2014 Baseball Preview

It’s Opening Day…or Opening Week…well, the season actually started a week or so ago…you know, I can’t even figure out baseball any longer. The season apparently began when Los Angeles and Arizona faced off in Australia, even though the Diamondbacks had five preseason games remaining. Only in modern day baseball can you start your season before finishing your preseason.

All the confusion aside, I’m actually excited about baseball being back. The long dark days of post-football-pre-baseball, when only basketball is getting national attention, are finally over.

The hometown Atlanta Braves begin this season with a limp in their step. They lost two of their top starting pitchers in the span of a day, as both Kris Medlen and Brandon Beachy required Tommy John Surgery to repair damaged elbows. Mike Minor is currently out with injury, meaning the Braves must rely on a young, somewhat inexperienced starting staff to get them through much of the early season. To compensate for the rash of injuries to the rotation, the Braves reached a quick deal with Ervin Santana.

The offense for the Braves should be just as explosive as last season. Catcher Brian McCann departed for the “greener” pastures of Yankee Stadium. Taking his place will be journeyman catcher Evan Gattis. Gattis, otherwise known as El Oso Blanco (The White Bear), was a pleasant surprise last season, proving that he could smash the ball into different zip codes when required.

At first base we have Freddie Freeman. While not as flashy as other first basemen, Freeman is the complete professional. He has power when needed, but is also willing to sacrifice himself to move runners over. Personally, I think Freeman is an MVP candidate in the making.

Second base could be a sore sport for Atlanta once again. A few years back, the Braves pulled off what some writers called a coup by signing Dan Uggla away from the Marlins. Uggla was a power-hitting player better known for his bat than his glove. But once he got to Atlanta, it was as if Uggla forgot how to hit. He became the worst type of streaky player. The streaks he went on were good, but they were far too short compared to his bad-to-mediocre play.

Shortstop may be the brightest point on the Braves roster. The position is held down by Andrelton Simmons. Last season, Simmons turned in what might just be the single best defensive season a player has ever had. He has range and he has a cannon for an arm. His bat is somewhat lacking, but he’s shown improvement. He’s never going to be a 40 home run kind of guy, but if he gives you 15-20 homers and 75+ RBI, on top of his defensive skills, that’s a great season.

Third base looks to be the domain of Chris Johnson once again. Johnson was a “throw-in” on the Justin Upton trade, but he proved just as valuable as Upton. He’s consistent at the plate (lead the team in batting average in 2013) and he’s more than adequate in the field. Don’t look for him to set the world on fire either way, but Johnson’s good enough for an everyday roster spot and his bat produces enough runs to help you win.

The outfield, from left to right, goes like this: Justin Upton, B.J. Upton, Jason Heyward.

Justin Upton patrols left field and was the big news for the Braves prior to 2013. He came to the team in a blockbuster trade (the aforementioned trade in which Chris Johnson was thrown in). Since arriving in Atlanta, Upton has been a streaky player, though better and more consistent than Dan Uggla. He still has a ton of untapped potential, and could easily put on an MVP-type year.

Older brother B.J. Upton was one of the biggest free agent signings the Braves have ever made. Now they need B.J. to have a good season and prove that the money wasn’t wasted. B.J. has really been disappointing during his Braves stint so far, but like younger brother Justin, B.J. has loads of potential as a centerfielder…he just needs to put it all together.

Right fielder Jason Heyward is a possible face of the franchise. He has all the potential in the world, but his biggest foe has been his health. No one can stop a case of appendicitis, and it’s hard to avoid having your jaw broken by an errant fastball. If Heyward can stay healthy for an entire season, he could be a 40-50 homer guy, and could easily provide 100+ RBI, given this Braves lineup.

The pitching staff, like I said earlier, is a patchwork in injury replacements. Ervin Santana and Aaron Harang were brought in to salvage depth in the starting rotation. The bullpen likely remains the greatest weapon for the Braves…namely their closer, Craig Kimbrel. There are few pitchers as “lights-out” as Kimbrel. Watching him work is like watching a clinic in how to save a game for your team.

Predictions

American League

East: Tampa Bay Rays
Central: Detroit Tigers
West: Texas Rangers
Wild Cards: Los Angeles Angels, New York Yankees

National League

East: Washington Nationals
Central: St Louis Cardinals
West: Los Angeles Dodgers
Wild Cards: Atlanta Braves, Pittsburgh Pirates

World Series:

Detroit Tigers over Los Angeles Dodgers in seven games

Australian Grand Prix 2014: A Race in Review

The Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix took place over the weekend. It’s the kick-off to the F1 “season,” although like many other sports, there isn’t much downtime in F1 these days. The Albert Park Circuit in Melbourne is probably my favorite “street” circuit. It’s comprised of the city street around Albert Park Lake, in the heart of downtown Melbourne.

Qualifying

Qualifying was spectacular, as the rains came and went, constantly shifting strategies. Most pundits had pegged the Mercedes AMG Petronas factory works team as the favorite heading into the season, and that form showed true in qualifying, and Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg swapped the top spot back and forth for much of the session. Defending Constructor’s Champion Red Bull Renault was stymied in everything that Sebastian Vettel tried. The reigning Driver’s Champion failed to make Q3.

Anyone following Formula 1 knows that the V8 engines are now relegated to history, and we now have turbo-charged 1.6-liter V6 engines. The noise level difference is appreciable. When Vettel failed to get out of Q2, and was posted in P12 for the start, you could actually hear the crowd cheering for his failure. I think Vettel is falling into the same place that Dale Earnhardt once occupied in NASCAR. Either you love him or you hate him. There is no middle ground. (Personally, I’ve been on the anti-Vettel bandwagon since Brazil 2008, when his actions nearly cost Lewis Hamilton the Driver’s Championship.)

The surprise of qualifying was a toss-up between two drivers: Daniel Ricciardo and Kevin Magnussen. Magnussen is a rookie who was hired on to pilot the second McLaren, behind Jenson Button. He was able to manage a qualifying slot of P4. Ricciardo, as you know, was brought on by Red Bull Renault to replace the retired Mark Webber. The Red Bull RB10 has been notoriously unreliable in testing. So of course it was a huge surprise when Vettel couldn’t get out of Q2 while his teammate not only made Q3, but ended up posting a time good enough for P1…until Lewis Hamilton finished his flying lap about fifteen seconds later.

Race Results

More than anything in 2014, we’re going to see reliability be a huge issue for at least the first few weeks. As the race got underway it was apparent that Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes was lacking power. He drifted further and further back in the field until the call came on lap 6 to retire the car and try to save the engine. Teammate Nico Rosberg, however, had a brilliant day. He would go on to win the grand prix by a margin of 22+ seconds, which could’ve been even worse, considering the race did see an extended safety car period.

Australian Grand Prix Podium

Rosberg was followed across the line by Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo. The roar from the crowd was outstanding, as it was the first time in F1 that an Australian driver had reached the podium of the Australian Grand Prix. The excitement, though, was to be short-lived. The FIA called Ricciardo’s RB10 in for inspection, and determined that the car has “consistently exceed” the maximum allowed fuel flow rate. Ricciardo’s P2 was scrubbed from the books. The third place driver, McLaren rookie Kevin Magnussen, was moved into P2, and McLaren teammate Jenson Button moved into P3, giving McLaren Mercedes the initial hold on the Constructor’s Championship. As an aside, Magnussen’s podium finish was the first time in F1 history that a Danish driver had finished on the podium.

Red Bull has announced they plan to appeal the decision of the FIA. There is a lot of talk about how the fuel flow sensor the FIA recommends is faulty, but they couch the argument by saying it is “less faulty” than the alternative sensor.

Felipe Massa, Kamui Kobayashi, and Crashing

Felipe Massa’s career at Williams got off to a shaky start, through no fault of his own. Massa held a good line going in to turn 1 on the first lap of the race. From behind him a puff of white smoke indicated that someone had forgotten how a brake pedal works. That someone was Kamui Kobayashi. Within a split second, Kobayashi’s Caterham had plowed into the back of Massa’s beautifully-colored Williams, sending both drivers spiraling into the gravel trap and ending their respective races early.

Crashing in the First Curve at Melbourne

Massa called for Kobayashi to receive a grid penalty akin to the one handed to Romain Grosjean after the Belgian Grand Prix in 2012 (when Grosjean took out roughly half the field at the La Source hairpin). 

Kobayashi took to Twitter and accepted blame, apologizing to Massa and Williams. However, the FIA and the race stewards determined that Kobayashi’s Caterham suffered a KERS failure that led to the car losing all rear brakes. They further determined that no one was at fault on track, and Kobayashi’s Twitter page withdrew the apology. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out over the rest of the year.

Coming Up Next…

In a little less than two weeks time we’ll see the Malaysian Grand Prix from the Sepang International Circuit in Kuala Lumpur. I personally really enjoy this circuit…especially driving it in any one of the Formula 1 video games in which it appears. I’m not a huge fan of the slow-as-Christmas turn complex at the beginning of the lap, but otherwise there is just enough elevation change to keep things interesting. As we get closer to race day I’ll offer up a more in-depth preview of the Malaysian Grand Prix.

The Rapid Deterioration of Commercial Weather Forecasting Outlets

**Author's Note: I really thought I had already posted this, but apparently not. The image is from Wednesday, March 5. In fact, this whole article is from Wednesday, March 5. Don't ask me, I just work here.**

I don’t know what it is, but it seems like the weather becomes more and more important to a man as he grows older. We know roughly when the weather is coming on the local news shows, and we can readily change from Channel A to Channel B in time to catch the weather on both networks. Then we contrast and compare.

Channel A never calls for rain or snow. Channel B always acts like any form of precipitation will instigate Armageddon in the city. Channel C just hired a really pretty lady to act as their weather reporter, so we might flip over there and see what’s going on. Hey, we’re men. Unless we’re of an alternative lifestyle then it’s kinda what we do.

We’ll watch the Weather Channel for long blocks of time, even though we’ve already seen the local forecast. Weather Channel, at one time, had taken the pretty-lady-weather-reporter idea and multiplied it by a thousand. I don’t know if they still do, as now that I have U-Verse, the Weather Channel has become this interactive demon of television that makes it difficult even to change channels.

But my question now is this: What, in the name of all that is good and holy, has happened to Weather.com?

The Weather Channel’s website, once a bastion of information about local and regional weather, and once pretty good at forecasting said weather, is nothing but a shadow of its former self. While the page was once very informative, easy to navigate, and easy on the eyes, it is now inundated with ads, Recommended Videos, and horribly titled side-stories that are incredibly distracting. Take this picture for example. This is a screen capture I made a little after 10:00 am EST today.

Look at the titles of the videos along the top.

What March Has In Store For You! Okay, so this is a basic monthly forecast. Why is there an exclamation point on this title? Who is that excited about a single monthly forecast? Moving on…

He Thought He Was Safe. WRONG. If any video title should have an exclamation point, it’s this one. Instead, the headline writer appears to have struggled to get the title written before he yawned himself to sleep. It appears to me that the video is about a weather reporter or traffic report from some metropolitan area in the northeast US, and he’s probably going to get buried in snow kicked up by a snow plow. What does that have to do with the weather forecast?

Next Picture Even WILDER! Well, I imagine so, considering that the man and the bear in this picture are just lying on the ground. It’s hard to get less exciting than that. Again, though, what does this have to do with the forecast?

6 Months of Agony. Then DEATH! A basic understanding of punctuation would be greatly appreciated here. Also, that’s a freakin’ brown recluse spider, isn’t it?! Why? And what does the agony and death of whoever or whatever have to do with the weather?

Asteroid Headed Toward Earth Today! Okay, this is a justifiable use of an exclamation point. That said, the asteroid in question is projected to pass by just inside the moon’s orbital path, about 217,000 miles from Earth. I know that sensationalism helps to get hits on a website, but come on, man.

Honestly, I’m waiting on weather.com to post up some video title Language Professors Hate Her (if you get the reference, then you've been on the internet before). It just seems like a once respectable institution has fallen into the trap of using ploys to bring in viewers or readers.

Anyone going to the Weather Channel or to Weather.com probably already knows what they’re getting into. They’re not looking for goofy videos about snow plows and polar bears and venomous spawns of Satan. They’re looking for the forecast for their town, or for somewhere they’re going. If you guys would stop this nonsense, your website would be far more palatable for the casual user.

Traffic Laws and the People Who Don't Understand Them

Speeding.

We’re all guilty of it. Every single person who gets behind the wheel of a car has gone faster than the posted speed limit from time to time. Most of us do this when we’re teenagers and we think we’re bullet-proof. My first car was a 1992 Ford Escort. I got when I was sixteen, drove it for about six months, and proceeded to try and park it underneath a pick-up truck that was waiting to make a turn.

1992 Ford Not-In-Focus

Yep, crashed it…totaled it. But I was sixteen, I didn't yet know any better. That was the car that truly introduced me to speed. I’d been in the car with my parents when we’d had to hit 80-plus miles per hour, and once or twice we probably touched 90. I’d heard stories from my Dad about how he used to ride motorcycles and regularly top out over 100 mph.

But I never felt the rush that came with being behind the wheel and going faster and faster. That surge of adrenaline as you pushed the car to go faster than it probably should. I've said before that, when driving, life doesn't start until you hit triple-digits. That Ford Escort is responsible for introducing me to triple-digits*. It registered 120 mph. The peg was set at 125, or thereabouts…I figured it to be about 5 mph beyond the 120 limit.

I had the speedometer bouncing off the peg. By my best guess, I had that car over 125 mph. Like I said, I was all that was teenager. I was bullet-proof. It was two months later before I tried parking under the truck, which taught me a valuable physics lesson. The seatbelt on a 1992 Ford Escort can lock up so tight it will actually compress your ribs and fracture your sternum. To this day I struggle to listen to the album “Let’s Face It” by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. That’s what I was listening to when I crashed. Call it a weak version of PTSD.

Kinda Looks Like My Old S-10

But ever since I first reached triple-digits I’ve loved finding out what a car can do. My next ride was a 1996 Chevrolet S-10, with a 4.3-liter V6 Vortec engine that could produce upwards of 175 horsepower, which was manic in a vehicle as light as the S-10. The Escort would only make about 88 hp. The S-10 had far better acceleration than the Escort, but the S-10 was governed. While only registering 100 mph, the fuel flow would shut off once you hit 96 mph. Why? Who knows? Probably an auto manufacturer being pressured by some bureaucrat to make the choices for the user that keep the user “safe.”

Now I drive a 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt, which has a 2.4-liter Ecotec engine. The Cobalt registers 120 mph, and I know it will touch 115. I had to make a business trip to Huntsville, Alabama a couple years ago, and on my way north on I-75, between Atlanta and Chattanooga, I hooked up with three other cars and we basically drafted off each other the whole way, regularly changing who was in the lead. I knew it felt as though we were making good time, and when I glanced at the speedometer I realized why. I was running 90. So were they. It was a good Sunday afternoon drive for all involved.

Yes, I like driving fast. So do a lot of other people. I regularly drive I-985 on my way to work. The average commute on I-985 happens at about 80 mph or better. Of course, you get outliers on both sides. There’s always one guy driving 55 mph on the interstate, being passed by the guy driving 95 mph. Which brings me finally to my point: on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s web page, they have an article called “The Vent,” in which any reader can offer a quick quip about what’s bugging them.

A Venter recently wrote: “What's wrong staying in the left lane if you are driving 10 mph over the posted speed limit? It's the dummy running 30 mph over the limit that causes serious accidents. If I can slow them down by staying in the left lane, I will do just that.”

The “wrong,” Mr. Venter (assuming the writer to be male), is that you don’t know why someone is speeding. Yeah, I’ve driven fast just because I wanted to, but I’ve also had several instances where driving fast was necessary. That person coming up behind you doing 30 mph over the speed limit just might be on their way to the Emergency Room. They may have a loved one on the brink of death. And you think it’s your job to stop them because you’ve appointed yourself traffic police…

Even if the person coming up behind you doing 30 mph over the limit is doing so for fun, you still have to move. Every interstate I’ve ever been on has a wonderful little sign along the side of the road that reads “SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT” or “KEEP RIGHT EXCEPT TO PASS.” If you’re driving 80 mph in the left lane, and someone doing 100 mph comes up behind you, then an interesting dynamic has taken place. While you were, just moments before, passing slower traffic, you have now become slower traffic. Get over. Get out of the way.

Truthfully, more often than not, it isn’t the “dummy running 30 mph over” that causes serious accidents…it’s the “dummy running barely the speed limit in the fast lane, thus impeding the flow of traffic” that cause accidents. Too many people think they can just drive in the left lane whenever they want, so long as they go the speed limit. A good friend of mine thinks he can drive in the left lane whenever he wants simply because he is a tax payer.

All it takes is a basic understanding of traffic laws, people. The left lane is often referred to as the “passing lane.” If you are not passing another car, then stay out of that lane. If you are getting over into that lane, then use your turn signal to let other drivers know. Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, simply sitting behind the steering wheel of a car does not make one psychic. If you are getting into a turning lane, then get all the way into the turning lane…don’t remain halfway out into the traffic lanes, slowing everyone else down.

Perhaps as a nation we need to better invest in driver’s education. We could learn a lesson or two from Finland and how they teach their young people to drive. We could also stand to be more courteous on the roads. Doing the things listed above (turn signals, better driving practices, etc.) can greatly reduce instances of road rage. Also understand that it is not your job to police other drivers. I don’t believe in ‘karma,’ per se, but I do believe that people get what they give (that whole Golden Rule thing)…

* - I know the car is not responsible. I'm definitely not one of those people who blames the car, or the gun, or the fast food place...people are responsible for their own choices. *