H.RES 893. BILL TITLE: Congratulating the 2009 Major League Baseball World Series Champions, the New York Yankees
I am pleased to note that among the 17 who voted Nay is Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT-5), who went to the same high school as me.
Call your Congressperson and let them know what you think of their stance on this.
20x200 : In the Ballpark by Tatsuro Kiuchi
Now a new study, Professionals Do Not Play Minimax: Evidence from Major League Baseball and the National Football League (NBER Working Paper No. 15347), looks at two of the biggest high-stakes examples of zero-sum contests: pitch selection in Major League Baseball and play-calling in the National Football League. Authors Kenneth Kovash and Steven Levitt find that: “Pitchers appear to throw too many fastballs; football teams pass less than they should.” They also find that the selection of pitches or plays is too predictable. The researchers conclude that “correcting these decisionmaking errors could be worth as many as two additional victories a year to a Major League Baseball franchise and more than a half win per season for a professional football team.”
Job has high expectations for tomorrow. (via slyxc)
The artist is a creep with his little boxes, but the athlete is a man
who has stolen glory in all its forms, stolen honey in a cup from the gods
and hidden it in his insides where the bees drone. I’m always a boy
as I sit or stand in the shouting place and breathe the doses of men—
smoke and malt—as the night comes down in the exact pattern
of a diamond, a moonlit hothouse of dirt a boy knows is something
to spit on and pat into a shape. Dirt’s a cure for the buried someone.
Even as it begins with its anthem, it’s lost to me, the exact color
of devotion. So goodbye to the inning and other numbers on scoreboards
and the backs of our team, our blue and red, our lips, our business,
which is to rip into them, a boy learns, or bark at the hit or miss.
Men have skill, although I see them fail and fail again and fail to hit
the curve. I’m always a girl as I aww and ooo. What’s the infield-fly rule?
I tried to watch the grips and tricks, the metaphysics, the spin,
the positions of fast and still, scratch and spit … but I thought,
in all this infinity, of the Clementes, the Mayses, and the Yogis,
of the bats of ash I would have to crack and would I have to squeeze
them home? Would I be asked to sacrifice? Would I belly-button it
or break my wrists trying not to swing? There’s a box and a zone
in the air and the dirt I must own. To find my way out
or know where it is I sit, I keep my ticket stub in my fist.
From the September 7, 2009 issue of the New Yorker
Orioles vs. Indians (via slyxc). This game ended ridiculously.
1.
Twenty-five years ago, Kurt Schwitters,
I tried to instruct you in baseball
but kept getting distracted, gluing
bits and pieces of world history
alongside personal anecdote
instead of explicating baseball’s
habits. I was K.C. (for Casey)
in stanzas of nine times nine times nine.
Last year the Sox were ahead by twelve
2.
in May, by four in August—collapsed
as usual—then won the Series.
Jennifer, who loved baseball, enjoyed
the game on TV but fell asleep
by the fifth inning. She died twelve years
ago, and thus would be sixty now
watching baseball as her hair turned white.
I see her tending her hollyhocks,
gazing west at Eagle Pond, walking
3.
to the porch favoring her right knee.
I live alone with baseball each night
but without poems. One of my friends
called “Baseball” almost poetry. No
more vowels carrying images
leap suddenly from my excited
unwitting mind and purple Bic pen.
As he aged, Auden said that methods
of dry farming may also grow crops.
4.
When Jennifer died I had nightmares
that she left me for somebody else.
I bought condoms, looking for affairs,
as distracting as Red Sox baseball
and even more subject to failure.
There was love, there was comfort; always
something was wrong, or went wrong later
—her adultery, my neediness—
until after years I found Lauren.
5.
When I was named Poet Laureate,
the kids of Danbury School painted
baseballs on a kitchen chair for me,
with two lines from “Casey at the Bat.”
In fall I lost sixty pounds, and lost
poetry. I studied only “Law
and Order.” My son took from my house
the eight-sided Mossberg .22
my father gave me when I was twelve.
6.
Buy two pounds of cheap fat hamburger
so the meatloaf will be sweet, chop up
a big onion, add leaves of basil,
Tabasco, newspaper ads, soy sauce,
quail eggs, driftwood, tomato ketchup,
and library paste. Bake for ten hours
at thirty-five degrees. When pitchers
hit the batter’s head, Kurt, it is called
a beanball. The batter takes first base.
7.
After snowdrifts melted in April,
I gained pounds back, and with Lauren flew
to Paris, eating all day: croissants
warm, crisp, and buttery, then baguettes
Camembert, at last boeuf bourguignon
with bottles of red wine. Afternoons
we spent in the Luxembourg Gardens
or in museums: the Marmottan!
The Pompidou! The Orangerie!
8.
The Musée de la Vie Romantique!
The Louvre! The d’Orsay! The Jeu de
Paume! The Musée Maillol! The Petit
Palais! When the great Ted Williams died,
his son detached his head and froze it
in a Scottsdale depository.
In summer, enduring my dotage,
I try making this waterless farm,
Meatloaf, with many ingredients.
9.
In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
where I last clambered in middle age,
while I sit in my idle body
in the car, in the cool parking lot,
revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
counting nine syllables on fingers
discolored by old age and felt pens,
my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.
President Obama and Willie Mays on Air Force One (via whitehouse)
