Double bad news for Oakland fans, murder, an unsurprising but appalling lack of journalistic ethics, NIMBYs, robot sports writing, and social media, 1907-style.
I only listened to/watched a few A's games, but Fosse was always great as part of one of the better broadcast teams. (The Bay Area has it good that way.) And because I knew him as a voice of the A's, my brain somehow compartmentalized and forgot he was THAT Ray Fosse. The Ray Fosse in that famous photo, the one whose career was almost ruined because Pete Rose treated an exhibition game like the World Series. Brains are weird. Anyway, RIP Ray.
I grew up near there, and attended in the early 70s, and I don't recall it ever being used. Seemed to pop up in the 80s. But it IS the official name and I suppose always has been. (Same deal with Penn State and Johns Hopkins, but they never get any flack for it.)
As it happens, I grew up near Penn State, and I know its official name is The Pennsylvania State University.
They don't get flack for it though because the NFL players who attended PSU don't seem to make a habit of saying they went to THE Pennsylvania State University when they're introducing themselves on Sunday Night Football like former Buckeyes do.
Cancer sucks. RIP Ray Fosse and fight like hell, David Hess.
But can we talk about “majorly”? It’s a word that will soon be in the dictionary if it isn’t already, I guess, but where did it come from? TV? Movies? Somewhere else? I am a huge fan of slang and catchphrases, but this just feels like an error that is coming into general use solely through repetition.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go yell at these clouds.
Like impact as a verb (acceptable only in reference to a tooth or a bowel) or impactful (coined by a copywriter in the mid-60s)? Maybe I'm just champing at the bit... (and yes, I'm getting long in the tooth).
I remember working for a hospital back in the mid-1980s and the HR person said we were putting up "signage." I thought what a useless word. It's a sign.
My daughter's partner is a philosopher, and I've read a few of his papers. I don't if it's just him, or the journals he publishes in, but writing in academic philosophy these days seems *much* more casual about language (not the philosophical terms themselves tho) than academic writing in science.
Interesting. I do think scientific writing can sometimes be overly rigid. But, most of us don't actually have formal writing training, so we're learning on the job (like almost everything else in academia), and under those circumstance rules can help.
To finish the thought, I would bet that those in fields like philosophy get much more training in different types of writing, and likely read more broadly as well.
That's kinda how my wife feels about "irregardless". Did I spell that right? I notice when someone uses it, but holy crap, my wife is instant fist-and-teeth-clenching PISSED OFF. Which, of course, makes me chuckle.
I don't understand the impulse to add unnecessary syllables to already perfectly functional words. "Irregardless" is a good example, as is "orientated". How is orientated an improvement over "oriented"? Same with "commentate".
Maybe it’s true that AI is chasing you, Craig. I read a few years ago of a service introduced in the UK that automatically supplied defenses to parking and traffic citations. Is criminal defense more amenable to robots than sports reporting? Will we need physicians, if one can tell a robot one’s symptoms and simply wait for the machine to spit out a diagnosis & treatment plan? Which method will be more accurate?
I always liked Star Trek and go all the way back to the OG series.
So I am very proud of William Shatner doing an extended ad for Jeff Bezos, who really needs the hype, by shooting off in a rocket and then doing spots on morning shows during which he talks about "saving the planet." The money and jet fueled burned in these efforts don't trigger me at all.
Old newspapers are great, and I hope that something of 2021 will be preserved for residents of 2121 to spend their time on.
My favourite offseason baseball activity is reading very old SABR biographies (free on the web). The same themes keep coming up..."after his career ended, he ran a saloon. He spent a short time in prison after the death of a man whose wife he was seeing."
Here's one- Lee Richmond. He pitched the first perfect game in 1880. More significantly, he spent his college summers playing professional baseball. This annoyed Yale so much that they basically invented the NCAA. He didn't run a saloon, but he became a high school teacher in Ohio, where he taught Addie Joss' son and told him “Your father pitched a perfect game. Well, so did I. It doesn’t mean anything around here and it isn’t going to help you with your geometry.”
That's Addie Joss, who died at 31 and was elected to the Hall of Fame without meeting the usual 10-season requirement...I could do this all day.
How did the social news reporting happen back then? Did the person going out of town or coming into town contact them newspapers? Or did the host having the party that was being attended by out of town guest call up a reporter? I don’t suppose reporters would hang around train stations and inquire about the purpose of incoming passengers visit to their fair town, but maybe?
I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota that printed those notices at least into the mid-70s. There would be a separate column for each township: "Tyrone Notes" and "Jessenland Happenings" for instance. A woman in each area would aggregate the news and forward the column to town. Of course there were still party-line telephones then, too, so someone could simply listen in and save some running around.
Lots of who went where on Sunday and such, but you could pick out bigger happenings like someone returning from college but not going back after the holiday break.
It was essentially a shared line. Four or five neighbors would share the same number. When someone called the number the phones would ring in all the houses. The issue was all houses could listen in to all calls.
So much of "online culture" is a heck of a lot older than you'd think. "Emoticons" go back at least a century (https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2015/05/23/emoji_history/).... "Memes" and even LOLcats can be traced back to Victorian era novelty postcards....
See "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage for more.
Here in Smalltown, Vermont it was common practice for the hospital to provide the local newspaper with a weekly list of who was admitted and for what ailment. This wasn't some prohibition era thing either-- it didn't stop until the mid 1990's when HIPAA was enacted.
Fodder for future newsletters: I am not devious enough to think about this, but the current MLB has had no issues messing around with the rules of the game for "speedier" outcomes. As gambling continues to rise in baseball, what types of rule changes could MLB make to ensure a more gambling friendly sporting product? I can't think of any myself, but I am sure Craig could spend 1500 words on all the ways MLB could make that happen. Such fun times we live in!
Not sure what it's actively doing, but Manfred was at some Q&A a couple of months ago and recounted a story in which the NBA commissioner told him that baseball's slow pace is PERFECT for gambling, because there is a lot of time for the microbets the industry is moving toward. If you have 40 seconds between pitches, that's 40 seconds during which more people have a chance to grab their phones and bet $2 on whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike.
And how easy it will be for a struggling starter trying to get by on the MLB minimum of $500K a year to take an easy $20K from a gambling group to start the 2nd batter of the third inning with a curve.
Broadcast feeds can be significantly delayed, though. If those are home microbets, does that mean everyone at the ballpark is going to be talking on their phone proxy betting to someone at home who still has a few seconds to bet on something that just happened?
“How does someone who didn?t play every day strike out 213 times?” Rose says. “Ray Charles wouldn?t strike out that much. I just can?t imagine striking out 213 times without killing myself.”
"That was the worst (bleeping) lineup they could have put on the field,” Rose said to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale. “Their 6,7,8,9 hitters were all out-men. They had to have (Aaron) Judge and (Giancarlo) Stanton do something. If they didn?t, all of the pressure was on Joey Gallo. You saw how that worked out.”
Fun fact. Joey Gallo's wRC+ this year is almost identical to Pete Rose's career average (122 vs. 121). Sure, Joey Gallo had a weird batting line, but still 20% better than average.
I was born in a small, Illinois town in 1973. My birthday's events were in the newspaper for the first several years of my life, descriptions of the Raggedy Ann or Holly Hobbie cake and napkins and guest list included. Same with all my Letters to Santa. I prefer to believe it has my kids believing I was kind of a big deal, when they probably think I'm just old.
I got a subscription to newspapers.com about a year ago for a work matter, and pretty soon I was stuck going down rabbit holes every day. It's an amazingly awesome site. I got into things like reading about local history from 150 years ago, which is fascinating. But the most fascinating thing was one day I got the bright idea to read about how New Jersey papers addressed DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", and that led me to find out how newspapers in New Jersey talked about Black people at the time. It is unbelievable -- not in a good way. Like in a really really bad way. Kids should be required to read that stuff and understand that this notion that we're taught about the northeast not being racist like our brothers and sisters in the south is utter nonsense.
Thanks for sharing the Ray Fosse news. Another player from my teen years passes. Glad to still be kickin' but this is another reminder of my advancing years. NIMBYism bit was spot on.
What will Delaware County do if Amazon wants to build a warehouse? They cover the parking lot with solar panels. They do all the other odious things local councilmen love though.
I was just reading an article on solar farms in the WaPost yesterday. They outlined the problem in New York, but apparently the problem exists nationwide.
The solar farms tend to be in rural areas, while the demand for power is in urban areas. The electrical power network to transfer power long distances is already maxed out much of the time, so extra rural power generation won't help unless the network is dramatically improved, and the funding allocated to improve has thus far been woefully inadequate.
Power demand is likely to increase dramatically with the switch to electric cars. They surmise the most likely scenario is many small power generating stations of various types in and near the cities where the demand is.
I live in an old part of town. A while back a guy knocked on the door and had a newspaper page from a long-defunct paper with a little blurb about how the Saturday Evening Supper Society had their monthly dinner at my house. Once she realized that we could own this newspaper, my wife could not go find her wallet fast enough. Women be shoppin'. Amirite, fellas? But seriously it is pretty cool. It is framed and on the wall.
I only listened to/watched a few A's games, but Fosse was always great as part of one of the better broadcast teams. (The Bay Area has it good that way.) And because I knew him as a voice of the A's, my brain somehow compartmentalized and forgot he was THAT Ray Fosse. The Ray Fosse in that famous photo, the one whose career was almost ruined because Pete Rose treated an exhibition game like the World Series. Brains are weird. Anyway, RIP Ray.
I wonder how many irate letters to the editor that old newspaper got after failing to capitalize the T in “the O.S.U.”
"Earl ... has been attending the O.S.U."
And here I thought referring to it as "*The* Ohio State University" was of relatively recent vintage.
I grew up near there, and attended in the early 70s, and I don't recall it ever being used. Seemed to pop up in the 80s. But it IS the official name and I suppose always has been. (Same deal with Penn State and Johns Hopkins, but they never get any flack for it.)
As it happens, I grew up near Penn State, and I know its official name is The Pennsylvania State University.
They don't get flack for it though because the NFL players who attended PSU don't seem to make a habit of saying they went to THE Pennsylvania State University when they're introducing themselves on Sunday Night Football like former Buckeyes do.
Cancer sucks. RIP Ray Fosse and fight like hell, David Hess.
But can we talk about “majorly”? It’s a word that will soon be in the dictionary if it isn’t already, I guess, but where did it come from? TV? Movies? Somewhere else? I am a huge fan of slang and catchphrases, but this just feels like an error that is coming into general use solely through repetition.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go yell at these clouds.
1980s according to dictionary.com
Just how old ARE you?
Old enough to rant without checking, apparently. Majorly embarrassing.
Like impact as a verb (acceptable only in reference to a tooth or a bowel) or impactful (coined by a copywriter in the mid-60s)? Maybe I'm just champing at the bit... (and yes, I'm getting long in the tooth).
Oh, man, "impactful" may be my least favorite word of all time. I don't recall people using it regularly until the last decade or so.
I remember working for a hospital back in the mid-1980s and the HR person said we were putting up "signage." I thought what a useless word. It's a sign.
Hopefully you aren't a reviewer for any of my grants and papers, because my lab's research is hella impactful.
Funny enough, I'm a professional grant and paper reviewer with a focus on the work of salty scientiests who enjoy baseball.
(And yes, I intentionally misspell scientiests whenever I type it)
What's funny is that when I created this pseud I was making a backronym for "ASS," but everyone is too damn polite and calls me "Salty" instead.
I love this so much :)
My daughter's partner is a philosopher, and I've read a few of his papers. I don't if it's just him, or the journals he publishes in, but writing in academic philosophy these days seems *much* more casual about language (not the philosophical terms themselves tho) than academic writing in science.
"I don't know if", that should read. Sigh.
Interesting. I do think scientific writing can sometimes be overly rigid. But, most of us don't actually have formal writing training, so we're learning on the job (like almost everything else in academia), and under those circumstance rules can help.
To finish the thought, I would bet that those in fields like philosophy get much more training in different types of writing, and likely read more broadly as well.
That's kinda how my wife feels about "irregardless". Did I spell that right? I notice when someone uses it, but holy crap, my wife is instant fist-and-teeth-clenching PISSED OFF. Which, of course, makes me chuckle.
I don't understand the impulse to add unnecessary syllables to already perfectly functional words. "Irregardless" is a good example, as is "orientated". How is orientated an improvement over "oriented"? Same with "commentate".
Agreed. No need to mess with already cromulent words.
Maybe it’s true that AI is chasing you, Craig. I read a few years ago of a service introduced in the UK that automatically supplied defenses to parking and traffic citations. Is criminal defense more amenable to robots than sports reporting? Will we need physicians, if one can tell a robot one’s symptoms and simply wait for the machine to spit out a diagnosis & treatment plan? Which method will be more accurate?
I always liked Star Trek and go all the way back to the OG series.
So I am very proud of William Shatner doing an extended ad for Jeff Bezos, who really needs the hype, by shooting off in a rocket and then doing spots on morning shows during which he talks about "saving the planet." The money and jet fueled burned in these efforts don't trigger me at all.
Shatner is not Kirk. He's TJ Hooker and Denny Crane, but is not Kirk.
Nimoy, however, was Spock. and Stewart is Picard.
Surprised he didn’t turn it into an ad for Priceline
Old newspapers are great, and I hope that something of 2021 will be preserved for residents of 2121 to spend their time on.
My favourite offseason baseball activity is reading very old SABR biographies (free on the web). The same themes keep coming up..."after his career ended, he ran a saloon. He spent a short time in prison after the death of a man whose wife he was seeing."
Here's one- Lee Richmond. He pitched the first perfect game in 1880. More significantly, he spent his college summers playing professional baseball. This annoyed Yale so much that they basically invented the NCAA. He didn't run a saloon, but he became a high school teacher in Ohio, where he taught Addie Joss' son and told him “Your father pitched a perfect game. Well, so did I. It doesn’t mean anything around here and it isn’t going to help you with your geometry.”
That's Addie Joss, who died at 31 and was elected to the Hall of Fame without meeting the usual 10-season requirement...I could do this all day.
How did the social news reporting happen back then? Did the person going out of town or coming into town contact them newspapers? Or did the host having the party that was being attended by out of town guest call up a reporter? I don’t suppose reporters would hang around train stations and inquire about the purpose of incoming passengers visit to their fair town, but maybe?
I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota that printed those notices at least into the mid-70s. There would be a separate column for each township: "Tyrone Notes" and "Jessenland Happenings" for instance. A woman in each area would aggregate the news and forward the column to town. Of course there were still party-line telephones then, too, so someone could simply listen in and save some running around.
Lots of who went where on Sunday and such, but you could pick out bigger happenings like someone returning from college but not going back after the holiday break.
This seems as good a place to ask as any, but how did phones used to work? What is a party line? Did you have to call an operator all the time?
It was essentially a shared line. Four or five neighbors would share the same number. When someone called the number the phones would ring in all the houses. The issue was all houses could listen in to all calls.
So much of "online culture" is a heck of a lot older than you'd think. "Emoticons" go back at least a century (https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2015/05/23/emoji_history/).... "Memes" and even LOLcats can be traced back to Victorian era novelty postcards....
See "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage for more.
Here in Smalltown, Vermont it was common practice for the hospital to provide the local newspaper with a weekly list of who was admitted and for what ailment. This wasn't some prohibition era thing either-- it didn't stop until the mid 1990's when HIPAA was enacted.
Fodder for future newsletters: I am not devious enough to think about this, but the current MLB has had no issues messing around with the rules of the game for "speedier" outcomes. As gambling continues to rise in baseball, what types of rule changes could MLB make to ensure a more gambling friendly sporting product? I can't think of any myself, but I am sure Craig could spend 1500 words on all the ways MLB could make that happen. Such fun times we live in!
Not sure what it's actively doing, but Manfred was at some Q&A a couple of months ago and recounted a story in which the NBA commissioner told him that baseball's slow pace is PERFECT for gambling, because there is a lot of time for the microbets the industry is moving toward. If you have 40 seconds between pitches, that's 40 seconds during which more people have a chance to grab their phones and bet $2 on whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike.
And how easy it will be for a struggling starter trying to get by on the MLB minimum of $500K a year to take an easy $20K from a gambling group to start the 2nd batter of the third inning with a curve.
So you’re saying any introduction of a pitch clock would be for the MINIMUM amount of time needed to pass between pitches? Lovely.
So Silver is clearly trying to destroy baseball once and for all.
Broadcast feeds can be significantly delayed, though. If those are home microbets, does that mean everyone at the ballpark is going to be talking on their phone proxy betting to someone at home who still has a few seconds to bet on something that just happened?
ooh. a very interesting point to throw into the mix.
I say with as much ardor as I can summon on a rainy Chicago morning: Fuck Pete Rose.
He wasn't too kind to Rizzo and the (I'm sorry, The) Yankees yesterday, was he?
What did he say?
Sorry, it was Gallo not Rizzo.
“How does someone who didn?t play every day strike out 213 times?” Rose says. “Ray Charles wouldn?t strike out that much. I just can?t imagine striking out 213 times without killing myself.”
"That was the worst (bleeping) lineup they could have put on the field,” Rose said to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale. “Their 6,7,8,9 hitters were all out-men. They had to have (Aaron) Judge and (Giancarlo) Stanton do something. If they didn?t, all of the pressure was on Joey Gallo. You saw how that worked out.”
Fun fact. Joey Gallo's wRC+ this year is almost identical to Pete Rose's career average (122 vs. 121). Sure, Joey Gallo had a weird batting line, but still 20% better than average.
I was born in a small, Illinois town in 1973. My birthday's events were in the newspaper for the first several years of my life, descriptions of the Raggedy Ann or Holly Hobbie cake and napkins and guest list included. Same with all my Letters to Santa. I prefer to believe it has my kids believing I was kind of a big deal, when they probably think I'm just old.
I got a subscription to newspapers.com about a year ago for a work matter, and pretty soon I was stuck going down rabbit holes every day. It's an amazingly awesome site. I got into things like reading about local history from 150 years ago, which is fascinating. But the most fascinating thing was one day I got the bright idea to read about how New Jersey papers addressed DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", and that led me to find out how newspapers in New Jersey talked about Black people at the time. It is unbelievable -- not in a good way. Like in a really really bad way. Kids should be required to read that stuff and understand that this notion that we're taught about the northeast not being racist like our brothers and sisters in the south is utter nonsense.
Had to click on the “extraordinarily ethically compromised people” link just to be sure…
I didn't. It's always Rovell.
Better him than me. 😉
Thanks for sharing the Ray Fosse news. Another player from my teen years passes. Glad to still be kickin' but this is another reminder of my advancing years. NIMBYism bit was spot on.
What will Delaware County do if Amazon wants to build a warehouse? They cover the parking lot with solar panels. They do all the other odious things local councilmen love though.
I was just reading an article on solar farms in the WaPost yesterday. They outlined the problem in New York, but apparently the problem exists nationwide.
The solar farms tend to be in rural areas, while the demand for power is in urban areas. The electrical power network to transfer power long distances is already maxed out much of the time, so extra rural power generation won't help unless the network is dramatically improved, and the funding allocated to improve has thus far been woefully inadequate.
Power demand is likely to increase dramatically with the switch to electric cars. They surmise the most likely scenario is many small power generating stations of various types in and near the cities where the demand is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/13/electric-vehicles-grid-upgrade/
(Though, since Delaware County is adjacent to urban Columbus, none of this may apply to them)
I live in an old part of town. A while back a guy knocked on the door and had a newspaper page from a long-defunct paper with a little blurb about how the Saturday Evening Supper Society had their monthly dinner at my house. Once she realized that we could own this newspaper, my wife could not go find her wallet fast enough. Women be shoppin'. Amirite, fellas? But seriously it is pretty cool. It is framed and on the wall.