The Dord of Darien

Super Duper

Today’s the Super Bowl, and it seems like everybody and his brother is picking the Giants to win. That makes no sense, by the way.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; in one game, luck is way way waywayway overpowering. The surest possible thing is maybe 60% likely to win any given game — just ask the Denver Broncos, who built an entire playoff run (and quite possibly an entire career for Tim Tebow) on luck. So I’m certainly not saying the Giants can’t win. I’m just saying that I can’t find any way of looking at it that doesn’t make the Patriots overwhelming favourites. Let’s go down the list, shall we?

1) Defense: This is the thing, innit? We all know the Patriots can’t win because their defense is shit. Everybody knows the Patriots have shit defense. The badness of their defense is the subject of many an epic example of skaldship. Only one question: is their defense really as bad as people make it out to be? I see here that the Patriots allowed 342 points this season. That’s not exactly awesome, but you know what? League average is 354.9. The Patriots have allowed fewer points than the average team, which is not the hallmark of a terrible defensive line.

One could argue that this number is skewed by the fact that the Patriots never had to defend against their own offense, which scored an outrageous 513 points. I’d suggest that one shouldn’t mention the overpowerance of the Patriots’ offense in an argument about how bad they are, but never mind; the point is valid. So what now? We get nerdy up in this shit, that’s what.

The Patriots scored 32.1 points per game. League average is 22.2. So let’s assume that, instead of facing an average team, the Patriots had had a Mortal Kombat Mirror Match, and played against themselves. We would expect them to allow an additional ten points that game, giving them a season total of 352. This total is still slightly better than average.

It’s not that I’m trying to be difficult, lord knows; I just honestly cannot locate a metric by which the Patriots play meaningfully worse than average defense. Pro Football Ref’s weirdo Defensive SRS stat has them at -0.1 for the year — just a tiny tiny bit below average. And how do they stack up against the Giants? Well, the Giants have allowed 400 points this year and have a DSRS of -1.5. That’s much, much worse defense than the Patriots.

2) Offense:

Okay, defense is a little bit skewed, but offense is downright unfair. Behold:

Patriots: 513 points scored
Giants: 394 points scored

Ouch. Now, the Giants are not a bad team, offensively — they scored an above-average number of points, and PFR has them as a respectable 3.1 OSRS. But the Patriots are obscene. They scored an outrageous number of points, and accumulated a 9.4 OSRS for their trouble. Offensively, there simply isn’t any comparison. But if you need the whole package assembled for you, here we are:

Patriots point differential: 171
Giants point differential: -6

The Patriots are awesome. The Giants… well, it looks like 9-7 involved a bit of good luck. They should be an 8-8 team. And, no, I’m not bothering to renormalise the offensive stats to account for not playing against own defense; trust me, it doesn’t close a 119-point gap.

3) Clurtch: Oh, but the Giants have Momentum and Destiny and Voodoo and all that other shit that doesn’t really exist on their side! I don’t care if they have Bigfoot, Xenu, and Charles Bronson on their side — turns out stuff that isn’t real doesn’t help very much.

But okay, okay. I’ll play along. We’ll pretend this stuff actually matters. How do we define "momentum" here, and why do the Giants have it? By definition, any team in the Super Bowl has won its last few games, so it can’t be that. Maybe it’s the team that’s won its last few games by the biggest margins. Is that it?

Conference championships:
Patriots 23, Ravens 20 (3 points)
Giants 20, 49ers 17 (3 points)

Oh. Well, can we go back a round, then?

Division round:
Patriots 45, Broncos 10 (35 points)
Giants 37, Packers 20 (17 points)

Oh. Uh. I guess maybe that’s not what momentum is about. Maybe… maybe momentum is about who had the longest winning streak at the end of the regular season. That would make sense. Let’s check:

Patriots: won last 8 games
Giants: won last 2 games

Hrm. Nope, no Giants-favourable momentum there either. Actually, it turns out the only way to present the bullshit "momentum" argument in the Giants’ favour is to say that, since the Giants won the last time these two teams played in the Super Bowl, they have the all-time Super Bowl momentum!

Do I need to tell you why that’s insane? I didn’t think so.

So what is it then? I really, honestly can’t find anything to suggest that the Patriots aren’t the overpowering favourite in this matchup. I’m beginning to suspect that people place more emphasis on what they feel in their intestines than they do on actual data!

Might want to reserve your place in the comments now so you can edit in an "I-told-you-so" in a good position when the Giants win.

February 5th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Games | 5 comments

Clutch update

You know who is super unclutch? Fucking Tom Brady, that’s who. He’s the least clutch dude ever. Or so says Dan Wetzel anyhow, based on a sample of exactly four games. Which four games?

• The 2008 Super Bowl
• The 2010 Wild Card game
• The 2011 Division game
• Last week’s game against the Ravens

Wetzel’s conclusion? That Tom Brady is a gutless choker because he lost three of these four games cherry-picked over four years. Does it work like that? It counts as a "recent trend" if you have to bend, spindle, and mutilate four years of data to come up with four data points?

And, wait, what about the Broncos game? Does that one somehow not count, then? You remember that game. That was the one where Tom Brady tied the all-time record for touchdown passes in a playoff game en route to a 45-10 slaughter of God’s chosen team. Threw for 363 yards. He was ridiculous. You’d think that might be more important in terms of "recent trends" than a wild card game in 2010, but apparently you’d be wrong. And get this:

Then there are the ugly five touchdowns against six interceptions – disastrous compared to his 4.1-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio (153-37) during those four years.

His four-playoff game passer rating is a weak 69.5, a precipitous drop from the 107.5 he posted during those same regular seasons.

Would somebody at Yahoo please explain to this man what "sample size" means?

It’s also, as time passes, easy to forget that this happens to the best of them. Montana lost three consecutive playoff games with the San Francisco 49ers from 1985-87 in which he threw zero touchdown passes and a combined four picks. The next season he won another Super Bowl. Two years later he won it again.

Oh, so Montana wasn’t clutchless and finished because he had three bad games? Who would’ve thought? Glad you wrote this article anyhow.

Still, what to make of Brady’s mini recent track record?

There’s no simple answer here. There isn’t even a simple question.

Wrong and wrong. The simple question is "does this matter at all?" and the simple answer is "no it does not." Four games is a uselessly small sample, and explicitly choosing only bad games doesn’t make your argument better. Here, watch as I prove that Edgar Renteria is a better shortstop than Troy Tulowitzki using your logic:

Edgar Renteria, last playoff series: .412 / .444 / .765 / 1.209, 2 HR
Troy Tulowitzki, last playoff series: .250 / .278 / .375 / .653, 0 HR

You willing to do this, Dan? Renteria for Tulo, straight-up? Tulo may be better in the regular season, but it’s now been scientifically proven to your exacting standards that he doesn’t have what it takes to win in the playoffs! His most recent four games were just awful.

In New England it’s always started with Tom Brady. There’s never been a doubt that he’s the team’s most valuable player, its heart and soul, its unqualified leader. The supporting cast comes and goes. Brady stays.

Yes, Dan, he is the quarterback. Do you know much about football?

So while, yes, everyone does need to be at their best, the Patriots stand little chance if Tom Brady plays like he said he played against the Ravens.

Didn’t the Patriots win that game? Oh.

January 30th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments

Must-play games of 2011

So I guess I’ve put this off long enough. Here’s the official, authoritative list of games you absolutely must play or else you’ll get sent to internet Hell. If you disagree with any of my choices, well, that’s fine; there’s plenty of room for disagreement… in Hell!

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)

Skyward Sword is not just one of the best games of 2011 — it’s one of the best games at all. It’s finally 3D Zelda done right. It has a hell of a learning curve and a really sinister game-annihilating bug, but it’s worth it. The dungeons are fantastic, the world is beautiful, the dialogue is great, and Groose won’t bring you down. The only negative thing about this game — aside from the aforementioned soul-shattering bug — is that there are three "silent realm" areas that are 100% not fun at all, but that you can’t skip. But there’s a lot to love when you’re not doing that!

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (PC)

The original Witcher was a really, really thorough Neverwinter Nights mod. Witcher 2 ain’t like that at all. Instead, it’s more like a melee-centric Mass Effect 2 mod. The game is a direct sequel to the original Witcher, and follows Geralt on his continuing adventures to hack drowners to pieces and then get laid. The graphics are top-notch, the world is interesting, and the cutscenes are interactive enough that they don’t get too horrid. Plus this game contains the word "lesbomancy." What more do you need?

Jamestown (PC)

So it’s a top-down shooter, right? Nothing unusual about that. What if I told you it’s set on Mars? Still nothing? Okay. How about this: seventeenth-century colonial Spanish Mars? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere! Jamestown has a prodigiously awesome story about searching for the remnants of the Roanoke colony on Mars, which is all the funnier because a shmup is the very very last kind of game that needs a story. And its over-the-top story is backed by brilliant SNES-with-a-bigger-palette graphics and perfect shmup gameplay. There are four ships to choose from (eight with the "Gunpowder, Treason and Plot" DLC, which I bought on the strength of the name alone), five difficulty levels, unlockable extras, and local co-op! Damn, this game delivers.

Super Mario 3D Land (3DS)

The name, she is not so good. Never mind that, though, because that pooper of a name is wrapped around a truly excellent game. This is a "new school" 3D Mario game, which is to say that, like Mario Galaxy, it focuses on actual platforming rather than on 3D scavenger hunt adventure 64 mechanics. The game looks and sounds perfect — just like a Mario game should — and makes brilliant use of the 3DS’s 3D screen by giving you tons of really, really long drops that look a surprising amount scarier in 3D than you’d think. If there’s a flaw here to pick out, I’d say it’s that the game is too aggressive about making sure anybody can beat it; die in the same location three times, and on your next attempt there will be a block next to your spawn point containing a leaf that makes you invincible for the rest of the level. Yowza.

Portal 2 (PC, X360, PS3)

I’m "that guy" — you know, the guy who wasn’t totally in love with Portal 2. Now, don’t get me wrong — it’s a great game — but I think it points to a fundamental weakness in the Portal concept, which is: the original Portal, in three hours, managed to exhaust absolutely everything fun there is to do with the portal gun. Now, to their credit, Valve is bright enough to realise this, and Portal 2 relegates the portal gun almost to a support role, where the portal gun is the thing you use to move around the level, but you actually solve the puzzle by using laser-redirect cubes or magic bouncing pudding. Still and all, the environments are great, and the characterisation is great, and the gameplay is sufficiently good to hold it all together.

Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War 2: Retribution (PC)

I was worried about Retribution at first. It’s a significant departure from the Dawn of War 2 series, in that it moves back toward the RTS standard of resource-gathering and squad-recruiting, the absence of which was, in my opinion, a large part of why the original Dawn of War 2 was so great. But it turns out it works just fine — the implementation is sufficiently clever that your army will gradually grow as you play the map, without at any time becoming grind city USA of the future. There are six different campaigns, sort of; they’re basically all the same levels with small variations here and there, but the units and the storyline are entirely different. As an added bonus, Retribution is finally divorced from the wretched Games For Windows Live service! Hooray!

VVVVVV (3DS)

Hey now, wasn’t VVVVVV in last year’s roundup? Why yes it was. Oh, and I did screenshots last year? And got it out on time? Tsk. Can’t be arsed to fix it now. The difference between last year’s VVVVVV and this year’s model is not quantity of V’s, but quantity of D’s (hey-o! Was that joke lame enough? I’ll Leno this shit up if you’re not careful) — it’s the exact same game, but with the backgrounds and dialogues tastefully three-deed by Nicalis. If you liked VVVVVV, you should buy this one too, and then maybe I won’t be the only goof who’s bought it four times. If you didn’t like VVVVVV, well, there’s still room available in internet Hell. So don’t push me.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC)

I played World of Warcraft for six years, you know? So I wasn’t going to get this one. Figured, hey, I’ve done the MMO scene. But that’s the brilliance of SWTOR: in its heart of hearts, it’s a single-player game with some optional group content. Remember in WOW, how stuff would start out being normal solo quests, and then there’d be an elite quest, and a dungeon, and if you want to finish the storyline before you know it you need forty people for Molten goddamn Core? SWTOR doesn’t do that. The "storyline" quests are all steadfastly single-player — at no point do you need a group to finish what you’re doing. Group quests exist, but they’re optional "extras." And would you believe you can play any dungeon in the game with just two people? Because, hey: you can. This is truly an MMORPG designed with grown-ups who have jobs in mind.

So that’s that! Those are all the games that an internet committee appointed by me and consisting entirely of me commands you to play. I may be able to fit the whole internet in my mouth at once, but that doesn’t mean there are no gems I’ve overlooked — feel free to clog my commentpaths with suggestions of your own!

January 18th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments

If this is Wednesday I must be famous

I assume you’ve all heard about this SOPA brouhaha. The entire internet is shut down because of it! But you know me — I’m a notorious capitalist after all, so what’s the use of a protest if I can’t make a quick buck off of it? So here’s my plan: today, while the whole rest of the internet is shut down, I have updated my blog! The way I figure it, since there are no other web sites anymore, I’ll get 100% of all the traffic and become rich due to the multiplier. No, that’s how it works. I checked.

This may not seem like much of a blog post. In fact, the more astute among you may regard this as a useless "filler" post. There’s a story there. See, this was meant to be an erudite discussion of Curt Schilling’s new game "Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning," but it won’t run on my computer due to not supporting 1024×768. What the fucking fuck, Curt? I guess millionaire baseball players can afford to get a new monitor every ten years, but this one still works just fine thank you! Besides, if 1024×768 was good enough for the Lord God to create the World of Warcraft in, it’s good enough for anybody.

So I can’t review the game, but you know what I can review? The title. It’s pretty goddamn generic. "Kingdoms," generic fantasy name that at least doesn’t contain an apostrophe or a Y, colon, scary word that implies murder. That title could have been shat out of the Official Fantasy Game Title Shitter-Outter without using enough processing time to put a dent in Bioware’s shipping schedule. Here’s a better title for you: Curtis of Schillingforth: Sock Warrior. At least then not playing your game because of unstoppably weird system requirements would be 15% more fun!

Edit: Curt Schilling responded to this post, and he didn’t even swear at me even though I’m a complete asshole. I guess I really am famous!

January 18th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Bullshit, Games | no comments

Wasting my time

I really wanna see an end to unskippable physics-engine-logos taking front seat in game title sequences.

Jasper Byrne said that on Twitter earlier today, and it got me to thinking: I, personally really wanna see an end to unskippable anything. Not just in game title sequences, either; I mean anywhere in the game. As far as I’m concerned, anything I’m doing while I’m playing your game that doesn’t involve actually playing the game is you wasting my time. So here are things:

• Intro titles: I get the idea behind the titles; branding is not a foreign concept to me. But it’s getting ridiculous. Games these days often have like seven or eight mini-movie plugs you have to sit through before the title screen and attract mode even begin. That, to coin a phrase, is shit. I’ve actually had to look up — on the internet, so thank god for that — where games store their intro movies so I can go delete them and actually get into my damn games. There is absolutely no excuse for this garbage to be unskippable! At least take a cue from Relic and only make it unskippable the first time. That still sucks, but at least it only sucks once.

And everything I just said goes triple for you, Square Enix. No, I have not forgotten that Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals doesn’t even let me skip the attract mode. I seriously had to sit through like six minutes of crap before I even got to the main menu.

• Loading: I know. I know that load times are, to an extent, inevitable. I know there are solid technical reasons why a 20 GB game will have to load data. But.

There is absolutely no excuse why, if I die during a level, I have to sit through the entire loading process before I can respawn and try again. I’m talking to you, Mass Effect 2. Also, why is it that, here in 2012, we have MMORPGs clever enough to prefetch data to create large, broadly seamless environments, but single-player games can’t learn this same trick? I can load up World of Warcraft and run all the way from Winterspring to Ahn’Qiraj without seeing a single loading screen.

• Options menus: I’m not advocating getting rid of options; lord knows I can’t stand one-size-fits-all interfaces. But your options menus need to be designed with usability in mind. Ideally, I should be able to open the options and figure out what all the options do and configure everything all at once. That means you need goddamn tooltips, and it means you need sensible organisation. In particular, if your key bindings give me more than about a dozen actions to bind, they need to be paginated and categorised intelligently, not just dumped in a list at random, like they are in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Here’s a picture of the movement bindings. Categories are nice, but holy shit, Bioware, sort those maybe.

Also, hey Magicka, it is incredibly offensive that I can’t change my key bindings without quitting the game. Especially since you don’t let me save anywhere; if I discover I want my keys bound differently, I have a choice between finishing the level with suboptimal bindings or dumping my progress and starting over. And that’s terrible.

• Cutscenes: You knew it was coming. Now, contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually want cutscenes abolished. I get that there do exist out there people who play games because they really enjoy long, stupid movies with terrible dialogue and bad acting, and, more to the point, I acknowledge that cutscenes, properly used, can definitely enhance the game-playing experience. What I’m saying is that cutscenes are way, way, crazy, murderously overused. And there is no excuse in the atmosphere for them not to be skippable.

Now, I’m not talking about Bioware-style conversations. Those are actual gameplay elements. You see how you can interact with those? Actually make choices that influence the game? No, what I’m talking about is the endless bits of watching polygons talk to each other and having no ability to influence the game at all. A horrible offender in this way — and I’m not even going to discuss anything by Square Enix — Is Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Episode Two was especially egregious because the previous Half-Life games had all been excellent about allowing their narrative to be player-driven instead of relying on constant canned exposition. But here’s what happens in Episode Two (spoilers, obviously):

• Gordon is pinned under a house and can’t do anything but watch when the hunter attacks Alyx.
• Gordon can’t help with the healing ritual, so he just watches the Vortigaunts.
• The ritual cutscene is interrupted by a different cutscene, involving the G-Man. Inception-y. At least this one’s interesting.
• Gordon finally locates an Advisor… and gets paralysed and can’t do anything but watch until it leaves.
• Upon arriving at White Forest, Gordon stands around and watches Alyx and Eli discuss the plot.
• Another advisor. Gordon spends the whole encounter paralysed again — if they liked it once, they’ll love it twice!

What the hell, Valve? Why not let me participate in this somehow? If I’m locked out of playing the game and can’t do anything but watch, there’s no way to build suspense or tension. I know I can’t do anything, so why care?

For further illustration, let’s compare the beginning of Half-Life 2 with the beginning of Bioshock. They’re both paced the same; you start out riding transport, and then you wander around an unfamiliar environment for a while before suddenly finding yourself in danger. even the danger’s the same; in both games you’re under attack by enemies you don’t understand, and you have no means of defending yourself. But here’s where it gets different. In Half-Life 2, you’re climbing up through an apartment building, being ushered through apartments by residents who don’t want civil protection to catch you. The whole environment is very dynamic; as you run down hallways, CPs come in at the far end and close in on you, but then a door opens up and you get herded through to another place. Eventually, you wind up jumping from rooftop to rooftop as they shoot at you from the street. Then you finally get trapped, and the CPs begin to beat the shit out of you, but Alyx shows up for the rescue just in the nick of time. It’s really, really effective.

In contrast, Bioshock is very insecure. It doesn’t give you a large, open environment to run through — instead, you’re trapped in a bathysphere while a splicer attacks you. There’s nothing dynamic around you, either; it’s just an unchanging bathysphere. And to pile on even more idiocy, Bioshock doesn’t even let you struggle and get claustrophobic; you can’t move or act at all during this sequence. You just sit in the bathysphere and look straight forward out the window as the splicer attacks you, and then eventually Atlas kills it with a turret. Only after the danger is completely gone are you permitted to interact with the game at all. This is especially insulting since, as soon as you get out of the bathysphere, the game begins making Half-Life 2 references — if you fools were aware of Half-Life 2, why didn’t you learn anything from it?

January 8th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments

Real quick

Remember when I was making fun of this dum-dum for coming up with a kooky voodoo way of determining which players gave the most value for money? Well, here are actual smart people doing it an actual smart way. Just a heads up.

December 23rd, 2011 Posted by Darien | Baseball | no comments

Preview release #1

I asked on the Tweeter yesterday if anybody would be interested in a playable preview version of the game I’ve been working on. I got a rousing response! By which I mean one, single response. But it was very rousing!

Eh, good enough. So today I give to you a playable preview version of my game. You can play it here.

There isn’t a whole lot to do yet — and the graphics are, of course, all placeholders — but everything that’s implemented works, and you can get a rough idea of what the game is and what it’s about. The "level" I’ve included is, of course, not especially challenging, but feel free to play around with it and get a sense for the game. Any feedback is appreciated, especially if "feedback" is a euphemism for "money."

December 20th, 2011 Posted by Darien | My games | 2 comments

The Agony and the Idiocy

If there’s one thing you should have learned from reading this blog, it’s that a morally outraged sportswriter is the stupidest creature alive. I think this guy might have a shot at the title even when he’s sober. He’s written a column about steroids that he begins with the lines

The Agony Of Filling Out A Hall Of Fame Ballot

While leaving an empty box next to Jeff Bagwell’s name …

Yeah, it’s going to be one of those articles. Hold on to your hat. Oh, and you better read this quick; I’m going to quote whole huge swaths of it in utter defiance of SOPA, so the government may lock me and my website up in an overseas torture chamber per the provision in the other law they passed today but which fair-weather leftie "civil libertarians" don’t seem to care much about.

Lots of folks have a bucket list, or at least that’s the term they assign to it after the 2007 movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. And while it is probably best to keep most of the Before-I-Croak inventory private, I will share one checked off mine:

Cast a vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Really, BBWAA, why do you give people like this Hall of Fame votes? If they write shit like that, you just know they’re going cast stupid ballots.

The first hint reality wouldn’t be nearly as romantic as the dream arrived in the form of Michael Felger, Boston television and radio provocateur, in the Patriots locker room in 2008.

I can parse that, but it took me like four tries. And it totally wasn’t worth it. Also, I’m guessing you mean "raconteur," since that word you used… isn’t complimentary.

He pointed out I was the only new voter from the Boston chapter of the BBWAA that year and the Jim Rice ballot could come down to one vote either way. He offered two words of advice, "Be ready."

Better advice would have been "be quiet."

The two words scared me so much sabermetric decimal points started running down my leg.

Congratulations — you have written the very worst hacky stat-nerd joke of all time. Not only is it weirdly scatological, but it doesn’t even make sense; what makes a decimal point "sabermetric?" The decimal point in WPA is somehow materially different from the ones in like batting average and ERA?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the restroom and take a giant Jeff Jacobs column.

Rice got in by seven, with 412 votes among 539 ballots. Phew, dodged one bullet … only to be dragged into bottomless mire of performance-enhancing drugs. And, man, I have come to hate it.

It’s only bottomless for stupid people. Here’s a simple test: do the following people belong in the Hall of Fame?

• Ty Cobb
• Gaylord Perry
• Joe Morgan
• Willie Mays
• Rickey Henderson

If you said yes to any of them, then you have the answer: you do not care about allegations of cheating. All of those men were accused (some proven) of breaking the rules of baseball to get an advantage. To say nothing of the fact that the official rules of baseball contain the line "the pitcher shall not Intentionally Pitch at the Batter," which seriously disqualifies every pitcher ever, especially Bob Gibson.

On the other hand, if you said no, they’re all possible rule-breakers and they should all be out, then you’re completely mad. Easy!

Few things open you up more quickly to Internet ridicule than releasing your Hall of Fame ballot.

Among those things: supplementing it with lots of pointless, defensive hand-wringing.

You’ve got your, "Hey, moron, it’s not the Hall of Very Good. If you need to ask if a guy is a Hall of Famer, he’s not."

That’s Colin Cowherd you’re quoting there. He’s an idiot. Who cares what he thinks?

You’ve got your, "The guy hasn’t had one at-bat in five years, you’re a hypocrite for changing your mind." Guilty on that count, I’m voting for Barry Larkin this year after not voting for him the previous two.

Those people are the worst of all people. Like Colin Cowherd. And good on you for being at least slightly vulnerable to reason!

There’s the, "You’re an imbecile for voting for a compiler [Bert Blyleven]."

Okay, are any of these people not Colin Cowherd? Because I really think you’re just quoting something he said on his show yesterday. Look out! The SOPA will get you!

There’s the, “You’re an imbecile for voting for a guy who only came up big in big games [Jack Morris].” Guilty on both counts.

Oh, that one’s not Cowherd. Jack Morris is his favourite. Which is really, really funny, since Jack Morris kind of stank.

Yet it wasn’t until Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated wrote something last December that I began to wonder if voting for the Hall of Fame is worth the hassle. There are places on the Internet where you are called a man playing God if you don’t vote immediately for Jeff Bagwell. You are called Joe McCarthy. Posnanski didn’t use either term, but he came close.

Yeah, because Bagwell was great. All-time great. I wouldn’t call you a man playing God, though; I’d stick with "moron."

Bagwell never tested positive for steroids. He was not named in the Mitchell Report. Yet because Bagwell has become, in some voters’ minds, a player who used PEDs, Posnanski wrote, "I can’t even begin to describe my disgust … it makes me absolutely sick to my stomach.

"I hate the character clause in the Hall of Fame voting. I think it encourages people to believe their own nonsense, to stand up on high and be judge and jury …I’d rather a hundred steroid users were mistakenly voted into the Hall of Fame over keeping one non-user out."

Posnanski is often correct. This is one of those times.

Joe Posnanski is the best sports writer in 2011 America, but it doesn’t mean he’s 100 percent correct on this issue.

As in it’s not a causal relationship, sure. But… he is 100 percent correct on this issue. I get the feeling you’re about to say something really stupid.

Based on numbers alone, Bagwell deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. That part is easy. He hit .297 with 449 homers, eight 100-RBI seasons and had a .948 OPS as well as a Gold Glove and an MVP Award.

His grown-up numbers were good, too, by the way.

Yet because of the sins of his baseball generation, fair or not, Bagwell finds himself in an uncomfortable position.

Yeah. Which is: left out of the Hall because of idiots like you.

Yet we also have heard tens of players like Bagwell deny steroid use over the years only for it to turn out otherwise.

So add this to the list of reasons to bar people from the Hall of Fame: he says he didn’t cheat at baseball. This is a Life of Brian thing, isn’t it.

We have seen tens of players like Bagwell blow up from a skinny 20 to a cartoon 35.

I… what? That is fifteen years, you ignoramus. You don’t need to be on the juice to put on a bunch of muscle over fifteen years!

We have seen tens of players like Bagwell break down physically in their late 30s.

Players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Rafael Palmeiro, right? That’s what they were notorious for doing? Breaking down in their late 30s?

Come on, stupid. The notorious juicers had unnatural longevity. And now you’re using a late-30s breakdown — which we’ve seen not tens but thousands of players go through — as evidence that he was juicing?

Oh shit, you guys! Nap Lajoie was on the juice!

I will never vote for Rafael Palmeiro or Mark McGwire, not in 15 lifetimes, but I also don’t want to be part of any witch hunt.

I will never eat meat, not in 15 lifetimes, but I also don’t want to be a vegetarian.

I only want to play the percentages. I want Bagwell’s insistence he was clean to be true. I don’t want his induction to backfire in an ugly way.

So, wait. Your Hall of Fame standard is that you will never vote for anybody unless he can absolutely prove that he never cheated at baseball? No permissible ambiguity? And the reason for this is: you’re afraid of being wrong.

Great. Great people you’re letting in, BBWAA.

My view certainly is not foolproof, but it’s one I’m comfortable with given the uncomfortable parameters. Forget 100 juicers. I don’t knowingly want to vote for one.

Your view is bullshit. If I had a Firing Squad vote, I’d vote for you.

I have wanted to wait a few years to see if anything surfaced. To watch ESPN, Yahoo!, New York Daily News, the Texas media — someone with the resources and vigor — put Bagwell in its headlights and see if he emerges clean.

BBWAA: Mr. Jacobs, we’re thinking about giving you a Hall of Fame vote. But we’re concerned; will you ever make a decision for yourself?
Jacobs: I’ll have to check with my lawyer and get back to you.
BBWAA: You’re hired.

I have no intentions of making him wait forever. I will wait another year or two. If the worst thing I do is to make him enter the Hall of Fame with his teammate Craig Biggio, well, that’s damning Bagwell with a great blessing.

Yeah, the "great blessing" of spending another two years wondering why being one of the best first basemen of all time isn’t sufficient for getting into the Hall. Blessing of Caprice! Paladins get that at 40, I think, but only if they spec Dipshit.

I believe in using the 15-year voting period. The years give perspective. They help us look at circumstances differently. There’s strength in the process, not weakness.

You’re not gaining perspective, dummy. You’re waiting for a bunch of other people to change their minds so you don’t look like a dangerous maniac who disagrees with popular wisdom.

As much as it infuriates me, I have to agree with BBWAA secretary-treasurer Jack O’Connell’s assessment that the National League MVP vote on Ryan Braun stands even if his positive test holds up. Ken Caminiti and A-Rod kept their MVP trophies after it became known they did steroids in 1996 and 2003. And, yes, the 2011 voters voted on the information they had at the time with Braun. But that’s not why Braun should keep his MVP.

No, the reason Braun should keep his MVP is because the rules don’t contain any provision for revoking it. Like how president Obama gets to keep the Nobel Peace Prize even though he’s started three wars.

It is because the test he flunked was taken during the postseason. The MVP is a regular season award and unless it was scientifically proved he was using during the 162 games — even though the award announcement wasn’t made until November — I’d argue Braun should keep the 2011 award on a technicality.

What the fuck is wrong with you? With your brain, I mean. I thought the idea was to wait until there was absolute positive scientific proof that people didn’t take steroids. You said so yourself! I mean, for fuck’s sake.

There’s no evidence that Jeff Bagwell took steroids in the post-career either. The Hall of Fame is a regular-career honour. So oh my god you are making my brain evaporate did you even read what you fucking wrote?

Now make new precedent. Immediately. In this case, the BBWAA should make a rule that if a player tests positive for PEDs at any time during the calendar year he wins an award, he loses that award. Set the rules in advance and live with them.

What the fucking fuck is the point of that? Don’t hamstring everybody else because of your peccadilloes, asshole. What if I think 2004 Barry Bonds was so obscenely good that he deserves the MVP, steroids or no? Because I do. I’m now not allowed to vote for him, because it would offend your crazy head?

PEDs have made for a complicated, agonizing world for BBWAA voters.

Especially the stupid, spineless ones.

And until someone steps forward with a firm set of Hall of Fame guidelines, it’s not going to get any less agonizing. Brace yourself. Next year’s incoming Hall of Fame class with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa will bring arguments and name-calling like we’ve never seen.

Can’t wait. Any luck you’ll be dead by then and we’ll have smart people casting ballots instead.

In the meantime, peek over my shoulder at my 2012 ballot: Barry Larkin and Jack Morris. That’s it. I only hope this doesn’t make Joe Posnanski barf or for someone to call me Joe McCarthy.

Jack Morris was not very good, and there’s no excuse for voting for Barry Larkin and not Alan Trammell. Oh, and you left off Jeff Bagwell. Other than that, you did a great job oh my god I just realised that nobody can fucking prove that Barry Larkin and Jack Morris were not juicing. Larkin retired in 2004. Morris in 1994. These are not ancient players! Either one of them could have been on the juice, stupid. You have just randomly declared them not juicers with no better evidence than we have for Bagwell. You sir are unbelievably stupid.

Hey, Grant Brisbee’s written a better version of your article. Maybe you should just retract this mess.

December 15th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Baseball | no comments

In before Jose Canseco

So I guess you’ve heard — reigning National League MVP Ryan Braun? He juicin’. So I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what I have to say on the subject, as the world’s leading authority on telling people to shut the dick up about drug use.

Well, the first thing I have to say is: shut the dick up about drug use. The irrational terror about PEDs isn’t getting any more less irrational just because now it’s aimed at skinny Jewish kids instead of surly black man-mountains with heads the size of watermelons. You’ve all heard it (from me) before, but, seriously: get over it. Yes, steroid use is bad for baseball. No, it is not materially worse than corking your bat or throwing the spitter, neither of which gets you a mandatory 50-day suspension for a first offense, neither of which will get you barred from the Hall of Fame just on suspicion, and neither of which causes dummies to call for your retroactive erasure from all records. The only reason people think it is is because assholes like the World Anti-Doping Agency make shitloads of money telling us over and over again that steroids are the End Times injected directly into your asscheeks.

The second thing I have to say about the subject is: Ryan Braun failed one test. One. Oh, but, wait! "Experts" say that a false positive is really unlikely, so I guess we should all shit ourselves in our attempts to be the first one to believe it. Lord knows the PED sophists can’t possibly be wrong!

Comedying matters further, Ryan Braun insisted on being retested after his positive — and the second test came back clean. But disregard that, we’re told, because it’s not conclusive proof of his innocence. Is that the way it works? We hang people on suspicion so the WADA gets paid? Seriously, I’m no Brewers fan (lord knows), and I’m enjoying the schadenfreude of watching the Cardinals and the Brewers both twist in the wind this offseason, but I’d take the Brewers over the goddamn drug politicians any day of the week. So I’m officially on Braun’s side of this one. But here’s Jeff Passan, who is mostly reasonable on the issue, but seems utterly scandalised by the thought of people not trusting the system:

Braun took the standard defense, releasing a statement through his agent before telling USA Today: “It’s BS.” And as much as I want to believe him – that Braun, who came up through the minor leagues when steroid testing was mandatory, who eschewed the possibility of free agency to sign with Milwaukee through 2020, who, according to ESPN’s story, volunteered to give a second test that came back negative – I know better by now.

Not one positive test has been overturned.

So, if you’re following along at home, here’s the score: Braun has been tested regularly for all sorts of bogeyman substances since his minor league days. He never failed a test before. He has been tested since, and passed that one too. But the one positive is the one we should believe. Why? Because the System works, bitches!

Oh, by the way? We know the System is 100% flawless because no appeals have ever been upheld. Which doesn’t suffer from selection bias or sample size issues at all.

Oh, and never mind who judges the appeals. Not important.

Were a positive test, for example, grounds to allow a team to void a player’s contract, the only testosterone in Braun’s body would’ve been his own.

Uh, Jeff? It is. Remejmber Jason Giambi’s werd, cryptic apology for nothing in particular? Why do you think it was that he didn’t say what he was apologising for? Did he just forget, you think? No, Jeff: it’s because if he admitted to steroid use, the Yankees could have voided his contract. Similarly, if Braun is shown to have used steroids, the Brewers can void his contract. Now, the trick is this: the union will fight it. And if the team has an actual confession by the player, the union will probably lose. But if all the team has is one failed test — especially one bracketed by passed tests — then the union will probably win, because one test can be wrong.

Instead, we’re back to where we always are: Debating about how baseball can conquer this when the truth is it can’t. PEDs are going to be around forever.

Yes. Just like doctored game equipment. Which you didn’t seem to give a shit about when you covered Kenny Rogers cheating in the 2006 World Series. Or did it not matter because the Cardinals didn’t officially complain (aside: ever wonder why that was? Give you two guesses), and that’s The System?

The players’ union’s agreement to allow blood testing for HGH shows it’s malleable and concerned for the game’s well-being enough to entertain stricter penalties.

Yeah, okay. Or it shows that they got offered enough kickbacks to sign on the dotted line.

While voiding contracts seems harsh and rife for abuse from owners, baseball is entering its 10th season of steroid testing without one false positive.

Without admitting to one false positive, Jeff. That ain’t quite the same thing. Or is it also true that the United States has completed ten seasons of war with Afghanistan without torturing one single person?

If Ryan Braun becomes the first – if he clears his name – the mea culpas will fly fast and furious and he’ll emerge with his reputation intact, maybe even strengthened.

To Jeff’s credit, he’s quite likely to be one of the culpa-ing meas. Man is not shy about admitting when he fucks up. But really, maybe a bit less knee-jerk outrage would leave him with fewer occasions on which he needs to, don’t you think?

Now get this:

The NL MVP allegedly used PEDs, and we know this only because he got caught. Matt Kemp and Prince Fielder and Justin Upton and Albert Pujols and everyone else who finished behind him might’ve, too. Unless we know for certain they didn’t – and nobody ever will – the MVP needs to stay in Ryan Braun’s hands.

No matter how much blood is on them.

Fuck the heck, Jeff Passan? Ryan Braun did not murder some guy. You really need to relax.

December 11th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Baseball | no comments

Public service announcement

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword contains a game-breaking bug that will make it impossible to continue the game. Making matters worse, this bug is 40 – 50 hours in. In this post, I’ll detail for you exactly how to trigger this bug, and, therefore, exactly how to avoid it. There will be a spoiler-free section first (I will give province names; this is very very basic information that shouldn’t be any kind of spoiler. If you’re worried, come back after like ten hours and read this then) that is somewhat vague (though I think it’ll be clear enough), and, after the jump, detailed descriptions of exactly what happens. Don’t read that part if you don’t want spoilers.

Spoiler-free description:

Late in the game, there is a bit where you’ll be sent back to three provinces to gather pieces of a thing. You can do the three provinces in any order, but I strongly recommend doing Lanayru Desert last if you wish to be sure you’ll avoid the bug. It positively will not trigger if you complete the other two areas first. If the bug does trigger, you will be unable to collect any pieces you don’t already have. Nintendo has confirmed there is no workaround; once this happens, you’ll have to start over. So do Lanayru last, and back up your save before even starting this sequence if you’re really paranoid.

More detailed description follows below. Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear any more names.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 6th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments