Do I Make You Randy

The Cubs destroyed the Houston Astros today at Wrigley 12-0, and getting his 7th win of the year was starting pitcher Randy Wells. Wells was never really a top prospect, picked by the Cubs in the 38th round of the draft in 2002, and went to Toronto as a Rule 5 pick in 2008 before he was returned to the Cubs later that year. Next month he's going to be 27, so its taken him a while to get regular playing time in the majors. He came up early in the year when Carlos Zambrano was banged up and was pretty much just expected to be a brief fill-in guy for a couple of turns in the rotation. However, with Sean Marshall needing to stay in the bullpen, and with more recent injuries to Ryan Dempster and Ted Lilly, Wells has gotten a chance to stay around and prove himself, and he's done so spectacularly.

Today was Wells' 15th start and he's now 7-4 with a 2.84 ERA. With 95 IP, he's just outside of being qualified for rate stats for pitchers (the rule is that you need 1 IP for each game that your team has played), but if he had a few more innings, it would put him firmly in the top 10 in the NL. With 60 Ks, he hasn't been a lights out pitcher, but he's also only walked 21. He's generally able to keep his pitch count down and go pretty deep into games. Today he threw 110 pitches and lasted 8 innings. Hitters can definitely make contact off of him, but to this point he's mostly managed to keep the ball in the park and keep himself out of giving up big innings. So, with Wells' performance as good as its been, the question becomes, could Randy Wells win the NL Rookie of the Year? Geovany Soto deservedly won it in 2008, setting up the potential for back-to-back awards for Cubs players--and Cubs players who took a little while to get up to the Majors (Soto was 25).

It's seemingly a pretty down year for position player rookies in the N.L. St. Louis Caridinal outfielder Colby Rasmus, has been up for the whole year and has hit 11 homers, but hasn't hit much for average. Former Cub Casey McGehee is hitting .312 in 60 games for the Brewers, but his performance hasn't really jumped out as being amazing, and he would probably be further hurt by the fact that the Brewers aren't that good right now and might be fading in the divisional race. Wells might have stronger competition from his fellow pitchers. J.A. Happ started in the bullpen but has moved into the rotation for a good Phillies team, and has posted a 7-1 record with a 3.13 ERA. Then there's the 22-year old Tommy Hanson of the Braves, who has only been with the major league club since the start of June, but has gone 5-1 with a 2.95 ERA in 9 starts. The Braves aren't that good of a team, but if Hanson continues to pitch well he might have a little bit of an advantage in that he seems to be a little bit more of a genuine prospect who's expected to become a top pitcher, rather than someone of the journeyman underdog ilk like Wells. If Wells is pitching meaningful games for the Cubs in August and September though--and at this point it certainly seems like he will--Wells should get a good deal of national attention. At any rate it should be interesting.

Are you ready for some simulated electronic football

I'm only 24 years old, and so I'm firmly within the range of the Information Age generation, or whatever the hell you want to call people who have lived most of their lives with the internet existing. Combine that with the fact that I was a CS major in college, and in theory I should be pretty up on technology and used to the pace at which its currently advancing. All that said, every once in a while I do still get a "holy crap, this is like some Jetson's type shit here!" moment, and I had one of those moments playing NCAA Football 10, which I just picked up. Its the first sports game I've bought in roughly five years, and the first football game I've owned since NCAA 2004. While its certainly been tweaked and refined, the actual gameplay is roughly the same as it has been at its core. That's not really what I find so impressive about it. Rather, what I find so amazing is how throughly it incorporates online content into the game.

Any time you're browsing through menus, rather than actually being in-game, the game will play the latest actual Sportscenter update from ESPN Radio and on the bottom of your screen, you get an actual news and scores ticker. When you start a new exhibition game when the weather settings pop up, they default to the actually time of day, and actual temperature and conditions of your real-life location, based on weather.com. All of these little tidbits are cool, but the centerpiece of the online content is the new Teambuilder feature. Up to this point, create-a-team modes in spots games--if they even existed--have been pretty crude and rudimentary. You could pick from a few generic logos, pick your team colors, create a roster, etc. It never ended up being all that satisfying though. It never completely felt like a "real" team the same way all of the default teams that came packaged with the game did. With the new Teambuilder feature, all of that is now online. Teams are made on EA's website, and can then be searched for by anyone else with the game on their console. You're given 12 slots to download teams initially, and can buy more with micro-transactions (Side note: some of the micro-transactions in the game are pretty silly, like buying a new "pipeline" state for recruits for your Dynasty team. Are there really people willing to spend actual money to make recruiting easier for their fake football team?), so you have plenty of room to mess around and try out teams that people have made.

Obviously, a big way this is going to be used is to circumvent the rule that actual player names can't be used in NCAA games, but there's a whole plethora of teams you can find. Searching for teams in Bloomington, Illinois brings up a couple of different iterations of my alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan, a Division III team that's never going to actually exist as a default, on the disc team in any game. But with the Teambuilder function, they exist with all of their actual logos and a field reasonably close looking to their actual one. Hat tip to EA for coming up with a very cool idea and implementing it well.

Perfect Game

Again, not a Cubs post, but I feel like I should acknowledge Mark Buehrle's perfect game which happened yesterday against the Tampa Bay Rays. It was the 18th perfect game in the long history of Major League Baseball, and the first since Randy Johnson's in 2004. It was the second no-hitter of his career, the first being in 2007 against the Rangers. That game itself was also a perfect game. As I recall, the only batter to reach was Sammy Sosa on a walk, and he later got picked off of 1st. As always, Buehrle worked incredibly fast. He threw 116 pitches, and the Sox scored 5 runs in their halves of innings, and yet the game lasted all of 2 hours and 3 minutes.

This perfect game in particular is an impressive feat and sort of a strange event for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Buehrle is a guy who pitches to contact, and the White Sox defense has been pretty bad this year. Yesterday he struck out 6, and so 21 outs were left up to the defense. The play that will be remembered for a long time is the play that saved the no hitter in the 9th: Dwayne Wise scaling the outfield wall in left-center and just barely hanging on to the ball to rob Gabe Kapler of a home run. Wise had just entered the game as a defensive replacement in center, subbing in for Carlos Quentin and moving Scott Podsednik over to left. Podsednik, who isn't as fast as he used to be due to injury and who often takes bad routes to balls, most certainly doesn't make the catch. Its very much possible that Brain Anderson wouldn't have either, who was recently sent down when Quentin was activated from the DL. A lot of people, myself included, were pretty confused when Wise was kept on the roster over Anderson. Anderson has had a pretty tumultuous MLB career with the Sox, having not turned in to the top-level prospect he was once projected as, but he certainly is a better player than Dwane Wise, who has spent most of his career in the minors and is currently hitting under the Mendoza line. At least for a day though, the White Sox looked like geniuses, as a career minor league, below replacement-level player saved the 18th perfect game in Major League history. Sometimes baseball is weird like that.

Debating Nothing

I'll make another full Cubs post at some point in the near future, but for now I feel the need to rant about something which comes up every baseball season and is starting to crop up again now that we're through the All-Star break and down the backstretch. There's a whole lot of conventional wisdom held by sports fans, and a lot of sports commentators as well, that's just completely odd. For example, turn on any sports radio station at pretty much any time, and regardless of what sport is being talked about, at some point you'll probably hear someone saying, "Look at their home record! You can't win in this league if you can't win on your own park/field/court!" Oft times later in the same conversation you'll hear "Look at their road record! Sure they can win at home, but if they can't win on the road, how good are they really?" Look, a team only ever plays home games or road games and they count exactly the same in the standings. Ideally you want to win every game. If your team is either like 8-16 at home or 8-16 on the road, chances are your team is bad, not because of some mythical importance in winning one of those subcategories of games, but because if your record is that bad in the one case then it has to be 16-8 in the other just to get you back to .500. That's just how math works. Obviously winning on the road is harder because of the nation of playing on the road, but winning is always going to make your team's situation somewhat better and losing is always going to make it somewhat worse. That's the nature of playing a sport with a league schedule.

But the debate that I'm talking about is a different one, and one that's exclusive to baseball, though it bothers me for exactly the same reason. Every once in a while, when a team is trailing in both their division and in the wild card by a roughly equal number of games, you'll start hearing people give their opinions on whether they should "focus-on" winning the division or the wild-card. Obviously, its a legitimate debate to ask whether or not the team is more likely to win either the division or the wild-card. They may have to jump over more teams one way or the other, one might feel that the current leader in either the team's division or its league's wild card race is overachieving, etc., etc. But framing the discussion that way isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when people are lamenting their team's situation in a pennant race and say either, "I tell you what, I think these boys have to keep their eyes on the big prize! They can't just settle for the wild card, they have to keep focusing on winning the division!" or "I tell you what, I think this division is probably out of reach, I think they just have to do everything they can to focus in on getting in by way of the wild card." This isn't just a phenomenon of talk radio, or a random group of people standing around the proverbial water cooler, but you'll actually hear it asked of players in locker room interviews whether their team is "focused" on winning either the division or the wild-card.

Here's my question: how the hell does a baseball team focus on winning only one or the other?? If this was people watching competitive Starcraft or something, and they were advocating that a guy focus only on taking out the base of what they considered to be the weaker player, that would make perfect sense to me. In baseball, I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever. In the MLB you have a set schedule. You can't call up the team leading your division and say "Guess what? We're gonna play you 10 times in a row so we can instantly gain 10 games on you in the standings and talk over the division!" Nor does a team have separate win and loss records for purposes of the division and wild card standings that are somehow calculated differently. You can't "win" a game for purposes of competing in the division and somehow "lose" the same game for purposes of the wild card. Like the home-road debate, people are completely overcomplicating the simple truth, that winning will always put your team in a situation better than before the game, and losing will always put them in a worse situation. Whether you want to try and win the division or the wild card, the way you get there is exactly the same: you win more than the other teams. I dunno, its just something I've always found incredibly bizarre.

Public Enemies

Public Enemies (***1/2)

A few years removed from his modern day crime dramas Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann decides to take a stab at a prohibition-era gangster movie with Public Enemies, bringing along a powerful tandem of lead actors in the form of Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. The film looks a little bit more like a traditional movie than Collateral--which was shot mostly on hand-held digital cameras at night on location in LA, without a lot of the usual preparation that goes into shots using traditional film, like setting up lighting. Nevertheless, there are some shots that aren't entirely dissimilar from the style that Mann established in Collateral, with a lot of close-up, shaky, hand-held camera shots that frantically track characters, and an overall sense of being directly in the middle of what's taking place.

Johnny Depp is our protagonist playing John Dillinger, the most notorious amongst a loose alliance of bank robbers that included other legends of crime like George "Baby Face" Nelson. He seems to fancy himself in some ways as a Robin Hood type of figure. We see him cleaning out a bank vault, but then on the way out making a point to hand back the money customers and tellers have nervously pulled out of their pockets in anticipation of him demanding it. He's not against "the people", just the banks. At the same time though, he doesn't seem to see what he does as some sort of crusade against the evils of social stratification, but rather just sort of what he does to "live in the moment." Confronted with the reality that there's a nationwide manhunt for him which will certainly eventually catch up to him, Dillinger simply says "We're having too much fun today to be thinking about tomorrow." At a party, he becomes infatuated with a woman named Billie Frechette, and when he meets her again as she's working at a coat check, he roughs up a guy impatiently waiting for his coat, and tells her to leave with him because "You're with me now," and people who are with John Dillinger don't work at coat checks. As free-wheeling as he is, though, he's also not a psychopath, which puts him at odds with his frequent cohort Baby Face Nelson, who during one bank robbery starts firing randomly at onlookers as they're making their way to their getaway car.

After we're sufficiently introduced to Dillinger and his gang, we're introduced to their counterparts on the other side of the law. Christian Bale is Melvin Pervis, a federal agent who we first meet in the woods as he pursues--and eventually calmly guns down with a rifle--"Pretty Boy" Floyd, another notorious fugitive. Pervis becomes the poster boy for J. Edgar Hoover, who you might know from history either as the dude who created the FBI, or the dude who liked to cross-dress a lot. Evidently, here in 1933, Congress isn't quite sold on the whole idea of the FBI as a crime fighting organization, chastises Hoover during a hearing, and refuses to increase his funding. Hoover, nevertheless, uses what resources he has to set up a massive manhunt for Dillinger & co. with Pervis as point man. Christian Bale always has a tremendous, commanding presence about him which goes a long way, but even still, his character isn't really all that interesting here, especially compared to what the movie does with Dillinger. Other than one scene towards the movie's conclusion where he makes a decision regarding the morality of the FBI's tactics, basically the whole of Bale's character is that he's a guy who really, really wants to catch John Dillinger.

Watching the FBI investigation itself unfold though is a lot of fun though. I'm banking under the assumption that the movie and the book upon which its based did their homework, and that the equipment and tactics used are fairly accurate to what was used in reality. A lot of it seems to basically mirror the tactics that are used today, only utilizing cruder, older technology. The resulting effect makes it look like a weird steampunk version of Enemy of the State or something. The FBI puts a wiretap on the phone's of Dillinger and his girlfriend, but since its 1933 all the conversations are recorded onto phonographs. All of it is done in a room which is completely dark, except for the lights on the massive banks of phone line connections, making it look kind of like the room that controls the superlaser on the Death Star.

There are some great looking exterior shots as well, as set pieces of old Chicago are woven seamlessly into Michael Mann's frantic, always in motion shots. One that particularly stands out in my memory is a drive-by shot of the Art Institute. The atmosphere for the entire film is great. I'm convinced that the tommy gun is the ultimate crime movie weapon. They're obnoixiously big and loud and its hard not to look like you're completely bad news while you're carrying one. There's a scene where the FBI tracks down Dillinger and Nelson to a backwoods safehouse in Wisconsin which leads to a middle of the night gunfight which at times is lit pretty much entirely by the flashes created by the machine gun fine being exchanged. It contains no music and absolutely none is necessary for it to be thrilling.

Some might find the actual plot of Public Enemies to be a little bit simplistic and predictable, and indeed I don't think anyone will walk out of the theatre saying "Wow, I didn't see that coming" in regards to the ending or any other point of the movie. And while I imagine that the movie gets the broad strokes of the real-life story of John Dillinger correct, there are times when it seems embellished to the point of it threatening your suspension of disbelief, as when Dillinger just sort of moseys into the crime unit that's in charge of investigating him, and no one seems to notice who he is, even as he asks what the score of the Cubs game is. Nevertheless, Michael Mann manages to put a tremendous amount of energy into scenes like the nighttime gun fight described above, and there's more than enough inherent drama in the escalating duel between the FBI in its birth pangs and the most wanted bank robbers at the end of what the film's opening title card calls the "golden age of bank robbery" to draw you in and keep you drawn in.