Squids fantasy roundup - Week 3

Sorry for the late post, gang. I know all of you were probably very upset that it was not posted on time!

Week 3 of the fantasy season is now in the books. I had a busy weekend, and thus did not watch a single game. I missed the Thursday game because the NFL does not want me to see Thursday games, otherwise they wouldn't air it on some obscure network that I don't get. It also doesn't help that the Thursday games are typically the least interesting matchup possible. Kansas City and Philadelphia! Yippee!

I missed all the Sunday day games because I had to go into work all day Sunday. Which sucks, but hey, I'm at work now and doing this, so fair is fair, I guess. The Sunday night game, which is typically the week's marquee matchup, was a bit of a stinker (seriously, the Steelers suck. I do not want to watch Ben Rapeeverythingandeatlotsofburgers and company play. Ever.) so I watched the Emmy's instead. I maintain that I made the right choice there.

I missed Monday's game because I was, once again, working. You see, I was in the OC (don't call it that) for work. We were having a mock trial (without J. Reinhold). Watching jurors deliberate from a secret room did not give me much faith in the justice system.

Now on to the football!

This week's highest scorer was Drew Brees. Brees sat on the bench and watched as Joey's team got blown by Crazy Pat.* The curse of the high scoring player lives on!

Several owned players put up a big goose egg on the score board this week. Most of them were injured and sat out the whole game. Two of them, Jermichael Finley and Daryl Richardson, were injured early in the game. Only one played the whole game and still did nothing: Hakeem Nicks. Nicks is on my team. I lost.

*EDIT: Oops! I forgot to say "away" again!

Current Projected Winner: Crazy Pat!

Squids Fantasy Roundup - Week 2

We've now reached the end of week 2, and I've already run out of ideas on what to put here. It's going to be a long season, folks. I might not make it to the end.

Week 2 featured some more football games, I guess. The top fantasy scorer this week was Aaron Rodgers, who discount double-checked Pat's team to a loss to Drew. Having the top scorer in our league may be a curse.

The big game of week 2 was, of course, the hot Manning-on-Manning action that took place on Sunday afternoon. My girlfriend, whose love of watching Peyton Manning play football is only eclipsed by her love of the New York Giants, was very excited to watch this game. Unfortunately, the game was on as the same time as that oh so exciting Raiders/Jaguars game. Since we live in the SF Bay Area, we got the Raiders game. I was happy. She, less so.

My girlfriend was apparently not the only one who was not happy about the NFL-mandated TV coverage. A bunch of old Jews that retired to Florida from New York complained about not being able to see the game (I'm assuming), prompting the Orlando CBS affiliate to scroll this message across the screen:

"In accordance with NFL policy, WKMG must carry all Jacksonville Jaguars away games. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Needless to say, we went to a bar so that we could watch both games.

Projected Winner: Don'tMessWithSebas (hey, that's me!)

Every Football Teams' Salaries by Position

It's now the middle of September, and the NFL season is underway.  A little while ago, I came across this post from the Guardian, which has broken down all the salaries of NFL teams by position, and presented them graphically. It's a neat little tool, and I encourage you to go check it out.

Here's what it looks like, using tonight's Steelers/Bengals matchup.

The bigger the circles, the more money the team is spending at that position. Above, you can see that the Bengals defense is making a whole lot more money than the Steelers offense. That Steeler O-line should ask the Bengals D-line to buy them dinner as they feebly attempt to stop them from crushing Roethlisberger.

Some other, Pat Is Crazy relevant tidbits:

*The Raiders are the Houston Astros of the NFL. They're spending by far the lowest on both offense and defense (but are spending the 3rd most on special teams! Go Sebas!). And that's not even accounting for the fact that their second highest paid offensive player, Matt Flynn, is the 2nd or 3rd string QB, depending on who you ask.

*This chart is based off of what players on the current roster are making, and not on what the teams are actually spending this season. I know this because Darrius Heyward-Bey's salary shows up for the Colts, when in fact I'm pretty sure that the Raiders are the ones who are paying him.

*The Vikings have the 4th highest paid defense and the 2nd highest paid team overall. Guess you can't buy success in the NFL.

There is a Crack in Everything

Good morning Vietnam, I was perusing some of these here recent posts on the Pat is Crazy interweb site and a post about the Daily Kos by Oakland, our resident Cultural Critic and Vinyl Vault Reviewer, has provoked me to write a bit more on the topic.  There is actually a connection to the P.I.C. logo up there at the top of your screen: notice the Howard Dean sign being held.  Daily Kos was a platform used early on in the Dean campaign - one which I frequently read. 

Now, Daily Kos was one of the early blogs, back when they were cool and talked about by the hip folk - before blog was a word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  It was back when people didn't have a twitter or a facebook profile, or instagram or whatever the kids use today.  There was still a good number of people who relied on dial-up connections and the NSA probably only tracked and stored most of what you read and watched on the world wide web.  It was wild era.

I was living in the town of Peculiar, Missouri ("Where the Odds are with you") back in those days, organizing my peers against the war and soon there after to support the candidacy of a Doctor from Vermont named Howard Dean.  It was 2003 and this Dean dude was talking about some pretty rad things, you know?  Like, why are all these Democrats supporting the policies of George W. Bush (remember that guy?), why are they supporting a war of aggression in the Middle East, tax cuts designed for the wealthiest elite of the ruling class?  Why are these Democrats supporting anti-gay marriage amendments?  He was saying the Democratic leadership was corrupt.

Oakland's Vinyl Vault - Morrison Hotel

It's time to reach into the vault again! Today, we're going to book a room at the Morrison Hotel, by the Doors.

Release Date: February 9, 1970

Singles: You Make Me Real

Squids Fantasy Roundup - Week 1

The first week of the fantasy season is over!  Let's see how everyone did.

Peyton Manning had a record-tying 7 TD passes, so if you had Peyton or a Denver WR on your team, you probably won.* But did you win?

*Unless that Denver WR's name was Eric Decker. So damn Gopher-y

First, let's look at Peyton. Peyton Manning is on my team! Huzzah, I must have won!

Nope. I lost. Big time. That is because I am a half-wit, and put Manning on my bench. D'oh. (I don't know what's worse: the fact that I had Peyton on the bench, or the fact that I would have lost even if I had started Peyton. God I suck.)

What about Demaryius Thomas, Denver's top receiver?

Thomas is on Joe U's team. Joe U's team also lost, thanks to impressive amounts of suck by Rainn Russell Wilson and Brandon Pettigrew. Pettigrew scored fewer points than I did this weekend. So, 0/2.

Finally, we get to Wes Welker. Surely he led his team to victory! Welker is on Joeeeeeeeeey's team. And... they actually won! So that's 1/3 for the Denver stars. (If you're curious, Crazy Pat's team, who Decker plays for, also won. Nothing makes sense).

To recap:

Week 1's highest scoring player, Peyton Manning, sat on my bench, but would have been part of a losing effort even if he had played.

Week 1's lowest scoring player was David Wilson, who was on Drew's bench. But the second lowest scoring player, Pettigrew, led Joe U's team to a glorious defeat.

Fun!

Current Projected winner: Sex Gostkowski.

The Case of the AT&T Park Bullpens

As we enter the final month of the baseball season, the A's are battling for a division title, while across the bay the Giants are just waiting to see how high their draft pick is going to be. Back when the two teams faced off in late May, they had near identical records.

During one of the games in Oakland, professional blowhard Jon Heyman bemoaned the fact that he had to watch the game in the sewage-filled Oakland Coliseum, when just a few miles away pristine AT&T Park sat empty. This offended some of the A's fans and players, and prompted A's reliever Sean Doolittle to bring up a popular local urban legend: the reason the Giants' bullpens are on the field is because they forgot about them when they were building the stadium. This remark then caused Giants blogger extraordinaire, Grant Brisbee, to respond with this piece, which claims that the Giants did not in fact forget, and that they purposely put the bullpens on the field to give it an old-timey charm. After all, Wrigley's bullpens are on the field too! He then cites a some Giants officials giving this story, because clearly they would be impartial and tell you they fucked up if they did.

Let's compare Wrigley and AT&T.

First, here's AT&T:

The bullpens are down the lines, with basically no room between the foul line and the mound.

Now here's Wrigley:

As you can see, the bullpens are also down the lines, but there is a little more room between the mound and foul line. In fact, there's enough room that the relievers can actually sit in the bullpen.

In AT&T, however, the relievers sit in the dugout with the rest of the team, and have to walk from the dugout to the bullpen to warmup. Just like I did in little league (although I was the catcher more than the pitcher. Insert gay joke here). To my knowledge, it is the only park where that is the case.

One of the 1000+ comments on the post mentions that the original plans showed the jumbotron in right field with the bullpens off the field, in center and left. The bullpens were then moved to the field when they decided to move the jumbotron to center field. The problem with moving the bullpens onto the field is that there really isn't enough room for them. I imagine that when they decided to move the jumbotron, the bullpens were relocated to the field not to give the stadium an old-timey feel, but because they really didn't fit anywhere else. And while technically the mounds fit on the sidelines, it is clearly not a good place for them. There's a reason why no other new ballpark has the bullpen on the field.* They look like an afterthought, and I suspect they were.

So did they forget the bullpens when they were building AT&T Park? No, I doubt it. But I can see why you'd think that.

*A few geniuses pointed out that the Oakland Coliseum also features on the field bullpens, but come on. With its ample foul territory, the Coliseum is the ONLY ballpark where it actually makes sense to put them there. I mean, just look at it.

Most foul balls hit to the bullpen mounds are uncatchable because it's too far of a run.

Oakland's Vinyl Vault - Quadrophenia

The randomizer's love of Simon & Garfunkel has been well documented, so it was no surprise that last time it spit out the pair's swan song, Bridge Over Troubled Water. But here's some insider information: the next album the randomizer had queued up was yet another Paul Simon work. When a situation like that arises, I usually go record shopping, so that I can reshuffle the deck (so that the new albums are not just at the end of the list) and avoid listening to back to back albums from the same artist. I did that. And now I can confirm with relative certainty: the randomizer is fucking with me. No, it's not Paul Simon. It's the Who. Again. With a rock opera. Again. It's Quadrophenia.

Release date: October 19, 1973
Singles: 5.15; Love, Reign O'er Me; The Real Me