Friday 10/7/22
* I worked pretty hard this week. I'll work what that entailed into a larger accounting later.
* My little mentee registered for the SAT today with the help of her guidance counselor. Today was the last day to register to take the test in November. She is a senior and hasn't taken it before. I am near certain that if I hadn't taken a hand this would have gone by the wayside. I said I'd help her study if she wanted, promised it would be fine, told her not to stress, and said I would take her to the testing center if she wanted and do work in a cafe until she was done. I figured it was either me or nobody, but she can certainly go by herself, obviously.
* Yesterday I ran 3000 stairs and did 100 push-ups. Didn't do anything physical today. I'll get back at it in the morning. Tomorrow will be a long day. Let's be productive.
* If I am not doing something to actively try and get out of this situation, I feel worse. Said something can take many forms. Writing, putting books together, exposing the people I need to expose on here, and even working out to stay strong enough to keep going on the physical side with all that I must take on and endure.
* Looking at some baseball stats today, I saw that the Red Sox finished with 155 home runs as a team, which is truly dismal in this era. They had four guys in the top ten for doubles, though. Home run power become doubles power. Doubles are great, but when home runs become doubles--rather than when doubles augment home runs--you're in trouble.
* If you hit .278, you would have finished tenth in the National League in batting average.
* I don't think people understand the concept of total bases in baseball. It's funny: you have these people for whom sports is their main interest in life. Sports are simple. Sports aren't like what it takes to write a story for the ages. Understanding sports doesn't take a lot, but you know what? People don't even have that little bit. Sports people don't have it either. I saw people saying Aaron Judge fell short of 400 total bases. Someone said that makes them appreciate Jim Rice more. I saw fans say things like this, and people whose job it is to talk about sports. Do they really not know why Jim Rice had 400 total bases and Aaron Judge did not? It's because Rice had a terrible eye. He never walked. He had a fairly low on base percentage. Jim Rice in 1978 didn't have anywhere near the year Aaron Judge had in 2022. Ted Williams never had 400 total bases. Judge had a lot of walks and 391 total bases. If you walk a lot, 400 total bases is virtually impossible. Unless you were Lou Gehrig.
* People fall in love with ballplayers like they're the stuffed animals of their youth, though they're middle aged men. Time and again I see people post that signing Bogaerts has to be the number one offseason priority for the Red Sox. To those people I would suggest they grow up and wise up. Watching some of these playoff games today, do you know what the story was of each of them? Pitching, pitching, pitching. The Red Sox had Bogaerts. Where did it get them? They had no pitching. Where did that get them? Last place. Again. Sure, keep him. But he's not close to the number one priority if you want to contend again. That bullpen is a disaster.
* I saw on a baseball history discussion group where people were remarking that it was so weird that Willie Hernandez got the AL MVP in 1984. The consensus was that he didn't deserve it, and the voters were simply determined to give it to a Tiger. One person made a case for Lance Parrish. I love Lance Parrish, but that's silly. I will say that Hernandez did deserve that MVP. Or it's not significantly egregious that he got it, anyway. He pitched in 80 games. That means he appeared in half his team's games. He threw 140 innings. Saved a lot of games for that era, won a lot, lost only a few. His ERA+ was over 200. That's a pretty great season. But you have to know baseball to understand why it is. You can't just look at the save numbers. On a team of a lot of players who were a rock, he was the rock of rocks. He was more deserving of his MVP than Eckersley was of his. Or Rollie Fingers of his, definitely.
* I came up with two feature ideas on jazz for next year, but I haven't pitched them yet. One is on Duke Ellington, the other on Billie Holiday. I still have to do that other Billie Holiday feature I should have filed by now. I will try and make sure to have it in by Monday.
* Yesterday I saw a guy, maybe late fifties, with a T-shirt that read Die First Then Quit, with the first two words on top of the second two. I feel like you should have a modicum of self-awareness if you're the kind of person who seeks to send messages with your T-shirt. I don't think this man had ever exercised once in his life, and that got me thinking that he wasn't dead and surely he had quit long ago, but then again, if you never try, you can't quit.
* I am drinking buckets of green tea. I pitched a couple books things, too.
