The Daily Parker

I love this chart from Twitter user Jay Cuda:

Location of MLB ballparks in relation to downtown / city center pic.twitter.com/b9vq519NiC

— Jay Cuda (@JayCuda) January 19, 2023

If you don't want to click through to Twitter, here's Jay's chart:

The chart doesn't tell the whole story, does it? For example, both Chicago teams, both New York teams, Boston, DC, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Oakland are all about the same distance from downtown, but easily accessible by train. (Chicago's are both on the same El line, in fact.) Atlanta's and LA's parks, by contrast, are approximately the same distance but completely inaccessible by any form of public transit. (Atlanta's new park even appears deliberately located to prevent those people from getting there.)

I speak from personal experience, as long-time Daily Parker readers know: I've been to every one of them, except the new Atlanta park, which I refuse to visit because of its anti-democratic location.

Fifty years ago today, Major League Baseball adopted a rules change for the American League that led by increments to the 10th-inning-runner rule adopted last season:

On January 11, 1973, the owners of America’s 24 major league baseball teams vote to allow teams in the American League to use a “designated pinch-hitter” who could bat for the pitcher while still allowing the pitcher to stay in the game.

The idea of adding a player to the baseball lineup to bat for the pitcher had been suggested as early as 1906 by revered manager Connie Mack. In 1928, John Heydler, president of the National League, revived the issue, but the rule was rejected by the AL management.

The NL resisted the change, and for the first time in history, the two leagues would play using different rules. Though it initially began as a three-year experiment, it would be permanently adopted by the AL and later by most amateur and minor league teams.

Major League Baseball continues to believe that more runs means more money, even though the appeal of baseball has always been as a pastime. But what do I know? I was a Cubs fan for 40 years.

The Houston Astros won game 4 of the World Series last night with a no-hitter, which hasn't happened since 1956:

Pitching like a Game 1 starter, the young right-hander Cristian Javier put on a clinic on a night Houston was in need of something spectacular, throwing six no-hit innings at Philadelphia and combining with three relievers for the first combined no-hitter in World Series history.

Javier’s outing positioned the Astros for a 5-0, World Series-tying win in a Game 4 classic. Bryan Abreu struck out the side in the seventh inning, Rafael Montero worked a 1-2-3 eighth and Ryan Pressly lifted the Astros into the history books with a hitless ninth inning, delivering the third no-hitter of any type in postseason history and only the second to come in the World Series.

Only Don Larsen of the Yankees has ever thrown a solo no-hitter in the World Series. That was a perfect game in Game 5 in 1956, when catcher Yogi Berra famously leaped into Larsen’s arms to celebrate. On Wednesday, Houston’s catcher, Vázquez, had his choice of pitchers with whom to celebrate.

And yet, the TV audience declined again:

The Philadelphia Phillies’ 7-0 win over Houston in Game 3 of the World Series was seen by 11,162,000 viewers on Fox, down 2.7% from last year’s third game.

Atlanta’s 2-0 victory over the Astros last season was seen by 11,469,000. That game was on a Friday night, while this year’s Game 3 was on a Tuesday.

This year’s audience was up 34% from the 8,339,000 for the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 6-2 win over Tampa Bay in 2020, the lowest-rated World Series.

World Series viewership has declined steadily since its peak in the 1970s. But why?

Derek Thompson points to the influence of Sabermetrics ("Moneyball") strategies, which have "led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful:"

The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that there are two kinds of games in life: finite and infinite. A finite game is played to win; there are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing; the goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. The midterm elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. A great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world comes from not knowing the difference. A bad fight can destroy a marriage. A challenged election can destabilize a democracy. In baseball, winning the World Series is a finite game, while growing the popularity of Major League Baseball is an infinite game. What happened, I think, is that baseball’s finite game was solved so completely in such a way that the infinite game was lost.

Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?

Case in point: Don Larsen threw his perfect game all on his own in 1956. Christian Javier had three relievers last night. So is it really the same accomplishment?

I've spent the morning playing matchmaker between disparate time-streams of data, trying to see what relationships (if any) exist between them. They all seem pretty cool to each other at the moment, which is sub-optimal from my perspective. If I can get a couple to get together amicably, then I can get baby time streams to analyze, which I need desperately.

Speaking of sub-optimal:

• One more voice reminding people that "we" don't have a violence problem; Republicans do.
• One more beautiful old 19th-century house in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood will become ugly apartments soon.
• Jon Schwarz thinks Elon Musk buying Twitter might "end up being one of the funniest things that ever happened."
• Let us count the ways Sabermetrics has ruined baseball.

OK, back to work. Does anyone have an aphrodisiac for data streams?

This. Is. Amazing:

Chicago Public Media explains how they made it:

The viral video was shot earlier this summer, with the help of a Minneapolis-based production studio. With a “lean crew” of just three people, Sky Candy Studios paid a visit to the Windy City in late July, the company’s founder Michael Welsh said.

Over the course of a Saturday and a Sunday, Welsh piloted an FPV-style drone with a GoPro attached through the nooks and crannies of Wrigleyville. The “high-precision drone,” which weighs under 250 grams, is meant to cruise through tight spaces and wouldn’t do any damage if it were to bump into something — or someone, Welsh said.

“It’s incredibly small and safe and allows you to do these maneuvers that in the past you weren’t able to do with drones,” said Welsh, who initially started flying drones about 12 years ago when he was in the Army.

The final product includes five different videos that are stitched together “with some creative editing magic,” Welsh said. For each of the five videos, Welsh says they probably did about five takes, with a lot of prep and talking with the people who appear in the shots. Inside Murphy’s Bleachers, for example, they let patrons know a drone was coming through and they should ignore it. At first, Welsh said people can’t help but look at the camera flying by them, but by the third take “they’re kind of bored with it.”

And they did this all with a tiny 250-gram drone? Whoa.

I'm heading to North Carolina this afternoon, so I probably won't post much this weekend. The forecast for Durham looks even better than for Chicago. I had hoped to (finally!) take in a Bulls game tomorrow, but it appears they will be in Gwinnett, Ga., which is a bit of a drive.

Major League Baseball owners, over the objection of players, have made more rules changes trying to turn America's Pastime into something it never should become:

Major League Baseball passed a sweeping set of rules changes it hopes will fundamentally overhaul the game, voting Friday to implement a pitch clock and ban defensive shifts in 2023 to hasten the game's pace and increase action.

The league's competition committee, composed of six ownership-level representatives, four players and one umpire, approved a pitch clock of 15 seconds with empty bases and 20 seconds with runners on, a defensive alignment that must include two fielders on each side of the second-base bag with both feet on the dirt as well as rules limiting pickoff moves and expanding the size of bases.

The vote was not unanimous. Player representatives voted no on the shift and pitch-clock portions of changes.

The rule is strict: The catcher must be in position when the timer hits 10 seconds, the hitter must be have both feet in the batter's box and be "alert" at the 8-second mark and the pitcher must start his "motion to pitch" by the expiration of the clock. A violation by the pitcher is an automatic ball. One by the hitter constitutes an automatic strike.

The banning of defensive shifts, which were once a fringe strategy but have become normal occurrence and the bane of left-handed hitters, is among the more extreme versions, preventing defensive player movement in multiple directions. With all four infielders needing to be on the dirt, the days of the four-outfielder setup will be over. Even more pertinent, shifting an infielder to play short right field, or simply overshifting three infielders to the right side of the second-base bag, will no longer be legal.

Because the problem with baseball in the last 20 years has nothing to do with trading players like so much feed corn so that no one cared about their home team players anymore, and nothing to do with the new playoff rules making the season pretty much irrelevant, and nothing to do with turning baseball parks into Disneyfied "Entertainment Zones"...no, the problem was always the action.

And of course, turning off your traditional fan base has always worked in the long-term interests of the sport.

Just a few before I take a brick to my laptop for taking a damned half-hour to reformat a JSON file:

• The King has a long history of meddling in architecture and urban planning, with the divisive planned community of Poundbury, Dorset, his largest project to date.
• Meanwhile, in the US, architect Adam Paul Susaneck argues that cities need to remove highways that segregate communities. (Plus they're ugly and they cause the traffic they're built to alleviate, but that's another argument.)
• The Queen's death has gotten a lot of people's Irish up over the colonial history she oversaw as monarch. (I even decided to pause someone on Facebook for a month for dancing on her grave.)
• Developers found three time capsules while redeveloping Chicago's Tribune Tower this past year, one of which apparently contained a ball from the 1919 World Series.
• In a case that will make school administrators think thrice about joining student protests, Oberlin College in Ohio has agreed to pay a local bakery $37 million after a jury found the college had endorsed students labeling the bakery "racist."

Oh, good. My laptop has finished parsing the file. (In fairness it's 400,000 lines of JSON, but still, that's only 22 megabytes uncompressed.) I will now continue with my coding.

I went to a Cubs game today for the first time since 6 June 2019, mainly because they have made a quest of finding imaginative ways to lose.

Today they lost because of a new rule imported from kickball, where they put a man on second base at the start of extra innings. They want the game to end sooner, you see, but with the wind blowing in like this:

Then you get a 1-1 ballgame going into the 11th. The next run will win the game, because hitting really sucks with a 20-knot wind coming from center field. And the next run—shown on the scoreboard above—did win the game. That, and some lousy Cubs hitting.

I still had fun, but I really would have preferred the Cubs win instead of the Mutts.

Even though I feel like I have a moderate cold (stuffy, sneezy, and an occasional cough), I recognize that Covid-19 poses a real danger to people who haven't gotten vaccinations or who have other comorbidities. So I'm staying home today except to walk Cassie. It's 18°C and perfectly sunny, so Cassie might get a lot of walks.

Meanwhile, I have a couple of things to occupy my time:

• Arthur Rizer draws a straight line from the militarization of police to them becoming "LARPing half-trained, half-formed kids playing soldier in America’s streets and schools" who completely failed the children of Uvalde, Texas.
• Jamelle Bouie wants Democrats to turn up the volume on Ginny Thomas's and her husband's obvious collusion in the January 6th insurrection.
• The Sun-Times visits the Neenah Foundry in Wisconsin, which molded all 148,000 of Chicago's manhole covers—some of which appear to be over 120 years old.
• Freddie Boer lobs a ton of snark on his "Roster of the Good White Man." (He put himself on it, too.)
• The Netherlands General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD in Dutch) unmasked a GRU intelligence officer posing as a Brazilian student trying to infiltrate the International Criminal Court.
• The Cubs have won 1 of their last 11 games, giving up 92 runs since the beginning of June, and becoming only the second team in club history to lose back-to-back series by more than 20 runs. (The first time was in September 1879.)

Finally, today is the 210th anniversary of the War of 1812 and the 207th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.