This and That

This is me taking a break from reviewing and revising SOPs. Lately I've been very turnip-like at home, and work has been busy. Yesterday afternoon was spent reinstalling WinXP on a machine that had been hijacked. A good chunk of today was spent disinfecting another machine. Feh. In my perfect world, people who write adware get tied up and handed over to Angelus along with a pair of rusty tweezers.

( More dull and boring... )

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The Dodgers take on the Twins tonight for the first time since the '65 Series. By coincidence, I just downloaded a copy of the 7th game of the '65 Series from mlb.com, so I'll have something to get me into the spirit of the thing before tonight's game kicks off.

Chicks Dig the Long Ball...

...is the tag line of one of my all time favorite commercials, a Nike ad that showed (then) Braves' pitchers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux taking extra batting practice and doing strength training in an attempt to improve their home run hitting abilities so as to impress the ladies. The ad probably appeared the season after McGwire and Sosa went after Maris's record, and was terribly funny. Maddux's "Chicks dig the long ball" catch phrase was repeated early and often at our softball games. Of course, what made it especially funny is that in their very long and distinguished careers, Glavine has hit exactly one, single, solitary homer, while Maddux had hit only four. Until today, that is, when Maddux hit his fifth career home run against the Sox.

That isn't even why I bring the subject up. The real reason to talk about it is that Jeff Weaver has already given up three home runs to pitchers this season. That's really hard to do. Just to show how hard it is, consider the Phillies HoF pitcher, Robin Roberts. Roberts gave up more home runs than any pitcher in history, 505 in his 4688 innings of work (partly because he had to pitch in Shibe Park for so many years). Of those 505 home runs, only 6 were to pitchers (and two of those were to Don Drysdale, one of the best hitting pitchers of that era). By comparison, Weaver has given up half that many homers to pitchers in 80 innings so far this season. At the rate he's going, there'll be a lot of pitchers getting lucky because of Mr. Weaver.

eta: Neat! I found a copy of the commercial on-line. It's even funnier than I remembered. Plus, it's got Heather Locklear! See for yourself here. (Note, it's a 7.9MB file)