THIS POST IS BELOW .500

So last night I was watching the local sports when the announcer said that the Milwaukee Brewers’ road record this year is 25-52. Deplorable. Also typical. What the dude said next, though, completely set me off.

You know it can’t be anything to do with baseball. I don’t care about baseball. No, what had me steaming was when he said that the Brewers were “27 games below .500 on the road.” You hear this all the time. It’s one of those basic sports equations: Losses - Wins = Number of games below .500. 52 - 25 = 27. Right?

If only it were true.

Recalling that a .500 winning percentage means the number of wins and losses are equal, it’s easy to see how that particular equation is dead wrong, particularly in a sport where (except for the 2002 All Star Game) ties aren’t possible. Every game ends in either a win or a loss. Therefore, determine how far a team is below .500, you must determine how many game results must be changed to get an equal number of wins and losses.

The catch is that, since the number of games played remains constant, that means every time you change one number, the other number changes too. Let’s try it, using the 2006 Brewers’ road record as an example. We start with their actual record of 25-52. Now let’s change one loss at a time into a win and see how many steps it take to get the wins above the losses.

Well, would you look at that! We only have to change 13.5 game results to get the Brewers to .500! So how can you say the Brew Crew is 27 below .500 on the road? The real answer is that they’re 13.5 games below .500 on the road. That’s still not good, but it’s not nearly as depressing.

It works the other way, too. You’ll hear an NFL team which finishes 10-6 described as “4 games above .500″ but the real number is only 2. See? Things in sports are never as bad (or as good) as they seem at first glance. Even if Temple goes 0-for-2006, the worst they can finish is 6 games below .500.

TEN OFT-REPEATED LIES

1. “Your call is important to us.” Hey, I answer important calls.
2. “You can’t take away from what [NAME OF OPPOSING SPORTS TEAM] did out there today.” Translation: “Yes, it was a horrible call, one which completely changed the tenor of the game. But if I speak my mind, I’ll get fined a Lexus GS400.”
3. “The American people demand leadership from us on this issue.” Has any president or his minions ever said this about something which (a) went against his stated stance, thus indicating that the president has reconsidered his previous opinion, or (b) was NOT some tarted-up controversy designed to provide ammunition for mid-term election races?
4. “Sauce will thicken upon standing” . . . for a few hours, in Antartica. Otherwise, you could drink your side dish with a straw.
5. “Easy assembly. Tools included.” The assembly is usually only easy if you don’t use the included tools, unless you think a box wrench stamped out of an old Mr. Pibb can will tighten more than one nut more than halfway.
6. “On any given Saturday, any team can beat any other team in college football.” Upsets do happen, but I’ve gotten a consistent 80% win rate by going with conventional wisdom.
7. “Soccer sucks.” Go to a game in person sometime and see if you still think so. No, it’s not as exciting as American football, but it’s not nearly as bad as that vast nation of Morning Zoo listeners would have you believe.
8. “We’d be driving 100 MPG cars if not for collusion between the Big Three automakers and Big Oil.” Suuuuure. That’s why GM’s been flirting with bankruptcy for months and has seen its market share dwindle to less than half of what it used to be. All these interlocking directorates are running the second-largest company in the country into the ground just so there’s no cheap gas. Trust me: if there was 100 MPG technology out there, somebody would be trying to put it on the market right now.
9. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that for you.” I know the difference between the words “can’t” and “won’t.”
10. “Lists of ten things are stupid and outdated.” This one might be, but I still dig the Top 10s and Top 100s.

BECOME A TBP INSIDER TODAY

We here at The Bemusement Park are pleased to announce our new TBP Insider Program. TBP Insider is a special new feature wherein we will allow you to sample some small fractions of our less-important posts, but, should we write something you might actually want to read, it will cost you $4.95 a month, conveniently billed to your credit card in perpetuity unless you request us to stop. (All requests must be submitted by telephone to Leonard, our Customer Service Representative, who can be reached by calling Smitty’s Auto Body in Ekalaka, Montana, and asking Smitty if he could run next door because you need to talk to Leonard. Leonard’s a little behind on his phone bill these days.)

In addition to full access to all TBP articles, you’ll also be allowed to access the TBP Archives, letting you catch up with the past three years of articles, providing you agree not to comment on how much better this blog was back when I only had one kid to look after. Plus you’ll receive a wide variety of other benefits, including (but not limited to):

• Your very own personalized Member Name and unique, unchangeable password (note: all member names involving Keyser Soze, Tyler Durden, and the number between 68 and 70 have been claimed already)
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Unfortunately, the institution of TBP Insider will mean a few changes for those of you who opt not to upgrade yourself to Platinum Procrastinator status. We promise the new Flash banner ads won’t crash your browser every time you use it, and we do guarantee that the floating ads will take up no more than 89.3% of your visible screen, but unfortunately the ‘CLOSE’ button in 3-point type (ecru on an off-white background) is pretty much mandatory. Also, you’ll only get to read my one-line posts in their entirety. Everything else will be for TBP Insider subscribers. But you can still use the blogroll.

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A RANT BEFORE DRY-HEAVING

You know how sometimes you get sinus drainage that runs down your throat, but not all the way down your throat, so your spit is the consistency of epoxy and you’re gobbing into a Kleenex three times every five minutes just so you don’t suffocate because your nasty saliva is threatening to block your windpipe and eventually enough of the goo makes it downward so you start hacking up lungers and you do that for about three days until you’ve got all the stuff coughed out of your lungs, except that when it’s gone, now your windpipes are majorly inflamed so you cough even more violently and it just won’t get better because now you actually need mucus down there except there isn’t any so eventually you start coughing so hard you wouldn’t be surprised to see your shoes come flying out of your mouth, and eventually even the worst coughing fits come to a close, except that when they do it’s like somebody took a fork and did what your grandmother does to unpeeled cucumbers before she slices them–you know, takes a fork and gouges little parallel lines all up and down–so then you’re so inflamed from the pharynx to the palate that you can’t even speak, and you discover that those Luden’s “throat drops” actually are good for something, except that when you’ve finished with the throat drop, your saliva is starting to feel like cold pancake syrup again and you know it’s just a matter of time before you’re bent over the sink, red-faced and wheezing, eyes watering, totally unsure of whether you hope you do puke, or hope you don’t, until you realize that if you were going to puke, you’d have done so on the first retch and not the eleventh, so you know that it’s just a matter of time until you grab another Luden’s and try to figure out how to untangle this Gordian knot that your respiratory system has become?

I don’t like that.

TAKE ME OUT OF THE BALL GAME

I am often accused of hating baseball, simply because of nine or ten things I’ve written in the past two and a half years. I’d like to set the record straight. I do not hate baseball. In fact, under the right circumstances, I’ve been known to watch as many as three or four at-bats of a televised game, providing that no football, hockey, golf, tennis, indoor lacrosse, bowling, competitive spelling, backgammon, keno, Candy Land, or peek-a-boo games are being broadcast at the same time.

Okay, it’s true. I do pretty much hate baseball. But I want you to understand, dear reader, that my hatred is not entirely irrational. Compared with a fitting candidate like, say, college football, baseball is severely lacking as a pastime.

We’ll start with the first and most obvious complaint: Nothing ever happens in a baseball game. Well, not “ever;” sometimes as many as 60 of the 240 or so pitches thrown in a baseball game result in something happening. In fact, I believe that there have been baseball matches in which there were as many as twenty actual base hits. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that nothing ever happens in baseball. Let’s call it “next to nothing” instead.

But when something does happen, hoo boy! Get ready to hear an exhaustive dissertation on the historical and statistical importance of that bloop single you just saw! Baseball fans have stats for everything, and some of them even make sense. They’ll tell you that a lifetime .300 hitter is really something, even though that stat compares unfavorably with Bo Schembechler’s bowl-game record (or John Cooper’s record against Michigan, if you prefer). They’ll break down how Player X bats with runners in scoring position, or with a left-hander on the mound, or with a bad case of Cuervo’s Disease, or whatever. They’ll even come up with stats that show this particular pitcher can’t get this batter out, since the batter is a left-handed utility man with an unusually open stance and a tendency to pronounce the word library as “liberry,” while the batter doesn’t stand a chance against the pitcher because he can’t hit a pitcher who throws a side-armed split-finger fastball, trims his sideburns to the exact midpoint of that flap that sticks out where his ear canal is, and always remembers to put the toilet seat back down. So, since the batter can’t hit off the pitcher, but the pitcher can’t get the batter out, that means one of two things: (a) you’re about to witness an intense struggle between two implacable combatants, locked in a battle of fierce pride and tribalism, ending only when one of these warriors’ wills prove more indomitable than the other, or (b) you’re about to witness a nine-pitch walk.

Never mind, of course, that there are seven players on the field at all times who have essentially nothing to do but stand around and wait for something to happen. And never mind that a really active play might involve three of those seven players. Nope, it’s all about that ego duel between the pitcher and the batter, with the catcher serving as an oddly-dressed consultant. The combination of endless, semi-meaningful statistical manipulation and all the conceivable action centering around 20% of the participants reminds me of one other thing: Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, watching baseball is a lot like watching people play D&D, except D&D’s magic system makes considerably more sense than the infield fly rule.

So, since there’s seldom anything happening on the field, most baseball fans retreat into the meta-game, the real “inside baseball” stuff, if I may steal that cliche back for a second (I promise to return it to the political wonks shortly). But even here baseball’s a dud. It doesn’t have heroes right now, since we’re now mostly convinced that a lot of the recent offensive heroes have been, well, “enhanced.” (I realize it’s not fair to paint with such a broad brush. I wish that 93% of all power hitters didn’t have to give the other 7% such a bad name.)

Baseball can’t even come up with a good villain. The best they can do right now is Barry Bonds, who (a) hasn’t played a lick all season, and (b) is about as threatening as a bunny with the sniffles. (If you can’t tell the difference between Bonds and a true athletic villain like, say, Steve Spurrier, well, it’s nice to meet you, Adam, and please don’t take any dietary advice from your wife.) Baseball freaks love to tell you that they love the way Barry Bonds plays the game, but they just wish he’d be a little more connected with his teammates and a little more forrthcoming with the media. Otherwise, they say, he just might not be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Honestly, I can’t believe that the threat of having to wait one more year for his inevitable indictuction into Cooperstown hasn’t caused Bonds to get his act together. It’s probably keeping him up nights as he tosses and turns endlessly on his bed of cash.

Who are you kidding, Baseball Fan? The reason Bonds and his ilk treat you like leftover French toast is because you’ve proven, time and again, that you’ll take whatever disrespect they can dish out, and you’ll come wimpering back once you hear those magic words, “Pitchers and catchers report.” They don’t care because they cannot possibly put a product on the field which is so dreadful that you won’t watch it. People lose all sense of rationality and perspective when baseball is involved. Heck, here in southeastern Wisconsin we pay–we volunteered to pay–an extra half-cent-per-dollar sales tax to build a stadium for the Milwaukee Brewers. At the time of that vote, this was sort of like people in Atlanta voting to subsidize the William Tecumseh Sherman Interpretive Center, right there in downtown on the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree.

So maybe the owners are to blame? Quick, name three baseball owners other than George Steinbrenner and Ted Turner. Can’t do it? Neither can anybody. I came up with Mark Attanasio and Carl Pohlad, and that was it. But shouldn’t George and Ted qualify for true villainy? Bosh. Ted Turner is the Wile E. Coyote of baseball; his season always ends with him cowering under a pink parasol, holding up a little sign that reads “help.” And Steinbrenner’s team just isn’t good enough to hate anymore.

(You know, it’s funny. When Daniel Snyder bought the Washington Redskins, his actions seemed so ill-informed and tyrannical that people started calling him “Boy George,” an obvious reference to Steinbrenner. But now, in 2005, who’s got the lineup that might’ve scared everybody silly if it was still 1998?)

Nothing (OK, next to nothing) ever happens. Most of the guys on the field just stand around trying to look athletic. There’s nobody you can hate, but there’s nobody you can really like, either. It’s no wonder NASCAR has now eclipsed baseball as America’s number-two televised sport. At least in NASCAR, things are always moving (albeit in the same direction), and there are plenty of drivers you can hate. It’s enough to make a guy happy they call baseball the “national pastime” and not the “national interest.” To be an interest, you must be interesting.

I don’t mean to rain on tonight’s Some-Star game, but for somebody like me, this is one of the greatest nights of the year. After all, there’s no baseball tomorrow.

SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE

OK, I’ll say it: this Wisconsinite (who admittedly is not a Packer fan) is sick to death of Brett Favre. Not of the man personally; I’m sure he’s a decent, upstanding citizen whom anyone would love to have as a next-door neighbor. But, as I watched a four-minute orgy of self-congratulation on the FOX 6 news tonight, with a bunch of Packer fans positively giddy that Favre will be returning for another season, I officially decided I’m done with the guy. He’s a sure-shot, first-ballot Hall of Fame player, and I’m glad I got to see him play. But I can’t stand the personality cult that surrounds him anymore.

Again, I don’t fault Favre himself for this. I’ve learned enough about him to know that he would be perfectly happy if nobody talked about him at all, ever. And I’m sure you non-Wisconsinites don’t know what the big deal is. For a solid three and a half months now, we’ve had to endure a steady stream of “will he or won’t he?” talk from every imaginable source. Not just sports talk radio–I’m talking about the political talk shows as well. And every other possible avenue of discourse. It seems that, for the last couple months, nobody in this state has really had any interest in talking about anything else.

It’s been a hard couple of years for the guy, I know. I also know that nobody would’ve faulted him for deciding to hang it up, since his wife is sick, he’s had a flotilla of personal tragedies to deal with, and (WARNING! THE FOLLOWING PHRASE MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO PACKER FANS! PARENTAL GUIDANCE IS SUGGESTEDREQUIRED! NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SPILLED BEVERAGES!) he’s just not quite the dominating quarterback he once was. He benefits from playing in the second-weakest division in the NFL (only the NFC West is worse, and only because the Cardinals and 49ers are marginally worse than the Bears and Lions), and without Ahman Green, he’d get sacked more often than a 40-oz of Mickey’s. He’s still respected, mind you. But who’s afraid of him anymore?

Anyway, he’s coming back for one more season, and bully for him; I truly wish him luck. Can we talk about something else now? Anything else?

DRIVEN TO DIS-TRACTION

Written as only a man who’s just spent several days knocking around the upper Midwest can do.

Being A Catalog of Midwestern Highway Sins, on Behalf of Both the Driver and the Designer of the Road (with Noted Observances of Each)

Part the First: Sins of the Driver

• Timid freeway-entrance merging (Minneapolis)
• Malicious speed-limit obedience (Des Moines)
• Passing on the right when there is no reason not to pass on the left (Minneapolis)
• Being undecided about whether to drive 10 MPH below the speed limit, or 35 MPH above it (Illinois)
• Hurrying up to enter a roadway in advance of a vehicle, in total ignorance of the two miles of empty road behind said vehicle (Iowa)
• Refusing to drive in the right lane despite the fact that your vehicle is moving slower than continental drift (Wisconsin)
• Unusual incidence of peeing-Calvin decals (Missouri, Kansas)
• Deification of rusty Volvo 240s (St. Paul, MN)

Part the Second: Sins of the Engineer

• Developing a grandiose freeway plan, then building only a tiny fraction of it (Milwaukee, Omaha)
• Posting purely fictional speed limits (Beltline Highway, Madison, WI)
• Thinking that posting a “PODUNK, NEXT SIX EXITS” sign at the edge of a town of 200 people is hilarious (Iowa)
• Funneling all traffic into or out of major shopping areas into single access points, then not placing traffic signals at those access points (numerous Minneapolis suburbs)
• Believing that people who don’t work downtown will gladly pay to park there for shopping and/or entertainment, when the mall is a lot closer to where they live anyway (just about everyplace)

A DAY OF SPLEEN?

I’m in a snarky, combative mood today (long story, involving two tow trucks), so I’ve found a couple under-the-busings which are of interest. Over at Counterpunch, Joe Bageant is cautioning that those who fail to understand fundamentalism are doomed to repeat it, at least politically:

[A]s a leftist it is very clear to me these days why urban liberals not only fail to understand [fundamentalists], but do not even know they exist, other than as some general lump of ignorant, intolerant voters called “the religious right,” or the “Christian Right,” or “neocon Christians.” But until progressives come to understand what these people read, hear, are told and deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective. Given fundamentalist Christianity’s inherent cultural isolation, it is nearly impossible for most enlightened Americans to imagine, in honest human terms, what fundamentalist Americans believe, let alone understand why we should all care.

The whole article is well worth your time, particularly the “Establishing a Savage Eden” section.

Meanwhile, across the web at Slate, they’re jumping on the “David Brooks is wicked bad” bandwagon:

Week after week, Brooks has been dribbling out well-meaning and dreary sentiments: Let’s hear it for the “sensible majority” and “bipartisanship.” Let’s, but somewhere else.

(Brooks is the “house conservative” for the New York Times, and, as you might expect, he’s really not all that conservative; he’s just taking valuable column space away from liberal writers. Or, at least, that’s my interpretation of things. Maybe once I read Brooks’ new book On Paradise Drive I’ll feel differently.)

I SAID, ‘DO YOU SPEAK-A MY LANGUAGE?’

This was about the point where my wife’s pregnancy kicked into full gear.–mh

Vidiot is talking about word usage pet peeves, and he’s got some goodies:

decimate, nauseous, imply/infer, less/fewer, disinterested, chaise longue, bemuse

I was almost offended by that last one. Anyway, here’s my list of Language Things Which Rub Me The Wrong Way.*

• your/you’re: Come on, is this really that hard to remember?
• impact as a synonym for affect: You’ve got a perfectly good word–affect–which everybody understands. So why replace it with an ugly word that doesn’t even mean the same thing? Oh, yeah, because too many writers are too lazy to learn the difference between affect and effect. There’s only one way to spell impact, so you can never be wrong.
• spelled-out mispronunciations like playa hata, dat, and a’ight: No, you don’t look cool. You look like the General Foods marketing department trying to get 8-year-olds to buy into your concept of ‘extreme branded toaster pastry-based cold breakfast cereal.’
• ‘I could care less’: This implies that you care a little bit. Perhaps you meant you couldn’t care less?
• ‘athiest’ instead of ‘atheist’: I’ve known a few atheists in my time, but none of them were particularly athy, so it’s hard to say if any of them qualified as the ‘athiest.’ But it does sound like something a starlet would’ve said in in a 50s ‘B’ movie: “Oh, Moondog, you’re the athiest!”
• ‘the exception that proves the rule’: All this phrase means is, if the sign says ‘NO PARKING 3 AM-6 AM,’ you can park there any other time.
• disinterested/uninterested: The first means ‘unbiased,’ the second, well, ‘uninterested.’
• mixture: Technically, if you can’t separate the things being combined, it’s not a mixture, it’s a compound. The Chex Mix is a mixture, the fruit punch is a compound.

(*: or is it ‘That Rub Me The Wrong Way’? I can never remember . . . I think it’s actually ‘That.’)

LETTER TO A FRIEND

Dear Dad,

I wasn’t going to do this, you know. Two years have passed and there’s nothing I’ve come to hate more than the fact that your life continues to be defined by your death. I’m sick of it, Dad. I should be remembering how you lived instead.

And one day I will, I know. Every cell in my brain keeps saying, “You can move on now, it’s OK,” and every feeling in my heart keeps saying, “No, not yet.” I mean, don’t get me wrong–it’s better this year than it was last year. But still, every once in a while, this thick, oily sadness comes bubbling up and I’m ruined for a couple days.

It’s such an insult, Dad. You lived a good life, and all anybody can talk about is your death. Probably because it was so senseless and so stupid and so difficult to understand. And I am sick–sicker than sick–of having to think of you as my father who died too soon because of someone else’s negligence.

That’s why I said I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to speak a word about how two years have passed now. By doing so, I’m just continuing to define your life by your death. But I can’t deny one thing: Yours wasn’t the only life so defined. My life’s been defined by it, too.

I remember the first time I heard Josh Groban sing. I thought to myself, “Crimony, I can’t stand this guy, but my dad would love him.” And as much as I would’ve hated being subjected to a Grobanfest every time I saw you, I feel all the worse knowing that I never got to see you appreciate him.

I feel the same way every time I find a place with a good cheeseburger. (Heaven knows we’ve got enough of those in Wisconsin.) Or every time I hang out down on Willy Street in Madison. It’s so incredibly frustrating to try and appreciate some of these things, knowing that I’m forever denied seeing you appreciate them too. One of the greatest pleasures in life is sharing something you love with somebody who loves it at least 75% as much as you do. Even though there’s plenty of people in my life I can share all my guilty pleasures with, and I appreciate each and every one of them, not being able to share them with you just dulls my joy. Nobody sings as well, the burgers aren’t as tasty, the people on Willy Street just aren’t as wonderfully weird–it’s like living in a perpetual twilight of the senses.

It’s so strange how I’m talking about little things like tenors and cheeseburgers when so much big has happened in the last year–your first biological grandchild is now 9 months old, and #2 is on the way. Either it really is the little things that wind up meaning the most, or I just can’t handle the thought of all the big things you’re missing out on, too.

But, you see, that’s also the hope. Death never gets the final word. Life is even more persistent. And, if we’re ever going to get back to normal, creating new memories is what’s going to lead us there.

Two years on. The people who wouldn’t do the right thing a year ago still haven’t. That’s a big part of why I can’t fully move on, why I can’t remember your life more than your death. There’s still some unfinished business, namely the objective proof that you were wronged severely, and so were we.

But I think I’m getting closer to letting go of your death and embracing your life. I promise I’ll be back next year when there’s a new baby and a little more clarity in this house, and maybe then I’ll be in a different place. After all, they say time heals all wounds.

Maybe so, Dad, but time is a pretty clumsy surgeon.

Say hi to the boss for me.

Love,

Mark