Yo
Cespedes had a “ranch incident” and broke his ankle, ‘cause he’s a Met and of course he did.
I shouldn’t have laughed so hard at this, but I did.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 7 Summary
Here are the standings at week 7! We’re starting to see a little bit of separation now.
Poor Yukon and Yellowknife. It’s too cold up there for baseball, haha.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 6 Summary
Here are the standings at week 6! I should make a document or something of the 25-man rosters for each team so that anyone who is interested (which is probably just me) can see where all the big players are in this fake league. I could put a link to it on here or something.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 5 Summary
Here are the updated current standings for week 5! Simulation Syndegaard is still hurt. Simulation Zack Wheeler is also out for the season with a ruptured ulnar collateral ligament, which sounds pretty gnarly (and sucks ‘cause his ERA was 1.70 so far).
I suspect the reason that Vancouver is doing so badly is because they’re all freaking sad that they have to play in Vancouver.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 4 Summary
Here are the updated current standings. No one is really pulling ahead at this point, but it’s very early in the season still.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 3 Summary
Here are the updated current standings. Go Calgary! Haha.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 2 Summary
Here are the updated current standings.
Other news: Simulation Syndergaard has already been injured like three times (just like the real 2017?), so he’s sitting right now.
Tune in next Sunday!
Holy crap, I missed baseball.
The season just started like two weeks ago and it’s already pretty wild.
Also this:
EXCITING
(Also, poor Marlins)
Canadian League Baseball: Week 1 Summary
My baseball simulation is super fun, so you’re going to get to here all about it every Sunday. Here are the current standings at the beginning of the season:
It’s still very early!
AAAA
Math midterms that go from 6:00 – 7:30 and are followed by two and a half hours of grading? Not my favorite way to spend Friday.
BUT HEY, I got home and made a logo for the Canadian Baseball League.
Super creative, right?
I figured a dude threatening to bludgeon a maple leaf with a bat was pretty Canadian.
(MLB, please don’t sue me, I’m just screwing around.)
OPENING DAY
It’s BASEBALL TIME, BITCHES!
It’s also the start of my season-long simulation of my fake baseball league, the Canadian Baseball League (CBL)!
So here’s what’s the what: I made up a total of 30* fake teams, put them into leagues and divisions, then had Out of the Park Baseball draft all the current** players and get them on the teams.
So without further ado, here are said teams, divisions, and leagues. I have two leagues that are called the Canadian League (as opposed to the American League) and the National League. Just like real MLB, there are three divisions within each league.
Canadian League
CL EAST
- Halifax: The Halifax Dreadhawks
- Newfoundland: The Newfoundland Hounds
- Ottawa: The Ottawa Mounties
- Quebec: The Quebec Rebels
- Saint John: The Saint John Saints
CL CENTRAL
- Hamilton: The Hamilton Steelers
- London: The London Chaps
- Saskatchewan: The Saskatchewan Winds
- Toronto: The Toronto Blue Jays
- Winnipeg: The Winnepeg Warriors
CL WEST
- Anchorage: The Anchorage Timberwolves
- Calgary: The Calgary Cowboys
- Edmonton: The Edmonton Oil Barons
- Victoria: The Victoria Royals
- Yukon: The Yukon Gold
National League
NL EAST
- Fredericton: The Fredericton Fighters
- Montreal: The Montreal Expos
- Nova Scotia: The Nova Scotia Mariners
- Nunavut: The Nunavut Miners
- Prince Edward Island: The Prince Edward Islanders
NL CENTRAL
- Manitoba: The Manitoba Lakers
- Ontario: The Ontario Horseshoes
- Regina: The Regina Giants
- Thunder Bay: The Thunder Bay Lightning
- Windsor: The Windsor Welders
NL WEST
- Alberta: The Alberta Bulls
- British Columbia: The BC Bears
- Saskatoon: The Saskatoon Sabers
- Vancouver: The Vancouver Blues
- Yellowknife: The Yellowknife Blizzards
I plan on simulating each day of the 2017 season in sync with this year’s actual MLB season. I’ll keep y’all updated on the standings weekly (though I’m sure none of you will actually care) and let you know if there are any simulated versions of current players doing any cool simulated things.
*I kept the Blue Jays and re-added the Expos, so I guess it’s only 28 fake teams, but whatev.
**Well, okay, I have OOTP 18, so my players are the 2017 versions of themselves.
I AM EXCITE
More Fake Baseball, Sorry
Alright, nerds, here is the finalized list of my fake baseball teams for my fake Canadian League Baseball simulation that I’ll start tomorrow. I tried to make most of the names relevant to the city/province/territory, but some of them are just “I couldn’t think of anything else so here’s some alliteration to make things sound good.”
Edit: I LIED, I’d forgotten to give Saint John a name. So I called them the Saints. Fight me.
- Alberta: The Alberta Bulls
- Anchorage: The Anchorage Timberwolves
- British Columbia: The BC Bears
- Calgary: The Calgary Cowboys
- Edmonton: The Edmonton Oil Barons
- Fredericton: The Fredericton Fighters
- London: The London Chaps
- Halifax: The Halifax Dreadhawks
- Hamilton: The Hamilton Steelers
- Manitoba: The Manitoba Lakers
- Montreal: The Montreal Expos
- Newfoundland: The Newfoundland Hounds
- Nova Scotia: The Nova Scotia Mariners
- Nunavut: The Nunavut Miners
- Ontario: The Ontario Horseshoes
- Ottawa: The Ottawa Monarchs
- Prince Edward Island: The Prince Edward Islanders
- Quebec: The Quebec Rebels
- Regina: The Regina Giants
- Saint John: The Saint John Saints
- Saskatchewan: The Saskatchewan Tornadoes
- Saskatoon: The Saskatoon Sabers
- Thunder Bay: The Thunder Bay Lightning
- Toronto: The Toronto Blue Jays
- Vancouver: The Vancouver Blues
- Victoria: The Victoria Royals
- Windsor: The Windsor Welders
- Winnipeg: The Winnepeg Warriors
- Yellowknife: The Yellowknife Blizzards
- Yukon: The Yukon Gold
Tune in tomorrow for the official intro to this project!
B A S E B A L L
More specifically: I C H I R O!
The Mariners played the Athletics in Japan as the first official game of the season. Ichiro got to play for a little bit. It was pretty cool.
Also, I guess this means that my “fake” baseball season with my Canadian teams will not include this first game (and tomorrow’s second game), ‘cause I STILL DON’T HAVE ALL MY TEAMS FIGURED OUT.
Gotta get on it.
Did I also mention that I want to design logos for all my fake teams, ‘cause I’m weird like that?
Yeah.
That won’t happen right at the start, but is definitely something I want to do as the season progresses.
Canadian Baseball League: Team Update
HI THERE
Still trying to think of names for my fake Canadian teams before the season starts. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
- Alberta: The Alberta Bulls
- Anchorage
- British Columbia
- Calgary: The Calgary Cowboys
- Edmonton: The Edmonton Oil Barons*
- London:
- Halifax: The Halifax Dreadhawks***
- Manitoba: The Manitoba Lakers (‘cause…there’s a lot of lakes in Manitoba?)
- Montreal
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Ottawa
- Prince Edward Island: The Prince Edward Islanders (I AM A GENIUS)
- Quebec
- Quebec City
- Regina: The Regina Giants (‘cause it sounds cool)
- Saint John
- Saskatchewan
- Saskatoon
- Thunder Bay: The Thunder Bay Lightning
- Toronto
- Vancouver:
- Victoria: The Victoria Royals
- Windsor:
- Winnipeg
- Yellowknife: The Yellowknife Blizzards
- Yukon: The Yukon Gold****
YES, a lot of them overlap with other sports. COWBOYS ARE NOT A UNIQUE GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURE TO DALLAS, OKAY?
*freaking ksdfjsjflsjfsjf the “Oil Barons” are name of a Junior Hockey Team from Fort McMurry. Gonna keep it anyway. And yes, I know, the Edmonton Oilers are a thing. Gonna keep it anyway. What the hell else is there unique about Edmonton, come on, give me a break.**
**Haha, I could call them “The Edmonton Mall Rats” instead, there ya go.
***Blame Picnicface. They’re Canadian, though, so it’s like a tribute.
****YES I KNOW THAT’S A POTATO I DON’T GIVE A STARCHY DAMN
‘Sall I got right now. Do you have any ideas/suggestions for the others?
Preliminary Baseball Stuff
Hey turd buckets.
So as I’ve mentioned on here, I want to use Out of the Park to simulate a Canadian version of MLB alongside next year’s actual baseball season. This means that I’m going to basically replace all 30 actual teams with 30 fake Canadian teams (and just have the current players randomly (maybe) assigned to the fake teams).
One of the most exciting parts of this to me is coming up with the names of the teams themselves. I also want to do logos and stuff because I’m weird, but names first.
So there are 30 teams in real MLB, 29 of which are in the US. So I’m probably just going to flip that: have 29 teams in Canada and then one team be from Alaska or something.
So here’s my current list of Canadian team cities/provinces (and the Alaska one):
- Alberta
- Anchorage
- British Columbia
- Calgary
- Edmonton
- London
- Halifax
- Manitoba
- Montreal
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland
- Northwest Territories (Yellowknife)
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut (Iqaluit)
- Ontario
- Ottawa
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Quebec City
- Regina
- Saint John
- Saskatchewan
- Saskatoon
- Thunder Bay
- Toronto
- Vancouver
- Victoria
- Windsor
- Winnipeg
- Yukon (Whitehorse)
I figure each province/territory can have its own team in addition to one or more cities in the province/territory having a team—except for maybe the territory’s teams might just be in their capitals, so I could change those (hence the parentheses).
Now for names! My problem is that I really like alliterative names, which actually aren’t a thing in baseball much. So I’ll try to avoid that.
Right now all I have are the Thunder Bay Lightning and the Victoria Royals. Part of me wants to also avoid duplicating any current baseball names (which would mean that Victoria Royals would have to get scratched), but I also like the name “Victoria Royals,” so…
Any thoughts?
Edit: what the hell do I do with the Blue Jays?
BASEBALL PARTY FUN TIME 2K18
Things I should be working on:
- NaNoWriMo
- Class notes
- Class review questions
- Answering emails
Things I worked on instead:
- This freaking blog
So remember that baseball thing I’ve done a couple times now, once for 2016 and once for 2017? I did it again for 2018 because why the hell not.
Let’s do the CopyPaste Dance from a previous blog:
At the end of the regular baseball season, you can see how many wins each team got out of the total number of games they played, and then rank the teams by their performance (who had the most wins, the second most wins, etc.).
What I want to do is see how this “real” data correlates with how many wins each team would get if they scored their average number of runs per game in every single game they played. For example, if the Athletics score an average of 5.02 runs per game, how many of their games would they have won by scoring 5.02 runs in each of those games?
(Yes, I know you can’t score 0.02 runs in a single game, but just work with me here.)
The process:
- Record each team’s average runs per game (I’ll call this “RPG”) (from here).
- Sort teams from highest to lowest RPG.
- Now, if a team A has a higher RPG than team B, that would mean that A would win every game they play against B. So the next step was to figure this out for each pairing of Team A versus Team B.
- I used this logic for all pairings (numbers of games per pair was obtained from here), then summed across the rows to get the “predicted” number of wins based on RPG alone. Then I compared looked at how each team’s “predicted” number of wins compared with their “actual” number of wins, and ranked each team by both their “predicted” and “actual” values.
How do they compare for the 2018 season?
Boston (highest RPG) would win every game they played; Miami (lowest RPG) would lose every game they played. Bummer.
Correlation of RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.797
Correlation of team rankings based on RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.832
Pretty cool.
The biggest discrepancies, of course, are at the extremes. Based on RPG alone, Boston was predicted to win 66 more games than they did; Miami predicted to lose 66 more than they did. The smallest discrepancy is for the Angels, who were predicted to win two more games than they did.
FUN!
Wanna be ‘80s cool?
Yeah you do. I submit that it’s impossible to be sad while watching this.
This is apparently an extended version of the 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship Opening.
Is this competition still a thing? ‘Cause it needs to be. All these people have big dick energy and I love it.
Now I’ve GOT THAT SONG STUCK IN MY HEAD FOREVER
Edit: holy crap it totally is!
Edit 2: bought the song on iTunes like half a year after posting this blog. Life will never be the same.
METS, NO
Mets, why you gotta go trading my favorite dude? Not cool.
I was legit sad when I read that Cabrera got traded. I dig Cabrera. Now he’s with the Phillies, the team against which he had the famous bat flip.
Edit: Did you know Cabrera has one of the 15 unassisted triple plays in MLB history? Now you do!
I’m sad.
HEY NOW, YOU’RE AN ALL-STAR
Dudes, the All-Star game was awesome. I actually don’t remember if we watched last year’s, but this year’s is definitely more memorable if we did.
It’s pretty cool to see all the big stars of baseball come together and play a game that’s not taken too seriously. Especially since we mostly watch NL East teams (due to Mets); it’s cool to see the other top dudes not in the NL East or even in the National League in general, like Trout and Judge and Altuve.
I also like how they mic up some of the dudes and interview them while they’re out on the field.
Yay baseball!
Skydive Arizona
Hey, so remember when I went skydiving like seven years ago? I finally found the DVD of the jump and decided to upload it to YouTube. Here ya go.
(Note: the video was originally some weird-ass file format, so I had to screen record it, haha).
“Up Close on Baseball’s Borders”
Okay, so I know this is a fairly old article now and things have (maybe?) changed, but I’m cleaning up my bookmarks and found this again, so here it is for y’all’s viewing pleasure.
Poor Mets, man. The fact that the Yankees had to be completely removed from the options to make that “New York Mets vs. Philadelphia Phillies” map possible is pretty bad.
Here’s the full interactive map.
It would be interesting to see Canada, too. I suspect Blue Jays everywhere, even in places like Vancouver, despite its proximity to the Mariners.
(I apologize if I’ve blogged about this before. I don’t think I have…)
BASEBALL BASEBALL BASEBALL
Holy freaking crap apples, I’d forgotten how much I missed watching baseball. The season started yesterday and so Nate and I watched the Mets game last night (they won, yay!) and are spending today watching a few of the other games from yesterday/today.
(Because Good Friday is a “you get the day off from work” holiday up here, which is weird to me.)
So despite the fact that it’s super cold and windy outside right now and it feels more like early February than ALMOST FREAKING APRIL, spring has now officially begun because baseball has started up again.
Yay.
Stacy’s mom has turned into a prawn / she’s got gills now and she’s flopping on the lawn
Today is the closing ceremony of the Olympics, so let’s make this blog Olympic-related.
Let’s rank some Olympic Logos! Specifically, top five and bottom five.
GO!
Top Five
5. Salt Lake 2002
This one’s a’ight. I like the star/torch/snowflake logo and how it’s not perfectly symmetric.
4. Melbourne/Stockholm 1956
This one is pretty. While not super “Olympics-looking,” I’ts like a cool little stamp. I dig it.
3. Tokyo 1964
I like how simple this logo is. The gradient in the circle is cool and the color looks really good with the gold color of the rings and text.
2. Atlanta 1996
I dig the torch. Also, I think this is the first Olympics I remember watching.
1. Calgary 1988
Totally not biased by the fact that it’s my birth year and the city I currently live in. I do really like this logo. It’s simple but still visually interesting, and definitely has an 80s vibe to it.
Bottom Five
5. Athens 2004
Not a huge fan of the little watercolor-looking blue square. It seems very disconnected with the rings/text and seems…unprofessional?
4. Mexico 1968
Why does the “X” get like 400 extra lines? There’s just too many goddamn lines. That “68” with the rings looks really busy. They should have just made the bottom two rings of the 6 and the 8 just two of the colored rings.
3. Berlin 1936
“Oh crap, we forgot to make an Olympics logo!”
“What are we going to do?!?”
“Here, quick, trace this picture of a bell with a ballpoint pen and write some stuff on it.”
“Should I color it or something?”
“No time, the Olympics start in two minutes!”
“Sheisse!”
2. Lake Placid 1932
That is the wonkiest North America I have ever seen. Apparently Mexico is a tube sock? And that dude is like 80% legs. Did a five year old with half an eye draw this?
1. London 2012
I like to imagine the dude who designed this logo was told that graphic design wasn’t an Olympic sport and he was like, “the fuck it isn’t!” and then proceeded to win gold in the “designing logos while on hallucinogens” event.
Men’s figure skating is the best Olympic event
Hey, it’s Winter Olympics time! That means it’s time to bring up this video again for any poor souls who haven’t seen it yet.
Johnny Weir is awesome.
Also, Plushenko. Because Plushenko.
Nnnnf.
Eigenblogger 