Red Sox: April 16

Wow. What a bad way to start the season. And let me note that Blogger doesn't handle tables very well.

After 12 games, they are 2-10:

• At a .500 pace, they'll end at 77-85.
  
• At a .550 pace (89 wins over a season), they'll end 85-77.
  
• At a .575 pace (93 wins over a season), they'll end 88-74.
  
• At a .600 pace (97 wins over a season), they'll end 92-70.
  
• At a .610 pace (99 wins over a season), they'll end 94-68.
  
• At a .620 pace (100 wins over a season), they'll end 95-66.
  

So, can they make the playoffs? Let's look at the last ten years.

First, let's look at what it takes to get into the playoffs in the American League:

Year	Top 3 AL East	Best 2nd place not in AL East
2010	96, 95, 89	88
2009	103, 95, 84	87
2008	97, 95, 89	88
2007	96, 94, 83	88
2006	97, 87, 86	95
2005	95, 95, 80	93
2004	101, 98, 78	91
2003	101, 95, 86	93
2002	103, 93, 78	99
2001	95, 82, 80	102

Getting to the wild card recently (since 2007) requires 89 wins, but 93 wins would be comfortable, and 95 would almost guarantee the wild card. Something happened between 2006 and 2007; the highest win total of a team from the Central or West that finished second dropped pretty sharply.

How many teams have got to 89 wins? 92? 95? Here's the table over the last 10 years:

Wins	Number of Teams	Teams
116	1	Mariners, 2001
105	1	Cardinals, 2004
103	3	Yankees, 2002, 2009; A's, 2002
102	1	A's, 2001
101	4	Braves, 2002, 2003; Yankees 2003, 2004
100	3	Giants, 2003; Cardinals, 2005; Angels, 2008
99	2	Angels, 2002; White Sox 2005
98	2	Diamondbacks 2002; Red Sox 2004
97	7
96	6
95	11
94	4
93	9
92	8
91	7
90	8
89	7

Out of 300 teams:

• 13 have won more than 100 games; that's 4 percent.
  
• 28 have won 95 to 100 games; that's 10 percent.
  
• 20 have won 92, 93, or 94 games; that's 7 percent.
  
• 22 have won 89, 90, or 91 games; that's 7 percent.
  

So:

• To get to 89 wins, they have to play at a 93 wins pace; 18 percent of teams have done that.
  
• To get to 92 wins, they have to play at a 97 wins pace; 8 percent of teams have done that.
  
• To get to 95 wins, they have to play at a 100 win pace; 4 percent of teams have done that.
  

Getting to the playoffs will require an impressive run over the rest of the season. Of course, another question for another day is: how many teams who've won 92 games have gone 2-10 over some stretch?

There are some wierd numbers for the hitters. Pedroia is playing great (.348/.423/.565), while Youkilis is getting on base but not hitting (.200/.451/.371) while Ortiz is hitting but not getting on base (.262/.333/.500). Nobody else is playing particularly well: Saltalamacchia and Crawford have OPS+ under 15, while Scutaro, Ellsbury, and Drew are between 54 and 78. Gonzalez is at 107, with a line of .244/.346/.400--about league average, but you'd hope for better production than that. Off the bench, Lowrie is at 209 for OPS+ (.471/.526/.588 in 19 PA), but McDonald is at league average and Cameron and Varitek are below zero.

Lester and Beckett are pitching well, especially Beckett. Buchholz, Lackey, and Matsuzaka are terrible. Papelbon and Aceves are pitching well in relief, but in only 10.2 innincpts. Wakefield is the best of the rest, but when a 44 year old knuckleballer is your best relief pitcher and his ERA+ is 76, there's trouble. Jenks was a flier; his control has been getting worse since 2007, and any hopes he can get his walk rate back down are getting slimmer. Wheeler is coming off a couple of good years at Tampa Bay; he might be able to straighten things out. Bard is the tricky one--strikeouts are way down, hits way up, but only in 4.2 IP. The bullpen might straighten out, but the three bad starting pitchers might be the biggest problem.

At this point, the Red Sox have played 4 complete series

1. 0-3 vs Texas and Cleveland
   
2. 0-2 vs Tampa Bay
   
3. 2-1 vs New York
   

Over the season, I will try to keep track of how many series each team has won and lost. Dropping a series to Cleveland doesn't look good.

Twins Report: April 8 2011

The Twins last year won the Central Division, at 94-68, with great years from Mauer and Morneau (although Morneau played only 81 games), and good years at the bat from Thome and Young. Valencia and Hudson weren't great at bat, but provided enough defence to get their bWAR over 2.0; Young his defence was bad enough to drag his bWAR under 2.0. Span, Kubel, Cuddyer all were basically at replacement level, or a little above.

As for pitching, Liriano, Pavano, and Duensing were good, although Duensing only got in 130.2 innings. Baker, Slowey, and Blackburn were the other main starters. The first two were replacement, while Blackburn basically sucked. Essentially, the 2010 Twins had two excellent and two solid players on offence, and three solid starters.

How will this carry over to 2011? Well, we are 6 games into the season, and the Twins are 2-4. At .500 ball for the rest of the season, they'll end up at 79-81. Over these six games, they've scored 19 runs, and given up 34. This is a rate of 3.17runs scored a game, and 5.67 runs allowed a game. This is a Pythagorean winning percentage of .238, predicting a year's won-lost record of 39-123. They won't be that bad, but still, it's not a good start.

For batters, only Denard Span (.304/.385/.478 in 26 PA) is playing well. Thome is about average (.200/.333/.400 in 12 PA), but he's not playing too much, which is good, for there are fears about his age. Everyone else is off to a terrible start, especially Cuddyer (.105/.150/.105 in 20 PA) and Young (.136/.136/.182 in 22 PA). Only Mauer, Span, and Thome have OBP above the league average of .325, and only Span and Thome have SLG at or above league average of .400. On the bench, Kubel is doing okay, but not providing much punch, at .333/.365/.381 in 22 PA as DH and corner outfielder. They also just lost Nishioka to a broken leg.

For pitchers, Blackburn had a good start, and everybody else (Liriano, Duensing, Baker, and Pavano) sucked. Duensing at least has good peripherals, with a 2.6 BB/9 and a 9.0 SO/9, but that's only one game. The starters are a collective 1-4, with Blackburn's win over the Blue Jays the only win. The bullpen seems okay--Nathan has 2 saves in 2 games, and Capps and Slowey their ERA+ is over 190. Hughes, Mijares, Perkins, and Manship have been terrible.

On the other hand, they've only played two teams, the Blue Jays and the Yankees, both away, and 1-2 in each series. Nothing to panic over; the season is long.

One Line Reviews.

Life of Black Hawk, by Black Hawk. This is the essence of American culture.

A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers. Privileged boy is (endlessly, tiresomely) privileged.

Rat Girl, by Kristin Hersh. About half-way through, an understanding of 'manic' was blossomed in my mind.

William Oughtred, by Florian Cajori. Things were better back then (1630).

The Sinking of the Titanic, by Marshall Logan. To a 21st century reader, accounts from 1912 are, by a terrible irony, overshadowed by World War I.

Dinner: Jan 1

I'm starting a project of sorts: taking pictures of my dinner, (almost) every day for a year. As I get better at this, I should be able to cover a couple of days in one post.

January 1: Salmon, Potatoes & Mushroom

The salmon was left over from New Year's Eve, when we had salmon and champagne. Sauteed mushrooms and baked potatoes rounded out the meal.

That's the table and the serving dish.

Our local wine store apparently overstocked this wine that is really good; 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 35% Merlot and 5% Cabernet Franc. Since they overstocked, they sell it cheap.

Finally, of course, we had to have dessert: cheese, M&M's, crackers and fig jam, and a hopalicious from Ale Asylum in Madison; Kate's nephew gifted us with lots of good Wisconsin beer when we went to Sheboygan before New Year's--I'll have to get him some local Minnesota beers!

Only a test.

Let me see how pictures work.

On Disc Golf

My home course is Becker . I try to play there at least twice a week. I record my scores (usually about 7 or 8 over par) and frequencies of good/bad drives/midranges/putts. I work (very occasionally) on my putts with my practice basket. I have hoped that disc golf would be a sport I could play well into my sixties or even seventies--my knees are bad, and I need activities that don't stress them too much. I take disc golf semi-seriously, but how seriously should I take it? Or, to put it differently, I've reached a plateau in my level of play, and so raising that level would take more time and more focused effort. Is that effort worth it?

In a larger sense, this is a question of priorities. Disc golf, cooking, reading--these are my primary hobbies. But there are secondary hobbies, like surfing the net, writing little essays about the books I read, and photography. Getting better at disc golf, or cooking, would require more time on those hobbies, and so less time on other things.

This is tied to the idea of a learning curve, although I've never been clear on the axes of a learning curve. If time is on the vertical axis and knowledge on the horizontal, then the steep part of the learning curve is there is little reward for much time, and so people quit when the learning curve gets steep. But if time is on the horizontal axis and knowledge on the vertical, then the steep part is much reward for little time, and is the easiest part. The idea of a plateau, as I mentioned above, works with time on the horizontal and knowledge on the vertical, so I'll go with that conception of a learning curve--knowledge approaches 100 percent along a horizontal asymptote.

And so, I'm at a height where a little knowledge in disc golf or cooking costs a lot of time. And where should that time come from? My life may have so much slack in it that I can find the time without cutting out too many other things I like to do, but I think not. SCSU has gone through a round of firings of tenured faculty, and my seniority is not so great that I feel bulletproof. I have to spend much more time on research than I have in the past, because I need to be able to get a job if I get fired. And that means picking up on mathematical research, not math history. But I need to publish the math history projects I'm working on, too.
So I have these sorts of priorities for work: research, teaching, service. Luckily for me, my chair has given me large lecture classes, which really cuts down on teaching time. And then for outside of work, there's K and then hobbies, like disc golf, cooking, reading, writing, photography. Intensive web surfing will have to go, which is a pity, because I liked being `the well-informed guy'.

And now I have over 500 words, which will have to be enough for this entry.

On the Name of this Blog

Blogging strikes me as a useful exercise in writing. If I am to be a historian, then writing has to be second nature. Drafts must flow from my fingers as water down the hills of the Lake District. Yet that is hard. I tinker so much with my writings that getting to a publishable state seems fantastical. So, perhaps, by writing a thousand (or so) words a week, I can become more fluid as a writer.

What will I write about?

Whatever happens to be on my mind, I guess. Looking forward to this fall, that means cooking, baseball and football, and cultural history. With Maureen, I'll be working on translating the prefatory material from 15th and 16th century math texts from Latin into English, so there might be more of that than would seem needful.
And, of course, I have giant rants in my mind about all sorts of things that I read on the net, so there'll be that. An unrepresentative diary of sorts.

Below is the inspiration for the name of this blog, an article from the lamented Journal of Irreproducible Results . I think the journal, as I knew it in high school and college, has died. Someone (who I met a few years back) bought the shambling corpse and tried to revivify it, but I don’t think they’ve truly succeeded.

Years back, I had a subscription to the Journal , which I let lapse after a year. It was 1986, and I know this because my copies resurfaced in the Great Move to Kate’s place this April. Sadly, but almost predictably, I’d romanticized these things I’d known before. They were not so great; entertaining, yes, but not the sheer incisive satire I’d remembered. When I graduated from high school, I’d bought The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results , and that text is more consistently funny than the journals themselves. And, I suppose, that book of selections colored my remembrance of the original.

And one last thing....the JIR was shelved in the Physics Library at Berkeley. One day I shall go back and see if it’s still there. I went back to Berkeley last January, but not to the Library. It was an important trip for setting old memories to rest, but that would be a longer and more difficult post. It’s still beautiful, thought, and many of my favorite places are still there. There’s something lovely about the conservatism of universities.

And that’s a small taste of the fabulous writing to come this fall!

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Cogito Ergo Sum

Murphy’s Refutation of Descartes

Rene Descartes’ catchy slogan, “I think, therefore I am”, has somehow gained a reputation as an important insight.
Its superficiality was first recognized by his contemporary, Edsel Murphy. It is regrettable that the fallacious
ideas of Descartes have become well known, while Murphy’s have sunk into obscurity. It is my hope, in this short
paper, to put the two into proper perspective.

Murphy himself seems to have been a somewhat elusive figure. According to Haber(1), he was born by a breech delivery
early in the fifteenth century. However, our evidence clearly places him as a contemporary of Descartes (1596-1650).
Possibly there were two Edsel Murphys. One or the other of them is best known for Murphy’s Law which, readers
are reminded, in its simplest form states that if anything can go wrong, it will.

Murphy, like many other well-known figures of the day, had a nickname. While Thomas Aquinas was known as “The Ox”
because of his large size and slow speech, Murphy as gone down in history as “The Horse.”

The Argument

“I think, therefore I am” sounds so impressive that it carries conviction. Murphy recognized it as a syllogism with an unstated major premise.

• Major Premise: A non-existent object cannot think.
  
• Minor Premise: I think.
  
• Conclusion: Therefore, I am.
  

When put this way, Descartes’ slogan is obviously trivial, said Murphy. Compare with,

“I weigh 170 pounds, therefore I am.”

Since nothing useful is to be found at this level, Murphy tried to search deeper. Descartes was apparently trying to answer the
question, “How do I know that I exist?” To this, “Cogito ergo sum” isn’t a bad reply, although it will not withstand critical examination.

After all, if I seriously doubt my existence, must I not also doubt my thinking? To put it another way:

Q: How can you be sure that you exist?

A: I think.

Q: How can you be sure you are thinking?

A: I can’t, but I do think that I think.

Q: Does that make you sure that you exist?

A: I think so.

This should make it clear that Descartes went too far. He ought to have said:

“I think I think, therefore I am.”

Or possibly,

“I think I think, therefore I think I am, I think”

To “The Horse,” even such watered-down version were unacceptable. This important proto-Existential philosopher
contended that, from a humanistic point of view, you do not really exist unless others are aware of your existence.
Murphy proclaimed,

“I stink, therefore I am.”

The Dispute

In typical scholastic fashion, there were acrimonious exchanges between the followers of Descartes and Murphy. The
Murphyites accused their opponents of putting Descartes before the Horse. On the other hand, Murphy’s modest
disclaimer of mathematical skill, “I don’t know math from a hole in the ground”, was used against him by the Cartesians.

Summary

I trust that this exposition will help rehabilitate Edsel Murphy and to reaffirm his important influence.

Bibliography

(1) Haber, S. Laboratory Halforisms, Path Ann. 7:345, 1972

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N.L. Morgenstern, MD

The Journal of Irreproducible Results, Vol. 24, No 3:6

Copyright © 1978 by the Journal of Irreproducible Results, Inc.