If you thought reading through the threads in a baseball forum after a tough sweep at the hands of a hot team is painful, just try reading the Democratic Underground thread lamenting the death of Zarqawi.

Here’s my favorite:

It’s almost an “open joke” among the military and civilians who know how PsyOps operate, and the History, that Zarqowi is merely a “Pentagon creation.”

And oh, don’t we need some good news now? It’s so predictable I could write the OP Orders. [Eye-rolling smiley]

It’s all bullshit LIES paraded around for PR exploitation. [Vomiting smiley]

We almost need wings to rise above it. [Frowning smiley]

It’s the same disconnect with reality that brought about the famous Our Season is Over thread from opening day of the 2004 season or the I Just Saw AJ Burnett at the Airport thread during the 2005 Winter Meetings.

Update: If some of you have your heads so far up your asses that you’d think Centcom would lie about something like this, I have absolute proof: Abu’s message from beyond the grave.

Cards pick RHP Adam Attavino in the first round: 6’5″ 215lb fastball-slider power pitcher.

Ottavino is a power arm who needs refinement.

Fastball reaches 96.
Senior Year Stats: 2.98 ERA 1.11 WHIP 0.38 HR/9 11.53 K/9 3.54 K:BB

Looks like a nice pick.

In the first round supplemental we took RHP Chris Perez–the closer for the Miami Hurricanes:
1.74 ERA 0 HR 56:28 K:BB

In the second round, the Cardinals picked LHP Brad Furnish 54th overall. Good fastball and curveball:
4.32 ERA 125:49 K:BB 11.25 K/9 0.9 HR/9

With the 74th pick, we took Jon Jay a speedy left-handed OF. Batting line of: .355/.494/.513 24:38 K:BB

In the second round supplemental, it’s Mark Hamilton from Tulane. Big left-handed first baseman: .336/.461/.643 20 HR in 235 AB.

Nice looking draft so far–all accomplished college players with a chance to advance quickly.

Last night’s game was a heartbreaker. Five runs in three innings is subpar pitching out of such a solid relief corps.

When I did a bit of early morning gardening, I found that the tops of all my beans had been eaten off by rabbits or some other varmint. I’d like to build a Rube Goldberg style anti-rabbit device. A non-lethal deterrent, probably involving a solonoid buried under the soil wired to a relay that would release a spring loaded boxing glove to sock the damned rodent in the kisser.

The Urbana city council passed their anti-smoking ban last night 6-1, so taverns in Urbana will go smoke-free next February. Ten Urbana tavern-owners hired a lawyer to delay the date when the ban would take effect for bars that long. Not sure if Champaign is having a city council election between then and now–their vote was 5-4 and if Champaign reverses their amendment to their health code, Urbana would surely follow suit. Ideally, I’d only be effected for a month since it’ll be warm enough to sit outside in mid-March and I’m hoping to finish school next summer and finally get a real job. The delay that the Urbana bar-owners managed to get was to allow them time to set up exterior smoking areas. A bar in St. Louis county, TJ Wings, has a heated outdoor patio that’s enclosed on all sides with canvas awning. I imagine that Bunny’s in Urbana could set one of those up if they think it would be worth it since they’ve got a large patio on their property. Aside from them and Brickhouse, the rest of the bars are out-of-luck unless the council makeup in Champaign changes between now and then–or nobody enforces that part of the amended health code in the bars.

The MLB draft is today and MLB.com is covering it live for the first time, John Sickels will be posting comments here, and VeB also has a page for coverage. The Royals kick off the selections at noon. The Cards have six picks in the first three rounds thanks to compensatory picks from the Giants for Matt Morris (1 first-round supplemental and a second round) and from the Phillies for Abraham Nunez (1 in 2nd round supplemental).

Draft Update: I’ll go ahead and make the joke about Tampa Bay’s 3rd overall pick, Evan Longoria.

In December, blogger deleted the fine Prairie Biker blog and its address was hijacked by an unamusing website. After an unnecessary effort, it was eventually restored.

Now the same thing has happened to Fungoes. This time there’s a spamblog there that sends traffic to some dog-fighting website. Not much could piss me off more than that. If Pip gets a trouble-ticket number, I’ll send blogger the same sort of email I’d sent last time to support having it brought back.

Since I was in the woods, I missed the two losses to the Cubs Friday and Saturday. I was at my mee-maw’s house on Sunday watching the Cards win the first game they’ve ever played with Albert Pujols on the disabled list. My roster prognostications from before I left were off-base a bit. Instead of putting Jimmy Ballgame on the DL, they sent Anthony Reyes down for Timo Perez. That would have surprised me at game time and it turns out to have been a bad move. They would have been far better served keeping Tony until Carp came back or even bringing up Josh Kinney or any other pitcher until Duncan was eligible to come off. Perhaps Edmonds would have pinch-hit on Friday’s 14-inning ugly-fest if another pitcher would have been available in the bullpen. That could not have been foreseen, of course, and the thinking was understandable in bringing up a batter with some positive numbers against Maddux and who’s shown some power this season in AAA. I’d have preferred a right-handed batter with all the lefties we’ll be seeing, but what do I know.

Pujols should be out most likely four weeks–worst case six. Four weeks would be the beginning of July, literally the middle game of the I-70 series in the Lou. The first game I’ll be going to at Busch is the last game of the series on July 2nd. If Pujols is back by then, it will be a truly amazing day for me–free booze and food in the McGwire box and the greatest ballplayer in the world out there on the field. Six weeks would be the series against the Dodgers to open the second half. Sounds like he should be playing for the Braves series when I’ll be attending all three games. I think the Cardinals are a good enough team to stay on top of the division until then in spite of some difficult series in that span. The interleague series against three exremely good teams in the White Sox, Tigers, and Indians will be an especially difficult nine days. The second-place Reds won’t have an easy month either, though. They have a four-game series against the Cubs and another against the Mets–plus three games against the White Sox and six against Cleveland. We can hang in there for six weeks–there’s no reason for panic. (Except panic relating to how Fungoes has been hijacked by a spamblog.) It’s a shame that Pujols won’t get to chase the RBI record or the Triple Crown. It’s a shame that we won’t get to watch him play baseball six or seven days out of every week. It would be a sin to panic and put ourselves into a position where he wouldn’t be able to help the team reach the postseason when he comes off the DL at the start or in the middle of next month.

Tonight there’s something good to play for: the Soup’s 100th career win. We’re facing Brandon Claussen, who Bellyscratcher calls “Pickles.” His full name is Brandon Allen Falker Claussen, so I’ll go ahead and call him “Gaylord” instead. Recalled 1B/COF is 1-1 with a home-run against Gaylord in a memorable game. Molina’s 7-11, so should hopefully keep chugging along and have his BA over the Mendoza line by the time #5 returns. Rolen’s 1-8 with a homer and Taguchi’s 4-12, no XBH. Luna is 1-2 and Miles is 0-2 with two walks. I’d run this lineup out there:

David Eckstein   SSChris Duncan     1BScott Rolen      3BJuan Encarnacion RFHector Luna      LFSo Taguchi       CFYadier Molina     CAaron Miles      2BJeff Suppan       P

If Duncan looks bad batting second, swap him with Luna for tomorrow’s game against fellow Reds lefty Eric Milton. Of course, if Speezer’s healthy, put him and his 1.118 OPS vs. Milton at first and put either Duncan or Luna in left, whoever looks better tonight.

Now that I’ve blogged and it’s cooled off a bit outside, it’s time to mow.

Post-Mow/Pre-Game Comments: TLR decided to start Edmonds at first instead of Duncan–he’ll be batting fifth between Encarnacion and Luna; Taguchi bats second. Having Edmonds bat against a lefty isn’t problematic–he’s been hitting ‘em pretty well this month.

So far, so good. Eckstein’s on first with no outs and Taguchi working a hitter’s count.

I left work at about 10:30 on Friday morning and hit the road to STL to meet up with the crew for a weekend of camping and general woodsy debauchery. We camped at Carr’s in Round Spring, probably my favorite place to camp these days. It was quite a weekend. I woke up around dawn each day with a lovely hangover and started my days with a swim in the cold, spring fed river that ran behind our campsite. No better way to start a day than that… Trust me. We had perfect weather and took a canoe trip on Saturday that lasted at least eight hours. With one flashlight between us, four of my party spelunked a cave. I led the way with the flashlight wielder marching third. I conked my coconut on an outcropping and scraped my back pretty roughly on another but emerged unscathed. There were enough incredible rock formations to marvel at that I didn’t feel much pain from either. The stalactites had merged into undulating rock curtains deep in the cave. Truly amazing. We turned back after crawling through a narrow passageway that was half flooded. Next year, I’ll bring my waterproof headlamp and follow the tunnel until its end.

I returned to CU worn out and sunburnt right edible–got changed and was out the door again to play a softball game. I played the second half of the game and only had one AB. It wasn’t a good one–I fouled a ball with two strikes for an automatic out. I’ve been taking some pride in how much I’ve improved on fielding flyballs in the outfield lately in practice and have been looking forward to an opportunity to field one in a game. I had a good chance last night, but I backpedaled too slow and let the ball go over my head. So it was a lousy game for me all around. We ended up losing a game that looked to be in the bag early on, so we’re still undefeated winless and morale is low among many of the players. Hopefully our team organist will be back from another gig next weekend to lift our spirits–although the team we’re playing then is very, very good. About the best we can hope for is to make it somewhat competitive.

I go camping for three days and the whole world falls apart.

That Data played the voice of Conan O’Brien in South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut.

A few days ago I did my usual roster prognosticating game to guess who would be called up when Edmonds goes on the DL tomorrow. To sum up (since it was a long and winding post): if they want a big bat on the bench, they’ll add Josh Kinney to the 40-man and give him a cup of coffee as an extra righty in the bullpen until Duncan is eligible to return to the Cardinals on Monday or Tuesday; if they want a long-term defensively reliable outfielder, they’ll call up Skip, who’s been on a tear since rejoining the AAA team: .337/.366/.463 with 2 HR and 7 XBH as of this morning. He’s 0-4 after six tonight with two 4-3 grounders and flyouts to left and center in an ugly game that saw Cunnane give up seven runs in the first three innings–including a Joe McEwing grand slam–before being pulled.

Tonight, Bernie Micklasz left this note in his pressbox:

Talked to members of medical staff just a little while ago. Edmonds won’t be able to do anything but “emergency” pinch hitting for the next few weeks. But La Russa won’t play shorthanded, so they will put him on the DL as expected. Good news is, they’re taking control of this abdominal wall strain early enough to where surgery won’t be necessary. But it will take some time to treat it and get Edmonds right. They’ll be calling up an OF from Memphis. Schumaker is doing the best – but not sure if he’ll get the call.

-B

That is good news. Every once in a while when you dip your toes into that flaming cesspool that Bernie endures maintaining, you come out with something worthwhile. It sounds like Edmonds will be out for at least the minimum, so I’m going with Skip. We have three lefty OF’ers available in Bigbie, Rodriguez, and Spiezio; also three right-handers in Encarnacion, Taguchi, and Luna. If not Schumaker then Gall–which would make some sense with all the lefties we’ll be facing the next few days. Some of the Pressbox kids think it’s time to call up Timo Perez, who’s hitting for average and with power: .315/.373/.500 with 5 HR 13 XBH as of this morning; he’s 1-2 with a double so far tonight. I’d rather Skip come up and show off the improvement he’s made. Perez is out of options, so if he comes up and shows that he can contribute at the highest level, it might allow us to swing a trade for a couple PBNLs when Edmonds comes off the shelf.

(Then again, Duncan’s 2-3 with a HR and a walk so far tonight for Memphis… Maybe they’ll go with plan A and give Kinney a memorable weekend in the bullpen of a Cubs @ Cardinals series.)

Update: Changed my mind… I’m thinking Gall’s the man. Gall didn’t start the last two games and when Cunnane lost control tonight, they brought in Shaun Boyd for left field in a double switch when they could have used John–so he might already be in the Lou. Facing four lefties over the next five games, it makes good sense–and Larry Bigbie’s surpringly a comparable center fielder to Jim Edmonds according to the primitive fielding statistics, so we’ve already got a centerfielding platoon available between B and So.

If I were to tell you that Mark Mulder is a better pitcher than Mark Buehrle, you’d be surprised, wouldn’t you? Sure, Mulder’s got an ERA 1.63 points higher than Buehrle, but for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about Mulder’s declining peripherals, he strikes out 1.15 more batters per nine innings than Buehrle. His serious problem is that he walks too many guys and gives up too many home runs in between those strikeouts. Go figure: Mulder’s power-pitching ways make him less effective.

I’m a Mulder fan and expect him to have a good season, but the last paragraph was a tongue-in-cheek mockery of cherry-picking stats to teleologically come to a conclusion. Mulder has contributed 23.1 net points of Win Probability Addded compared to Buehrle’s 94 points, to use a popular comprehensive statistic.

I could also make a cherry-pickin’ argument that Jamey Wright is a better pitcher than Sidney Ponson in spite of the 1.51 difference in ERA. WPA would disagree, saying that Wright has added only 41.4 Win Percentage points to Ponson’s 69.3 WPA. That argument would be quite a bit easier to make–excluding Wright’s awful last start, he’d have contributed 65.7 net WP. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how they end up this season.

I had an interesting problem brought up today. A colleague wanted a program that would spit out random numbers from some reasonable Guassian probability distribution from (-1,1)… Somthing that would spit out random fractions from -1 to 1 such that if you generated a large number of them, rounded down to several significant digits, and graphed the rounded down fractions against the frequency that they were generated, you’d approximate a bell curve around 0. Computers have a special circuit for generating pseudo-random floating point numbers between 0 and 1. I’m not learned on the details, but it gets the number by generating white noise… it’s pseudo-random because the process white-noise generator is deterministic–you’d need access to sub-Planck distance processes to generate true random numbers, and the hardware to do that isn’t cost-effective for personal computer CPUs. The point is that the computer sitting in front of you can generate random-enough numbers. If it’s running Windows, there’s an environment variable called %random% that generates a random 16 bit positive integer using that circuit. To play with it, run cmd and issue the command echo %random%. Most programmming languages typically have libraries to generate a floating point random number from the hardware, but the distribution of the numbers generated isn’t Gaussian, but flat–the probability of any random number being generated is equal.

So I coded up the polar form of the Box-Muller transform in my first language, the Deparment of Defense’s Ada 95, during down-time at work today. Having such a tool should come in handy–lots of stochastic processes require gaussian random variables.

Perhaps hearing the cat-like tread of Pittsburgh approaching, the Cubs traded Jerry Hairston Jr. to the Rangers for Phil Nevin. It seems to me a fairly lopsided deal even before factoring in that Texas will pick up most of the 7.7 megabuck difference in salaries. Nevin’s hit 9 homers and 8 doubles so far this season, although he’s been slumping since about April 26th, batting .153/.231/.245 since then. He’s not been very effective against the Cardinals pitchers during his career (batting .164/.233/.309 in 60 plate appearances.) Not sure what the Rangers see in Hairston, but I think the Cubs did better than they would have in my pipedream Brian Daubach for Juan Mateo swap. Daubach, by the way, went 2-4 tonight and hit his seventh home run. Skip also went 2-4 and was caught stealing.

Jim Edmonds was diagnosed with an abdominal strain and will be on the DL by Friday. They’re calling it a “mild to moderate lower abdominal strain” and could be back as soon as June 13th and in a worst/feasible scenario six weeks from now. That’ll open a roster spot and that calls for a guessing game.

If we call up a pitcher, it’d be Brian Falkenborg or possibly Josh Kinney would be added to the 40-man and called up for his first cup of coffee. If we add a positional player, it’d be an outfielder. Chris Duncan won’t be permitted to return until Tuesday, so he’s out. Skip would make the most sense if the call-up were expected to stay until Edmonds is well again. He’s the best defensive outfielder in Memphis and has been on a hitting tear for the past month since being sent down to AAA. In this series against the Cubs this weekend, we’ll be seeing two lefthanded starters, Sean Marshall and Glendon Rusch; then lefties Claussen and Milton on Monday and Tuesday, so it makes a lot of sense to call up a right-handed batter. With Duncan unavailable your only right-handed OF is John Gall, who is on something of a mini-slump.

I’d expect a pitcher to be called up between Friday and Tuesday–I’d like to see Kinney get his first taste of the big leagues–and then either Chris Duncan will come up if Edmonds looks to be healing quickly enough to be ready to come off the DL after the minimum or else Skip Schumaker gets to show off a hot bat. After today’s 11th inning heroics, I can’t imagine anyone complaining about adding a left-handed So Taguchi (Skip) to the roster.