I got my second turn at live action yesterday, this time with a high school team playing for us. About three Seacrest H.S. alumni who are currently in the high minor leagues came out with them. The good news is, I did okay – only one major screw-up, and that was one that would never be noticed except by a professional umpire. The bad news is, even with a backup Baltimore Orioles catcher batting, no one got on base. I saw two ground outs and a fly ball as the plate umpire[1]. As the base umpire, I saw a ground out, a fly out, and a popup. I did get to call “foul ball!” once. The end result is, I’m more relaxed than I was last week, I’ve built some confidence… but I still want to see how I handle full-speed baseball action with runners actually on base.
The science department is debating the “slurpable noodle” question from www.straightdope.com. Our investigation currently centers on wet vs. oily vs. dry noodles, and their slurpability quotient. Stay tuned for updates.
Dan, the Canadian gentleman who returned just recently from years managing an arctic aviation base, studied with me last night. Dan is the only person here who has any sort of serious nerdly credentials. How do I know? We discussed how poorly-written the baseball rulebook is. We recognize that this is for historical reasons – clauses tended to be tacked on to apply to specific situations, when it would have been clearer to just rewrite. Dan says that he and his friends re-wrote the entire Dungeons and Dragons rulebook over the course of four years, clarifying ambiguities and adjusting what they felt to be unbalanced situations.
The science department is debating the “slurpable noodle” question from www.straightdope.com. Our investigation currently centers on wet vs. oily vs. dry noodles, and their slurpability quotient. Stay tuned for updates.
Dan, the Canadian gentleman who returned just recently from years managing an arctic aviation base, studied with me last night. Dan is the only person here who has any sort of serious nerdly credentials. How do I know? We discussed how poorly-written the baseball rulebook is. We recognize that this is for historical reasons – clauses tended to be tacked on to apply to specific situations, when it would have been clearer to just rewrite. Dan says that he and his friends re-wrote the entire Dungeons and Dragons rulebook over the course of four years, clarifying ambiguities and adjusting what they felt to be unbalanced situations.
Speaking of Dan, we have *got* to get this guy to give a talk at Woodberry. He has amazing stories of his time spent with the Inuit, including 60 mile treks in arctic blizzards, hunting caribou and polar bear, almost dying because he stepped a yard away from his snowmobile to relieve himself (the visibility was so bad he couldn’t find the snowmobile again), learning Inuit survival and navigation skills and Inuit history, living in igloos occasionally... he did ask me to turn down the heat in what I felt was a slightly cold room. :-)
More tonight or tomorrow. Time to talk about batting out of order. Maybe tonight I'll have a chance to describe one particular baseball rule that, if enforced correctly, does little but make the umpires look bad.
[1] I didn’t get out from my position far enough for either… the steel-toed plate shoes make me even slower than normal. I’ll have to work on speed in full equipment.
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