Tag astros (4)
'Topes lose! 'Topes lose!
Mood: zen
Music: nothing yet
Posted on 2005-10-27 09:22:00
Tags: astros worldofwarcraft
Words: 260
So even before the Astros lost yesterday, I decided to take a more Zen approach to watching them lose. I mean, last year was the first year they won a playoff series at all, so winning the pennant and just making it to the World Series is definitely a step forward. And it would have been nice if they had won at least one game (so they could have played another game at home), but that's just gravy. They had a good season, and we should be happy about that. It's tough to get over the frustration of being so close to winning every single game in the World Series, but that's the way it goes (and the fact that they didn't win any probably means the White Sox were a better team). So I've made my peace.
I took a few sick hours yesterday and went home early - I wasn't feeling horrible, but a combination of allergies and being tired was enough to make me completely incapable of concentrating. So I watched a few episodes of "Murphy Brown" (which is on Nick at Nite now! Very nostalgic for me...my mom loved that show...) and took a nap. Magic was pretty fun, then came back and played a little WoW (mostly gathering silk), although I had to play on David's laptop because I couldn't download the patch. Grr.
Tonight is the Michael Jackson singalong! I am much anticipatory.
Good day so far - stock is doing decently after good earnings yesterday, and Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to the Supreme Court.
Just another day...
Mood: confused (at work)
Music: Phil Collins - "Another Day In Paradise"
Posted on 2005-10-24 13:06:00
Tags: baseball astros baseballstats
Words: 146
Wow...the weekend did not treat the Astros well. Down 2-0 isn't horrible, though, especially because they're coming home. And Berkman has had two good games, which is promising. The walk-off home run last night hurt, but not nearly as bad as the Pujols one. I'm mostly just happy they made it here at this point. (although I do hope they win a few at home!)
I threw together a PHP script, so you can now calculate baseball Win Expectancy given a situation. I may work on it some more at some point...
The last week or so, I've had some trouble getting to sleep - nothing serious but it's been taking me at least half an hour to get to sleep. I'm gonna try avoiding caffeine this week and see if that helps.
Edit: meant to link to this article about win expectancy. So now I did!
Yay Astros!
Mood: hopped up on baseball
Music: E. J. Jones -"Castle of Dromore"
Posted on 2005-10-20 09:21:00
Tags: baseball astros baseballstats
Words: 246
Hooray!
My nervous energy yesterday launched me into a new project. It started when I read the Crawfish Boxes (an Astros blog that is part of a network started by the founder of Daily Kos) after the 18 inning Game 4 of the Atlanta series. They talked about how amazing the game was, and talked about WPA, which after reading a link to the Hardball Times, discovered was the statistical relative frequency that a team will win in a given situation. They linked to the Win Expectancy Finder, which calculates WPA and is based on the data file that Phil Birnbaum put together that he made from Retrosheet game data. However, he only did games from 1979-1990, and Retrosheet has many more event logs for games.
So I decided to try to write a parser for them and create a data file like Birnbaum's, except with more games. It turns out the data file format is kinda hard to parse, but I have a script that mostly does it, so I'm somewhat close to my goal. I need to test it on more games - almost finished testing it on all 2004 games and tweaking it to make it work (luckily, there's redundant data in the files so I can fairly quickly tell when I did something wrong).
Anyway, that's my new project, and hopefully I'll put something up soon. I worked on it a lot last night before going to magic and while watching the game.
Astros and such
Mood: industrious
Music: Dave Matthews Band - "What You Are"
Posted on 2005-10-18 13:55:00
Tags: todolist astros
Words: 90
So, yes, the astros loss was heartbreaking. Being one strike away from the World Series and then giving up a monster 3 run home run tends to be. That Pujols kid can hit, I'll give him that. But the Astros are still up 3-2, and Oswalt is on the mound tomorrow, which bodes well for the Astros. (Astros in 6!)
Been working some more on my todo list - I added showing entries from my Palm calendar on there, but only on my private version. *shrug*
Gamenight should be fun tonight!
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