matthearn.com

You may have noticed that the baseball playoffs have descended upon us, unless you are my wife, who is about as interested in sports as I am in Grey’s Anatomy. (I hear that McCrumbly or somebody died? Is that right? Spoiler alert, or something. They apparently played the last episode in almost random order, it was unwatchable.) I think fairly frequently about the changes in baseball over time, specifically modern players’ ability to draw walks far more than they used to. The reason for it is fairly simple: in the old days, Batting Average was king. If you drew a ton of walks but batted .210, you weren’t going to see a lot of playing time. On-base percentage was unheard-of. Hitters routinely swung at anything close, which meant that walks were few, pitch counts were lower (making it easier for starting pitchers to complete games), and there was generally less offense.

Modern baseball, however, has wised up to the fact that there is a lot of value in getting on base, or more correctly, simply not getting out. A guy who bats .280 with no walks is getting out 72% of the time. That’s not great. A guy who bats .240 in 500 at-bats BUT also walked 80 times got on base 200 times in 580 plate appearances, which is a .344 on-base percentage, which is very, very good. If the guy couples that with a half decent slugging percentage, he will be an every day player. Adam Dunn played 151 games for the White Sox this year despite posting a .204 average. He struck out 222 times! But he also walked 105 times, and slugged .468. (None of this is particularly news to baseball fans, but bear with me, I’m bringing everybody else up to speed.)

The problem is, and I think we can agree on this: walks are pretty boring, as outcomes go. The actual battle between the pitcher and the batter is always interesting, but balls hit into play are much more satisfying. Even a strikeout can be interesting; watching a good pitcher rack up double digit Ks is very exciting. If a batter racks up 4 walks in a game, that’s just lame. But is there any way to reduce the number of walks in the game? I don’t think pitchers are less accurate than they’ve been in history, it’s just that the move towards on-base percentage has led to batters learning to wait for their pitch. Pitches that in the past would have been swung on and bounced to short are let go because the batter knows he can’t put decent wood on it. Pitch counts are up, walks are up, offense is up. So in order for walks to go down, you can either convince batters to swing more often, which there’s really no way to do, or convince pitchers to throw more strikes.

In theory the latter should be relatively easy. Pitchers are usually told “throw strikes,” “pitch to contact,” “stop nibbling.” The best pitchers throw far more strikes than balls (Cliff Lee is 7.43 times more likely to strike a batter out than walk him, a ridiculous rate). However that doesn’t always mean that the pitcher is throwing more pitches through the strike zone; a curveball that dives under the zone and is swung on is just as much a strike as a fastball on the corner that’s looked at. So a pitcher may produce a high strike/ball ratio just by having insane “stuff” (be it movement or speed) that hitters just miss a lot. Pretty much the only way I can think of to reduce walks is to make them more of a penalty for the defense in some way, like letting the batter go to second base in certain situations (any 4-0 walk, be it intention or otherwise), or to add some monetary penalty (teams or players have to pay a tax if their walk rate is too high), or to make a huge fundamental change like going back to the late 1800s when batters had to watch 6 balls to draw a walk.

The problem with increasing the in-game penalty is that it just makes it MORE beneficial for a hitter to draw a walk. Say MLB makes a change like saying once a team allows four walks, any walk beyond that sends the batter to second. Batters become even LESS likely to swing at that point, unless they have two strikes. It might perhaps make pitchers throw a few more strikes than they already do, but I think that’s counterbalanced by the fact that the hitter is going to be looking to swing less frequently. Same with the 6-ball walk: that just delays the inevitable. It gives the pitcher a bit more leeway, so he’s going to probably throw FEWER strikes, and the hitter can be more selective because he knows the pitcher will throw fewer strikes.

The monetary penalty has some value, I think. It doesn’t make it more likely for a team to walk a guy in any single situation, so they still can use the intentional walk as before if they feel a game is on the line, but I feel like overall walks will drop because a pitcher will want to shy away from the penalty level. He’ll still pitch around Miguel Cabrera, but he’s going to be a bit more likely to throw strikes to a lesser player like Michael Martinez. Also, it doesn’t change the fundamental rules of the game, something I always prefer to avoid (I don’t believe that the American League has played actual baseball, aside from interleague games on the road, since 1972).

(If you aren’t a giant nerd, “^2” is shorthand for “squared.” Hence, hour 24*24, or day 24. I know. Don’t worry about it.)

Things continue more-or-less as they were. The number of sick people keeps climbing, as does the number of dead people, sadly. I won’t go into a lot of detail about the virus because that info can be acquired elsewhere. Instead, I offer a few highlights about what Team Hearn has been up to.

Official remote learning has begun! The kids use a tool called Schoology where they can get their assignments and communicate with teachers and peers. So far it seems to be working reasonably well, although it can be very, very hard for parents to figure out what assignments there are for a child without clicking each “course” and digging through it, which for 3 kids with 6-8 courses (specials like PhysEd and Music are included for the youngers) is time-prohibitive. Still, it keeps the children reasonably busy for a few hours, even if we end up having to monitor them and answer questions.

Working from home is going okay. It’s generally fine for me; there’s literally no reason for me to go to the office other than to be face-to-face with people, and because my employer has expanded so much in the last few years, we don’t have enough desks. Half the time I went to the office I had to find a little university-library-style carrel in which to set up my laptop, which means I don’t get my multi-screen view, so it’s actually less productive than being at home. I was working from home 3-4 days a week anyway.

Sarah’s job is more complicated because of the need to manage people and run training sessions and presentations, but she’s been using Zoom to her advantage there. Teacher “inservice” classes have been more or less cancelled at this point. The hardest thing was that she had started “facilitating” an actual college class this year, working with professors and running small discussion sections. That has proved a challenge for everyone involved, but they’re once again using Zoom to help. Hopefully they can avoid being “zoom-bombed” with porn…

As the weather improves we’ve been trying to spend as much time outside as humanly possible. I was able to mount a trailer hitch to our van, which means I can attach my 5-bicycle rack to it and haul wheels to places to ride. On Sunday, we loaded up and went to Bellevue State Park, where the boys and I put a few miles on our legs on the Delaware Greenway Trail, while Sarah and Josephine hiked around the pond.

Being trapped at home does give me more opportunity to work around the house, so I’ve been able to get yard work done when it hasn’t been raining. Hopefully this year I can get my lawn looking decent; every year I try to over-seed and fertilize, and every spring it still comes up with bare patches and brown spots. I also need to hack away at tons of stumps from trees that have fallen or been removed.

Since any church with any ****ing sense has cancelled all in-person services and is doing things online, I haven’t had to get up on Sunday mornings to go sing in weeks. However, I did get the opportunity to be the “Easter soloist” for my usual church, Christ Church Christiana Hundred. On Easter day they’ll release a pretty high-production-value video of a service featuring yours truly fighting his way through some challenging Ralph Vaughan Williams solos, along with hymns and other pieces with organ and trumpet, plus the actual Easter liturgy, minus the Eucharist. We recorded it in pieces last Friday and I think it went very well.

My facial hair situation has gotten…grim.

Sarah is not thrilled, but tolerating it. I keep hoping the moustache will fill out a bit, but based on the rest of the beard my hopes are probably going to be dashed.

Edit: For some reason this didn’t post on the day I expected it to, but instead on roughly day 29. I cannot explain this, but do not feel that you are crazy that this post seems mis-dated.

(Day 10, for those uninitiated into Snoopisms.)

As others have noted, the COVID19 quarantine is giving people a lot of opportunities for activities. Folks are spending time outside, cleaning their homes, educating their kids, learning to play instruments, and even putting on virtual concerts.

In addition to some of the stuff I mentioned last week, we’ve been doing some baking:

Working on a 1000-piece puzzle:

Creating art:

I’ve been practicing the piano nearly every day for at least a half-hour, and have taken my skills from “yikes” to “I can play like a couple Bach 2-part inventions fairly well and fumble my way through sight-reading easier hymns.” By the end of the crisis I hope to be up to “Playing some portion of Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’.”

The call came in tonight; schools are closed until May 15th, which is terrifying. We’ve decided to try and do at least 3 hours of “learning” a day, in sort of a Montessori-style method. The kids are given some tasks, and then choose from among them to be completed in any order:

• Some Duolingo language practice
• Online learning (Dreambox, Khan Academy, etc.)
• Practicing musical instruments
• Math
• Lots and lots (and lots) of reading, followed by crafting some kind of response

If they want to do other stuff, like googling up how the nudibranch do, they can absotively have at it. The kids seem to have embraced the new schedule, at least after day one, and we’re happy to have their heads out of devices for a few hours. The downside is that they require a certain amount of monitoring and they constantly request help or attention, which means getting our actual jobs done is a touch challenging.

As to the crisis itself, so far nobody we know is sick, but the counts just keep going up, so I suspect it’s inevitable. I’m legit worried about my older relatives and friends, particularly since people don’t seem to have the sense God gave a gooseberry and keep going out and getting breathed on and touched. It’s a shame that governments are having to order people to stay home, but apparently we’re too stupid to be relied on.

We’re also getting our spring allergies, so every day I wake up with a tickle in my throat thinking “Uh oh,” and by mid-morning I’m feeling fine. Probably going to continue until one of us actually gets the dreaded COVID.

Avoid touching, you know, anything. Especially your face. Tell your kids to read. Stay safe out there!

The best day to start documenting what’s going on during a quarantine is during the first day of the quarantine; the second best day is whatever today happens to be. Today, six days in, is when it finally occurred to me it might be wise to start noting what’s been happening, what might happen next, and any other thoughts that occur to me.

So, after 5 years of zero updates, I’m resurrecting matthearn.com, at least for the Duration of the Current Emergency.

A brief glimpse of what’s happened so far, just for posterity; the details can be found at many other sources far more reliable than I.

• A new (“novel”) coronavirus erupted in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
• It reached the United States via cruise ship and other travelers in early 2020, and rapidly began to spread throughout the country.
• The Trump Administration, in its collective “wisdom,” played down the severity of the outbreak, even implying that it is a “Democratic hoax.”
• In mid-March, the first cases were confirmed in Delaware; a professor and three of his students who apparently picked it up at a conference out of state. Other cases began to be confirmed over the following days.
• Friday, March 13th, Governor Carney ordered schools to be closed for two weeks, and asked people to begin to use “social distancing” to slow the spread of the virus and avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, which only has so many ventilators and ICU beds.
• Shortly thereafter, following the lead of other states, the Governor orders restaurants and bars to become “take-out only”, with no eat-in service.
• Saturday, March 14th, the Hearn family goes into more-or-less complete lockdown. Our eldest asks if he can still play with his friends; we decree that he can only do so outside, not trapped in the same room sharing germs.
• Tuesday, March 17th, our eldest and his friends spend the afternoon writhing all over each other on the trampoline in our backyard.
• Wednesday, March 18th, one of those friends is now reportedly “sick.”

So we’re playing the waiting game to see if any of us contract some sort of virulent illness. The good news is that none of us is in the demographic that’s in significant danger, so I’m not terribly concerned about any of us getting sick to the point of hospitalization or worse.

There is much to be concerned about, of course. We’re lucky; my jobs can be done from anywhere, and Sarah’s office completely closed, so she and I have both continued to work, while trying to keep our children’s brains from atrophying. We’ve been making them try to do a little bit of schoolwork every day, though at this point they’ve completed everything that had been assigned before schools closed their doors, and have mostly moved on towards educational videos and Duolingo. I’m hoping we can start doing some actual instructional time, because it’s looking increasingly likely that schools will be out for far more than the two weeks that the Governor originally decreed.

I’m worried for people who can’t work remotely, or whose jobs depend on folks actually being able to leave their homes. We’re going to try and get in the habit of getting take-out from local restaurants on occasion to help keep them afloat. It does look like the Federal government is actually doing its job; we could see billions of dollars spent on actually helping people, which is more novel than the virus itself.

My main concern is for anyone over the age of 60. Not just for their health, though the virus seems to be far more dangerous for them, but the stock market tanking seems to be hitting everybody’s retirement funds pretty hard. I know the value of mine has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks. Luckily, I’m 17 years away from being able to withdraw anything from mine, so I’ve actually increased my 401K contribution to buy while the funds are cheap. Plenty of older folks are in a tough spot right now, particularly if they didn’t move their money from the stock market to less volatile investments as they got closer to retirement.

We’ve decided that it’s possible for us to “isolate” but still spend some time outside, which is good. The kids and I have played soccer in our yard every evening this week, and yesterday afternoon we drove to the DuPont Environmental Education Center (the funny-looking building in Churchman’s Marsh south of Frawley Stadium and the Shipyard Shops in south Wilmington); the center itself is closed, but all of the walking paths are open. There were a fair number of other people there as well, taking advantage of the warm sun. The Jack Markell Trail was also open and busy; I might need to take a bicycle down there and go for a ride if I can break away for a few hours. We hope to start going to state parks, particularly as the weather warms, but have to deal with the fact that the younger kids will want to use playgrounds where they found them, and I have to assume that every inch of a jungle gym is crawling with COVID19 and my children cannot stop touching their own faces.

From reports, China is starting to recover from its outbreak; hopefully more good news comes from there. Meanwhile, hunker down and wash your hands everyone!

Golly, it’s been a brutal week. I actually wrote a post on Monday but forgot to actually, you know, publish it, and I kept putting it off, and procrasting, as I do, and yesterday was my birthday so Sarah’s just been stuffing me with things that are very bad for me and inspiring me to drink too much.

So it’s all her fault, as you can obviously see.

I’ve managed to keep up with my workouts, for the most part, though today was supposed to be a scheduled swim and I just didn’t have it in me. I decided to go for a nice hike at the office instead, wandered through the woods and did about 3 miles of hills in an hour. I didn’t measure my heart rate but it was definitely elevated; I might add a weekly hike to my workouts, at least until early March when I start really ramping up the triathlon training.

Tomorrow’s going to be fairly hectic, so it remains to be seen if I’ll get any training in at all other than my chins and pushups; I have to take my truck to the shop for repairs and borrow a car and drive to take a certification test about an hour away, and I’m cutting things a little fine to get there in time. If I can’t lift tomorrow, hopefully I find time for it over the weekend, otherwise I will have a super sad.

I haven’t checked my weight in a few days because my diet has been horrific, though I don’t seem to have backslid much when I look in the mirror. It looks like I may be writing off most of January, and I probably need to seriously think about a different way to stay accountable and make better food choices more frequently.

I probably should not have spent Friday and Saturday making fun of all the people who were frantically running around buying up all the batteries, milk, bread, and gasoline. Irene exacted a measure of revenge, although I should be clear nothing terribly serious happened, nobody was hurt, and I suspect insurance will take care of everything. Still, we got home from a short road trip to Virginia to find the following backyard devastation:

I may have to purchase a more substantial chainsaw before tackling any of this, although if Liberty Mutual will pay for it I’ll just get somebody out to chop up everything into firewood and grind the brush up and haul it away. Hopefully everybody is dry and warm and not missing parts of their homes or persons.

I am not an economic genius. My grasp of world-wide fiscal issues is worse than tenuous. But certain things seem obvious: it’s probably better for people to be working and earning an income than not. This is why I’ve greatly enjoyed a post from Karl Smith and a follow-up from Matthew Yglesias (whose twitter handle @mattyglesias always scans to me as Matty Glesias, for some reason). Short, but read ’em.

My feeling on the matter of stimulus spending, as opposed to tax cuts, is this: let’s say you have a middle-class fellow. (Ignore for the moment that tax cuts, as designed by Republicans, usually benefit only the richest of Americans, completely ignoring the middle-class, who are expected to benefit from the “trickle down” of these excess dollars.) Let’s call him Marv Strawman. He’s doing okay right now, all things considering. He’s still got a nice job in IT, his wife’s working part time doing some clerical work at a nearby school. He’s got a little savings, but not as much as he’d hope, and he’s not adding to it because nobody at his company got raises this year, and he’s trying to help out his brother, whose carpet-cleaning business is slowly failing. He doesn’t have any credit card debt, luckily, because he’s pretty smart. Smart enough to know that big expenditures in his situation would be a bad idea, drawing down on an already meagre savings account. So while he’d like to get his out-dated bathroom remodeled, he can’t really swing it this year, and probably not the next.

(As I’m typing this, I realize I’m using a close cousin to the anecdotal evidence argument I talked about the other day. I never said I knew what I was talking about. Bear with me.)

Then, he finds out that the Federal Government, in all its wisdom, has decided to give a nice big tax cut, because while adding to the deficit with additional spending smacks of socialism, doing so to give money back to Americans is, well, American. He does his tax return and discovers that, sure enough, he saved about $600 this year. Now: as a smart guy, what is he to do with this money, knowing that the economy is still in tatters and nobody knows what tomorrow will hold? Does he get his old, but perfectly functioning, bathroom redone? Does he splurge on a nice new TV for his bedroom?

No. If he’s got any sense, he socks it away in his savings account and saves it for a rainy day. He is behaving perfectly rationally.

Now, the other option: the government keeps Mr. Strawman’s $600, along with a few billion dollars in income from the taxes of many other Americans. It then comes to Mr. Strawman’s town (Strawville; it’s actually named for the founder, a distant relative of Marv, something of which he’s inordinately proud) and hires up a bunch of people, including the younger Mr. Strawman, whose business finally collapsed into bankruptcy, to plant a new park in the center of town. It also renovates a local train station for the line leading to the Big City so commuters don’t have to sit on benches that smell strongly of hobo piss. Then it sends some grant money to the town Baptist church, which uses it to build a shelter for the hobos so they’ll stop hanging around the train station. It also pours some money into the police force, so they can rehire the 3 officers they laid off, and they can get back to rousting hobos and preventing kids from vandalizing the new park. And all of these working people get decent living wages and can afford to feed their families, and Marv Strawman takes the money he’d set aside to help his brother and buys a $600 TV for his bedroom. (And all of these people keep paying nice taxes back to the municipal, state, and federal governments.)

Doesn’t that sound like a more pleasant outcome than Mr. Strawman having six hundo in a savings account earning 1%?

fever makes comedy work in brain again