baseball « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

baseball

baseball / family / photo / weekend — Comments Off
25
May 13

Yeeeeeeeep

He did not hit the ball today …

But the ball hit him …

That means the same thing: baserunners. And so it was that we found ourselves in the last inning, whatever inning it was, with the bases loaded and let’s say the tying run at the plate in the first round of the playoffs. This is a league casual enough that they run the scoreboard some of the time. And it is a league with enough sensitive feelings that the players aren’t allowed to say “Hey batter batter batter.” Instead they say “Yeeeeeeeep” each pitch and this is OK.

I saw my first little league parent today, not the cheering, “Pay attention” parent, but the “Don’t throw it to the cutoff man, throw it in!” parent. The “I want to see you dive and catch it” parent. Looked like a biker. He was mildly mortified when his boy overran a ball in center. I’m sure it’ll effect his work all next week.

There is no need to discuss the relative merits of the play of your teammate, the second baseman. These kids are nine. But the demonstrative, chain smoker, ponytail guy felt he had to get his money’s worth.

I’d like to think, if I had a child in a sports league, that I’d let the coach coach and I’d quietly cheer and not do much more than that. My post-game interview — the sort of thing I used to do professionally — would consist of two questions. Did you play hard? Did you have fun? Well, then, pizza!

I would, however, roll my eyes at the rule about squelching batter chatter. That, too, is part of the game.

I did not heckle like a champion today. It was widely acknowledged that the other team was cheating. They were juicing. They had a 32-year-old pitcher. The coach was recruiting not just from his little league fields, but the greater tri-county area. How could he have otherwise fielded a team that could defeat these wholesome young men who played pepper games with pure joie de vivre, who are looking forward to church tomorrow and the end-of-the-season party sometime next week?

When my second cousin was on first base he would have been the tying run. Perhaps. The scoreboard did not say. But there was a pop up and that ended the game. The season came to a sad conclusion, because the boys would play through droughts and rain and all through Christmas if they’d let them. There was a dusty mound and green grass and a long strand of black irrigation pipe topping the outfield fence. They had lights for darkness and a concession stand for hunger. They had gloves and balls and an umpire who couldn’t find the first strike zone on any of the three adjoining fields. What else did they need?

Fans had two sets of aluminum bleachers in the sun and an outfield lined with beautiful oaks for shade. They had the weather the national chamber of commerce orders when holding the chamber of commerce convention. It was a beautiful day for everyone.

Also, we saw the rare 1-3-2 double play. Ground ball to the pitcher, he threw out the baserunner at first. The first baseman noticed the runner at third sneaking home. He fed the catcher who chased the runner back up the line until he stumbled and was tagged out. That is a rally-killing double play, friends.

Auburn / baseball / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
18
May 13

Last home baseball game of the year

The last baseball game of the season, and some nice photographs to celebrate it. Trey Cochrane-Gill pitched five and two-thirds innings in middle-relief for Auburn. He allowed six hits and chalked up five strikeouts against four runs:

Arkansas’ Brett McAfee homered in the third. Here’s a three-photo spread of his play at the plate in the fifth inning, when he tripled and then raced home on a squeeze play:

Cochran-Gill fielded the bunt and threw it home to Blake Austin:

And Austin looked up to the umpire who, finally, made a correct call. McAfee was out:

Brandon Moore was the second of seven Arkansas pitchers they trotted out today. He’s trying to catch Ryan Tella leaning, but that wasn’t going to happen:

In the bottom of the fifth Tella walked and then stole second. A single to left by Austin sent Tella to third. Mitchell Self was up to bat and he laid down the bunt of the day. Tella scored from third on the throw home, which was an error. Austin moved to second and then third on the error. Self got caught in a run down off first base. He held Arkansas’ attention long enough to let Austin score. It was a complete little league play by then, but Self, who started this with the bunt, found himself standing on second when it was done.

That was the start of a huge inning, where Auburn scored eight runs on six hits. Self singled later in the same inning. He got caught in his second rundown of the inning, but he managed to drive in another run doing it. N for the senior, Mitchell, on senior day. He’s had just 26 at-bats all season before cracking the starting lineup because of an injury. He finished the weekend 5-for-9 at the plate.

Here’s Tella scoring from third on the bad throw that was the beginning of Self’s first big play. Arkansas’ Jake Wise could only stand and watch. See the ball?

On the strength of that eight-run fifth inning, the second eight-run inning Auburn has recently had and one of the more exciting innings we’ve seen this season, the Tigers won the regular season finale 11-6, taking the series from the 11th ranked Razorbacks. The bats have come alive for Auburn at the right time, as they’ve won eight of their last 11 games overall and will face Alabama in the first round of the SEC baseball tournament in Hoover next week. Arkansas is the three seed in the tournament. Alabama is slotted at seven, Auburn enters at 10. Here’s the bracket.

Here’s the video, including the big fifth inning rally:

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / journalism / photo / video — Comments Off
17
May 13

A pitchers’ duel, videos, helmets

One of the more knowledgable people in our section — as opposed to the guy last night that called every ground ball a “can of corn” and his date who thought the umpires should reverse their hand signals for out and safe — said this evening that whomever scored a run would win. And he was right.

Game two of the last series of the season was a fine one. Auburn put Mike O’Neal on the mound. Check out this delivery:

Have you ever seen a pitcher get that low to the ground with an overhand delivery? I’ve seen submariners with scrapped up knuckles, but this is a different thing. That’s long been O’Neal’s style, though, and I’m sure that’s what stymied Florida through nine innings last weekend in the most heart-breaking loss of the season.

But O’Neal shook it off, took the ball and delivered again. Seriously, though, the guy is down if he played college football:

O’Neal allowed four hits and one run through seven innings and 100 pitches. The junior has had some hard luck lately, with a record now sitting at 8-4, but he’s got a great command of the mound.

Tonight he just happened to be facing the guy who is perhaps a first-round pitcher:

Seriously, between Arkansas’ Ryne Stanek and two LSU pitchers, we’ve watched a major league pitching corps this year. Stanek scattered six hits and four walks in seven and two-thirds innings and was never not in control of the game. Just a rock steady performance as Arkansas defeated Auburn 1-0. The guy in our section was right.

Here are the highlights, including a 98 mile per hour fastball from Stanek. He was throwing into the mid-90s in the sixth inning:

Auburn did, by virtue of other teams’ play, manage to secure their 10th seed in next week’s SEC baseball tournament. Now they have to go out and beat Arkansas tomorrow to end the season on a high note.

Things to read and watch: This video is described as “A crowd-funded video trailer boosting America’s future in space” which is in the trailer package of the new Star Trek movie. It was shot in Huntsville, which is reason enough to watch it I guess. I share it because it looks pretty awesome, and someone booked Optimus Prime to do the v/o.

In 1910 the USS Birmingham was the first warship to launch an airplane, which would be cool enough to say since the ship was named for Birmingham. Today the navy is launching and landing UAVs via aircraft carrier.

Murder rates? Early data suggests way down. How far down? Century-record lows. There’s an interesting hypothesis:

Analytically speaking, murder is an especially interesting crime because we have pretty good homicide statistics going all the way back to 1900. Most other crimes have only been tracked since about 1960. And if you look at the murder rate in the chart below (the red line), you see that it follows an odd double-hump pattern: rising in the first third of the century, reaching a peak around 1930; then declining until about 1960; then rising again, reaching a second peak around 1990. It’s been dropping ever since then.

This is the exact same pattern we see in lead ingestion among small children, offset by 21 years (the black line). Lead exposure rises in the late 1800s, during the heyday of lead paint, reaching a peak around 1910; then declines through World War II; and then begins rising again during our postwar love affair with big cars that burned high-octane leaded gasoline. Lead finally enters its final decline in the mid-70s when we begin the switch to unleaded gasoline.

This is powerful evidence in favor of the theory that lead exposure in childhood produces higher rates of violent crime in adulthood.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. …

If you’ve been glossing over the IRS hearings, that’s a good place to start.

Meanwhile, also in Washington, D.C. …

My second-favorite part of that Eric Holder press conference, after when he ignored a reporter’s question of about if the attorney general can see how the media “would find this troubling” was that claim about national security. That, with the actual timeline in place, stood up to scrutiny for several full minutes:

(I)t seems fairly clear that the claim that this leak was among the most damaging in American history simply doesn’t add up. If that’s the case, then why would the CIA have told the AP that the national security concerns it had previously expressed were “no longer an issue?”

All of this took about six seconds to become political. There was probably never a time when we seized on things purely in the pursuit of good governance, but I wish that time were now.

Finally, I’ve probably talked about helmets and bicycle crashes enough here in the past year. The farther removed from all of the events of last summer the more convinced I am about how lucky I was, head trauma-wise, and how bad that hospital was, head trauma-wise. (Here’s my helmet after the crash. The sum total of my head exam was telling a triage nurse I was cognitively fine. That’s it. Frightening. I have some generally spotty recollections of things between the trauma and the surgery and the recovery. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to hear about things I don’t remember, or read things I have no recollection of writing after the fact. And my old helmet, by definition, more or less completely did its job.) Anyway, this is one more story worth reading, and probably Bicycling’s best piece in some time:

If you crash and hit your head, there are two types of impacts. One is known as linear acceleration. That’s the impact of skull meeting pavement. Today’s helmets do an excellent job of preventing catastrophic injury and death by attenuating that blow.

The second type is known as rotational acceleration. This is where things get tricky. Even if the skull isn’t damaged, it still stops short. That causes the brain to rotate—the technical term is inertial spin—which creates shear strain. Imagine a plate of fruit gelatin being jarred so hard that little cuts open throughout the jiggly mass. That strain can damage the axons that carry information between neurons.

There are other factors involved, but research has consistently pointed to rotational acceleration as the biggest single factor in a concussion’s severity. The CPSC helmet benchmark is based solely on linear acceleration. There’s never been a standards test, required or voluntary, for rotational acceleration.

[…]

A report last year by the International Olympic Committee World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport summed up the state of the art in a sentence: “Little has changed in helmet-safety design during the past 30 years.”

[…]

There may never be an improved government standard for bicycle helmets. Experts may never come to a consensus on a standard for testing the forces most closely associated with concussions. But one test can be administered now: the market test. After all, new technology costs more. “Adding that upcharge to a $50 helmet,” Scott Sports designer John Thompson told me, “is a harder sell.”

This is the bike-helmet industry’s air-bag moment. The new rotation-dampening systems may not be perfect, but they are the biggest step forward in decades. The choices cyclists make with their money matter. You can pretend to protect your brain, or you can spend more money and get closer to actually doing it.

The science isn’t settled by a longshot, the industry is filled with legal frights and there are all kind of marketing concerns. But there’s also plenty to consider in that full piece, which is worth a cyclist’s time.

Auburn / baseball / family / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
16
May 13

From northern Europe to Alabama in a few generations

We were talking about grandparents. I’ve had the great fortune to know many ancestors, some of them for a wonderful and long time. (Ten or eleven, if you’ll let me count step-grandparents, who always manage to dote on you just like a regular grandchild, anyway.)

I have prominent memories, for example, of a great-great-grandmother. I could not remember when she died, so I had to look that up. I was in the ninth grade or so. She’d lived for 93 years, a simple, country life, but she’d seen planes, cars, penicillin, the nuclear age, space flight, hippies and the entire run of MacGyver.

She was a little woman, always wore her bun in her hair. We were always probably too loud for her. But she gave you a kiss and a half a stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint every time you saw her.

In re-discovering her obituary I found a link to someone’s genealogy research. I had great luck going back in time through her husband’s family tree — most of the success coming from the men, as they are typically better documented beyond a certain point. I found the names of people who died before the family cemetery was built. These people have a long history in the area, which helps explain why they are one of the four or five family names you always hear in that county.

I found a man named Peter who served in the 2nd Regiment of the West Tennessee Militia. I found a mention that suggests he might have bene in the middle of Andrew Jackson’s lines at the battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.

Peter had sandy colored hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. The Census noted he could read, though his wife couldn’t. He was a Tennessee boy, but moved, with his brother, to Alabama soon after that opened that section of land was opened up to white settlers. Purely a guess, but I’m guessing this was in the 18-teens, likely just before statehood. So that family has been in the area a good long while. (That’s four two-brothers stories I’ve heard of in that county. How everything isn’t named Romulus and Remus is beyond me.)

Peter came from a big family. His father, Layton, married twice. He had 24 children, his last when he was 63. Somewhere, how he found the time I don’t know, Layton moved his family into what is now Tennessee, soon after the Revolutionary War. But Layton’s parents were from New Jersey, back when it was still new, and spent some time in West Virginia before moving into Virginia to avoid the Indian Wars. And right in here, somewhere in the middle of the 18th century, is when the spelling of their family name changed.

One more generation puts you in New York — in Amersfort, NY (modern Long Island or
Brooklyn, NY). That makes my grandfather 10th generation American, a farmer like much of his family before him, and descended down one branch of his family line from Netherlands.

If all of that is correct. I did read it on the Internet. But it is easy to be amazed at how many people you’ve never heard of, supposedly in your family, doing genealogy research when you skim those sites.

Update: A trip home to look in one of those compendium books — someone solicited family stories from everyone in the county and all that were received were organized, hashed out, molded into some semblance of common sense and published — from the turn into the 21st century gave a few more details. They were merchants and farmers and soldiers and store clerks. There were teachers and county commissioners and sheriffs. There were soldiers, fighter pilots and phone operators.

One person, one of those people I don’t think I’ve ever met, wrote in the book “they were law enforcers as well as law breakers. They are hard-headed and stubborn at times, but believe in fair play for everyone.”

Hard to put that in a coat of arms.

One of them was named Rite Rise, which is just about the neatest alliterative name possible. I bet he woke up early every morning, too.

I’d already found where that family’s name changed the common spelling, as you read above. Now I’ve found the first apparent spelling change: it goes back to England, where in the 14th century they backed the wrong side in the War of the Roses. Guess I should have paid more attention to that in junior high. That’s when they moved to Holland before, a few hundred years later, sending out descendants to the new world.

One of the ancestors was apparently the Lord Mayor of London.

On the other side of the family tree I found some Dutch roots last year, through a hit off a digitized 1946 newspaper. The Alabama Courier (established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969 to publish the News Courier) copy yielded two new surnames and the obit of a great-great grandfather, a WWI veteran. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.

Some of that genealogical work was done by a nice lady whom I emailed, but have never met, who is apparently a fourth or eighth cousin.

Makes you wonder what a real family reunion would look like.

At the ballpark tonight Conner Kendrick pitched seven and one-third innings, allowing only four hits while striking out eight, which ties a personal best. When he left the game Auburn had a 2-0 lead over the 11th ranked Arkansas Razorbacks:

Kendrick’s night ended so that Terrance Dedrick could take the mound. Dedrick, as a junior, has become the closer that Auburn has been searching for over much of the last decade. He’s 4-2 this year and came in tonight with nine saves.

And he’s usually doing something amazing, ballet moves at first, over the shoulder catches behind the mound, or just striking people out the old fashioned way. Tonight he forced a 4-6-3 double play to end the game and give Auburn a key late-season win over Arkansas, 4-2.

There’s video:

The first conference shutout since 2011. Now they just need two more wins to end the season.

Auburn / baseball / family / photo / Samford / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
14
May 13

Just a few random things

There is a chipmunk. Being a chipmunk he tends to move very quickly. The cat has, to my knowledge, never seen him. She is not the most attentive indoor hunter of things outdoors. She’s not the most attentive hunter of things indoors, but I digress.

Anyway, the chipmunk took the time to sun himself today. I was able to get a shot from a fair way off. I have now documented the chipmunk:

Aubie came to visit us at the game tonight. Aubie has a flashing problem:

No one in the family has bothered to confront him yet. I think everyone is waiting for the right time.

He also sat with us for awhile, until the children came calling. Aubie is a ladies man, but he’s all about the kids, too. And so, after a time, he was off to hug little girls and tousle the hair of the young guys.

All of this during a baseball game that Auburn lost to Jacksonville State 6-1.

Grading papers. One student wrote “This class has shaped how I view journalism and will be foundational in my future studies in this major.”

That made my day.

And then I graded on. And on and on.

Still not done.

Two new things on Tumblr, here and here. A lot, lot more on Twitter.

Also I converted that not-quite-good Toomer’s Corner thing I wrote last month into the Big Stories format. You might have read it here or on TWER, but it is a different way of seeing it. Sometimes that makes all the difference. I’m going to use that format for things every now and then. I expect there will be a few additions this summer.

Which is on the way, by the way. Summer, I mean. We hit 79 today. We’ll be in the 80s tomorrow.

Talking with my grandmother Sunday I told her that I knew she’d been frustrated by the spring, with the cold temperatures. She said it was the coldest spring she could remember. And she said she wouldn’t complain about the summer at all. When it gets here.