Time travel

Mozart, 1782: "Lick my ass nicely, lick it nice and clean, nice and clean, lick my ass."

Shaq, 2008: "Kobe, ni****, tell me how my ass taste."

Frankly, Shaq's is catchier.

Schilling Lumbers Off Into the Sunset

Curt Schilling's retirement announcement, with commentary from the very inner conscience of Curt Schilling:

“Turn out the lights, the party’s over”

Rather than simply state I am retiring, I will build this up like a prick. Because I am a self-indulgent prick.

I used to wait with bated breath for Don Meredith to start singing that on “Monday Night Football.” Normally, it was sweet music if the Steelers were playing.

I am a self-indulgent prick.

If I could get him to sing it again, I would. This party has officially ended. After being blessed to experience 23 years of playing professional baseball in front of the world’s best fans in so many different places, it is with zero regrets that I am making my retirement official.

I am a self-indulgent prick.

To say I’ve been blessed would be like calling Refrigerator Perry “a bit overweight.”

It would be like calling Curt Schilling "a bit overweight."

[...]Four World Series, three World Championships. That there are men with plaques in Cooperstown who never experienced one — and I was able to be on three teams over seven years that won it all — is another “beyond my wildest dreams” set of memories I’ll take with me.

I, one pitcher, Curt Schilling, believe I am solely responsible for the championships of all three teams.

The game always gave me far more than I ever gave it. All of those things, every single one of those memories is enveloped with fan sights and sounds for me. Without the fans, they would still be great memories, but none would be enduring and unforgettable because they infused the energy, rage, passion and “feel” of all of those times.

You can tell I'm disingenuous here, because this sentence makes absolutely no fucking sense at all, even for me: "Without the fans, they would still be great memories, but none [fans? memories? experiences?] would be enduring and unforgettable because they [fans? memories? donuts?] infused the energy, rage, passion and “feel” of all of those [wtf????] times." Totally nailed it.

I am and always will be more grateful than any of you could ever possibly know.

I am a sanctimonious prick.

I want to offer two special thank you’s.

To my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for granting me the ability to step between the lines for 23 years and compete against the best players in the world.

Christ died for most people's sins. But because I have no sins, he died so I could play ball. And yes, my sanctimonious prickness is coming across loud and clear.

To my wife Shonda

I married a hatchback car.

and my 4 children, Gehrig, Gabriella, Grant and Garrison for sacrificing their lives and allowing baseball to be mine while I played. Without their unquestioned support I would not have been able to do what I did, or enjoy the life, and I am hopefully going to live long enough to repay them as much as a Father and Husband can.

See how I know the quantity and names of my children! First letter is always G, that's how I remember. But perhaps I was too forthcoming in acknowledging that my kids "sacrificed their lives" and that I never questioned their support.

Thank you and God Bless
Curt Schilling

Totally nailed it.

Yuuuuuckkk

Kevin Youkilis: Greek god of having the fucking ugliest headshot ever.

I Am Mankiw, I Am Douche

Greg Mankiw writes (translated from the Bullshit):

"Recently I found myself desiring to highlight how important I am. I noticed people were talking about how this other professor disclaimed any interest in debating the stimulus, saying: 'all I know on this issue I got from Greg Mankiw's blog.' Gosh! Look how important I am! So I contrived a post that speculated the professor was being tongue in cheek -- fanciful of me, because hey, if I were someone else, I'd parrot me -- in order to draw further attention to my own large, throbbing intellect. It's rock hard, my intellect."

Pussy of the Day

Is Alex Rodriguez, for confining himself to a mea culpa, for not going after the player's union and the leakers, for not offering Peter Gammons to feel his testicles.

Updike

I cannot call myself an Updike fan, having read nothing of his other than a scattered few articles. What I can say is that he wrote beautifully about baseball; this is the article that has been getting a lot of play today. I particularly like this part:

"Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money."

I also could not help but notice his mention of attending school "near Boston". I suppose it should count as little surprise to see this particular prevalent instance of Harvadian false modesty should be so old, but it was nevertheless quite amusing.

I'd Like To Thank Truth, Beauty, Jack Bauer

The second annual

Primarily Baseball

award for

Excellence in Sportswriting Excellence

for the pursuit and achievement of excellence in sportswriting excellence

in the year of our Fucking God Damn Lord 2008

goes to Primarily Baseball.

This site, in its first full year of existence, brought trenchant analysis and unparalleled wit to baseball fans the world over. It gave no quarter to irrationality, intellectual dishonesty, and poor taste, and has them on the run, everywhere. It made the surge work and Sarah Palin lose. It kept the gravitational constants constant, so that mankind could live. Thank you, Primarily Baseball. Because if he can claim to have liberated 50 million people, you can claim them all.

A Christmas Coincidence

From Roch Kubatko:

"If anyone has taken the tour of Camden Yards, you've heard the story from the press box about Rosenthal's laptop being destroyed by a Cal Ripken foul ball. Rosenthal had written a column the night before suggesting that Ripken end The Streak. The screaming line drive that sent his laptop crashing to the floor was a delicious irony . . . . Ripken had no idea what happened until after the game, when former PR director John Maroon rushed to his locker with the news. Ripken's response went something like this: 'Cool.'"

A little math goes a long way

Over here, Colin Wyers, who is generally a smart guy, studies whether a run saved is just as valuable as a run scored.  He takes it to be an implication of the Pythagorean winning percentage formula (Win% = (RS^2/(RS^2+RA^2)) that this is indeed the case.  However, looking at teams with matched run differentials but widely differing total runs (so, for instance, a team with RS/RA allowed of 900/800 gets matched with a 750/650) he finds that the lower scoring teams do slightly, but statistically significantly better.  He takes this to imply some slight deficiency in the Pythagorean formula.

The problem is that he is completely wrong in his interpretation of the Pythagorean formula.  In fact, as I showed in one of my first posts here, according to the Pythagorean formula a run saved is more valuable when the team is an above average team, and a run scored more valuable when it is below average.  Thus, if there are more teams above .500 in his sample than below--which, if you look at the article, is indeed the case--the Pythagorean formula would predict that that the run saved is better than the run scored.  In other words, completely contrary to the article's claim, the Pythagorean formula correctly predicts the data!

To be fair, Colin does later present some additional evidence that Pythagorean estimators are less accurate for the low scoring teams.  That, however, does not make up for the earlier error.

Dog Puppet Is Superior To Ralph Nader

Highly superior.