Coincidence?

Want to hear something strange? Yesterday I was looking up some information on Transformers toys as I'm thinking about buying some for the nephews. This was the main one I was reading about:

This morning I went shopping at Wal-mart and saw a semi in the parking lot that looked almost exactly the same, which is especially weird since there aren't a lot of cab over trucks currently in use and gray and purple isn't a common color combination.

Sports Analytics

There's been some great articles and videos on espn.com from Nate Silver and the boys over at fivethirtyeight.com, especially this one and this one ranking all the teams from the four major sports.. They've got some great research on what teams are the best in crunching sports data and which teams, like the Jim Leyland Tigers, just throw the advanced research in the trash. They rank all the teams from the four major sports and break them down into categories.

In our last two years of coaching varsity baseball, we decided to use a mom to do all of our score booking duties in the dugout. She had done it the past two years on JV since her son was on the team. I was obviously a little reluctant to give up my old-fashioned scorebook for an app called GameChanger, not to mention a mom sitting in our dugout as we made fun of our players (and occasionally drank shots of hard liquor to get us through the bad nights).

I don't have the time or patience on an iPad to fully explain how I utilized the GameChanger app to gain research and information on our opponents, especially in our post-season successes, but I made it very clear to our scorebook mom that she will NEVER make our team site accessible to ANYONE but her and I. Only two people was going to have access! Again, without getting into a lot of details, knowing what I was able to do with other teams stats, I did not want other coaches to do to me what I was doing to them. It was all legal, they were just idiots for making it public information for anyone who had a GameChanger account. Now, not all teams used GameChanger...well, I don't want to give too many secrets away. Just believe me when I say I'm a big believer in sabermetrics. We without a doubt won baseball games because I put the time into combing through as many stats as possible to gain an advantage.

It also helped that I had a post-season, night-before-tournament ritual of watching "Moneyball" before going to bed. Actually, I just couldn't sleep.

?

How do the more serious baseball fans feel about MLB's pace-of-play rule changes? I don't watch a ton of baseball as the Tigers are never on here, but when I do I almost always watch something else at the same time because of the pace of the game. I've found I can pretty easily follow a movie and a game at the same time because of all the down time. I don't see any real drawbacks to the changes and it might get me to watch slightly more.

Inappropriate...but still Awesome

As a parent of two little girls and someone who will not watch this movie, (nor will I watch "Fifty Shades of Grey") this is still funny to imagine happening.

Seriously. Can you imagine taking your kids to see "Spongebob" and at the same time some chick is tied up naked? How do you explain that one to the innocent eyes?

Spider-Man Returns to Marvel

You've probably heard this by now, but if you haven't, Spider-Man is joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sony owns the movie rights to Spider-Man, so the movies they have made previously were not connected to what Marvel Studios was doing with the properties they were in control of, but that changes now. Spider-Man will appear in a Marvel film, most likely Captain America: Civil War, then have his own movie on July 28, 2017 co-produced by Sony and Marvel Studios. Rumors suggest that this will be a reboot for Spider-Man with a new actor playing the role and the last two movies discarded, which is probably for the best since the last movie was garbage.

Confession

Like Tiger Woods, I sometimes have trouble activating my glutes.

Daredevil

RE: Super Bowl Thoughts

This video and the story on the same page is exactly how I feel about the Marshawn Lynch media situation. Talking to the media is part of the job of a high-profile (millionaire) athlete. It comes with the territory. Deal with it. For once, I really enjoyed hearing what Steven A. Smith had to say. I thought it was spot on.

Going into the game, I would not have been surprised by either team winning, but I expected a close game. NE might not win, but you're not blowing out Brady-Belichick. I kinda leaned towards the Pats. You just knew all this talk and "distractions" about Deflategate was only going to fire them up and motivate them even more. I think it worked against the Seachickens.

Again, Seattle is a great team, but I had a hard time seeing Brady-Belichick get beat for a 3rd time in the SB. To me, it was more of the Brady-Belichick factor, not how good Seattle's defense is.

Watching the game at Big Daddy's, we were all yelling for the Pats to let Seattle score. You knew they would, so you're better off getting the ball back with :40 seconds, one Timeout, and only needing a FG. As we're all being arm-chair quarterbacks, at that moment, Wilson threw the pick. Unbelievable play and play-call.

Give the ball to Lynch. Or, design any number of plays involving Wilson scrambling for a running TD. Neither one was going to be stopped. It felt as if Carroll out-coached himself in the situation and didn't want to score too easily/quickly.

Great game.