A Great Day
One year ago, I got married. It was the best decision of my life. Today, I celebrated our first anniversary with my wife. We ate at the place we had our first date, exchanged gifts, did some alphabet photography, and watched The Amazing Race together. It was a great day.
Sitting here, watching the Mariners close out their season (on replay, of course – Amy > baseball) with an on-field hugging session and seeing the emotion as the players realize that the 2009 Mariners aren’t going to be a team tomorrow, I’m not the only one celebrating the completion of a great year with someone I love. That kind of celebration can’t be contrived. There’s no way that people who don’t genuinely care for each other have that kind of reaction to a baseball season that concludes on October 4th.
Beltre and Felix. Griffey being carried off by his teammates. Silva (!) carrying Ichiro on his shoulders. It was really amazing to watch.
The M’s have had the kind-of-hokey “You Gotta Love These Guys” slogan for years, as they appeal to soccer moms everywhere with the cuddliness of the people on the team. Except, we didn’t have to. They weren’t that much fun to root for. We wanted most of them to go away.
This group? It’s actually true. We might be numbers-crunching nerds who quantify everything and lack souls (depending who you talk to, anyway), but even I could appreciate the tremendous amount of emotion that was conveyed in that postgame hug-a-thon. That team loved each other, and it was pretty obvious.
The 2009 season is over. It didn’t end with a World Series title, but it was the most fun year to be a Mariner fan that I’ve had since ’95. It was a team worth loving.
Giving jsa the benefit of the doubt, “deserves” and “should have” are somewhat loaded words. Simply saying the following might have been better.
By plugging . . . expected runs scored and allowed [as figured by a runs created-type equation (the most accurate at the team level being Base Runs)] into the pythagorean formula, one can generate second-order wins, the number of wins a team would have scored and allowed given their component offensive and defensive statistics.”
Still, that’s pretty nit-picky. It isn’t that hard to understand what is going on with second (and third) order wins. The wiki-explanation is pretty damn good. To me, the money line is “These formulas result in the team’s expected number of runs given their total singles, doubles, walks, etc., which helps to eliminate the luck factor of the order in which the team’s hits and walks came within an inning” and “Second- and third-order winning percentage has been shown to predict future actual team winning percentage better than both actual winning percentage and first-order winning percentage.” Whether you like the “prediction model” used or not, if it correlates better with future performance than either actual or first-order expected winning %, what’s not useful about that?
rsrobinson. You say we need a LF. Have you forgot about Endy Chavez?
Endy Chavez is not only probably out until the AS break, he is due to be a free agent.
I could not believe what took place on the field. Our record wasn’t horrible, but seeing the players/coaches show that much emotion for each other was truly inspirational. My schedule for the past 6 months revolved around making sure i caught each game; this will be a tough/long off-season after seeing that display.