Tales from the jar side: Baseball

Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of October 6 - 13, 2019. This week I taught an online Spring and Spring Boot class, talked to a client about a potential Geb class,and gave five talks at the No Fluff, Just Stuff event in Minneapolis, MN.

We're in the middle of the Major League Baseball playoffs, and poor Minnesota played well enough to qualify but ran into the stupid Yankees, again, and got swept, again, so I commiserated with the attendees when I went to Minneapolis. My favorite team is the Boston Red Sox, which means both that I root for them and that I root against the Yankees, so was very much hoping that Minnesota would play better than they did. As many of you know, I'm based in Connecticut, which also puts me on the front lines of the Boston / New York rivalry. It's easy to be a Red Sox fan in Boston -- so is everybody else. It's here in Connecticut that in the airport you'll find a display of both Yankees shirts and Red Sox shirts on the same table. Do you know how hard it is to knock over half a display?

(Me neither, of course, at least as far as you know.)

During my formative years, my family lived near Baltimore, MD (Owings Mills, specifically) when I was between the ages of 7 and 11. Those were the golden years of the Baltimore Orioles and their brilliant manager Earl Weaver. In those days the Orioles were fantastic, with great players like Brooks Robinson, Don Baylor, Paul Blair, Bobby Grich, Mark Belanger, and a pitching staff led by the great Jim Palmer. That was the era where Weaver coined the term "pitching, defense, and the three-run homer", which was a sabermetric approach at least thirty years ahead of its time.

I wasn't a huge baseball fan at the time, though, mostly because nobody else in my family liked it. My father mostly thought baseball was boring and my mother didn't care at all, so while we went to an occasional game in old Memorial stadium, I really didn't dwell on it. I did carry my fandom through our move to York, PA, when I was twelve, however.

It's funny how much difference a relatively short distance in geography can make. We moved from about a dozen miles south of the Mason-Dixon line (the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania) to about a dozen miles north of it, and my whole world changed. I went from a relatively diverse, relatively large city in Baltimore, to a much more rural, small city in York that felt provincial even to a kid like me.

York claimed to be the first capital of the United States, in a weird way. It turns out that the Continental Congress was driven out of Philadelphia when the British took the city during the Revolutionary War, and fled to York just in time to sign the Articles of Confederation (a precursor to the Constitution). So there's that. Of course, the government moved right back to Philly as soon as it could, so York must not have been all that appealing even then.

In high school we learned about another "big event" of the time. During the winter of 1778, there was a lot of dissatisfaction with George Washington's conduct of the war, and a group of rebels known as the Conway Cabal wanted to replace him. The legend goes that at a dinner in York, the famous French general Lafayette felt that Washington wasn't getting the proper respect and decided to make the "Toast That Saved The Union", saluting Washington and declaring his support for him, which apparently was enough to end the cabal.

Even as a kid, I thought that was pretty lame. Assuming it happened at all, I've never seen it documented anywhere outside of York. The Wikipedia page on the Conway Cabal (which I'm surprised even exists) doesn't even mention it.

In 1979, the Orioles made the World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Despite the fact that we were way closer to Baltimore than Pittsburgh, almost everyone in my school was rooting for Pittsburgh. That was Willie Stargel's team, and they played the insipid song "We Are Family" constantly. The Orioles won the first two games and then got swept over the next four, which was seriously depressing.

Four years later, in 1983, the Orioles of Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken, Jr, finally won the title. I was in Boston at the time, as an undergrad at M.I.T. The school is in Cambridge, which across the river from Boston, and not a terribly long walk from Fenway Park. During those days you could see the lights from Fenway from my dorm, and if the meal plan was particularly awful that night, a few of us would walk over the Fenway and sit in the bleachers. I vaguely recall the cost of those tickets being about $4.

We experienced a lot of "local color". I remember the beah vendahs yelling, "Get yah beah heah," which I thought was pretty funny until I got used to it. I also didn't realize that Cahney Landsfohd had a couple of "ahs" (okay, r's) in his name until I saw it written down.

My junior year I took a statistics class, and the professor, Stephan Morgenthaler, who was from Sweden and had never seen a baseball game. Baseball and statistics are a natural combination, so I invited him to go to a game at Fenway. We looked pretty silly walking over, because he was 6 feet, 7 inches and lanky, and I was a foot shorter than that on my best day. We had fun, though. I think the Sox won, too, so the crowd went home happy.

As a player, I was a truly awful second baseman. M.I.T. had intramural programs in everything, and my dorm had a C-league softball team that would have been in D-League had there been one. We hadn't won a game in years. My senior year I got to be the captain, so I made the batting order, which meant I got to bat first every game. Our most glorious moment happened that year. A game was tied going into the bottom of the last inning. We loaded the bases and sent Anna Quaadgras up to bat. She was from the Netherlands and had never played baseball in any form in her life. We told her not to swing no matter what, and sure enough she drew a walk to score the winning run. Naturally we carried her off the field and the celebration afterwards was epic.

(To put my own skills in perspective, in one game I hit a grounder to short. The shortstop bobbled it, dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again, picked it up one more time, and threw to first. I beat the throw by a step. One of my friends was coaching first base at the time. He came up to me and said, "were you not trying or are you really that slow?" I would have answered him with the appropriate level of indignation, but I was too out of breath to say anything.)

I didn't follow baseball much after that until the mid 90's. By then, the rise of the Internet gave me access to a web site called Baseball Prospectus, and I finally started learning about sabermetrics, the science of baseball performance analysis based on statistics. That's when I learned that many of the accepted truisms in baseball weren't true at all if you analyzed the actual data. You may be aware that in the last couple of decades this statistical revolution has taken over baseball, everywhere except for the idiotic commentators during the games, who are mostly former baseball players and mostly don't believe all this math nonsense. All I know is that the Red Sox hired Theo Epstein as general manager in 2003 and even the great Bill James as a consultant, and proceeded to win World Series titles in 2004, 2007, 2011, and 2018.

The Sox were always my second favorite team, and became my favorite when I moved to Connecticut for good in 1988. New England was one of the few parts of the country that cared about baseball more than football, especially because the New England Patriots -- though it's hard to imagine this now -- were a complete joke from the late 60's until the late 90's. When the Patriots won the Super Bowl in 2001 as a 14-point underdog to the St. Louis Rams, everybody celebrated, partly because nobody could believe the Patriots had won anything and partly because we knew the Red Sox were never going to win the World Series so we might as well have a good time when the opportunity afforded itself.

In 2004, in the American League Championship Series, the Red Sox became the first and only team to come back from a three games to none deficit and beat the Yankees four straight to go to the World Series, which they also swept 4 - 0. As you may have heard, the Sox had not won a World Series prior to that since 1918. Bill Simmons, who wrote for ESPN at the time and was previously known as the Boston Sports Guy, actually wrote a book about the 2004 season called Now I Can Die In Peace. After the 2004 win, there were over 2 million people at the parade, and in the off-season between 2004 and 2005 they took the World Series trophy on tour to every city and town in New England.

(I was out of town when it came to Marlborough, but I'm okay with that.)

My interest in baseball was also revived in those years because my son was between about 7 and 10 and baseball as another way we could connect. I used to take him to minor league games, which were great. We had two AA teams nearby: the New Britain Rock Cats (yes, minor league team names are strange) and the Norwich Navigators, who eventually became the Connecticut Defenders and then sadly left town. Many times I would take my son and one or two of his friends to a game. I'd hand him $20 and told him to come back whenever it was gone. He could spend it on food, or games, or T-shirts, or whatever, but when it was gone that was it. I never worried about him, partly because it was a minor league game and partly because he was never alone. He'd come back and get bored by about the end of the 6th inning, at which point we'd go home.

In 2009, I spent a year as a paid scorer for Baseball Info Solutions (now Sports Info Solutions). They had their own system for recording every pitch and grading every fly (I remember the distinction between liners and "fliners", and more) and they paid for a ticket to every game. I would drive down to Norwich (by myself -- I was working, so I didn't bring the boy along), upgrade the seat to the nice sky box (for a whopping $12 extra dollars), and get lost in scoring the game. I would then go home, enter the data into their system, check it against the official scoresheet, and get paid about $7/game, not counting the ticket. It was a great way to take a break from my actual work, not to mention see a lot of good baseball.

These days I don't pay as much attention to baseball. My son cares way more about the NBA, and can't wait for the new basketball season to start. I like to keep baseball games on in the background, and especially in the playoffs I enjoy the radio broadcasts much more than the national TV ones. I've kept up with sabermetric developments mostly as a subscriber to Joe Sheehan's newsletter, which is a wonderful blend of data and insight.

To wrap this up, a few miscellaneous items:

• The I.T. world has seen a huge rise in data science in the past few years, which means they're going through the revolution that swept the baseball world over the last twenty years. It's taught me the difference between data and actual insight, as I mentioned.

• During those years I "discovered" a baseball writer named Nate Silver. Silver later applied the same statistical techniques from baseball to predicting presidential elections, and became famous when he got every state right in 2008. He now has a site called fivethirtyeight.com, which I used to follow religiously but can't anymore because I can't handle political discussions anymore. Still, I feel like I know him the way you remember seeing a band in a local club before they hit it big.

• The book Moneyball takes place during rise of sabermetrics, focusing on the Oakland A's and their general manager, Billy Bean. To my considerable astonishment, it got made into a pretty good movie starring Brad Pitt, which is worth seeing if you haven't yet.

Speaking of books, this is the last week I'm adding new sections to my Kotlin Cookbook, which should wrap up on Monday. I'll probably address that next week.

Last week:

• Spring and Spring Boot, online at Safari

• Conference call to plan a Geb class. Geb is a Groovy library for browser automation.

• No Fluff, Just Stuff event in Minneapolis, MN.

Next week:

• Appearing on the Talking Kotlin podcast, hosted by Hadi Harriri

• Submit my last sections to Kotlin Cookbook, including the chapter on coroutines

• Groovy for Java Developers course for a local client