The Blog

Spring training is finally upon us, which means Matthew is already asking about fantasy baseball (and has been for a few weeks now). It also means ESPN is worth watching at two in the afternoon. Yesterday, I had the Braves/Astros game on my office TV while I was grading some papers. Spring training bottom lines are usually full of fantasy figurations (a.k.a. the process of making the figure 8). This year, there seems to be a new feature – I've never seen it before. This year, the ESPN fantasy gurus will fill your bottom line with "Top 3 Outfielders [or whatever] On the Decline." Kind of a depressing feature, but I suppose it's useful information for fantasy players. The big surprise, though, was who was on the list for outfielders (the only list I actually caught all of):

1. Nick Swisher (no real surprise)
   
2. Gary Matthews, Jr. (another shocker)
   
3. Andruw Jones
   

Now here's where I have problems. There's no way Andruw should be #3 on this list. If he's on it at all, he should be #1. He's earned it. But, honestly, he shouldn't even be in contention. He's signed a minor league contract with the Rangers. Is he really going to see much daylight behind last year's #1 OF "On the Rise" Josh Hamilton?

So, I got this wild idea last night to try to determine which NCAA basketball conferences have the most teams with zero non-conference losses. I knew, when I made this plan, that the ACC has three: Clemson, Wake, and UNC. My goal was to make a worthwhile comparison between the ACC and the Big East, thereby evaluating the strength of the respective conferences in some meaningful way. I figured that this calculation would prove (in a small way) that the ACC is the stronger conference because they only lose to each other. So, anyhow, it turns out both Connecticut and Pittsburgh also have zero non-conference losses, and a 3-to-2 ratio doesn't really prove dominance. I suppose I could argue that 3 out of 12-to-2 out of 16 is a more meaningful comparison, but who really wants to do that? It might also be worth mentioning that ACC teams have an average 2.25 non-conference losses, while Big East teams average 2.75. But I don't know if you go in for that sort of thing.

Another interesting tidbit that came out of this process: Stanford is the only Pac-10 team with zero non-conference losses, but they still have 11 losses on the season (4-11 in conference play).

The fourth and final Futurama "movie" was released this week. It was less than spectacular, but none of the recent movie releases have come close to the show's original brilliance, which doesn't bode well for the upcoming Arrested Development movie that has evidently been confirmed.

QotD (submitted by m, not to be confused with M from MI-6):

What names should have "the" before them?

My take: The Batman is always good, but I'm going to have to go with the Austin because if you know the Austin, then you don't really need to know any others.