The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

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You’re not going to believe this, but…

Ozzie Guillen is a crazy man. You see at the bottom of here? You see how it says the White Sox intentionally walked Ichiro Suzuki? Read that again. Let it sink in.

Intentional walk.

Ichiro.

Fun fact about Ichiro. Last season, Ichiro had 213 hits, which is a lot, and racked up a grand total of 33 XBH. 33. Thirty-three. You know what percent of 213 33 is? Zero. Zero fucking percent. Ichiro is a singles hitter — a great singles hitter, to be sure, but a singles hitter — and that is all. He is such a non-power-threat that this IBB on April 29th was his very first walk of the season. And Crazy Ozzie did it on purpose. He intentionally placed Ichiro on first base to prevent him from… reaching first base.


April 30th, 2009 Posted by | Baseball | one comment

Oh no he didn’t

This sort of thing just pisses me off.

I mean, I like that the Cubs won for a fucking change. And it always amuses me to read stories of Carlos Zambrano crushing the damn ball. But you know what isn’t great? Breathless "almost hit for the cycle!" stories when the dude in question did not have the goddamn triple. I am extremely done with stupid triple-less almost-cycle bullshit. You know what the hard hit to get is? I bet you can guess: the triple. If you have the single, the double, and the HR, and you have at least one probable at-bat left in the game, then, hey, congratulations! You’ve had a good day at the plate. But almost hitting for the cycle? Bullshit. You’re at maybe 40%. The grunt-work is done, and now for the hard part, hey?

To put this another way: Carlos Zambrano’s 162-game average has him hitting 13 doubles, 11 HR, and… two triples. Two. That means that, strictly according to the 162-game average, he has a 1/81 chance of hitting a triple in any given game. So, no, he was not particularly goddamn close to the cycle.

But, hey, grats to Carlos Zambrano for having more career homers than some dude who’s been playing for just about as long, and makes $8M/year as an outfielder. As opposed to, you know, a starting pitcher.


April 29th, 2009 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

Ladies love my massive OPness

So I’m back to World of Warcraft after six months of vacation, and I’m getting to grips with what’s changed in the interim. Turns out that protection paladins have become extremely, hilariously overpowered as regards soloing group content. I just wrapped up Grizzly Hills, and there’s a 200k HP bear god to deal with. It took me eight minutes or so to chew through all that health, but I sure did finish the fight at full health and mana. Then there’s the evil wizard on the island, who gave me a small amount more trouble, but also had fewer HP and thus died faster.

Turns out it’s not very hard to solo all kinds of stuff when you’re completely indestructable and never run out of mana. It’s to the point where I’m seriously wondering if I can solo dungeons on-level.


April 25th, 2009 Posted by | World of Warcraft | no comments

To serve man

So I just took this idiotic Facebook quiz that purports to tell me the "secret meaning" of my name. And apparently what it does is make your name look really, really queer and then just give you adjectives that start with all the different letters in your name, like so:

D A R I E N

Never mind how stupid the whole thing is. I’d like to point out in particular how stupid the D entry is. Delicious? Delicious? Fuck the heck?

I sure hope this quiz wasn’t written by man-eating space monsters. If it was, I think I might be first in line.


April 20th, 2009 Posted by | Bullshit | no comments

Och, I’m really bad at this

First Derek Jeter, and now Buzz Aldrin? WTF?


April 17th, 2009 Posted by | Bullshit | no comments

Holy shit the Indians are not good

Is it too late for me to change my AL Central pick? 1-7? Good lord, them’s some Washington Nationals-type numbers. Looking back at what I said, I had them pegged at "they’ll do well enough to win a weak division." In retrospect, it’s looking like they won’t even do well enough to win the NL West. To be sure, seven losses ain’t never ruled nobody out of the playoffs — the Indians could very well go 154-0 for the rest of the season. But, man, it’s not looking likely. My boy Mark DeRosa and his .542 OPS aren’t exactly lighting the world on fire, but at least Woody hasn’t blown a save yet. Of course, that’s on account of the Indians haven’t had a save situation yet. 1.50 WHIP? Get that shit under control, Woody!

So where the hell did this Kosuke Fukudome come from? More to the point, can we keep this one? He’s a lot better than the one we had last year. That 1.325 OPS is absolutely sick. There’s something to be said for a line that looks like .417 / .533 / .792 / 1.325, and that something is: horry kow! Yeah, I still find it funny that those awful, tacky t-shirts are still around. The funny part being, of course, that everyone would have forgotten about them real fast except that every baseball journalist shit himself trying to be more outraged and offended than everybody else, and they got a whole lot of free publicity. Good work, you fucking hacks.

Congratulations to the Orioles for a pretty remarkable job of beating up on teams that are much, much better than they are. Exactly like I said, their offense is a goddamn force, and so far other teams just haven’t pounced on their pitching enough. I mean, it’s going to happen; the sky is going to fall, just like it does every season. But you’ll always have April! Just like you do every season.


April 15th, 2009 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

I am such a terrorist

Hey, remember last time the government declared me a terrorist? Well, if you thought that being completely humiliated would keep the government from doing the exact damn same thing a second time, you were not correct. Everybody’s favourite government bureau, the Department of Homeland Security, has just issued another nine pages of fear and libel. If you’re just interested in hitting the highlights, catch the footnote on page two. No, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Go check it out for yourself.


April 15th, 2009 Posted by | Bullshit | no comments

What would Gonzo do?

Offensive to women? I mean, I haven’t seen the thing, but… offensive to… women? Chicken women, maybe.

Also, again, I haven’t seen the thing, and the article (in typical lazy shock-article fashion) leaves out this meaningless bit of trivia, but I’m given to wonder if the players in question did this in their spare time in a way that wouldn’t immediately connect them to the team. Because if so, well then the chuckleheads who run the team need to lighten the hell up and not start trying to regulate everything their employees do when they’re off the clock.

On the other hand, if they did make the video in some way that would seem to associate it with the team, well then the chucklehead players need to smarten up for next time. You don’t see me dragging my employer’s name into any of the stupid, childish shit I do, do you? No you do not.

Of course, asserting that I’m a bit brighter than your average Australian Rules player won’t exactly be the shocking statement of the century.


April 10th, 2009 Posted by | Bullshit | 3 comments

More Uncle Miltie

I’ve been cruising the baseball tubes lately, scoping out the reaction of the general populace to Milton Bradley now that the season’s begun in earnest. I’m generally pleasantly surprised with what I’m seeing. It seems like people are willing to give the dude the benefit of the doubt, which is nice; I’m not seeing a whole lot of people making nasty comments about how long it’s going to be until Milton loses his shit and maybe busts up an umpire or a fan or somehow kills the Astros’ whole season, which would be especially unfair after last season, when Bud Selig ruined the Astros by callously not allowing the Cubs to be obliterated by a hurricane to make the division a bit easier.

I’m in favour of Milton Bradley, really. You’ll notice that every time I’ve mentioned him so far, I’ve voiced concerns about his ability to stay healthy, but I haven’t jumped on the "Milton Bradley is a poo-poo head" bandwagon? Sure, he did some dumb things when he was younger, but I can’t find an instance of him losing his cool in the last five years without being goaded into it. Frankly, I probably would have sided with Milton no matter what he did to this piece of shit if he managed to find the dude.

So what I’m saying is that I’m glad people appear to be willing to give the dude a chance. He’s a hell of a batter if he stays healthy, and we should probably wait for him to, you know, do something wrong before we jump all over him for it.


April 9th, 2009 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

Tea party!

Okay, see, whatever your position on this idiotic "stimulus" bullshit is — and I know I’ve been very subtle about mine — you can’t help but find this hilarious.

I’d buy a can right now, except that I’m not really 100% excited about things that contain a whole pile of untested herbs meant to contain pharmaceutically-effective levels of drugs. Oh, also, fuck organics, and extra-fuck Fair Trade Certification.


April 8th, 2009 Posted by | Bullshit | no comments