The View From Wisconsin
Just a random set of rants from a Sports Fan from Wisconsin.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Saturday's All Right
- There is a push by members of the UW-Milwaukee Student Senate seeking a name change for their university - to Wisconsin State. I'm not sure I care for the idea, as the name "Wisconsin State University" makes me think of the old name of the UW system. The primary reason for the change is apparently because some students want to "get rid of the hyphen" in the school's name. By changing the name to Wisconsin State, you'd be getting rid of the "Milwaukee", too.
- I've been tinkering around with the Simple Runs formula, after finally updating my stats through 2005 (thanks, Mr. Lahman). I decided to go with a different formula for the years when Caught Stealing totals weren't kept: OBP x (TB + .35 x SB) / SRF. (SRF, for those of you too lazy to look elsewhere for the formulas, is the league totals for the numerator of the formula, divided by runs scored.) For those few years in the 1870's and 1880's when the NL and AA didn't track stolen bases, I went simply with OBP x TB / SRF. What bothers me is this: no matter how much I try to adjust the pre-1893 totals, James Edward "Tip" O'Neill's 1887 season with the St. Louis Browns of the American Association still ranks as the best ever season in SR - just ahead of Babe Ruth's 1921 season.
- You know you're turning into a road geek when you sit up all night and copy/paste maps of fifty strange sections of Interstate highway to bitmaps for reference to a document you wrote about each of the 50 sections.
- Brewers are 4-0 for the first time since 1987. And we all know what happened with the Brewers in 1987. (I smell hamburgers, for some reason...)
- Dear Brett: Thanks for the memories, now do like Kelly Clarkson and just walk away.
Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, Joseph Houk. All rights reserved.
