I was surprised to read on my newsfeed this afternoon that the Cardinals had fired manager Mike Shildt.

My guess is that it had something to do with management wanting him to rely more on analytics and less on gut feel, but who knows? "Philosophical differences", the Cardinals said.

This has caused numerous columnists who think they're clever to ( Read more... )

The Cardinals had a heck of a season to get to the Wild Card game and managed to play the Dodgers even until the bottom of the ninth. Sadly, that was as much as they could manage.

All things considered, I'm pretty happy with their season. :)

I am amused to note that the Cubs starting battery tonight is Abbott and Castillo.

The Cardinals won their 17th game in a row today, beating the Brewers and clinching the second wild card slot.

Wow! I am happily surprised.

As is my habit (all things being equal), I went down to Wrigley Field for the last home game of the Cubs season. Much to my surprise, I was in a position where I might have the chance to see the Cardinals clinch at least a tie for the second wild card slot, which I had not expected two weeks ago.

It was a good game which became completely bonkers ( Read more... )

I am rather surprised to find that the Cardinals are suddenly in sole possession of the second wild-card berth in the NL. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

In other news, I used the remaining chunk of the rebate from the new refrigerator to defray most of the cost of buying an electric hedge trimmer that will work with the batteries from the ( Read more... )

I caught my next-to-last Cubs game for the year today. It was a gorgeous day and the Cubs managed to make a game of it before losing to the Giants 6-5.

I went to the Cubs game with Marnie tonight. We had a lovely conversation *and* the Cubs broke their 13 game home losing streak.

What's not to like? :)

I went to the finale of the Cubs/White Sox series with a friend of mine who is a White Sox fan. The game did not go well at all for the Cubs (which was perhaps not so much of a surprise, although giving up five runs in the top of the first is almost never a good sign).

But the conversation was good. :)

I have been trying to figure out how to generate a schedule for our APBA league for the 60 game computer season. Normally, I would just let the program generate the schedule, but because I want to schedule exactly five games per team per calendar week, that doesn't work.

So I let the program generate the schedule and I then exported to a CSV file ( Read more... )