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| Jul-15-12 | | Jim Bartle: Jason Kidd is the ultimate team player, and in a way the ultimate teammate. But boy has he had a checkered life off the court. |
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Jul-16-12
 | | perfidious: <Jim> Till you mentioned Mysterious Walker, I'd never heard of him-he made the Cook's tour as a player and a coach in both baseball and basketball, though. |
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Jul-16-12
 | | Phony Benoni: <perfidious> I never thought to look in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myster... Can't say I'm surprised. Just the few snippets I found indicated a story just made for book and movie. |
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Jul-16-12
 | | WannaBe: Tigers just tied and went ahead on the Angels. |
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Jul-16-12
| | Phony Benoni: Tigers finally seem to be snapping out of their funk. The big factor is finally getting consistent contributions from the bottom half of the lineup. |
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Jul-16-12
| | WannaBe: The Romanian judge gave Fielder's slide into third base a 2.7, but the USA judge gave it a 6.1 |
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Jul-16-12
| | Phony Benoni: The USA judge was using the Richter Scale. |
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| Jul-17-12 | | Jim Bartle: I saw an incredible headfirst slide into second by John Kruk somewhere, but can't find it now. He went in headfirst but ended up doing a complete somersault, and not at all elegantly. |
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Jul-17-12
| | WannaBe: http://espn.go.com/dallas/nfl/story... This D. Bryant story just get sadder and sadder. |
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| Jul-17-12 | | Jim Bartle: How things change. Back in the first real heyday of the Cowboys in the late 70s, they seemed to take pride in being wild and borderline out of control. (Not the quarterback, of course, but guys like Thomas Henderson and Too Tall Jones.) But it must be a strange world to be on the Cowboys. I had a casual friend who was on the team in that period, and he said some really wild things went on (and lots of cocaine), and bascially the fans overlooked it all. He said the players were treated like royalty all around Dallas, and it was hard not to get caught up in being treated that way. |
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Jul-17-12
| | Phony Benoni: Today's baseball cliche involves getting ahead in the count. Everybody knows you can't be a winning pitcher without doint it. So here is one Elias' stats for today: <PORCELLO THROWS 18 STRAIGHT STRIKE ONESRick Porcello threw a first-pitch strike to the first 18 batters he faced on Monday night. That was the longest such streak to start a game since Zach Duke threw first-pitch strikes to the first 19 batters he faced against the Dodgers on May 1, 2010.> Despite this feat, Porcello got knocked out of the game in the fifth inning. And here's what happened to Zach Duke: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/... Makes you wonder, doesn't it? |
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Jul-17-12
| | Phony Benoni: But here is today's gem from Elias:
<THE UNLIKELIEST WIN OF THE CENTURY---OR ANY CENTURY?The Astros defeated the Padres, 2-0, at Petco Park last night in a victory that only the longshot players would have touched. Houston came into the game winless in its last 13 road games and its starting pitcher, J.A. Happ, had lost his last 11 decisions as a visitor dating back to May 2011. Here's the money part: It had been 116 years since a visiting pitcher on a road losing streak longer than 10 games posted a victory for a team that had lost more than 10 straight road games. That's no typo. Until last night, there hadn't been such a victory in Major League Baseball -- or maybe we should call it Base Ball -- since two weeks after the close of the first "modern" Olympics and a month before the introduction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The last pitcher to do so was Jake Boyd, pitching for the original Washington Senators on April 28, 1896. Boyd had an 0-11 career record on the road prior to his victory at Oriole Park III, and he never won another game, home or road, in his brief major-league career.> |
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| Jul-17-12 | | Jim Bartle: The Astros have a player named Happ? Well, clearly they should have him pitch to at least one batter every game. That will keep them from being Happ-less. All this stuff about first-pitch strikes, and batting averages on particular counts can get confusing and deceiving. Of course if you can get an 0-1 count on a batter that's an advantage, but then if you're making sure to throw that strike, it might get hit. And then you see these articles about how much batting averages go down with two strikes. Well, how obvious is that? With less than two strikes, you can let a tough strike go by, or swing and miss and your average isn't affected. The opposite with two strikes. |
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Jul-20-12
| | perfidious: <Phony Benoni> Where the bleep do the staff at Elias come up with stats like that? Small wonder Boyd never won another, what with a career mark of 3-16. |
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Jul-20-12
| | Phony Benoni: <perfidious> I believe that Elias has been in the baseball stat business for the better part of a century, if not longer. They must have some incredible files, diabolical computer programmers, and a bunch of truly sick minds. |
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Jul-20-12
| | perfidious: <Phony Benoni> On a chess-related subject (horror of horrors!), I sent on a correction for Klescewki vs J Rizzitano, 1988, as White was Nick Kleszczewski, for your US Open collection. By the way, how far along are you now? Last year, you were in the 1950s or some such thing. |
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| Jul-20-12 | | crawfb5: I had the rare luxury today of having some spare time after work when the town library was still open as I drove by. I stopped in to take out Winter's book on Capablanca, thinking there might be something on the Blanco-Kupchik match. Capablanca wrote a column for a Cuban newspaper, Diario de la Marina, from spring 1912 to summer 1913. On 16 March 1913 he wrote: <The hard-fought match between Blanco and Kupchik was very interesting, but it is obvious that young Kupchik does not play as is proper, reflecting on his moves as would the top players in the world; playing with great rapidity, he tries to win against an opponent whis is as strong as him, if not stronger...inevitably his play is superficial and the element of luck counts a great deal in determining the result of his games...given his age, the young Russian plays very well, but if he is ever to become somebody, it will be necessary for him to think much more when, as in the present case, he is playing a match an not just offhand games to pass the time.>
(Winter's book on Capablanca, pages 44-45) |
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Jul-20-12
| | Phony Benoni: <perfidious> And it's been fixed already! At the moment I'm working on the crosstable for 1961, but I keep getting distracted. Spent a couple of months chasing down games by Abraham Kupchik; I think we have a very good collection now. I may even put together a couple of collections with the biographical material I've found, just in case somebody ever gets interested enough to write a book about the guy. <crawfb5> Thanks for that note from Capablanca. The superficiality sounds a lot like Kupchik His games seem practical rather than profound. He often gets less than nothing from the opening, then slowly consolidates and neutralizes the opponent's attack. Overextended, the opponent often loses a pawn to a <petit combination>. Then Kupchik starts trading down, and when Kupchik starts trading down up a pawn it's like when Spassky sacrifices a piece: you might as well resign then and there. Sounds a bit like Capablanca, but he's stodgy instead of elegant. Or maybe a bit like Petrosian, but he's shallow rather than deep. |
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Jul-20-12
| | perfidious: < <perfidious> And it's been fixed already!> Damme, that's some fine work! |
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Jul-21-12
| | WannaBe: News: Braves comes back from 9-0 deficit to win the game. Reaction: Too bad they couldn't do it at the end of last season. |
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Jul-21-12
| | WannaBe: Breaking News for <JB>, Toronto no longer Happ-less! http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8... |
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| Jul-21-12 | | crawfb5: I had a little time on a slow Saturday morning, so I took a quick run through <Chess Review> for 1933-1949 for Kupchik games and found a few not currently in the database: 1933 Tenner
1937 Cohen
1938 Polland (not the US champ game)
1940 Partos
1943 Horowitz
1945 Rivise
The last few were 10 sec/move games and the others were Manhattan CC or Metropolitan League games. Do you have any of these already in the pipeline? If not, I can upload them. I haven't looked at old <Chess Life> issues. Back in the day when it was a newsletter I don't think they ran an index, so searching would be much slower. |
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Jul-21-12
| | Phony Benoni: In the Atlanta game, the Braves pitcher retired the first two batters in each of the first four innings. At that point, he was behind 6-0. |
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Jul-21-12
| | Phony Benoni: So why do they call Justin Verlander nasty?
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-b... Beckham is lucky it wasn't a cold day in April. |
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Jul-21-12
| | WannaBe: I'm sure Elias will have the answer, today, both Hamel and Cain homered, in the same inning. When was the last time this happened, or if it ever happened (before)? |
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