Roy Halladay, 1977-2017

A few thoughts on the career of Roy Halladay, who died piloting his plane yesterday. (Halladay had just taken delivery of the ICON A5 amphibious plane a month ago. It is the second fatal crash for the "sports car with wings" this year).


First I wanted to note that Halladay had a well-deserved reputation as a good guy. He was heavily involved in charitable work in both his Blue Jays and Phillies years. He was a multiple finalist for the Roberto Clemente Award, given to players with exemplary records for humanitarianism.


As a pitcher, Roy had few equals in his era. He won 203 games, threw a no-hitter for the Phillies in the 2010 playoffs, and is rated the 42nd best starting pitcher of all-time by the JAWS metric.


The most similar pitcher to Roy by Similarity Score is Zach Greinke of Arizona, another pitcher who will likely end up in the Hall of Fame. (Interestingly enough, the most similar pitcher to Greinke is Roy Oswalt, who with Halladay, Cole Hamels, and Cliff Lee formed the historic "Four Aces" rotation of the 2011 Phillies, who won 102 games).


Halladay never won a World Series, having arrived in both Toronto and Philadelphia a little too late for either team's championship years. But in 38 innings of excellent post-season work, he bettered his regular season ERA by a full run.


RIP to a good man and a fine athlete.

By the numbers

We are knee-deep in the baseball playoffs, which look to be yielding a potentially classic Yankees/Dodgers World Series. The games have been good, if rather long-averaging about half an hour longer than the regular season...in fact no game has been less than three hours (ALCS game two was exactly three hours).

Here, though, I wanted to talk about some regular season questions. We baseball fans like numbers. We argue about which ones matter, when if ever they should take second place to intangibles like the evergreen notion of the "veteran clubhouse presence", and whether "statheads" are universally guys who couldn't play (in my case, yes).

I just wanted to take a quick look at a few correlations between wins (ranging from the Dodgers' 104 to the Giants' and Tigers' 64), and factors like payroll, batter age, pitchers' strikeouts, etc. Nothing too sophisticated here. And yes, correlation is not causation. This is quick and dirty stuff. Anyway...


The highest positive correlation I found was between wins and pitcher strikeouts per nine innings: 0.76. Think teams like Cleveland, the Dodgers, Houston. Baseball is more and more about power arms, and numbers like this one will only encourage the trend.


The highest negative one was between wins and runs against per game, not surprisingly, at -0.86. The correlation for runs scored per game was 0.72.


There is a decent sized positive correlation for pitcher age, at 0.32, and a tiny negative one for batter age. The former figure would seem to contradict the number above on the value of young flamethrowers.


And with modest-payroll teams like the Astros and Diamondbacks making the playoffs, it's not a shock that while payroll is an important factor in success, it isn't necessarily central-the positive correlation here is 0.37

Trump tracking-down 4.1%

In the Real Clear Politics average of RV/LV, Trump stands at 42% approval.

This is down 4.1% from his election popular vote percentage, but up from 40% last time I checked this on September 13.


I track this not only because because I'm interested in this figure, but because I track all sorts of stuff-health numbers like blood pressure and resting pulse, twitter tweets per follower, a wide variety of baseball stats, etc. I do love numbers.

On this date in Phillies' history

They lost.

Pictured: Hugh "Losing Pitcher" Mulcahy.

A few good links

Some worthwhile reads:

Lynn on enjoying the eclipse, and also enjoying things that we see every day. Which makes me think of this: click it! (TY Dustbury.)

Ann Althouse on the outrageous Trump. 


Terry Teachout names his favorite big band tracks. Well, there are no tracks by Maynard Ferguson, Don Ellis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Buddy Rich, or Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, but it's still a nice grouping.

Edward Feser and Joe Bessette present the Catholic case for capital punishment. It's impossible to argue, from a Catholic perspective, that CP is intrinsically wrong, like abortion or euthanasia.


Megan McArdle-"As a woman in tech, I realized these are not my people". Reflections on the Google memo.

Cartoons can be useful. 

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another"-Hamlet. The Bard might wonder at some current lunacies, like presto-chango sexes.


Father Mitch Pacwa, no longer SJ, is tossed out of the Jesuits after being caught with a Catechism.



538 has the Dodgers getting to 114 wins, two shy of the record.

Anti-social media

I haven't posted on twitter in months. Most of what I post on facebook is just youtube music clips, though I do occasionally annoy people there with my right wing views. I also vex people with comments on the Phillies, in various places, such as here. 

I have at times had semi-popular blogs that people with discriminating taste read ignored. I have no real desire to chase that dragon once again, but I would like to keep this blog updated once in a while. There might be someone out there who would like to read it and say, "Damn, this dude's more f-ed up than I am." That's the kind of service to mankind I'd like to provide.


Really, I can never can decide what to with my writing. I've written poetry, stories, lyrics to songs (including the only really funny song ever written about Prozac), blogs, and once had a fairly substantial number of jokes written for a comedy act I was working on. The character was to be a total loser-i.e., strictly autobiographical. You see, I'm the kind of guy who can calculate the most arcane baseball statistics in his head, but can't figure out a restaurant tip, because I can't get a girl to go to a restaurant with me. The main idea was, Here is a comedian you can't heckle, because I'm up here HECKLING MYSELF. "Is this thing off? Good."

The total loser part turned out to be all too accurate, when I lost the ability to access the tablet the jokes were in due to a dead battery that proved impossible to recharge. WTF? Who does that happen to? I guess I could've gotten a new battery, but only about half of the jokes were good.


So I guess I'll write some more self-deprecating material. Which raises an interesting question....is that an indication of really lousy self-esteem, or really good self-esteem? If Bob Uecker says, for example, "You know, people had divided opinions on my career in baseball-half thought I was awful, the other half thought I was a disgrace to the uniform"-is he saner than the rest of us? Or closer to the edge?

What sound does a blogger make when he's not saying anything?

In the words of longtime Phillies' announcer & Hall of Fame outfielder Richie Ashburn, "If you don't have anything to say, don't say it".