Dodger Thoughts

Jon Weisman's outlet for dealing psychologically with the Los Angeles Dodgers, baseball and life

Month: June 2019

The last damn walk to school

For 51 years I’ve been on this earth, for nearly 17 of those years as a parent and for 12 as a parent at our neighborhood elementary school.

I have been walking one or more of my children to that school since 2007. Today was the last day.

This wouldn’t matter so much if those seven-minute walks hadn’t been my favorite moments to be alive.

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How the NCAA playoffs clash with the pitch-count era

UCLA pitcher and Texas Rangers draftee Ryan Garcia, 21, threw 112 pitches in his NCAA regionals start, then pitched in relief two days later. (Scott Chandler/UCLA Athletics)

In a typical regular-season week of NCAA college baseball, schools will play one midweek game (on a Tuesday, for example) against a non-conference opponent and then a three-game series Friday through Sunday. In short, four games every seven days.

In the opening round of the NCAA playoffs, schools participate in a four-team, double-elimination tournament. This means that if a school loses one of its first two games, it must play five games in four days in order to advance.

This presents two problems:

  1. The regular season doesn’t prepare a team for the playoffs.
  2. Workloads for pitching staffs are ramped up radically.

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The scourge of the backward apostrophe

The nearly ubiquitous word processing program, Microsoft Word, has perhaps been a net positive for society. But it has its failings, including one so deleterious that it is rotting away the core of punctuation — and in turn, society — as we know it.

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