Hats off to Yankee starting pitcher, Hiroki Kuroda ...

Game Notes from Saturday afternoon's scorecard - a match between the visiting Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays --- the complete scorecard of which, is here: http://internetbaseballscorecard2013.blogspot.ca/2013/04/20-yankees-at-blue-jays-game-2.html

Game Notes

46,095 paid tickets

Final in 11
New York Yankees: 5
Toronto Blue Jays: 3

As the TV sportcasting crew was saying all game long, the Jays were hitting the ball right at positioned Yankees ... And that tells you (me) that the Yankees' starting pitcher had full command and control of his pitches today - pitching to spots against the Jay's offense, that resulted in the batted ball going where the Yankee brain trust predicted they would most likely go.

Hats off to Yankee starting pitcher, Hiroki Kuroda for executing the game plan.

On the sloppy play by the Blue Jays' defence (which cost them the game) there is plenty of blame to go around. It seems everyone is trying too hard - especially Lawrie who is a natural leader - and so everyone is trying too hard ...

Not to mention that it is still uncertain who will stick with this team. With lots of major league capable talent just down the road in AAA Buffalo, who knows what will happen if some under performance is detected - anywhere on the field, it seems (if John Gibbons' PH and defensive replacement meme is any indication - which as yet, it is hard to tell  what messages he's trying to send to his players --- from here, a mile away from the stadium, at any rate).

Which reminds me of an idea related to this - do second-time-through coaches get the usual honeymoon ... Or are we allowed to call for their heads in April?  :)


mh

Dammit Jim, I'm a Health Insurance Adjustor, not a Baseball Writer!

Game Notes from Tuesday night's scorecard - a match between the visiting White Sox and the Toronto Blue Jays --- the complete scorecard of which, is here:
http://internetbaseballscorecard2013.blogspot.ca/2013/04/16-white-sox-at-blue-jays-game-2.html

Game Notes

Gibbons PH for Rasmus in the 7th.

Injury?

Usually you try to put your best defensive team on the field with a lead late. As the score was tied...

I like the way Joe Madden manages - everyone moves to the same position at a certain point in the game when the coach decides it's the best inning. That team is your defensive juggernaut.

Anyway...

It has to be a physical problem, because Rasmus was 2 for 2 with a home run when Gibbons pulled him, late, in a low scoring, tie game.


Dammit Jim, I'm a Health Insurance Adjustor, not a Baseball Writer!



mh

drawing illusions with code

This is a bit of code I wrote that creates the outfield icon perimeter in the Internet Baseball Scorecard 2013.

To show you how it's made, below I add 'border: 1px solid;' to two 'containers'.

The border reveals the two containers which each have a white background. The inner shape is a 'border-radius:' - code that lets you put rounded corners on a box.

Here I show the two containers pulled apart. I moved the right-hand container 'left: 30px;'.

If I put a box with a white background around the half circle you can see the five shapes create an illusion:

A floating semi-circle. The top of a parachute. Perhaps the ice-cream end of the cone.

'radius-simple' - that will go into the scorecard



mh

Baseball Art - "Izturis slides, Perez blocks, Jerry Meals gets into position"

An instant of a game caught on high definition camaras, broadcast on line at MLB and paused by me at this instant. The shot reminds me of the action in the Ty Cobb photo (see below) of him sliding into third, into the camera.

Everything's in motion in this frame. The tension before resolution is at it's zenith. I love the way the umpire is 'flowing' with the play.

"Izturis slides, Perez blocks, Jerry Meals gets into position"
by Michael Holloway

(open image in a new tab to see full size)

So what happened?!

--> Izturis looked to be blocked off the plate, but the ump had the only good look at it - he ruled the runner's cleat touched the plate (otherwise he was out).

Charles M. Conlon's photograph of Ty Cobb (1910), via Graham Womack's Twitter background image - https://twitter.com/grahamdude

Updated version - with cropped section restored (from Baseball's Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon 1993)

Screen Print via Time Magazine http://lightbox.time.com/2011/10/19/the-golden-age-of-baseball-photographs-by-charles-m-conlon/#11

---------------------

Top image created from a screenshot from MLB, Gameday, "Kawasaki's sac fly"

MLB | "Kawasaki's sac fly" | TOR@KC: Kawasaki drives in Izturis with a sac fly (01:16)
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/gameday/index.jsp?gid=2013_04_13_tormlb_kcamlb_1&mode=box

(Can't link directly to it - the link above gets you to the MLB Box Score for this game. Click on the Video Tab at the top and check the list of videos for this game - your looking for, "Kawasaki's sac fly".)

[This is a bad user experience, MLB Advanced Media.]



mh

WHY do 'IMG' tags align left to right by default - unlike any other tag?

Minima II v3.5.0 latest version DIY baseball scorecard for Blogger

Originally at +Michael Holloway in Google+
2013-03-26 12:48 AM (edited) - Public
https://plus.google.com/u/0/106539188672607672565/posts/J8xaPFLgzb8

This is the story of a fella who tried to learn how to code web pages without a teacher. Yeah, it's been done before - but this is my story, a long story/short - by way of introducing the latest version of my DIY html baseball scorecard - using Blogger as the publish medium.



I started a new Blogger blog for this year's version (http://internetbaseballscorecard2013.blogspot.ca/) - I used the Template Editor to pick a blog with a left sidebar, had to settle for a blog template that had one on each side, erased all the coding for the right sidebar, and then made the body of the blog really, really wide. I was done in about 20 minutes - simple. Simple I hoped, would mean fast.

When I started coding this scorecard monster back in 2010 (http://internetbaseballscorecard.blogspot.ca/), somehow I got the different default properties of the 'img' tag, and all other html tags - confused. I found out early in blogging, that if one wanted to place two images side by side, all you had to do was make sure they were small enough to fit in the space that one was providing for them and - by default in all browsers - they sit one beside the other; unlike any other tag, all of which align one Under the other.

So when I finally got to the point of discarding 'tables' as a way of positioning elements in the scorecard - and instead started using the position attribute - I was constantly trying to get elements to run left to right - like images do - trying to take advantage of the browser defaults to reduce coding and increase efficiency.

Blogger didn't like my coding; browsers didn't like it. I was at a loss ... all my scorecards we slow and sometimes became scrambled, especially in the new Blogger Compose Interface ... Until finally a couple of days ago - I realized, all elements align one BELOW the other by default, in all browsers - ALL EXCEPT image!!!


This new baseball scorecard is now built like all other web pages - positioned columns with rows of elements in them.


So far so good in Blogger.

Next I'm going to try and rebuild the monster with all the style in css in the Template of the blog (which will reduce the number of bytes per post by about half. Blogger likes that - and each post must be 1MB or less).

See how css in the template renders the new coding in Blogger's Compose Interface (which has been the biggest problem of late) - tomorrow perhaps.

Still lots of tables to make with columns and rows; and per-inning-totals coding to do - but it all looks like its going to end up smaller than Blogger's maximum of 1,048,576 bytes.


So it's looking like I'll be able to start scoring games in time for the start of the MLB season next week ... And log as many games as I can this year, on the way the the World Series where the Toronto Blue Jays will win in 6 over the San Fransisco Giants.

(when pigs fly; but there's a good chance the team will make the play-offs. :)



Internet Baseball Scorecard 2013 | Monday, March 25, 2013 | TEST: optimized for browser defaults, style in html, scrolling text areas, 11 col, 9 row, 2 teams - http://internetbaseballscorecard2013.blogspot.ca/2013/03/test-optimiized-for-brower-defaults.html

Internet Baseball Scorecard 2013: http://internetbaseballscorecard2013.blogspot.ca/

Full size image (internetbaseballscorecard2013.blogspot.ca): https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuaIgmFQpgDWal1_3kgCcMvRy47KF1z2OaoHi9CS5_JkXG0CLEsD8Dr93Q0kRV33ysOgnvI_VfXQozO20Sc12kSR5etRQkL_4VRCmbERrzYJMRo_i7YJMJMrI3LMHdrIDPrBaZErL6ijH0/s1600/Internetbaseball-scorecard2013_Minima-II_v_3.05.00.jpg

(edited for clarity)



mh

My Earliest Baseball Memories

William Ivie, Jr. (I-70 Baseball http://www.i70baseball.com/) one of the fearless Baseball Bloggers Alliance, baseball bloggers, put up a form asking folks to sumit their earliest, most profound baseball memory.

Below is my submission.

Add yours to the form - Bill guarantees your submission will be included in the article. (I'll link to the piece when it's published at I-70 Baseball.)

'Earliest Baseball Memories' form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dDZPZHRROFQyeW1sbk1WazNqOWJFc1E6MQ

My Earliest Baseball Memory

My earliest baseball memory is standing in right field as a 14 year old; the team from my Village visiting another - Bright, Ontario was it's name (where the great cheddar cheese comes from).

It was my first year in the PeeWee league, and in our new farm house in a new Township, in a new Province ... and I wasn't feeling like I was 'on the Team'.

I wasn't in right field because of my great arm or ability to track balls slicing towards the right field line (both of which I later discovered I was very good at) - this was 14 year old's - I was in right field because the couch didn't bother to find out what part of the game I was good at. I was the outsider, the kid from Alberta - in right - I was there because hitters at this level aren't adept at hitting the ball the other way - and 90% of us were righties.

I watched motionless from medium-deep right field as the bottom of the innings paced by.

As the brilliant setting summer sun began to spot the infield the character of the light became angelic - like when the cinematographer puts oil on the lens of the camera to get that wisps of cloud look around the edges. At one point I noticed that I couldn't hear a sound from the infield. The wind was blowing in - and so even as I was playing relatively shallow (because of the wind) - because of the wind there was an acoustic shadow in right. The game I didn't feel much a part of was all happening in a fully brilliant, dream-like holiness - but in complete quiet - like a silent film made by god.

And I found myself at that moment, pinning for the hoop and backboard my dad had mounted for me on the yard-light pole, halfway to the barn - practicing my free throws and 20 footers.

mh

Baseball Bloggers Alliance 2013 Hall Of Fame Ballot

Well, it that time of year again when Baseball Bloggers Alliance writers cast their lot for the Baseball Bloggers Alliance (BBA) Baseball Hall of Fame. (This has nothing to do with the Baseball Writers of America Hall of Fame Voting, this is strictly a vote by the Baseball Bloggers Alliance.)

This year I voted for a record number of players - three.

My vote: Edgar Martinez (4), Barry Bonds (1), Roger Clemens (1)
(number in brackets means number of years on the ballot, maximum is 15 years)

(click on img for fullscreen)

Edgar Martinez was a career .312 hitter, a great right fielder and played the game at it's highest level for 18 years, and for one team - which I emphasize because it indicates selflessness - and that is good for the game.

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were amoung the best players to ever play the game. I needn't make any arguement for their inclusion based on he numbers they put up. The fact they both used steroids at the end of their careers, to me, is irrelevant - with the following caveat.

They played in an era where the absence of screening by MLB allowed cheating via performance enhancing substances - and coincidentally - they played in an era where MLB juiced the ball to add spectacle to the game. Thus their inflated numbers cannot be quantified as to which part of the inflation was due to cheating, and which part was a function of the profiteering of MLB through the dumbing-down of the game via the spectacle fetish for the home run.

The numbers these two players put up compared to their peers from other eras of baseball will forever be a subject of speculation. I acknowledge that these players were at the pinnacle of talent amoungst their peers (many of whom were also on steroids).

As such - an asterisk should be added beside their names - if inducted by the Baseball Writers of America - indicating they played in the nuclear-ball / steroid era.




mh