… but they’re total crap.

Tonight’s game was the highest scoring Game 1 in World Series history. So what?!?!

What would be more impressive would be a World Series game in which no record of any kind was broken. In the last 100 years, there have been 100 Game 1’s. Actually, less, because a few Series weren’t played. That’s less games than are played in a regular season. There are basically infinite ways you can look at the numbers, so the chances are pretty good that you’ll be able to pull out a quasi-meaningful number that’s never happened in a (relatively) small pool of games.

Another meaningless number: the Red Sox being the first team to win a postseason series after being down 0-3. Everybody kept talking about this like it was some inviolable law of nature. You have to ask yourself, “why was this so?” Probably, a team that gets down 0-3 is hopelessly mis-matched against its competition. This was obviously not the case with the Yankees; the teams were very evenly matched, and being down 0-3 was a fluke to begin with.

The danger in making too much out of statistics is that people constantly defy them, or appear to defy them, and so people discount them wholesale. You are constantly hearing baseball people saying “I’m not a numbers guy”. There are just right and wrong ways to understand stats, and right and wrong ways to use what you learn from them. It’s like the mutual fund companies always tell you: past performance is no guarantee of future success. And that’s probably the biggest mistake I see people making using baseball stats. If a batter has bad numbers against a certain pitcher, there are tons of factors that could be the real cause, including things a batter can work on.

So, now that Mark Bellhorn has hit yet another home run in the postseason, this one to win game 1 of the World Series, I’m coming around to him. He’s still my least favorite player on the team, but maybe there’s something to him. My previous assessment was that he has such a high number of both walks and strikeouts because he’s just too lazy to swing the bat; his slothful fielding confirms this impression. Anyway, that can’t be the whole story if you get three important home runs in as many games.

He also looks like Tim Curry. Whenever I see him, I want to sing “Whatever happened…. to Fay Wray? That delicate satin-draped fra-hay-hayme…”

I am having trouble believing the World Series is really here in Boston. Last time I lived in the general area of a World Series, it was the 1979 Pirates. But we just heard the F-16’s flying over us a few seconds before they showed up on TV, so it’s definitely real.

It’s another very October New England day. Nice, crisp, overcast. The photo wasn’t taken today, but it was a day similar to this, a couple of weeks ago, when we went to a P. J. Harvey show at Avalon, across the street.


So… before this starts…

“2 invitations to a wedding I don’t want to go to”. If you’re going to skim, make sure you at least read the final update to the description.

“This website has original drawings made by children who are abducted by aliens. It includes drawings of aliens, alien spacecraft, alien hybrids, children being abducted by aliens, and the things aliens do to children.”

With all these baseball posts lately, I would be remiss in not pointing out this fantastically funny bit in Slate by the great local sports(ish) writer Charlie Pierce.

You hear a lot of jabber about the Curse of the Bambino. As someone pointed out last year, the only thing the curse ever did was put irksome Globe sportswriter and curse-coiner Dan Shaughnessy’s kids through college.
Well, irksome Salon sportswriter King Kaufmann points out a very real way that the legacy of Babe Ruth actually helped the Sox last night.

Talking about Johnny Damon’s grand slam:

What would have been an out in most parks was a home run because Yankee Stadium has a “short porch” in right, a configuration that favors left-handed sluggers. That’s because it was built in 1923, a time when 10,000 was a pretty spiffy crowd, but the Yankees had Babe Ruth, a left-handed slugger whose drawing power made the construction of a 70,000-seater seem like a sharp idea. The Yankees wanted to accentuate the positive. …the home run that gave Boston a commanding lead and turned the Yankees’ faces to ash got an assist from Babe Ruth.

…Carrot Top is funny today. Cats are chasing dogs, kids begging for liver. See if you can pick up a railroad car. Look for the sunset in the east. Ask Beyonce for a date. You just don’t know anymore.

That’s Terri’s message to A-Rod.

yes yes yes yes YES~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

holy crap!

We’re leading 10-3. It seems too good to be true.

Derek Lowe pitched 6 terrific innings. They’re leading 8-1. But they’ve taken him out and put in Pedro, who just gave up a hit to Hideki Matsui. To quote Tom Waits, everybody wants to know the same thing: how’s it gonna end?

We’re into the 14th inning. Terri’s knitting, I’m blogging. Jerry and Joe have been in good form tonight. “Welcome to the second edition of the Boston marathon”. “Even my grey hairs are getting grey hairs”. It’s interesting to watch Fox and listen to WEEI; the commercials sort of cancel each other out, and it’s easy to forget that the sound isn’t coming from the TV. Wakefield’s knuckleball is looking good.

But this is getting ridiculous. It’s 10:48. This game has almost been as long as two.

Whadya know, part II. Edward Tufte’s Q&A has an RSS feed. Tufte’s worth reading, though he’s possibly the only person who’s made a cult out of information design.

Whatdya know. William Gibson has a blog, and has some thoughts about the NYT Suskind article I pointed out yesterday.