“Derek Jeter, if he’s not an All-Star, there’s not an All-Star. That may not be the most popular thing for a Red Sox manager to say, but this guy is the way baseball is supposed to be, that’s how much respect I have for him.”
nice!
coming soon, (if they’ll let me write about it!) intentionally cryptic musings on tallying the All-Star votes…
–ryan
More gadget-goodness for the blog this weekend!
For father’s day, I sent my dad (back home in the midwest) a new iMac to replace his recently dead and long-fossilized powerbook… he’s pretty happy with it, and is digging on how well it works with his little digital camera.
Back here in New York, I took my friend Rudy and his parents, (all of whom hail from Chicago) to Yankees-Cubs in the Bronx. One of the benefits to being on-call for server monitoring at MLB is that I happened to be up, and online when the tickets go on sale… for some undersold games, we get to go as guests of the team, but for sold-out big-deal series like this one, everybody’s gotta pay. I bought these seats back in around March, knowing that I’d be able to make somebody happy with them. Rudy Sr., from the Chicago suburbs, you’re the winner!
Great day for a game, too… Yankees win, 6-3 sweeping the Cubs. The Cubs have never won a game in Yankees Stadium. Ever. And yet the atmosphere was pretty civil, especially for the Bronx. LOTS of Cubs fans there, too. I imagine this is what it feels like for out of town teams when the Yankees visit, and all the ex-pat New Yorkers show up in blue. It was probably 40% Cubs fans.
Anyway, back to tech and gadgets… here’s a panorama taken originally as four different pictures on my Treo 650 cameraphone, then merged together with PhotoStitch software that originally came with a Canon Camera I bought years ago. I don’t know where you can get the software outside of buying a Canon, but it’s considered some of the best stitching software out there. It really stretches what my little cameraphone can do, and will take input from any jpegs you feed it.
(update!) if you have a PC and MS Windows, google for “autostitch”… it’s currently free, and really cool stitching software.
Happy Father’s day, Dad, Rudy Sr., Mieczyslaw (my dad-in-law to be), and all other dads out there!
–ryan
I, a couple other members of the MLB.com tech department, and some friends went up to the Bronx last night for a game… it rained right before, but then stopped, making for a nice cool night of ball… only my second game of the year!
This weekend is Yankees-Cubs with a friend and his parents from Chicago.
This photo and entry blogged via flickr.com!
We’re doing a lot of construction here in MLB.com’s offices, creating new mlb.tv production studios, and technical production facilities for all kinds of new mlb.com projects.
This construction has left some big holes in parts of our building that are letting all the hot air in, and melting us geeks. The other side of the office is suspiciously cool… fortunately there’s an ice cream place downstairs, so we’re not in much danger of passing out, or losing any weight.
This construction involves new machine rooms, new workstations, new servers, and new studio lighting, all of which creates even more heat, so the construction crews are installing several more tons of air conditioning equipment on our building’s roof. This gives me the opportunity to escape the melty-hot office and go up to the searingly-hot tar roof of the building. I could sing doo-wop songs about being on the roof in the city at night, but during the day, it’s just a frying pan up there.
…it did give me the opportunity to get this picture, though. The windows of our sister company in the MLB family, MLB Productions, overlook this chunk of roof in our mega-building complex:
I believe there’s a long list of quirky ground rules detailing how you play around the giant pipes and how many bases the runner gets if the ball falls 6 floors and takes out a taxi.
–ryan
Long time no blog!
It’s really a little crazy here… not even including the actual baseball games we’re serving up info on… the Yankees went on a tear after my last “superstition” post, but my lucky quarter has faded, apparently, and the bronx bombers are back to bombing, and not in the good way.
These days, I and several other developer and creative types around here are *frantically* preparing for “on the internet only, no tv” MLB draft next Tuesday and Wednesday. This is always a huge traffic day for us (people hit “reload” a LOT).
I typically lead a highly interrupt-driven professional life… I and the rest of the group are in the business of fixing things, spur of the moment, but I’ve had to put up signs warning those who would attempt to distract me to put off asking for favors late next week.
You blog readers may have to wait, too… although during the draft, hopefully it’ll be smooth, and maybe I can crank out another post or two while I watch the processes run in 8 or 9 x-windows.
–ryan
For some reason, I’m a very superstitious person.
I don’t consiously believe the stuff, to the point of arguing with others about how rediculous Tarot readers, Feng Shui, and Dianetics are. I’m an engineer, a person of science, by profession, and I know stepping on a crack will not break mom’s back. (hi, mom!)
In college, my roommates frequently annoyed me by spilling salt in my presence.
I own two black cats, too. They were born in Boston, which makes them lucky, from my point of view. At least they worked for the first three years I had ’em… (come to think of it, I moved ’em to a house outside of the five boroughs, and boom… reverse the curse…. ugh. Manny, you’re a fraud! It was all the location of Brutus’s litterbox!)
Still, though, I find myself becoming a little compulsive about certain things to “make” my team win. It gets worse as the playoffs approach. I have lucky shirts, and unlucky shirts, and colors that are good or bad. The shirts stay good or bad. The colors change depending on the opponent, and whether their luck needs reversal or not. Should the science-of-the-shirt fail me, then the fadeaway jumpshot I use to deposit it into the hamper at night determines whether it’s mojo will recharge for duty after laundry day. Airballs are bad. A rim-in is a tremendously good omen.
I have lucky artifacts in the office, too. Bob Feller was born down the road from my hometown, and I have an autographed ball (I hear Bob will pretty much sign anything if you donate to his museum, which is pretty cool.) He threw the only opening-day no-hitter ever, and since I’ve been carrying it around on MLB.com opening days, we’ve been pretty lucky.
Recently, on my trip to New Orleans, I got my change from the newstand in the Atlanta airport in the form of a $2 bill and a Panamanian quarter… I tipped the cab driver with the Two, after a conversation about the casino downtown, and he wished me lots of luck. I had quite a bit.
I found the Panama Quarter in the pocket of my bag again right before the Yankees went on their recent five game streak… Now I’m figuring this quarter must have been in Mariano’s pocket or something sometime down the line, and I’m doing all I can to remember not to spend it someplace while the streak is on (they work in our vending machines, I’m told.)
… or maybe it’s just something logical, like Tino not washing his left sock.
–ryan
Sorry in advance for the terrible, terrible blog-entry title.
I just got back from a trip to New Orleans. I met up with some old college friends, and saw some Jazz at Jazzfest, ate a TON of great food, got some sun, finally.
Due to time constraints, I didn’t, however, make it to the New Orleans Zephyrs vs. the Albuquerque Isotopes game on Sunday afternoon…
I was actually kind of conflicted, ’cause I really did need a little time away from work, and baseball is, technically work for me… however, I’ve not gotten to a minor league game yet this year, and I really want to go. This, coupled with my intense love for weird, regional ballpark food (I can only imagine what food is available in the ballpark on the bayou) made this game a strong draw.
Plus, it’s the Isotopes, on the road! A must for the Simpsons-lover in me.
Alas, it didn’t happen. I’ll have to settle for some Cyclones or Staten Island Yankees games soon. Maybe a road trip out towards Pennsylvania…
The only baseball-related fun in the Big Easy happened at the casino downtown, where a group of guys inquired about my “Baltimore” shirt, and were confused when I told them that I’d never actually been to Baltimore. I said that I work at MLB.com and actually have a lot of various MLB-branded gear (if you ever need some Devil Rays baby clothes, I can hook you up). When I revealed that I was actually a Yankees fan from NYC, they pretty much left me alone to gamble in peace (on cards! just cards! that’s all!).
–ryan
We did the MLB.com employees fantasy draft last night. Yeah, we’re a little late… Greg Klayman was apparently busy getting YOUR fantasy league ready, you impatient fan, you…
The league we “play” in is also simplified a little this year, because a lot of the participants are reporters, broadcasters and the like, and have ended up letting their teams atrophy in the later part of the season, when they’re caught up following (and reporting) real baseball, and things like interviewing the players and stuff.
(I’ve heard that the players themselves also play fantasy, which would be weird, I think… “I just traded myself to David Ortiz for Johan Santana”)
Our league is a Draft-and-Ignore setup… the guys we picked, are the guys we have, for the whole season, no trades, no subs, with the exception of injuries, and once your starter comes off the DL, he’s back in the lineup.
As a geek, I just wish we had RSS feeds for this (and hey, maybe we actually, do, or will… hm… I’ll look into that.)
Baseball knowledge credit goes to “Z”, who’s not totally happy with our draft, but our top picks in several rounds were poached by the guy ahead of us (next year, we’ll remember to sit next to less savvy co-workers).
Presenting your 2005 MLB.com Systems Group “Squids”:
-starters-
Joe Mauer
Shawn Green
Alfonso Soriano
Orlando Cabrera
Scott Rolen
Gary Sheffield
Cliff Floyd
Larry Walker
Raul Ibanez
-pitching-
Dontrelle Willis
Adam Eaton
Jake Westbook
Mark Redman
Scott Kazmir
Mariano Rivera
Jose Mesa
-reserves-
Edgardo Alfonzo
Eric Hinske
Erubiel Durazo
Mark Kotsay
Ugueth Urbina
Bernie Williams
–ryan
I mentioned earlier that a perk of the job here at MLB is that we can argue baseball at work, and (sort of) justify it as still being professional (sort of.)
Of course, for THE OFFICIAL DATABASE OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, we use a very big professional database on very big professional hardware… but I, myself, am actually fairly bush-league with respect to running a database. Database machines, I can make purr, but I’m a rookie at creating SQL queries and stuff.
Baseball, though, makes for really fun test data for learning this stuff. If you’re brushing up on your SQL, I heartily recommend getting the baseball table dumps from http://www.baseball-databank.org… they’ll import into MySQL (which I have running here on my workstation), and are a deep well of interesting stuff to dig through and practice with.
Here in the office, based on a request from a mailing list I occasionally browse, we were discussing the heaviest (weighing, not hitting) players from MLB history.
According to my data (unofficial!), congratulations to “Jumbo Brown”, who played from 1925 to 1941 at 295 lbs. (that’s 18 pounds per year.)
mysql> select playerID, nameFirst, nameLast, weight, height from Master where weight > 260 order by weight;
+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+--------+
| playerID | nameFirst | nameLast | weight | height |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+--------+
| judenje01 | Jeff | Juden | 265 | 80.0 |
| pickeca01 | Calvin | Pickering | 275 | 77.0 |
| brownju01 | Jumbo | Brown | 295 | 76.0 |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+--------+
3 rows in set (0.27 sec)
One of my guesses, Mo Vaughn, doesn’t even come close to Jumbo, although he does appear to be the heaviest “Vaughn” in the database, at 230 lbs… even beating out “Hippo” Vaughn at 215.
“Hippo”…Ouch.
mysql> select playerID, nameFirst, nameLast, weight, height from Master where playerID like “%vaugh%”;
+———–+———–+———-+——–+——–+
| playerID | nameFirst | nameLast | weight | height |
+———–+———–+———-+——–+——–+
| vaughar01 | Arky | Vaughan | 175 | NULL |
| vaughch01 | Charlie | Vaughan | 185 | NULL |
| vaughgl01 | Glenn | Vaughan | 170 | 71.0 |
| vaughpo01 | Porter | Vaughan | 178 | 73.0 |
| vaughbo01 | Bobby | Vaughn | 150 | 69.0 |
| vaughde01 | De Wayne | Vaughn | 180 | 71.0 |
| vaughfa01 | Farmer | Vaughn | 177 | 75.0 |
| vaughfr01 | Fred | Vaughn | 185 | 70.0 |
| vaughgr01 | Greg | Vaughn | 193 | 72.0 |
| vaughhi01 | Hippo | Vaughn | 215 | 76.0 |
| vaughmo01 | Mo | Vaughn | 230 | 73.0 |
| vaughro01 | Roy | Vaughn | 178 | 72.0 |
+———–+———–+———-+——–+——–+
12 rows in set (0.09 sec)
–ryan
"root" for the home team... 
