Anger Management, or Why I am not the Cubs GM

Woke up this morning to some annoying news -- the Cubs traded for the Marlins closer and aren't planning to re-sign Kerry Wood. This pisses me off, as Wood has long been my favorite Cub. I understand the reasoning behind it, and I'm not a big fan of giving closers huge contracts in general, but still. This is Wood. He's supposed to be a Cub. I want the Cubs to be in a position to get to the World Series, but I want Wood to be part of it. He deserves it.

It's pretty ironic, too, considering Wood posted a sparkling 1.08 WHIP last year, the best of his career. IMO, WHIP is by far the best stat we have to measure a pitcher's effectiveness. I see a pitcher with anything below 1.15 and I start salivating. (If you really want to see me start drooling, bring up Greg Maddux's stats from the late 80s/early 90s.) OK, this is kind of gross imagery. I'll stop.

Anyway, I am going to be depressed to see Wood in a different club's uniform. He's been a Cub for 10 years (ten years! God, time goes by fast). I've told my friends this story a lot, but I always like to claim that I should have been at his 20K game in 1998. I was a senior in high school at the time and one of the sports editors of our school yearbook. (BTW, 1998 yearbook = best designed yearbook Central ever put out, I guarantee it).

So, as spring rolled around and we were putting the finishing touches on the book, our yearbook advisor decided that we had earned a field trip. She entertained suggestions from us, and mine was obviously that we should go to a Cubs game. But I guess she thought she wouldn't be able to pass that off as educational enough, so we ended up going to the Museum of Modern Art (where, it turned out, one of the halls had a huge exhibit up dedicated to vaginas--well, I'm sure it had some kind of thematic meaning beyond that, but all I remember 10 years later is looking at lots and lots of vaginas and thinking, "why am I not at the Cubs game?"). Then we spent the afternoon at Watertower Place (fancy shopping mall on Michigan Ave)--highly educational of course. That day was May 6, 1998. On the way back, in the bus, I listened to the game in disbelief as Wood racked up strikeout after strikeout and got home just in time to see the ninth inning on TV (and Wood's postgame interview, where he shoke like a leaf as he held the headpiece to his ear).

The next day one of the many articles about the game in the Tribune was a little blurb about how the tickets from that game had become instant collectibles and were already selling for a couple hundred bucks a piece. Just to be cruel, I brought it in to show to everyone in my yearbook office.

Anyway, ever since that day, Wood has been my (and I'm sure thousands of other fans')favorite Cub. I'm gonna miss him.

P.S. Looking for a photo of Wood's 20K game, I stumbled upon this site, where someone I've never heard of reviews pitching mechanics. Really interesting stuff.

Also, I am so proud to see that he listed Greg Maddux as someone who has superb mechanics. When I taught myself how to pitch when I was a kid, I modeled my windup and pitching motion after what I saw Maddux do, as he was my favorite Cub at the time. As I grew up, and he left the Cubs, I completely forgot that I had learned how to pitch from watching him. You can imagine how shocked I was in 2004, as Maddux returned to the Cubs and I watched him closely for the first time since I was about ten years old, to realize that I had the exact same windup and delivery as him. It was one of those bizarre moments of suddenly recalling a memory you didn't know existed, as my brain leapt back over a decade to an image of myself standing in the middle of my family room, mimicking his motion as closely as possible with every pitch projected on the TV in front of me.

Sadly, I never progressed past the windup stage of pitching knowledge, so my childhood repertoire of pitches consisted of one 40 mph fastball, over and over. Hey, I could hit a target, at least! I guess I should be thankful that I didn't model myself after Mitch Williams.

The Fish is Me

I am still a huge fish in PLO. This is sad, as I have spent about a month now working on my game. Well, playing anyway. I haven't watched enough videos recently, because it's more fun to play than to learn (yes, I am the perfect fish). My recent mode seems to be: get home from work, eat dinner, play 4 tables of PLO50 on my laptop while watching an episode of something on HULU in the corner of my screen. Not the most profitable session type for me, but it has been kinda relaxing and enjoyable to play the "lunch-money" stakes again. And now I've gotten myself addicted to PLO, so while I recognize that I do suck quite badly at it, I'm gonna keep working on it and hopefully pull myself up into the "competent small stakes player" realm in the near future.

I am pretty curious what my PLO stats are like, but since I've been playing mostly on the laptop (a Mac), I haven't bothered with buying Pokertracker Omaha. My brother has promised to help me fix up my desktop comp when he's home for Thanksgiving, so I think I'll get it then and import all my hands. I'm guessing I'm playing too LAGGy, like 30/20/4, and winning at something sad like 1ptbb/100 (at least, I think I don't have a negative winrate--would be pretty depressing to find out otherwise. It's kinda hard to keep track when I'm jumping back and forth between my normal NL games and the PLO).

The main thing I've learned the hard way about the difference between PLO and NLH is the suckiness of pocket pairs in PLO. Still hasn't quite sunk in, though. Last night I was watching a video where the pro mucked crappy kings (like KK38r) from the SB against a BTN open without a second thought, and I was like, "Oh shit, I'm supposed to be folding there?!?" Weird game.

The nice thing about the PLO setup I have going right now is that I have been able to watch a shit-ton of stuff on hulu.com. The other night I even had this bizarre dream that I was going to open the first hulu review site (I actually looked this up afterwards and learned that there already is at least one of these--so sad, dream self). I'll have to settle for reviewing stuff in my blog instead.

So far on hulu I have watched:

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia -- great, great show. One of the funniest shows I've seen, in fact. I have my coworker's son to thank for recommending it to me. Best description of it I've heard is "Seinfeld on crack."

Friday Night Lights -- This show really grew on me. I was depressed when I got through the second season and realized hulu didn't have any more episodes. The show kept doing ridiculous, soap-opera-y things to the characters, but never enough at one time to completely sink the plotline. This show does get some extra points in my book b/c of all the hot guys on it.

The O.C. -- Yeah, I can't really believe I watched this show either. Don't know what came over me. It pretty much sucked as badly as could be expected. The scenery was nice, though (lots of mansions and beaches to keep my mind off the plot). And Peter Gallagher's eyebrows amuse me. As do storylines about the macho, bully kid walking in on his supposedly-straight dad making out with his male friend at his car dealership.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents -- There are a ton of these on hulu; took me like 2 weeks to get through them all. They all kind of blend together after a while, but the intro/outro bits by Hitchcock were always amusing. Three out of four episodes seemed to involve either one spouse poisoning the other for their insurance money or someone killing their wealthy relative for their inheritance money. Good times, good times.

Alfred Hitchcock Hour -- I never realized before that this was a different show. Hitchcock Presents was a 30 min. show that ran in the late 50s; the Hitchcock Hour was an hour long show from the early 60s. So far I'm just partway through the first season of this show, but I am generally liking it better than "Presents." Dramas are much better suited to the hour format rather than half hour, IMO. Actually, the first episode of this show cracked me up b/c it was about poker (main character is secretly a pro gambler and his younger brother is a poker fish who thinks he is good, so the older brother decides to "school him" before he ruins his life or whatever)--and it was kinda surprising to hear that the term "fish" was in the poker lexicon even back then.

My favorite episode so far has been one called Hangover, starring Tony Randall:

The scene where he is fucking up his presentation to the ad execs is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've ever watched. Just brutal.

A Rant

WTF is up with everyone using the term "drop" to mean when something is released? E.g., sentence I just read on another blog: "We're never shy about touting an open-source, highly-extendable browser, so feel free to try it out when it drops." That has to be the most retarded slang I've ever seen. And I keep coming across it everywhere -- new albums don't get released anymore, they "drop." WTF is wrong with this world?!?

On a slightly more important note, I am pretty bummed about this Prop 8 nonsense in California. What a juxtaposition--we elect our first multiracial President on the same day that this piece of codified bigotry gets passed. It never ceases to amaze me how close-minded people can be. Who the fuck cares if your church defines marriage as between a man and a woman? Go hang out in your intolerant little church, then. But don't push your religious views onto the rest of society and the government. And don't tell me you or your church are accepting of gay people even though you voted for prop 8, as if merely acknowledging their existence is some great accomplishment of tolerance. If you were accepting of gay people, you certainly wouldn't be asking the government to deny them the same rights as you or me. And, no, same rights does not mean "the right for a man to marry a woman." It means the right for one person to marry whichever other damn person they wish. Consenting adult & consenting adult. This is not rocket science, guys. It's basic human decency. You want to tell someone else who they are allowed to marry? Seriously. Say that to my face.

OK, that topic gets me a bit riled up. I guess I'll save my poker thoughts for later.

The Power of Obama

Full Tilt was running a 3x points special for election night, so I put in a solid NLH session for the first time in several weeks. I guess my luckbox and my NL skills are a bit rusty. I may have set a personal record for number of times I bluffed into the nuts. Someone needs to remind me that I do better as a nit.

Obama is making his victory speech now, though, and I can't stop smiling. What's a couple of buyins on a night like this? (although, in retrospect, I definitely should have gone down to Grant Park for the celebration and skipped the poker grinding--results oriented thinking much?) It's all pretty amazing, though. If someone had asked me a couple years ago when there would be the first non-white President, my estimate would have been a few decades from now. But apparently America is a better country than I gave it credit for. I'm proud. I'm excited to see what President Obama will accomplish. And, most of all, I can't wait until we look back on Obama as one of the greatest presidents in US history, and my mom has to admit that she is the worst judge of character in our family. I'm going to bed smiling, dammit. I'll worry about my stupid poker leaks later.