Over a week ago now was supposed to be the best day of the year: Opening Day, the glorious beginning of the 2020 baseball season. But, like so many other things (everything), it has been… More
Blog Project
Night baseball, part 35
The 2019 World Series has now ended (congratulations, Nationals!), which means it’s time to update my post from last year about night baseball and the World Series.
We got lucky this year; even though the Series went a full seven games, only two were over four hours (game two was 4:01, and game three was 4:03). But, despite that, only one ended up being under three and a half hours (game five was 3:19).
Altogether, the average length for a game this year was 3 hours, 44 minutes, and 43 seconds, which makes it fourth Series in the past five years to have a game-length average between 3:40 and 3:50.
However, if we ignore the extra inning games, this is actually the second-longest World Series game average length since the World Series became a night-based event in 1985. The longest averaged slightly longer in 2007 at 3 hours, 45 minutes, and 45 seconds. That was the Series in which Boston swept Colorado, and no game was faster than three and a half hours. Interesting!
And here’s one more fun fact for you: this Washington-Houston World Series is the first (definitely in the night ball era; possibly ever) in which there were multiple nine-inning games that spanned more than four hours.
Spring is coming, you can just tell
Oh goodness. My soft 2019 goal of blogging at least once a week went off the rails rather quickly, but if I can salvage some credit for myself, I’m doing great on my soft goal: I’ve already finished six books and read more than 2,000 pages across multiple genres and authors. According to Goodreads, I’m two books ahead of the pace I need to keep in order to hit my reading goal (so many goals this year) of 20 by the time the calendar turns to 2020. This year is off to a good start!
I’ve also started a new job, which is great news. While it was a fun time just hanging out, exploring Syracuse, and being unsustainably unemployed, I always felt guilty that I didn’t have work. And so, as fortune would have it, I was able to find something similar to my old AV position, and now here we are.
But with that position came less time to write. More ideas, sure, but less time to write. I never realized how much easier it was to crawl into bed and read someone else’s ideas than it was to get mine out there. That’s why I need to make a concerted effort to do better as we roll into springtime.
Honestly, it’s surprising that spring is just around the corner based on the constant layer of snow on the ground outside. We peaked into the 60s on Thursday–it was amazing!–so it was understandably hard to face the (cold) reality as snow and ice returned this weekend. But it made me incredibly excited for a Syracuse spring and summer.
I have so many plans. First, I want to hit up as many small towns in the area as possible. There’s really nothing better than a good, small upstate town: a main street, some cool shops, possibly a diner, and then BAM farmland. If it’s a really good small upstate town, it’ll have plan #2: ice cream. I want to visit as many local soft serve stands as possible. Nothing says summer (or warm weather generally) to me more than a vanilla cone. Hell, maybe that’ll be my next online project, a big upstate ice cream map. I know I’d love to have one.
My third plan is, obviously, baseball.
And the rest of my plans are…to make more plans. Ice cream and small towns and baseball (and the combinations thereof!) are great, but I feel like there should be more. So that’s my self-imposed homework heading into the warm weather season. I think I’ve got some time until that gets here, but I can’t wait for it to start.
My 2019 reading list
When last we met, I talked about my favorite books that I read last year, and now I’d like to turn to the books I’m excited to read this year.
My personal “Best Books of 2018” list, featuring books not from 2018
Last year was a great year for me, and not least because I got back on the reading train in a big way. For the first few years out of grad school, I had a lot of other things on my mind. First, I had to find a new job. Then, I had to learn to navigate a city I’d never really been to while finding a place to live and learning a new job. And throughout all of that, I was honestly a bit burned out on reading.
Continue reading “My personal “Best Books of 2018” list, featuring books not from 2018″
A new project
Happy new year! I hope yours is off to as great a start as mine. Over the past few days, I ended my impromptu holiday blogging hiatus with an annual trip with friends to the Hudson Valley region. It was wonderful: great company, great food, great exploring, and a great time had by all.
And now comes the new year. It has begun exhaustingly, in a good way, and here’s hoping it continues as such.
I’ve never really been big on new year’s resolutions, but I figured I’d challenge myself this year. I’m going to post here at least once a week. On days I don’t post, I’ll do some writing in another form, whether that’s a blog draft, in a journal, as part of a larger project, or maybe (if I want to cheat) I’ll just tweet something. And if I don’t personally expand the general corpus of blogging like that, I’ll read at least 20 pages of whatever book I happen to be working through at the moment (currently, it’s Grant by Ron Chernow and Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson). Like I’ve heard said, “No input, no output,” after all.
So in lieu of resolutions, that’s my first major goal of 2019. I can tell it’s off to a good start because I already have this post done and ready to go. Here’s looking forward to 51 more!
Review-a-Cuse #1: Mother’s Cupboard
Welcome to a new series of posts in which I begin the process of becoming a local by venturing to new places, eating new things, and trying secretly to mimic the central New York accent. And as my contribution to the genre of online reviews, I’ll write about them here.
Today, I’ll take a look at Mother’s Cupboard, a diner on James Street in Eastwood.
Some thoughts on voting
On Tuesday, I cast the 604th ballot of the day at my polling place, and I was happy to do so. It was incredibly easy to go into the church assigned to me, sign my name in the register (I had forgotten all about this part! It was very satisfying to sign in the Big Book of Democracy.), mark my ballot, and slide it into the scanner. Had I actually not been still debating my vote for the city council, it would’ve have taken less than 10 minutes.
Election Day
Happy Election Day!
I’ve enjoyed Election Day since I was a kid, accompanying my parents into the voting booth, closing us behind that little curtain, and staring up at all the name and all the little levers and the one big red lever with a big handle. If I remember correctly, sometimes they even let me pull that handle to record their votes; it seemed magical: the machine would add their votes to the totals and at the same time, it would open up the curtain. Wow…technology. Continue reading “Election Day”
Some thoughts on the Syracuse Mets
It was perfect timing; I moved to Syracuse, and so did the Mets.
They had been looking for a new location for the their top farm club for what seemed like ages, trying to get out of the far-off Las Vegas market. Then an opportunity opened up in Syracuse, and the Mets jumped at it.
Initially, I was suspicious. Continue reading “Some thoughts on the Syracuse Mets”
Metal mushroom mini-mystery
One of the first things I noticed after moving to Syracuse was a little metal pipe sticking out of the front of our yard. In fact, all of the houses on our street and in our neighborhood have these pipes: a (usually) rusty metal tube sticking up about six or seven inches, covered by a curved cap. All in all, it looks like a little metal mushroom or, in my eyes, a tube wearing a World War I helmet. Continue reading “Metal mushroom mini-mystery”