Dangerous, Difficult Mission

200+ miles up?
Threat of instant death from space debris?
A satellite needs complex, challenging repairs?
To help the entire planet understand the mysteries of the cosmos?
No problem: The United States at your service.

Don't Sweat It, Big Man...

You've given up only 3 runs in your last 23 innings.

General Motors equity...

...has increased in value almost 25% in the last 48 hours...

...with bankruptcy a foregone conclusion for the last 3 or 4 weeks...

...These shares should be at something like $0.25 right now. Forget it, my feeble brain is passing on even a wild-ass guess at what is going on here.

Girardi in Charge...

May 15, 2009, Yahoo sports:
It began when Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira exchanged some heated words with Twins center fielder Carlos Gomez. According to the MLB.com report, Teixeira felt that Gomez had run too close to the line, which could potentially injure him when he fielded the throw from catcher Kevin Cash. After the pair had a verbal spat, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire and Yanks manager Joe Girardi came out to add some words of their own.

"I just wanted to make sure nothing escalated," Girardi said.

Girardi also wanted to check on Teixeira's wrist, which he had problems with earlier in the year. Gardenhire was equally dismissive following the game, calling the incident "heat of the moment stuff."

"He's defending, I'm defending," Gardenhire said of Girardi. "That's what we do -- defend [our players]."

Pelosi...

...after stupidly attacking the institution of the CIA, (which crippled Bush 43 with a series of leaks, just as they have done to the White House for decades) she's now scrambling to direct her fire at the Bush administration. It's probably too late: Even liberal darling Jon Stewart is taking her down.

Interesting: From telecommunications/internet surveillance to rendition and now to the military tribunal program, the Obama admin. is keeping the formerly abhorrent Bush counter-terrorism policies in place.

It is a dangerous world, after all.

May 16, 2009: Remember the Date

Bottom of the 11th, 4:44 PM, Yankee Stadium, game tied 4-4.

Mark Teixiera: After going 4 for 4, Twins pitcher Craig Breslow walks Big Tex. The next batter is Alex Rodriguez: Home run to deep left.

Yankees win, 6-4...Their 4th in a row on a strong performance by Joba.

A massive freight train has left the station, and momentum is building.

Baseball and The Black Swan

My eyes were opened to the SABR approach to watching baseball after
(like so many others) reading Moneyball five years ago.

I hope you've had the chance to read Nassim Taleb's eye-opener, The
Black Swan. His general theme is that Gaussian probability is flawed.
The distribution of of so called "outliers" in a dynamic system (he
focuses on financial markets) is not as remote as traditional
statistical theory tells us.

Taleb describes a "Black Swan" as a completely unexpected event
that humans try to explain (rationalize) after the fact by a series of
logical and, in his mind, statistical fallacies. Taleb favors the
idea of scalable probability based on fractal mathematics, i.e., large
deviations from the "mean" are certainly more rare, yet they occur
much more frequently than the bell curve dictates.

So since baseball is a dynamic system (insofar as there are a massive
amount of things that can happen with every pitch) this brings to mind many potential "black swans", like Brady Anderson hitting 50 HRs in 1996 and Shawn Chacon's Yankees pitching performance in 2005...or Johnny Damon tearing it up so far this season.

Taleb's concepts might (that's might) describe baseball outcomes better than Jamesian/SABR normalized (bell curve) assumptions.