The only thing about this story that surprises me is that the Royals even have a closer. I’m mean, I know.

Some interesting discussion in the comments at David Pinto’s about the Royals’ highly talented Zach Greinke. (Henceforth: Wacky Zacky)

I’m looking forwards to seeing the Royals’ new left fielder, Reggie Sanders, in St. Louis on July 2nd. His biggest fan on the road will be found the series starting July 28th in Arlington, TX. And he just might have his tickets bought for him from an old friend. I’d mistakenly thought that the Rangers were in the AL Central and that the Royals would be playing down there much more often. Haven’t been keeping up with the Junior Circuit.

And on to the updated 25-man roster prediction!

The rotation remains the same as before:

Carp Mulder Soup Marquis Ponson

The starting lineup remains the same, although if Larry Bigbie doesn’t get his bat working, we’ll swap him to the bench in favor of the Gooch. At the moment the best Spring bat among the candidates for the left field job is Skip Schumaker and he’s only hitting .293/.356/.366 (sub-par .721 OPS and 0.073 ISO) in 41 AB through yesterday. I’m as big a fan of Skip as I imagine there is, he’s an outstanding defender and his power numbers have inched up over the past three seasons. That being said, I expect him to start the season in Memphis. Another lineup question is 2B, and just about any baseball site that mentions the Cardinals today will have something negative to say about Junior Spivey, who’s expected to win the job. I’m sticking with Aaron Miles, who is (I’m told) a good fielder and a switch-hitter who’s better from the left side, which is fairly important in the overwhelmingly right-handed pitching NL Central division. So here’s the lineup, and their predicted order:

Eck BigB Pujols Rolen Edmonds InstBreak Molina Miles Pitcher

I figure Molina to put up good enough power numbers this year to justify moving him up a spot in the lineup. Miles then becomes a sort of second leadoff man with high average and some speed to be bunted over by a pitcher or to table-set for a pinch hitter.

I don’t remember where I read it, but someone in Jupiter said that the plan is to carry two lefties in the bullpen to open the season, and that’s how many I’d had in the last round of guesses. The last two pitchers I’d had in the bullpen were Jeff Nelson and Anthony Reyes, and it’s obvious by now that Reyes is headed back to Memphis as a starter. Wainwright looks to have inherited the seventh opening in the Danny Haren long man/spot starter role. The sixth spot in the bullpen is to fill the Al Reyes middle innings strikeout man, and that’s up between (numbers from 2005 season) Jeff Nelson – (8.35 K/9-MLB), Brian Falkenborg (7.20 K/9-AAA; 8.18 K/9-MLB), and Josh Hancock (7.77 K/9-AAA; 3.21 K/9 MLB). So far in Spring, Nelson’s sruck out five in 4 2/3 innings; Falkenborg 5 in 7 1/3; and Hancock 7 in 6 1/3. My guess is that Falkenborg will return as the closer in Memphis, Hancock will join him there, and Nelson will make the opening day roster.

Izzy Loop Rincon Flores Thompson Nelson Wainwright

Now I’m looking at the bench players I’d picked and notice that they’re all right-handers, except for the switch hitting Scott Spiezio. If Spivey ends up getting the starting job at second, then there’d be two switch hitters on the bench with Miles there, too. Maybe there’s a spot for Skip after all… Daubach’s shown nice power since showing up in camp, but there’s no place for him to play in the field, so he’d have to be strictly a pinch-hitter unless you’d remove Pujols in a double-switch. And it’s hard to see that happening.

Let’s go out on a limb and say that Spivey is sent down to work on his game and heal his shoulder:

Bennett-(C) Taguchi-(OF) Schumaker-(OF) Cruz-(2B/3B/SS/L-RF) Spiezio-(1B/3B/2B/L-RF)

Let’s further speculate that Rick Ankiel starts the season on the DL and rehabs at Springfield while the team decides whether to bring him up in place of Schumaker or attempt to option him to AA.

Spring officially began about two hours ago, and this is my week of Spring Break. The gods decided to have some fun at my expense, as East-Central Illinois is expected to have its first significant snowfall of the year tonight to total 5-9 inches of snow blanket.

It was a depressing weekend for reasons both personal and college basketball. No Big Ten team advanced beyond the first weekend of the big dance. Big Ten Wonk, being out of material due to the ill-humored gods, has taken to blogging up on the Election of 1840. These are low times.

And there’s a Cardinals v. Braves game televised today, but I haven’t had cable installed yet, so I’m not watching it. At least my house will be nice and cleaned up by the time I go to sleep (where I’m a viking) tonight.

At least snow is beautiful, and this late snowstorm preceded by months of mildness might kill off some ‘squitos. I think I’ll take my camera in to work tomorrow and snap pictures.

And ideally I’ll get some progress made on a project that’s recently been moved back to a front burner. A clean house and academic progress should break me out of these nasty blues.

There’s an article at Yahoo today about the Gyroball, Searching for Baseball’s Bigfoot. It’s a pitch invented by two Japanese scientists with the help of a supercomputer that’s supposed to be relatively gentle on the shoulder and elbow, but have enormous movement. The spin on the ball is perpendicular to the flight path, the ball spins like a bullet, with counter-clockwise spin from a righthander. Apparently, people though Daisuke Matsuzaka of the Seibo Lions throws one based on the video included with the article, but he says he doesn’t although wants to learn to throw it.

But Will Carroll taught a pitcher from Indiana how to throw one (he’s a freshman starting pitcher now at Wabash College.)

And he’s got video evidence of it. Back. And to the left.

I can’t believe that Jermaine Wallace hit that last second, desperation three to allow 14-seed Northwestern State to upset the third-seeded Iowa Hawkeyes. SIU next, and can’t wait for the Kansas-Bradley game that Alex guarantees to be an upset. Damn that Bill Self. (But thanks be to him for leaving and allowing us to hire the great and wondrous Bruce Weber)

Zen

Good on ya, gammers!

(Last two links by way of Dave Barry)

On a tip from our pal Jim, Pip at Fungoes discovered something I did not know. The Macho Man Randy Savage was in the St. Cardinals organization for a few years before joining his father’s professional wrestling troupe. He was a switch-hitting catcher who began throwing left-handed after injuring his right shoulder a la Billy Wagner.

Unfortunately, the Slim Jim company has dumped the Macho Man as their advertising draw, going instead with an astonishingly annoying flash website and an EXTREME street sports campaign.

I enjoy filling out the crossword puzzles in newspapers, but my favorite game is the Jumble, where your task is to unscramble four words to get the letters for a lame joke’s punchline. It’s pretty fun and only takes a minute or two to solve unless one of the words is very low-frequency or otherwise unusual. Today’s puzzle had a ridiculously easy one. The scrambled word was LOVENC. It wouldn’t surprise me if very experienced players had to take some time to solve that since the scrambling usually wouldn’t be that straightforward, and it seems like lots of the scrambled words have red herrings, where the scrambling looks like some other word, and that causes distraction that makes the game slightly less easy.

So I got to thinking about what sort of an algorithm might be effective for automatically generating the scrambled words in a game of Jumble. You could take a dictionary of five and six letter words in English, sort them by frequency, lop off the top and bottom fifteen percent or so to avoid very common and very uncommon words. I suppose for each word, you’d have to find all possible scramblings to check that any scrambling has only one possible real-word de-scramble (by checking all the possible scramblings against the dictionary entries.) That gives you a presumably large set of possible words to go into a jumble puzzle. To get a good scramble, you could filter the set of all possible scramblings for the word that was generated in the last step to exclude those where the first and last letter haven’t changed for reasons that were made popular in the email that was forwarded around a few years ago including this observation on the redundancy of the English spelling system:

Aoccdrnig to rseearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

(Text taken from here with some modifications… Check out that page, though… lots of interesting discussion.) This gives you a set of non-trivial scramblings. To pick the best one, I suppose you could take the scrambling with the largest Levenshtein edit distance. Although it might make the puzzle harder in the long run if you do nothing special, and pick a random scrambling from the set of non-trivial scramblings, since always using the most thoroughly scrambled example (where thoroughness of scrambling is measured by Levenshtein distance) might make it easier for players, since the letters will always be scrambled far away from their true position, which would significantly restrict the number of de-scramblings the player needs to consider.

The Germans did something similar with their wartime encryptions, where an order came down to always guarantee that no letter was encrypted as itself thinking that would make their signals harder to crack. It was a reasonable naive intuition, but once the allies figured it out, it made the number of computations they needed to consider slightly more manageable.

[Update: More here...]

The grass in Busch stadium is now installed. There’s an interesting, although short, article at the P-D about it today, describing where the grass comes from and why it’s expected to do better than the grass at the former Busch stadium. The very interesting snippet is where Tim O’Neil briefly describes how the drainage system works. That’s something I always wondered about. I’d heard that outdoor baseball stadiums had these modern drainage systems that could dry up the field in no time flat and as the new Busch was being built I kept my eyes peeled for any clues as to how it might work. I imagined there are channels cut into a concrete base that route water to drains, where it would be filtered and pumped up somewhere above field level to feed into the sprinkler systems. And on top of that concrete deck, there’d be a few feet of gravel and sand, with a thin layer of topsoil and grass on top of that. So long as you keep the field flat and the topsoil layer reasonably loose, any rainwater should drain off uniformly and quickly.

The article definitely makes it clear that the gravel and sand is a part of the drainage system, and that the layer of topsoil and grass (if I’m reading him right) is only two inches thick. That seems like a surprisingly thin layer, where it would be too easy to tear a divot in the field.

From Bird Land’s most recent Postcards entry, a question that I’d considered as well:

Q: Any chance Michel Hernandez wins the backup catcher job over Gary Bennett? Do Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan like him defensively?

– Steve Massmann

DG: La Russa said the other day that Hernandez is coming to the Cardinals at a good time in his career. He’s 27 years old and spent last season with Triple-A Portland, where he hit .288 with a .368 on-base percentage (and a .364 slugging percentage). He’s been solid in camp and has been entrusted with catching most of the regular starters and auditioning relievers. All that said, Bennett is the backup for the big-league club in 2006. He has a veteran savvy and has spent the most time learning and working with the established pitchers. He’s comfortable in the backup role, having been the backup for four different teams over the past four seasons. Hernandez gives depth – and maybe a future backup. But now it’s Bennett.

It should be clear that I’m a fan of Hernandez, but as I said in post below predicting the 25-man roster, I’d like him down in Memphis working with the next generation of starters and learning some outfield to make him a more versatile bench-player/backup-catcher in the Eli Marrero mold.

A question in the postcards is also put to Goold about Alan Benes’ chances of making the team. I’d thought he would be a longshot, but Derrick puts his odds higher than I do. It also sounds like the Cardinals don’t want to put Anthony Reyes into the bullpen like they did with Danny Haren. Put those two strands together and you can swap Reyes out of the twenty-five man roster for Alan Benes. That sounds good to me.

What is the sound of one hand clapping? Probably something like: “Aye, nay, aye, nay, aye, nay, aye.” Why don’t the right honorable aldermenpersons from Urbana endorse a resolution calling for the Federal government to provide universal health care and free ponies to all girls aged (two syllables) 8-15 while they’re performing exercises in futility.

Also before that august body: a proposal to lease the 2nd floor of the downtown urbana parking garage to a pair of bar owners to have an open-air bar. Sez one of those proposing the scheme: “It’ll have a tropical theme and a real relaxed atmosphere. We’ll gear toward world beat music, like reggae, salsa, marimba and some funk.” That parking garage is quite a mystery. They charge twenty-five cents an hour to park there and only charge people who leave between 8am and 5pm. It’s basically a scam where they use campus parking at $0.75 an hour to subsidize the downtown parking situation. Calling the partice a scam isn’t entirely fair, since the city doesn’t collect any property taxes from the University and the University can assume ownership of any property it wants via eminent domain. It is a nice parking garage though. I park there sometimes in the morning during the baseball season and hop a bus to campus. Hop a bus to downtown Urbana, watch the game at a watering hole, and my car’s there waiting for me and no garage attendant waiting to charge me a parking fee. Old trees around the garage reach up over the edges of it–it’s only two stories after all. I’d rather go drink beer at Mike and Molly’s or Brickhouse on a hot summer night instead of the roof of a parking garage. And the tropical horseshit wouldn’t make that decision any harder.

I beat Metroid Prime tonight and got a laugh while the credits were scrolling by.

One of the game’s designers is named Amanda Rubright.

Since I’d only collected 61% of the stuff in the game, the ending wasn’t too spectacular. No Samus in a swimsuit or anything. At least someone with a funny name worked on the thing to amuse me a bit.

The weather this weekend was fantastic and Archway was doing their refresher course weekend so I had plans to head down to Vandalia to do groundschool and make a jump, then head on to STL for a break from routine. (You have to make a jump at least once every six months to stay current or you need to do some groundschool refresher training.) But I grilled up some strip steaks and cooked some eggs sunny-side up for breakfast and by the time Cass and I got on the road,it was too late a start to make the courses in time. But I went ahead with the rest of the plans and had a ball in the Lou. We got into town at around 4:40, and went straight to the zoo to check out the penguins at feeding time. It smelled like they’d already been fed, but it was still worth the stop. After that, we went by the Billy Goat for dinner without knowing that they were closed on weekends. So we made for the popular and well-reputed Pho Grand restaurant. While driving around looking for a good parking spot, I happened to spy the Black Thorn Pub and insisted on stopping in, for tales are told of their pizza being the best, hands down, anywhere. Unfortunately, we were starving and in spite of coming in “before the rush,” it would still have been an hour and a half wait for a pie. Smelled incredible though, and I’m definitely heading back there next chance I get.

After a coupla brews, it was off to Pho Grand, where the food was excellent and inexpensive. We split a lotus-root salad that was delish, and I had a calamari with cucumber and tomato dish. Next door is an Afghan restaurant called Sameem that I also want to try out sometime. That South Grand neighborhood has some kick-ass dining, I tell you what. With bellies full, it was off to the Central West end for drinks at Maji and Lleywelyn’s. with Jeff, the Gianellas, and some friends of theirs for the remainder of the evening. Next morning, we grabbed some breakfast at Uncle Bill’s on South Kingshighway. The hangovers and grease in the guts made ground school and jumping out of an airplane seem like less than a stellar idea, and so we went back to the zoo to walk off the pain while looking at monkeys and lizards and stuff on a fantastic day in the sunshine.

And then it was back to my stinkin’ life again.

It’s early, but…

Rotation:

Chris Carpenter
Mark Mulder
Jeff Suppan
Jason Marquis
Sidney Ponson

Starters:

C: Yadier Molina
1B: Albert Pujols
2B: Aaron Miles
3B: Scott Rolen
SS: David Eckstein
LF: Larry Bigbie
CF: Jim Edmonds
RF: Juan Encarnacion

Bullpen:

Jason Isringhausen
Braden Looper
Ricardo Rincon
Brad Thompson
Randy Flores
Jeff Nelson
Anthony Reyes

Bench:

(C) Gary Bennett
(1B/3B/2B/L-RF) Scott Spiezio
(OF) So Taguchi
(2B/3B/SS) Earnest L. Spivey
(2B/3B/SS/L-RF) Deivi Cruz

I expect Michel Hernandez to catch Adam Wainwright and whoever turns out as our other top starting pitcher in Memphis and play shifts in the outfield the other games. If he bats reasonably well, he’ll be brought up before the all-star break as a backup catcher/emergency corner outfielder and Gary Bennett optioned down and released. This would make our second Cuban backup-catcher/outfielder if the century. I dig the bench versatility, dude. I think Spiezio already volunteered to learn catcher, too… so we’ve got our emergency backup catcher. It wouldn’t surprise me much if Reyes were sent down and Brad Voyles brought up. I expect Junior Spivey and Aaron Miles to continue competing for time at second unless a Jason Marquis for Victor Diaz/Kaz Matsui/AA pitcher/Ca$h deal ends up going through in spring and Kaz reverts to his Japanese league level of exellence under the tutelage of Jose Oquendo, and the comaraderie of So Taguchi and Albert Pujols. Such a deal might move Adam Wainwright into the back of the rotation. I predict John Rodriguez will be assigned to Memphis, and the first outfielder call-up will be Skip Schumaker, who has a hell of an arm and will hit surprisingly well in the early AAA season. Rick Ankiel will be claimed by some team, probably the Rockies, and will turn up midseason in the bigs.

These are the predictions I’ve pulled out of my ass on this fine evening. I’ll be interested to hear of any comments. I predict the first one will question why I think Tony Reyes will end up in the bullpen and that Wainwright would be the first replacement starter. That or why Aaron Miles is the starting two-sacker. Or why Jeff Nelson makes the team over Tyler Johnson (who’s unfairly referred to as a lefty specialist). I could (and would be happy to) yammer about this stuff all day long.

Here’s what everyone will be talking about around baseball for the next few days:

Book Traces Bonds’ Steroid Use to McGwire-Sosa Home Run Race (Via Birdland)

Bonds Exposed: Shadows Details Superstar Slugger’s Steroid Use (Via Birdwatch)

Too bad, the WBC is picking up steam with a marquee showdown between Venezuela and the Dominican Republic that has so far lived up to its promise. At the time of writing, the DR is up 6-5 pitching in the 8th. For the Dominican team, Pujols has gone 1-2 with 2 walks; Encarnacion is 1-3 with a walk; and former Cardinal Julian Tavarez allowed an inherited runner to score on a double and hit a batter. Other than that, crazy Julian looks OK pitching into the 8th. No Cardinals are playing for the Venezuelan team, although the Cubs’ crazy Carlos Zambrano pitched earlier and was lit up fairly nicely for four runs earlier in the game.

The great single-season ticket rush on Saturday created a lot of frustration. There was an article at the PD, and both Jeff at 26th Man and Pip at Fungoes had some tales of woe to share of their attempts. My buying experience was similar to Fungoes, although ultimitely successful. The one additional problem I had was not the fault of the Cardinals at all. I need to re-run the phone line to my office that the dsl modem is plugged into. It’s pretty noisy and the dsl connection drops regularly some days. To my chagrin, the dsl connection dropped exactly after I’d made my first round of ticket purchases, leaving me with no confirmation that the transaction had gone through. I was leery refresh the page, since that sort of thing might have double-billed me for a lot of tickets. I eventually did and found that I’d been kicked out of the system. Unlike those other fellas, I didn’t have any kids nearby, so a torrent of unholy language was unleashed. An email showed up in my mailbox a few seconds later confirming the ticket sale, so all ended well.

There’s a slew of new articles at the STL Cardinals website this morning. The first one to post, a puff piece about how the Cards are contenders again and don’t get enough respect for managing roster turnover each year, includes this rather bizarre error:

This is a club that coasted to 102 wins in 2004, only to provide a near repeat performance last year with 95 victories.
– Alyson Footer, Astros beat writer

I recall the “coast” came to a stop at 105 wins in the 2004 regular season and 100 wins last year. It’s not like this sort of basic knowledge isn’t hard to double-check.

Update: Jeff points out that she caught and corrected the mistake. One of the articles that came out over the weekend was a nice piece on how Michel Hernandez has been impressing La Russa. We plucked Hernandez from the Padres organization in the minor league draft. He’s put up decent minor league batting numbers for a catcher, and it’s nice to hear that his defense and throwing arm have been impressive.

The Illini won comfortably in East Lansing this morning to close out the regular season with an excellent 25-5 record. Mark Tupper writes that the Illini might be peaking at the perfect time. It was an impressive game, with offense coming from everywhere. It’s nice to see Jamar Smith get his shot back after having a pretty rough February, scoring 10 points today.

The remaining 400,000 single-game Cardinals tickets went on sale this morning at 9am, and I was right in the virtual waiting room to snatch some up at the online ticket store. I bought five tickets for each game in the series against the Braves July 17th, 18th, and 19th. I plan on converting my friends who recently moved up here from Georgia into Cardinals fans. Shouldn’t be very difficult. I got $16 bleacher seats for Monday’s game and super cheap $13 upper terrace reserve seats for the next two. Then I got a little crazy. I’m taking a trip to Delaware at the end of June to hang out on the beach for a week with my sister’s family, and figured I’d close out that week’s vacation with a baseball game. Turns out the Royals are playing at Busch the first weekend of July when I’ll be passing back through. The cheap seats were all sold out for the most part, so I ended up spurging mightily. I bought $90 party room tickets to the game. If I’m reading it right, I’m in the Mark McGwire room. Free food, beer, and sodie pop are included in the price of the ticket, and I don’t think it’ll be too much of a stretch that I could make up the price difference at stadium concession prices. It should be a blast!

I’ve been using the excellent Bugmenot.com website for quite a while now to bypass irritating newspaper registrations.

It turns out that there’s a mozilla/firefox extension available to automatically download login data from the bugmenot database and fill out the forms. It’s available here, and works beautifully. When you arrive at a registration login page, just right-click in a form field, choose “fill out form with bugmenot,” and presto… you’re in like Flynn.

Today’s the Unofficial St. Patrick’s day at the University of Illinois, a tradition of which we’re all very proud. Today, undergrads from all around descend onto the shithole bars in Campustown to get tanked. The radio station on my way in was warning decent people to stay away from that area, and a reporter was broadcasting live from sixth and Daniel, updating the bemused citizens of Champaign-Urbana as to the scene of staggering drunks in the middle of the street. A client of mine had ten students show up to his noon class, nine of whom were tanked beyond civility. The dude who delivers mail to our building said that drunken undergrads were banging their fists on the sides of his truck when he had to drive through the Campustown area. Things are fairly quiet around my building.

The remaining 400,000 single game tickets for the 2006 season at Busch stadium go on sale tomorrow morning at 9am. I’m gonna carefully look through a schedule tonight and buy some tickets now. I was planning on going to a series against Atlanta with some friends of mine who’d just moved here from Georgia. It’s going to be a pisser not being able to get tickets whenever I want like last year, when I’d drive down and buy a weekend’s worth of tickets the day of.

Derrick Goold, on a roll at Bird Land, gives a sneak peak at an article he’s contributing to for Sunday’s paper on the features of the new stadium. Among the fancy things at the new stadium is a Build-a-Bear workshop where kids can make their own custom Fredbird dolls. I’m a fan of that company.

I got a google hit a bit ago for “which distribution to use” and math.

I think this intrepid gooler ought to start out with the liveCD distribution Quantian, the newest version of which came out yesterday.

The Cardinals kick off the Spring games with a 1:05 start against the Mets. Soup starts for the Cards against Steve Trachsel. Derrick Goold has got the lineup. Yahoo sports should have the boxscore updated semi-live.

Lots of good articles at the P-D today, including this one about Adam Wainwright.

Update: Ouch! Derrick Goold graciously liveblogs thusly:

Suppan went 1 1/3 innings, allowed nine hits, nine runs (all earned) and left after Xavier Nady launched a grand slam to center field. He wasn?t helped by his defense ? the Mets led off both innings with triples, one played into a triple by Juan Encarnacion. Bigbie, playing in the difficult left field at Roger Dean Stadium, had a fly ball drop in front of him. Entering the bottom of the second, Mets lead, 9-0.

Don’t like to hear about subpar play from the new corner outfielders, even this early–and especially with Encarnacion leaving in a few days for the Dominican WBC team. They owe us a few runs apiece then. I’ll be interested to see how the young pitchers look, especially Tankersley who got the final two outs of the second without giving up a hit. (Nothing kills a rally like a home run.) Just checked back and Molina smacked a dinger of his own. Cards are now down 9-4 and still batting in their half of the second inning.

‘Nother one: There’s a Mets-centric liveblog of the game here. If I’m interpreting the conflicting information right, Tankersley came in after Soup gave up the grand slam to Nagy in the second, got two strikeouts and gave up a hit. (Link via VeB.)

One more: I just went ahead and ordered a subscription to the MLB.com gameday audio. It’s fifteen bucks for almost all MLB games through the whole season, including Spring games that aren’t on the radio. It makes sense for me, since I work in a basement where I can’t pick up radio signals in day games. Unfortunately, they’re having some technical difficulties at Roger Dean, so I’m listening to the Indians vs. Astros game. Cards are now down 9-7 off a Pujols homer. Our non-Soup pitchers look to be doing all right today.

I’m a Liar: The World Baseball Classic starts tonight, believe it or not. The tournament kicks off with Korea vs. Taipei tonight at 9:30 on some ESPN2 channels. They’ve got college basketball playing here, but the game will be replayed at 1am. If only I’d gotten cable television installed already.