point at least, Mets losing by one run :).
Oh, and i've been meaning to ask, is there a Dodgers game coming up soon that would be a good one for me to first hear Vin Scully? You've talked about his announcing so much that I feel bad never having actually heard him (or was conscious of who it was, at least).
Oh, another thing I was curious about, not being at all familiar with how fantasy baseball works - do the standings change this rapidly later i n the season? It would make sense that they wouldn't, but it occured to me that may be an assumption that isn't true in this case.
The standings change very rapidly this early in fantasy baseball because of the tininess of the sample size of the statistics. For example, I have just over 1000 points in total and 355 of them came yesterday.
Thorman's HR indeed helped, but I traded him because he's platooning rather than starting. I may get him again later.
Vin Scully announces the tv side (with a simulcast on the radio side for the first 3 innings) of regular season games except when he's on vacation. (The past several years, he's taken more vacations than he did before.) Today at 1pm is the home opener. I assume he'll be broadcasting that. Of course, I won't be at home to watch it, but at least I'll get the radio.
Maybe I should have a game night during an evening game where I know (or at least think) he's announcing and you can come over and we can have the game on in the background while it's on?
Makes sense on the statistics side. How long into the season does it take for things to settle down into longer term changes?
That plan sounds good for watching a game. I wouldn't mind just making it a night to see the baseball game, but I imagine more people will be interested if you do it as a game night as well. :)
For watching the game, I am up for it most nights. :)
Tomorrow I might only have it on in the background. I need to figure out when I am going through my page proofs. (We're doing this in series, so tomorrow night may well be very busy for me.)
In terms of how long it takes for the stats to settle down, it corresponds roughly to what we see with things like team batting averages stabilizing.
I think I was bad luck for the Phillies - Mets game, wow. Maybe I should stop following the Dodgers game i've got updating in the background. :/ That sounds good, i'm thinking probably later in the week will be better for me anyways, so i'll just check on how the page proofs are going in a few days :)
I will be finishing with my turn at the proofs by Thursday, so I'll certainly be able to watch games starting Thursday night. (I don't know if the Dodgers are playing that day.) Actually, I'm going to try to do the whole thing tomorrow -- I'm planning to ignore my research tomorrow during the day -- so that we can FedEx the proofs up to Autumn a day earlier than I think will happen. The timescale is immediately, so while it will be hard to do things while I have the proofs, it will be over quickly.
Somebody else is taking them tonight -- we are purposely marking up the same copy because that's easiest for the layout people -- so I am available for Buffy tonight. :)
Cool. I'll give you a call in a few, I haven't located a copy of 2nd season yet but can probably do so. I also disavow any responsibility about the Dodgers game today, I started watching in the 5th inning.
For Buffy, I am available after 10 pm or so. I have ping pong until 9pm and then I need to go home and shower.
The Dodgers were down 3-2 when I left for class. They were down 5-2 when I came back, allowed one more run, and then loaded the bases with nobody out in the 9th but only scored one run.
Another Mariners-Indians doubleheader got postponed today. I'm glad I'm not in Cleveland. Those two teams have still only played 3 games each! I have one pitcher on Cleveland. He's pitched once and is supposed to pitch again on Thursday, but I'm guessing that he won't start that day.
The Angels are supposed to start a series in Cleveland tomorrow, so I purposely traded my one Angels player last night. (I was thinking of trading him anyway.)
OT: You guys are watching Buffy? Excellent.
AG: Oh, right. I should probably write a blog entry reviewing Buffy, or at least season 1 thereof. We powered through season 1 in the 2 weeks before we went to Florida, and we'll be starting season 2 shortly. We didn't end up watching tonight, so either Wednesday or Thursday, we'll start up again. (Tomorrow is reserved for page proofs and we'll see if that's still going on Wednesday night. During the day on Wednesday, I have a film shoot to attend and provide the mathematical consultation for.)
AG: Yep. I got motivated to go see it by a Making Light post mentioning the 10-yr anniversary and reading the comments thread, and we found the first season used at Interact. :)
Perhaps better reserved for Mason's Buffy post, but the current most-quoted line from season one is Principal Snyder: "It's that kind of woolly-headed liberal thinking that leads to getting eaten."
Some of my other favorites:
Buffy: "You want Xander, you've gotta speak up, girl!"
Willow: "No, no, no. No speaking up, that way leads to madness and sweaty palms."
Willow: "I don't actually date a whole lot, lately."
Buffy: "Why not?"
Willow: "Well, when i'm with a boy I like, it's hard for me to say anything cool, or witty, or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away."
Buffy: "It's not that bad."
Willow: "It is. I think boys are more interested in a girl who can talk."
Principal Snyder: "There are no dead students here. This week."
Also the last lines in I Robot, You Jane were priceless in the delivery, but i'm not going to quote them here. :)
There was also one by Xander which i'm sure i've heard us use before (possibly from someone who had seen it?), which goes something like: "On a scale from one to ten? It sucked."
The getting eaten line is awesome. I'm just waiting for an appropriate political blog post in which to use it...
It might be a few days before I make that post. I'm currently only on page 27 of the book proofs -- only 69 more to go.
Also, this post (originally about baseball, no less!) has a chance to have my largest number of comments ever.
Take that, hornets!
There were a lot of quotes in the UGCS fortune database back in the day, so I was already familiar with some of the one-liners. I can actually go so far as to say I'd already established Xander as my favorite character long before I'd seen a single episode. ><
Oh, and "lol threadjack".
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