i got to the airport pretty early for my 9:30pm departure – around 7:30 or so. normally i wouldn’t get to the airport that early, but that’s just how this trip went. i checked in and went to the relatively-short security line. i was in line behind a couple who, to me, seemed german or something – really unfamiliar with security, required multiple attempts to get through the metal detector, etc. the guy didn’t even pull his laptop out of his backpack when putting it through the x-ray, which required a second trip through the x-ray machine just before my bag and laptop and shoes went in. all in all, pretty freaking annoying.

i got through security and i was sitting at my gate reading work emails and thinking about how i should do a little work, but just resisting with all my might. i noticed the couple that was ahead of me in security walking by – for whatever reason i noticed them going towards one of the dead-ends in mccarran’s b terminal. i didn’t give it a second thought.

10-20 minutes passed and i decided, yes, it was time to do some work. i unzip my bag and reach in to get my work laptop. i thought briefly that the computer seemed a bit light to me, but only once i opened it up did i realize the problem. “don’t forget to call the food bank” was written on a post-it note in the bottom left corner
what fucking food bank?
oh shit
what have i done

that’s right, i swapped laptops with the guy who was in front of me in security. i took his 13″ mbp, he took my 15″. adrenaline and butterflies took over my body in a wave, starting directly from my lower intestine. i somehow processed that yes, he and his wife and a second couple had walked down the hallway to my right. i ran down there.

now you’re in an open space. there are 6 gates in a circle in front of you. each gate has people boarding and each gate has lots of people sitting around. there are slot machines in the middle. what the hell do you do?

i ran from gate to gate looking for a sign of the people i had seen earlier. thank fucking god the wife (i presume) had a very distinctive light blue jacket on, because i found her and her friend sitting at gate 24, waiting for their flight to edmonton. it took the longest 45 seconds of my life. i explained the situation and had no issues swapping laptops with the (apparently) canadians.

“that would have sucked for everyone” her friend said. “a lot” i agreed.

and that is how you have good luck in vegas. while this story might seem anti-climactic, anything less than this ending would have sucked for everyone a lot.

vote in comments.

“In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers,” the nonprofit organization wrote. “We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.”

It continued: “Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4′s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that ‘mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.’ The tests also indicate that AT&T’s network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4′s much-reported signal woes.”

here is apple’s piece of shit lying statement. it is not a software problem, you liars, but you know that. it is a goddamn terrible design decision. and you can’t sit here and argue essentially that all phones have this problem to an extent AND you have a software problem.

ok, i’m getting carried away. but let me pose this question: if i am making a phone call, and then i shift my hands around and all of a sudden i’m covering the antenna, why does my perfectly motherfucking clear phone call drop, if this is just a simple software fix? was my perfectly clear phone call confused by the incorrect number of bars displayed on the phone and thus thought it had service, when in fact the service was very low the whole time?

WHAT KIND OF JEDI BULLSHIT ARE YOU ASSHOLES TRYING TO PULL?

the sad part is that due to my employment at AT&T it makes no sense for me to change phone companies. but apple is really, really starting to piss me off. and i’m not even going to bother linking to the piece of shit apple apologists out there, all you assholes make me sick. why don’t you push the company you love to do better instead of mocking everyone who recognizes that apple is, right now, completely batshit insane and pretty evil. you’re like republicans, you fucks.

this is day 3 of my really bad mood.

male bonding – nothing hurts

i saw the video for “year’s not long” the other day on stereogum. the video is … well, whatever. it degenerates into dudes making out, which i wouldn’t consider noteworthy except for the force with which these dudes make out. this is, of course, the point of the video. and tangential to how awesome i find this noise-pop to be.

paul simon – graceland

talk about being late to the party.

passion pit – manners

late to the party here, but not quite as egregious. it’s slowly grown on me since i first bothered to listen, to the point where i feel obligated to tell people that yes, i am one of those people who likes passion pit.

japandroids – post-nothing

i’ve been pimping this album to anyone i can since i started listening to it, but i guess i never really mentioned it here. maybe because i disappeared from here for a while. regardless, AWESOME. i like all these bands who listened to my bloody valentine but then were like “let’s make it rock”

deftones – diamond eyes

i’ll stop here for now. diamond eyes is the platonic ideal of an album from an established band. the deftones have been around since i was in middle school pumping out awesome, evolving hard rock. they’ve taken a leap with this album, where they combined the best elements of previous works and produced something so awesome that it brings their previous works into a new, better light. let me say that again in a different way – this album makes their past albums sound better. think about how incredible an accomplishment that is and then go listen.

i’ve learned that having a james loney at first just won’t fly – there’s too much power at the position, and i put myself in a terrible disadvantage by not getting a piece of that power. you can’t make it up in other places. so i budgeted $45 for a 1B and hoped i’d get someone in the 3rd tier (first being pujols, second being fielder+miguel cabrera+ryan howard).

and here’s what i wrote about carlos pena at the time:

priority 2 was a win, i think, but i could easily be wrong. i paid $37 for carlos pena, who is good but one step down from what i wanted.

well, so far, i’ve been wrong. carlos pena is hitting .184 with an OBP of .298 and SLG .331. 5 home runs, 19 runs scored. excuse my language, but he’s been pretty fucking brutal.

now a lot of other moves i made have worked out. my pitching has started slow but is doing well enough, and my offense, despite the deadweight at 1st, has been doing great, anchored by the extra power out of my pair of 2Bs, dan uggla and chase utley. as of right now i’m in 2nd place, 3.5 points out of first, but as recently as last week i was in 1st. however, players are starting to move (including a trade i just made that i’ll have to write about in another post), and i need to make a decision on first base. i have a couple of interesting guys who i can consider moving to a team out of contention in order to replace pena, but the only reason to consider doing that is if i truly don’t believe pena will rebound. so, let’s look a bit deeper into his 2010.

fangraphs is the first (and sometimes only) stop when trying to evaluate players a bit further. looking at pena’s page there, you’ll see his BABIP is .220, which is low and somewhat unlucky. however, the real problem seems to be his GB/FB ratio, which has jumped to .98 from being .54 last year and .63 the year before that. this is partially due to a lack of line drives (12.6% as opposed to 17-18% the last 3 years), but his GB% has just skyrocketed so far this year. it’s really dragging down every other part of his line, because his K rate has dropped(!) and his BB rate is only slightly down. so why has the GB% jumped?

well, here come the fun pictures:

the first picture is carlos pena’s pitches seen in 2009, and the second one is 2010 to this point. blue indicates balls, red indicates strikes, purple indicates swinging strikes, and green indicates a ball put into play. right now, it looks to me like pitchers have a really good approach when pena’s at the plate. the number of pitches on the outer half of the plate have decreased significantly, as well as the pitches in the upper half of the plate – everything is down and in, down and in. however, pena is also not punishing mistakes – there is far less green and far too much red on the second image. this could be because he’s generally trying to change his approach to adjust to the slump and see more pitches, but it seems to me that pena needs to adjust to how pitchers have adjusted to him – go down and get pitches in the lower half of the zone and punish the mistakes he has seen.

going back to fangraphs, it’s clear that not a lot has changed about pena’s plate discipline. he is swinging at a few more pitches outside the zone, but his overall contact% is actually higher than in year’s past. so while i can sit here and argue that his approach might need help, it seems much more likely that in reality, this is a bit of statistical noise from 39 games and 160 PA, and by the end of the season, we probably won’t remember the difficult beginning.

update a few things have changed as i was writing this post. first, i’m now in first place by 1.5 points with 80 points in the league. second, carlos pena hit a home run. but hey, i’m just working my way back into this blog game, so some rust is to be expected.

that’s the smell of new server. and new host. i moved from a dedicated server on layered tech over to the planet yesterday. i left layered tech because my server there was having a massive hardware failure and getting a new server from them was just too expensive. i went to the planet because of good reviews from people i trust, as well as the good pricing. hopefully it works out well.

moving servers was surprisingly easy. of course, now that i say that, something bad will happen, but dump mysql, copy over some php and configs, and voila, everything worked. the two things that were tricky were timezones (apparently i have a remarkable amount of code that is very reliant on eastern time, which i guess is my bad) and perl’s mysql interface (the one i was using is uh… discontinued?)

anyway, just a note that i am alive, my server is new, and i hope to start having a presence here again.

in your last paragraph you implicitly assume that kershaw = lee. do you believe that is true? kershaw seems to be younger, less expensive, and arguably better overall (better in ks and slg, even in era, worse in whip).

even if they are a wash, is turning smoak, santana and reimold into utley a coup? i like utley a whole lot (think he’s the 3rd best hitter in the league) but that is quite a bit to give up – its a very win-now deal. obviously if things dont go well you can try to flip utley again as we move along into the season, but do you expect you’d be able to get that much back for him?

no doubt your team is better off this year as a result of these deals on net. so i guess im trying to figure out the merits of looking at your roster post-draft and immediately deciding to either go for it all or sell it all off versus taking a more wait-and-see approach as the season progresses. i certainly fall more on the cautious side, but the past two years you seem to have gone with the aggressive strategy.

i think geoff’s overarching point was that i was implying a whole hell of a lot in my previous post, and i think he was right. so let me step through each of his comments and then address it as a whole, to better share my thinking on how to build an ottoneu dynasty team.

first off, he points out that i imply that kershaw = lee. his criticisms against that assumption are valid – kershaw is $7 less, he strikes out more batters, he still has tremendous amounts of upside since he’s 22, etc. kershaw is, for the purposes of long-term thinking, unequivocally better than cliff lee. however, i think cliff lee is not a terrible deal at $33, and i think what i gain back in cliff lee gets me, conservatively, 3/4 of the way back towards what i lost in clayton kershaw. the jump i made was that i can eat that 1/4 drop in a starter, because i have other good starters in my rotation. and what i got back – chase utley – more than makes up for that drop.

this brings me to the second point geoff made, of how i gave up 2 top 20 prospects, including a top 5 prospect in carlos santana, as well as a young, cheap OF in making these trades. i gained back 2 established stars with no upside and borderline keeper status for 3 surefire keepers and nolan reimold, who could be a keeper as well. both the prospects i gave up are major-league ready – santana should be up with the tribe this summer, and justin smoak is probably the starting first baseman for the texas rangers in 2011. and of course, clayton kershaw is clayton kershaw.

i agree, this was an aggressive set of moves to make before the season even started. i don’t know how my risks (see executing a flawed strategy) are going to pan out yet, and if they all somehow go well, i might not have needed to give up what i gave up. and if they all go badly, utley might not be enough to turn it around. i understand that, but there are two things to consider:

1. jee hang started his firesale. a team was going to end up with the big names off his team. he helped make the decision to be aggressive pre-season.
2. all it takes is one league win in 6 years to pay for entry fees. in other words, if i ever have the slightest chance to finish in the top 3, i have to jump on it as aggressively as possible.

my first point is simple – if i didn’t get cliff lee, allan might have gotten cliff lee. or geoff, or chad, or parker, or sugarman, or any other owner. and in order to pry utley from jon’s hands, knowing full well that jon wasn’t planning on moving him until mid-june at the earliest, i knew i’d have to catch his attention. clayton kershaw catches one’s attention, and cliff lee makes it bearable to part with clayton kershaw, with the added bonus of stopping another team with a strong staff from improving it with cliff lee.

and my second point is the whole point. its great to build a team organically with prospects that you stick with for 3 years until they pan out and give you above-average production at below-average prices for 6 years. but, it’s even better to seize your opportunities. because who knows – maybe justin smoak and carlos santana don’t pan out, maybe nolan reimold doesn’t ever become a top-tier OF, and maybe clayton kershaw never tops the year he had last year. prospects are a whole lot of fun, and finally getting to play them is one of the most exciting things about ottoneu, but the only thing that is more exciting is caring about at-bats in late september and walking away with 6 times what you put in.

after examining my team, it was clear that i was starting pitcher-heavy, and lacking in the OF and MI spots. however, my lack of a bullpen kind of made it hard for me to really lose much on the starter side, i decided.

a side note – i think our league might have a weakness in that we don’t have saves as a stat, but we have an equal number of starter and reliever lineup slots, with no P flex slots available. i think this needs to be balanced better, because i think starters are more important than relievers. then again, major league teams carry 11-12 pitchers and usually 4 guys who make 30+ starts, so maybe i’m wrong in my thinking. i would like to get some feedback on that.

so geoff basically convinced me that completely ignoring relievers was dumb, but given the lack of quality relievers available after the draft, i felt stuck on that side of things – i can get some replacement level guys for a dollar here or there, but i wasn’t going to make strides there. so, despite my starting pitching depth, i didn’t want to give up too much on that side, but i still wanted to add a major bat to my offense.

thankfully, just in time, one of our owners decided he wasn’t going to compete this year. this was probably an accurate assessment. due to work constraints, he was unable to attend our auction draft, and his proxy wasn’t able to keep up with us at auction, just because he didn’t know the tendencies of each owner. this owner was thus stuck with a few very overpriced offensive pieces, but nothing in the way of depth or skill at most positions. so, he started his fire sale immediately after the auction draft. i think my firesale last season was sooner, and while it is annoying for other owners for one owner to quit right away, i can tell you from personal experience that it is way more annoying to have to go through an entire baseball season without competing in your fantasy baseball league.

the owner in question, jee hang, had aaron hill, a decent but grossly overpaid (at $30) 2B option. he asked me for justin smoak, a prized prospect out of the rangers farm system that i picked up in my dealings last year. i said no, and looked to other 2B options. but, i kept in mind that jee hang valued smoak, which provided a lot of help later on.

that night, i had dinner with jon. jon’s team had 3 excellent, excellent players at excellent values – roy halladay, chase utley, and kevin youkilis. through the whole dinner, i interjected our otherwise scintillating conversation with trade offers for chase utley. ok, the conversation wasn’t actually scintillating, which made it easier for me to make those trade offers. i knew jon wasn’t willing to make a trade for just prospects – he needed a proven player back, and with his lack of depth on the rotation, plus the fact that utley’s cost ($44) was pushing up against keepable, i thought we’d make a good match. we left each other with the thought of clayton kershaw plus justin smoak for utley left dangling.

the next day was a crazy, crazy day.

i emailed jon and asked him to give me a deadline to make the trade. i emailed jee hang around 10am, and i told him that justin smoak was going to be traded very soon, unless he objected, and that my new asking price was a starting pitcher, NOT aaron hill.

in very rapid succession, i got multiple emails from jee hang saying he was extremely busy but that he didn’t want me to give up smoak, and from jon telling me he’d trade me utley for kershaw and carlos santana. this worked out as well as i wanted, though giving up santana was pretty tough for me as an indians fan and collector of catching prospects.

around 11:15am, fedex showed up to my office. this is important, because we didn’t expect fedex to show up until later in the evening, and on the fedex truck was 4 tickets to the morning session of the first round of the ncaa tournament in san jose, which we had assumed would be wasted. of course, my phone wasn’t charged. while i greatly enjoyed seeing murray state nail a buzzer-beater against vandy, being offline for 5 hours in the middle of the day was far from ideal. at some point during the second game i told jon i’d agree to utley ($44) for kershaw ($26) and santana . now my goal was to replace kershaw’s performance in my rotation.

jee hang had a couple of interesting starting pitcher targets, cole hamels (who i expect to bounce back strong this year) and cliff lee. hamels was a bit expensive, so i told jee hang (again, during the ncaa games, just before my phone died) that i wanted cliff lee, and offered a package of lower-tiered prospects in addition to justin smoak. he countered with nolan reimold (currently my #4 or #5 OF, $5) and smoak ($4) for lee ($33). i quickly, quickly accepted. i think consensus around the league would be that jee hang could have gotten more for cliff lee at that price, but there was a feeling that pitching in our league generally was cheap, so lee might be overpriced compared to his peers.

and that is how i turned clayton kershaw, justin smoak, carlos santana, and nolan reimold into chase utley and cliff lee. in other words, how i turned smoak + santana + reimold into chase utley over the course of two days. with both utley and lee, i was trying to acquire targets that were off the radar of the rest of the league. it was imperative that i moved quickly and snagged both players before i could get outbid on either, and on this front i was successful. i’m not sure if i would have been outbid on utley, but numerous owners have made it clear to both me and jee hang that my snagging of lee was, by their estimations, a coup.

so march 18 was an unequivocal success. and yes, i’ll talk about something else soon.