Category: baseball

  • Spring Vacation Day Eight – Athletics vs Giants

    Today was the last baseball game of the trip and the Athletics hosted the cross-bay rival Giants.  The game wasn’t so great from the perspective of the A’s, except for the five innings thrown by Trevor Cahill.  The only thing bad that happened to him was Travis Ishikawa belted the first of his two homeruns. …

  • Spring Vacation Day Six – Athletics at Rangers

    Today was the only ‘road trip’ of our games this week.  We ate breakfast and hopped in the car for the hour drive up to Surprise, Arizona.  Surprise Stadium is in the middle of the Surprise Recreation Campus, which includes practice fields, picnic grounds, a library, tennis courts, community pool and a water park.  Both…

  • Spring Vacation Day Four – Baseball and Hockey

    Today was a long day.  We got to Phoenix Muni early, almost too early.  Parking was open, but the stadium wasn’t, so we went inside the shop to browse around.  I bought myself another straw hat, since you can never have too many of them.  When we finally got inside, we headed over near the…

  • Spring Vacation Day Three – Dodgers at Athletics

    Today was the first baseball game of the trip, with the A’s hosting the Dodgers split squad.  After allowing the Dodgers to put up four runs in the second, they came back and scored nine in the third.  They wanted to coast home, but the Dodgers put up four runs in the ninth to bring…

  • Baseball Stats – dollars-per-win

    A recent post on the Beyond the Boxscore blog pointed me to another blog entry on Statspeak called Building a sabermatrician’s workbench.  And as the web will do, I was in turn pointed to Baseball-Databank.org. I’m not new to MySQL databases or SQL queries, but the existence of a free baseball database was news to me, so…

  • Real Opening Day

    My wife and I went to the real home opener for the A’s last night and watched what I hope is not an example of the kinds of games we’re going to see all season long.  They lost the game 2-1 against the pitching of Daisuke Matsuzaka who was definately on his game. Frustrating rookiee…

  • We’ve got SimYard, now we only need SimHotDog and SimBeer.

    For the past week I have been addicted to a new online game.  It’s a baseball management simulator called SimYard.  Like other baseball sims, you pick a team name, logo and colors, and pit your team against others.  SimYard has an interesting twist to it.  Your team is made up of semi-pro players who you…