This is Ken Arneson s blog about baseball, brains, art, science, technology, philosophy, poetry, politics and whatever else Ken Arneson feels like writing about
Some changes to this site to announce: 1. I have imported all the blog entries from my 2020 baseball blogging adventure over on Catfish Stew into this blog, so all my writing is in one place. 2. I took the revamped HTML/CSS I did for that Toaster relaunch, and turned it into a WordPress theme, [ ]
The Oakland A s 2020 season ended on October 8, with a 11-6 game loss, and a 3-1 series loss, to the Houston Astros in the AL Division Series.
Winning a championship in baseball requires a certain amount of luck, perhaps more luck than in any other major sport. If Chad Pinder doesn t hit a fly ball to the opposite field at just the right height and angle and direction, under just the right atmospheric conditions, that turns pop flies into 3-run homers instead [ ]
I ve you ve been reading this blog, you know that I have, for the last two entries, been very angry. Anger is not rational. It s an emotion, the fight in fight or flight , designed by nature to get you to be willing to risk harm to yourself to address a threat. And because it s not rational, [ ]
I m still angry. I was going to put up some comparison of GWB s Mission Accomplished speech on the aircraft carrier, where they declared victory before victory had been achieved, and the Iraq War dragged on and on and on, to how it felt like the A s first round victory was a championship in itself, and [ ]
We got about five hours of happiness. A good plot throws some unexpected curveballs at you, surprises that move the narrative in a direction you were not expecting. That s difficult to do in a simple, straightforward story. That s why a lot of plots actually have several subplots that get woven together. Those subplots can interact [ ]
The A s have been so futile in the playoffs for so long now that there is sometime confusion about exactly how futile they ve been. I heard a couple of times today that the A s never win elimination games, but that s not exactly true. The A s have won some games when they ve been the ones threatened [ ]
This was the day I was dreading and, with one exception, it was as bad as I was expecting. Here s what I said the other day, in an article titled Dread: This team is built the same as so many of those other A s teams that failed in the playoffs: full of guys who mash [ ]
Well, here we are. We made it through a 60-game regular season in a pandemic, amidst racial unrest, and our state on fire. And if it wasn t for the sentence before this one, you could say the regular season was quite a success for the A s, as they won the American League Western Division by [ ]
It s Saturday, and there are three things impending in the upcoming week that I m dreading: The heat/fire/smoke situation The presidential debates The playoffs The heat/fire/smoke situation is first on the agenda. It started to warm up a bit on Saturday, but it s supposed to really get hot on Sunday and Monday, perhaps into the 90s [ ]
As the A s are preparing for the playoffs next week, we at home are doing the same thing, as the weather forecast is calling for the winds to turn from the east, making the temperatures soar, smoke from old fires to fill the air. make the risk of new ones starting extremely high. We re probably [ ]
With three days left in the regular season after the A s 5-1 loss to the Dodgers, the A s still have seven different possible playoff opponents in the first round: Astros, Angels, Twins, White Sox, Indians, Yankees, and Blue Jays. I tried to figure out what the odds were of each of these possibilities, but I [ ]
We had one day yesterday with nice enough air to go outside for awhile, and one day yesterday with normal enough news to be able to focus our thoughts on baseball alone for a change. But that didn t last long, for this afternoon news came out of Louisville that nobody would be indicted for killing [ ]
The A s have clinched a playoff spot and the division title, so the only thing left to play for is seedings. The A s are either going to be the #1, #2 or #3 seed in the playoffs, and play the first round at home. But there won t be any home games beyond the first round. [ ]
The A s lost to the Giants on Sunday 14-2, losing an opportunity to clinch the AL West division title by their own hands. The Astros played twice between that game and the A s next game coming up on Tuesday, and lost the second of those two games, thereby clinching the crown for the A s via [ ]