SurhoffRules
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Posts posted by SurhoffRules
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22 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:
I keep hearing this, but then I don't hear many recommendations for recruiting the next generation of fans to baseball. The average age of a MLB television viewer is 57, or at least that's what the first result said when I Googled it. The average NBA viewer is 15 years younger. I'd bet American soccer and hockey fans are, on average, a lot younger than 57.
Baseball is whistling past the graveyard. Revenues are at record levels. But the baby boomers aren't going to be here forever. Gen Xers are in their 40s and 50s.
If you're not willing to entertain even incremental changes to appeal to younger people, you're eventually going to have to deal with MLB being a very niche product with lower revenues and a smaller fanbase. Attendance is down 10,000,000 since the peak in 2007. Not that much, I guess. I'm sure it's just a blip, it'll come back. No need to worry, right? Eventually the kids will come around to pastoral beauty of three hour games with three homers, 18 strikeouts, 12 pitching changes and 15 hits.
I feel like viewing rule changes as "we have to do this because no one is watching our product anymore" can distract from the more inclusive question of "what are things this sport could do with/without to make it a better experience." I've no plans to stop watching baseball games regardless of the lack of rule tweaks, but I know there are things I could do without or wouldn't mind if they changed. If the sport picks up some more viewers in the process, hooray, but it doesn't need to be the primary goal of the endevour.
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10 minutes ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:
I can only think of Adam Loewen who went the reverse route from pitcher to position player.
Loewen has actually done a reverse reverse!
After coming up as pitcher from 2003-2008, he flipped to position player from 09-2015, and then jumped back to the mound!
Since 2014 years he's pitched for Phily & AZ in the bigs and for them & Texas in AAA and AA!
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Another take on what's slowing the game down: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/foul-balls-are-the-pace-of-play-problem-nobodys-talking-about/
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33 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:
Unfortunately, commercials aren't going anywhere. I watched a game from the 90s a few weeks ago on youtube, the pace of play wasn't noticeably faster. The average game time is about 3 hours, that's the same for an NFL football game. I'm struggling to figure out why people are complaining about a game that takes 3 hours when most of them are perfectly happy to dedicate that amount of time to an NFL game on a Sunday afternoon in the fall.
I posted this elsewhere before but in 1991, the average length of a game was 2:54. Last year it was 3:04. In the last 25 years the average baseball game has been 3 hours, plus or minus about 8 minutes.
From the 50s through the end of the 70s it was very similar, games were right on 2:30. The big jump in game length came from in the decade and a half from about '77 to '91.
I'm all for shortening the game, I'd love something closer to 2:30, but this isn't a new "problem". Being in my 30s I literally can not recall watching a game that wasn't about 3 hours. If folks think the game is slow or boring now compared to 25 years ago, its probably from changes within the game rather than just the duration.
Or maybe it was the rise of cable networks and the ability to watch literally every single game that's leading to burnout. I dunno.
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The mound was lowered from 15 to 10 inches in 1968 and offense jumped from 6.84 to 8.14 runs per game.
That being said they also shrunk the strike zone and decided to enforce more restrictions on doctored balls, so teasing out how much of the offense jump was due to the mound is tricky.
I think the general consensus is a lower mound benefits the batter.
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On 9/30/2018 at 5:11 PM, Moose Milligan said:
I'd really love to see Nick get a ring, I think that would be so f'ing cool so I'm pulling hard for the Braves.
This is the last year of Nick's contract in ATL. I think it would be nice to see them go on a run deep into the post season.
I was curious as to how his contract played out. Nick produced 5.7 fWAR is his 4 years on the Braves (almost half of that this year). He was paid ~$44.05 M and produced $46.1 M worth of value in that time. At the age of 34, I wonder what the market for his services will be this offseason.
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Someone has compiled 100 Hubble Images. They are quite beautiful.
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The bassist from Soundgarden released his first solo album today. He recorded it before they regrouped so it's all him. I'm enjoying it immensely. The closest comparison I can make is Screaming Trees but that's not a direct mapping. There's a lot of dirty sounding acoustic guitars and a few hard rockers. Here's one of the latter.
[video=youtube;aR-5SXrODIs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR-5SXrODIs
Here's one of the former.
[video=youtube;_5MoJpoWdf4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5MoJpoWdf4
He didn't do any singing in Soundgarden and I must say I'm impressed. Surprisingly soulful, gritty, and honest sounding. It's nice to see people with a natural bass register not try and force themselves into the more popular and energetic tenor or baritone registers.
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I'm going to add a little context to this, but, the sound of canned produced "popping".
We picked 36 pounds of sweet cherries today at Baugher's orchard in Westminster. They're awesome. We got home a little later than we wanted and started canning. It's now just after 1 and the last batch of jars just started popping. Basically, when you take the jars out of the hot water bath they sit and cool. At some point, if you've done it right, there's a distinct pop when the suction is enough to vacuum seal the lid to the jar. What it means to me is that jar now contains 1 quart of fruit sealed tight at peak ripeness. I'm a happy boy tonight.
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Three and a half pounds of delicious homemade corned beef. Two weeks of waiting....totally worth it.
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Nice pics! If I recall correctly, sunspots can last from hours to weeks (maybe even months) and are caused by changes in the magnetic field on the sun. I like the pair in the lower right corner of the second picture. Sunspots generally appear in pairs, having opposite polarity. I'm actually not sure if the pairs appear that close to each other like that, but I'd imagine they do.
Have fun this weekend. The air is comparatively dry right now and still right now in Baltimore. I hope it stays that way for you.
I took a couple pictures of the sun yesterday through my telescope with the solar filter attached using my cell phone camera. There's not a whole lot to see, but it may be interesting to see how the sunspots move over time. I'm not sure what their lifespan is.I'm planning to go to a star party in Howard County on Saturday hosted by the Howard County Astronomy League (HAL). I'm hoping to learn more about the hobby from people with experience. I'd happily meet up with anyone who is interested in going. The forecast looks borderline for Saturday, so plans are subject to change.
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That pdf looks pretty advanced, but I printed it out and I'll look over it. Hopefully I can understand enough of it to makes sense of things. You sound like you know what you're talking about. Do you have any kind of background in this?
The early solar system was jostled around by the original orbits and gravity of Saturn and Jupiter. I believe they switched places and Neptune was thrown out to where it is now. I hadn't even heard of rogue planets until the past year or two. I never thought that a large body could be ejected from a solar system. So young and naive.
I was an astronomy minor in college. After I finished that track I stayed on as an assistant to one of my professors who taught planetary science and orbital mechanics. I was basically his java code jockey for a semester(I was a Comp Sci major). He had a N-Body simulator that he built in a while back that was a lot of fun to play with. You could make some really wonky systems.
The math track for Comp Sci was a lot different than Astronomy otherwise I would have loved to double major. By the time I got to some of 300 level courses on the minor track I realized I'd have to go back and fill in a bunch of math if I wanted to start taking the other major track courses I was interested in. It was a bit late in my college career for that. If I'd had it to do over again, I'd have definitely planned that out better. I had a ton of fun in those classes.
The more time passes the rustier I get, but I can still read along with a portion of astronomy publications. The key for me is deciding if the paper requires you to actually understand the math in order to understand the premise, methodology, and conclusion, or if I can gloss over it and still understand the science it presents. Hardcore astrophysics and some of the more out there theoretical cosmology I don't do super well with unless it's in format specific for the lay person (like a book geared for the general public). I'd certainly never open a research paper on those topics and expect to understand anything past the abstract.
As for the more run of mill astronomy, if a paper is geared for students or the educated public, I can normally keep pace with the concepts. A lot of it really depends on the subject matter and how well the author writes.
Rogue planets are fun topic. The new telescopes and optic enhancement methods have made it possible to start to find and track some of these objects that are of the sub-brown dwarf variety. There's still debate about whether most of these interstellar objects formed in stellar systems and were then ejected or if they formed on their own from the interstellar medium. They are thought to be very numerous though. It's interesting to imagine oodles of large, massive, nearly invisible objects whizzing through space with no practical destination.
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I still haven't found an answer to the white dwarf/neutron star binary system origin question. I need an astrophysicist on retainer so I can ask these questions.
If you're up for it. http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0303456v1.pdf
I skimmed it, skipping over the math because I wouldn't understand the equations anyway, but what I take away is depending on the masses of the pair, the configuration of the pair and its common envelop, and the type and duration of the mass loss events, there are a number of mechanisms that could preserve the high mass stellar remnants. They are non-standard events but not impossible and given the exceedingly large numbers of binary pairs in the universe these outcomes are not unexpected.
Also, when it comes to ejection from a gravitational system, the vast majority of those objects were expelled due to harmonics in the tidal forces caused by other orbital members of the same system (orbits syncing up in such a way that one of the actors is eventually expelled) or from close encounters with foreign gravitational systems (one star system passing through another expelling objects from one or both systems) and not from explosive force of a nova. Odd things happen in N-body modeling given enough bodies, starting configurations, and time. Things that appear to be gravitationally bound are not always so.
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Not so much a rant as a lament...but sick babies. The boy is breaking my heart right now. This cold needs to go away.
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Overtired babies who do not want to take naps.
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The keyboard dock for my Transformer Prime arrived today. I don't know if I could love a piece of technology more. This thing went from pretty boss to totally boss.
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I heart listening to Joe Angel call baseball games...that is all.
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Forgetting to the cut the power off at the circuit breaker BEFORE removing the the light switch panel cover........ZAP.
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This is a question from long ago, but since the thread was bumped: Yes. Caffeine is a diuretic.
I made this mistake all the time until someone clarified it for me: a diuretic is something that makes you urinate, a laxative is something that either induces a bowel movement or loosens your stool.
Coffee is a diuretic because of caffeine. It makes everyone pee. Its effect as a laxative on specific people is kind of debated. Warmness of the liquid, irritation of the stomach due to specific enzyme, etc, etc......whatever it is normally works on me....often at the office.
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Screw you Ram's Head Live or whoever provided the PA for Megadeth tonight. Nothing like sitting through 3 hours of Exodus and Testament only to have Megadeth come out and the PA make a wonderful farting sound at full volume. Took them another hour to rip every wire out of the board and plug it into another. Then after a completely inadequate sound check, the band comes back out and sounds AWFUL. Of course, some heinous sound twice the volume of the rest of the band combined starts coming out of the bass in the middle of their third song and the band gave up again. Yes, I realize the band is not at fault and I'd love to stick around for another hour while someone attempts to rectify the situation so they can play, but seriously. They tried to go on around 9:30 and now it's 11:30 and I've still got to drive back to Arlington from Baltimore. I rolled because I figured even if they did start playing it wouldn't be over until 2 or something. Bah. Lame. Just lame. You've got all freaking day to set this stuff up and we all know for the larger acts they set up every instrument mic before hand for every band that's going to play that night so they can just start clearing one act from the front of the stage and uncover the setup for the next. One of my friends just let me know they gave up and the band never played. Disappointing.
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Getting there...sometimes there's nothing quite like having nothing to do.
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In no particular order:
Harold and the Purple Crayon - Crockett Johnson
Love You Forever - Robert Munsch
Blueberries For Sal - Robert McCloskey
Goodnight Moon - Margaret Wise Brown
In all seriousness, children's books are underrated by adults. You don't have to stop loving them because you're all grown up.
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Never having any idea what to get people for X-Mas. I may the worst gift-giver in the history of mankind.
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Little Pink House. Nonfiction about the 2005 Supreme Court case that redefined eminent domain.
MLB and Union talk major rule changes
in Orioles Talk
Posted
That's an interesting take. The nfl does really market the league but since the vast majority of games take place on Sundays it's probably a bit easier to sell the idea of being a football fan compared to the spread out marathon that is baseball. I wonder what sort of league wide initiative could be effective.