Improbability Drive...

Any lingering doubts I may have had that David Drake modeled Daniel Leary and Adele Mundy on O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin were dispelled by the title of their most recent adventure, The Far Side of the Stars. ( It would make a great text adventure game... )

Dodgers won a wild one last night in St. Louis. Scott Erickson was lousy. It looks like Sunday is going to be his last chance to demonstrate that he deserves to stay with the team.

Pitching a Case...

Finished Roger Kahn's The Head Game: Baseball Seen from the Pitcher's Mound last night. Kahn is best known for writing The Boys of Summer about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early fifties. This book comes out of a conversation he had with one of them, Preacher Roe, about the mental aspects of pitching, what Roe called the head game. Warren Spahn once said that "Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing." Kahn takes that idea, and looks at both the various techniques by which a pitcher can upset timing, and the thought processes that go into them by looking at a number of great pitchers and pitching coaches.

( Looking in from the pitchers mound... )