John Wright's Weblog

New England Vacation 2010

Melissa and I just got back on Saturday from a week touring the northeast.  It was a lot of driving, but still a fun trip.

Among our stops:

• Steamtown Mall (Scranton, PA)
• Freedom Trail (historic sites in Boston, MA)
• Prudential Tower (Boston, MA)
• Fenway Park (Boston, MA) for the 6/20 Dodgers-Red Sox game
• At least 6-8 different Dunkin Donuts locations
• Legal Sea Foods (Boston, MA) restaurant
• Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
• Several Maine coastal towns
• L.L. Bean store (Freeport, ME)
• Barnacle Billy’s (Ogunquit, ME) restaurant
• Several retail stores that were inexplicably playing country music despite not being located in the South
• Plymouth Rock
• Cape Cod National Seashore
• Newport, RI mansions (The Breakers)
• Hershey’s Chocolate World (Hershey, PA)
• Gettysburg, PA

We passed through 13 states in 9 days, staying the night in five of them.  (The complete list: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine)

The highlight for me was (of course) Fenway Park, although it really was one excellent stop after another.  Some of the historic sites nearly take your breath away, while you leave others thinking, “that’s all?”  Regardless, they were each interesting in their own right.  I tend to enjoy visiting places like the Freedom Trail sites (Bunker Hill, USS Constitution, etc.) but not dwelling on them.  There were few sites where I could have spent more time (Gettysburg chief among them), while others left me glad they were just a quick stop (Plymouth Rock).

I put together a slideshow of my favorite pictures below with a bit more detail in the captions.  (It will take a few minutes to go through them – there are 157.)

It’s good to be home now, and I’m going to have to rest up for another exciting weekend ahead, seeing the Braves in Atlanta.

Posted in Other | 1 Comment »

2010 Pythagorean Wins with BaseRuns

Matthew Carruth made some excellent points in today’s Fangraphs article about using BaseRuns as a “sanity check” for a team’s performance at this point in the season.

The theory is that you can break runs scored and allowed into their components and remove some of the “noise” in projecting wins based on run scoring.  BaseRuns is probably my favorite run estimator because it ties closely to actual run scoring even in very high and very low run environments (i.e. college baseball or the MLB dead-ball era).

I wasn’t able to duplicate Matthew’s numbers exactly, so I’ll be up front about the formulas I used in case anyone wants to correct my work:

BaseRuns formula (with the “calibration” mentioned)
I used the second version (with SB/CS) for hitting and the third for pitching
Pythagorean Wins formula (with the “more accurate” 1.83 exponent)

Download the regular Excel version here.  The stats will update daily via Fangraphs, and the standings will do the same via Baseball Reference.  I didn’t make a regular Google Docs version because the web queries wouldn’t work right.

What you’ll notice on the “summary” tab is that the teams are sorted from “luckiest” to “unluckiest.”  Let me be quick to say that this is a rough estimate, so take any notions of “luck” with a grain of salt.

Based on their hitting and pitching components, though, we would say that the Rays have been the “luckiest” MLB team, and that they would finish with a record more like 100-62 (including the games they’ve already played) if they play at their current level the rest of the year.  The Orioles, perhaps unsurprisingly, are playing four games below their current BaseRuns expectation.

Braves fans may notice that the pitching staff has looked a little better from a BaseRuns perspective (83 BsR allowed, 91 actual), but good pitching can only do so much, as has been evident over the last eight days.

If you have any questions about what I did or a suggestion for how to improve it, drop me a line in the comments.

Posted in Baseball, Braves | 17 Comments »

Giving Twitter a shot

I created a Twitter account a while back to follow a few people I know, but I never really got into it myself because of Facebook.  I’m going to give it another go-round, and this time I’m not protecting my tweets.  Follow me at @jfw3i if you’re so inclined.  You’ll get updates every time I post here as well (you know, every six months or so).

Posted in Other | 3 Comments »

Duke – Your 2010 National Champions

Like a bear emerging from hibernation to eat, I will take the chance today to return from my blogging hiatus, if only briefly, to celebrate one of my favorite teams reaching the pinnacle of their sport.

That’s right – I was one of the few non-Duke-alumni not rooting for the underdogs in last night’s NCAA championship game.  My college basketball allegiances are probably a story for another time, but I’ve been rooting for the Blue Devils since I reached middle school and started watching college basketball.

It’s really no fun to root against a team like Butler, a mid-major school which (as was evident last night) absolutely deserved to play in the title game.  The “David and Goliath” storyline existed only to drum up some interest in an otherwise star-less game.  Butler has an excellent team and a terrific coach, and they proved once again that they could execute against a bigger team.

In Duke and Mike Krzyzewski, Brad Stevens’ Butler team met their coaching-and-execution match, finding a team that was every bit as tenacious as they were and just a smidge more talented.  Duke finally wore down Butler’s defensive rebounding presence to get some second chances in the second half.

That was Duke’s calling card all year: efficient offense through offensive rebounding and passing to an open shooter.  On the other end of the floor, they played pressure defense around the perimeter, and Matt Howard couldn’t do enough inside to get them to back off Mack and Hayward.

The three seniors – Scheyer, Thomas, and Zoubek – played about as well as they could all year, and they’ll be remembered as champions, while other recent Duke greats like Williams and Redick moved on the NBA empty-handed.  Juniors Smith and Singler were bigger contributors in the tournament, and if they both return, they’ll be the keys to a title defense in 2011.

So, congratulations again to Duke.  Now it’s time for the Summer of Jason Heyward to get underway.  I know some of my readers moved on long ago (you’re still there…right?…….right?), but now I’m with you.

Posted in D-I Basketball | 3 Comments »

CauseWorld: Make your shopping count

I’m back from the dead again, I know.

I thought I’d use this platform, for whatever it’s worth, to mention a new app that’s been released for iPhone and Android.  It’s called CauseWorld, and here’s the basic premise:

Corporations pledge to donate money to charities based on your shopping visits to certain stores.  You don’t have to buy anything at these stores, but you “check in” at the store using the phone’s geolocation feature.  Checking in gets you a certain number of “karma” credits.  Once you accumulate credits, you can “spend” them on charities that have signed up through the CauseWorld program.

Essentially, you get to choose where certain corporations (at the moment, Kraft and Citi) allocate their charitable donations.  Just open the app and check in when you’re out doing your normal shopping, and then spend the karmas you accumulate on the charities of your choice.

I’m all for charitable giving, and the corporations are all about encouraging economic activity by getting you out shopping.  This app leverages those interests, which can certainly be seen as competing interests, into something that I believe is immensely powerful.  It turns over control of these corporate donations to you and I, people who are interested in helping out where we can.  We get to evaluate the charities ourselves and, hopefully, make wise choices on how to allocate this corporate money.

I want to accomplish two things in this post:

First, I want to encourage anyone out there with an iPhone or Android-based smartphone to download the free CauseWorld app and use it all the time.  You don’t even have to change your shopping habits.  Just use it in the normal course of your day.

Second, I want to help you spend your “karmas” wisely.  So, I’m providing a list of the charities, what they claim to do with the karma credits, and their Charity Navigator star ratings (out of four stars).  Charity Navigator evaluates charities based on a number of factors, including the percentage of their donations that directly relate to their charitable activity (rather than administration, etc.).  I’m not necessarily going to rate the particular causes, but I would encourage you to give first to the 3- or 4-star-rated charities, since you’ll get the most bang for your (corporate) buck that way.

Currently there are nine charities associated with CauseWorld:

• Carbonfund.org (NR) – 1 karma offsets 2 pounds of carbon emissions
• DonorsChoose (4) – 5 karmas for ??? toward netbooks for a South Side Chicago classroom
• Prevent Child Abuse America (1) – 5 karmas for ??? toward child abuse prevention
• Feeding America (3) – 14 karmas for one food bank meal
• CHF International (4) – 30 karmas for one month of clean water for a Sudanese person
• American Humane (3) – 50 karmas for ??? support for the care of an injured animal
• Jane Goodall Institute (4) – 100 karmas for 1 pound of food for chimps in the Congo
• American Forests (4) – 100 karmas for 1 planted tree in the rainforest
• Room to Read (4) – 100 karmas for a children’s book for SE Asian kids

There’s a more immediate need than any of these causes today in Haiti, and plenty of good organizations will be supporting that effort as well.  For now, they’re not part of CauseWorld.

I think I’m going to start out with CHF International because of the severity of the water crisis in Africa, although there are a number of highly-rated charities participating.  I’m probably going to steer clear of Prevent Child Abuse America and Carbonfund.org (at least until it gets a rating), and I will probably favor the non-animal charities over the animal charities (even though I love our pets).

Hopefully this kind of thing inspires you to give in the same way it inspires me.  I know I’m always amazed at the power of technology, both good and bad, and I hope you’ll join me in supporting one of its good uses.  Check out the CauseWorld website to learn more and download the app.

Posted in Christianity/Ministry, Other | No Comments »