… and other Spurs-based hilarity

I’ve been falling out of love with football lately, but this along with the whole Newcastle thing is encouraging so much entertaining media that I’m almost arsed to follow what’s going on in the Premiership these days.

Get that ball off my lawn!

Caffeine and LL withdrawls. I hope I can handle this.

all I want to do when it gets dark so early is drink and sleep.

MLB needs a better abbreviation hard core.

And has too many cheap deals. My wallet does not like me.

Add some hardware to his trophy case.

Well, The Gaslight Anthem isn’t a new band, but they’re new to me, and they’re pretty freakin’ cool. They’re The Hold Steady without the grandiose production – and that’s not a knock against The Hold Steady, I love that band like I’d love a child of my own; it’s just that the Gaslight Anthem takes that sound and strips it down to the basics – two guitars, bass and drums, and good lyrics. Really good stuff.

The singer’s voice sounds like Brandon whatshisname from the Killers, which isn’t a bad thing either; I really like this record, and now I want to go get the rest of their catalog.

Today, 13 years ago, I met my first girlfriend.
We went out for a few months and then she broke up with me. Several years later we ended up talking again and have been very good friends for the last 7 years.

This morning I realized why, for instance one of the last diving jobs I worked there were roughly 25 people on the boat. I tallied approximately 80 years of prison time. Not counting county lockups and time served while waiting bail etc. That seems pretty typical for a lot of crews I’ve worked with.
So basically I’ve spent a lot of years surrounded by people with poor emotional responses and anger management issues. The majority have a great sense of humor, yet all the stories and jokes tend to be the self deprecating type. Safer that way I suppose. Slica’s comments yesterday probably led me down this line of thought.

This post at Beyond the Boxscore has Jose Lopez as being the 8th best 2B in MLB in ‘08. I have no trouble believing he was +26 with the bat, but I refuse to believe he was +5 with the glove. I’m not willing to believe he’s as bad as Dave Cameron says he is (which is stupid because Dave Cameron is way smarter than me, but still.)

So does anyone have a decent guess at how Jose’s defense actually rates? I would say it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of -10 runs or so, but that’s not based on anything I can really articulate.

I honestly don’t believe there’s any reliable way of measuring them accurately and meaningfully (i.e. specifically) without being subject to too much noise and still a fair amount of subjectivity. The range thing sorta works for me (i.e. someone is between -5 runs and +5 runs), but that’s not reliable enough for me to say “Player X is worth 10 runs above average” comfortably (let alone dogmatically like others proclaim). I honestly can’t subscribe quite yet to any firm defensive metric that places a specific, definitive run value on ANY player. Reliable systems are not anywhere close to being in place to measure this. They’re getting better, sure, and certainly some defensive metric systems are better than others.

I still stick by the “Asset, Average, Liability” range, and would say that Lopez is somewhere around Average and falling towards the Liability side. Yuni is falling faster…

There was a pretty good article in the NYT about AC/DC today, and it contains this line:

The next year, after the singer Bon Scott died in a misadventure with alcohol, the band recruited Mr. Johnson.

Saying Bon Scott had a “misadventure with alcohol” is like saying that Keith Richards dabbled with experimental drugs.