Madison Bumgarner and the real MVP

The winner of the 2014 World Series has yet to be determined, and by all official counts, so has the winner of the 2014 World Series MVP. One or two games will determine the former; I'm making the argument right now that the latter has already been decided, regardless of outcome. Only once has a World Series MVP come from the losing team (Bobby Richardson, 1960), and if it's going to happen a second time, the Giants' ace is the one to be that player.

Bumgarner's numbers are plain filthy - an earned run average of 0.29 in four career World Series starts and a 2014 postseason ERA of 1.13 in six outings. These are good, but exactly how good are they compared to his 3.06 career ERA? Well, that's where math comes in. Allow me to explain:

• Bumgarner's career ERA is 3.06. He's thrown 47.2 innings in the 2014 postseason, so at a standard rate, should allow 16.2 earned runs, or 2.7 runs per start. His actual sample of earned runs allowed this postseason is {0, 2, 0, 3, 1, 0} across those six starts. The likelihood that this sample occurs against the average of 2.7 runs per start is 1 in 46. That's some serious statistical significance.
• Now, a similar method with his four career World Series starts. In 31 innings, he has allowed one earned run. Compare this sample ({0, 0, 1, 0}) against what should be an average of 2.6 runs per game, and it should occur every 1 in 392 times.

Bumgarner has the lowest career World Series ERA ever for pitchers who have thrown at least 20 World Series innings. He has been effectively automatic in this World Series, being all but sharpied in for two victories before he even stepped on the mound. He steps up big in the playoffs, and has been the best player throughout this entire postseason. Kansas City may have already won the World Series if it wasn't for the dominant Bumgarner. Instead, the Giants stand one win away from their third championship in five years, and you can be sure that Bumgarner will be doing a lot of celebrating if San Francisco wins it all.

Like I said, a lot of celebrating.

How to win at social media

It's clear that we're at a point in our technologically-driven world where we spend a majority of our leisure time (or non-leisure time) staring at a screen, eyes and minds rotting for several hours a day. When so much time is spent swiping left, right, up, down, and in circles, scrolling through facades our peers, a pattern of how we use social media emerges. And when patterns exist, opportunities arise to take advantage of those patterns. Allow me to explain:

Facebook
To me, Facebook is good for three things - storing pictures that I don't already have downloaded to my computer, having group chats that I normally wouldn't have over text (the fantasy baseball and basketball leagues I'm in are good examples), and posting links to this blog for all of you wonderful people. We've taken to Twitter for sporadic updates about our lives, following along with breaking news, and a majority of our photographical escapades take place on Instagram. Facebook in its heyday was a place where people could put literally everything in one place. Now that other platforms are dedicated to individual pieces of that puzzle, Facebook seems to be lost in the storm.

Twitter
I love Twitter. I think that every single one of my tweets are golden. Twitter is an excellent place for me to tell everyone something that I'm not sure who I should tell individually. There is a lot of humor in the Twittersphere, and if you can craft a balance of friends who you're obligated to follow, friends you actually find interesting, well-known accounts (celebrities or sports teams are good examples), and accounts meant for nothing but the sheer joy of humankind, then you're all over the Twitter game.

Instagram
I was steadfastly off the Instagram train for a long time, but then decided that it was worth dipping into. Here's why everyone is on Instagram - it's the easiest thing in the world. You see something that's worth taking a picture of, choose from one of 19 filters, and you're done. When you're scrolling through your Instagram feed, you're doing the same thing you are on Tinder, minus the social implications. Snap judgments of a picture, and an imperative to double-tap and like the picture, or keep scrolling. The lure of Instagram is that everything is right in front of you. There are no links to take you to the picture, nothing extra you have to do to like it. It's a big reason why I aim for all pictures and videos on my blog to be within the post - because you're not really going to sit through a YouTube ad just to see a video I've linked up, but you'll watch if it's right there.

So that's the haps on social media. We're all about the right now in the technological world, so we wants pictures readily available, we want to be able to click one button to serve approval across the social realm, and we want lists because they're chunked into small bits of words we can read instead of a large paragraph. Social media is a social game, but we're the players. Play on.

Room #437

I can't. I can't put together words to formulate a blog post. Read about what happened in Washington state today, and read about what happened in Ottawa this week, and you'll know where I'm coming from when I say I literally cannot come up with a blog post. I'm sick of hearing about this and I'm sick of reading about it. I have nothing to say.

Rippy bits

Here's what happens when I don't blog for eight days:

A feeling that I need to blog arises. It festers. Sometimes I'll think of things I want to blog about, but don't feel strongly enough to blog about in that moment. I'll come up with post titles, ideas, words, but not be able to put them together cohesively. I remember song lyrics more often, quotes from movies.

So here's everything that I've been thinking about for the past week, in shredded bits and pieces. At various points in time, I believed that they were enough for a blog post, and now, they finally are.

A lyric from "Holocene" by Bon Iver: "We smoked a screen to make it what it was to be; now to know it in my memory." The post, which would have been called Smokescreen, would have been something along those lines of putting up a screen to make life appear differently; perhaps rose-colored lenses, if you will.

Two quotes about perspectives of life that I really like. The first, from The Town: "But I know I'll see you again; this side or the other." The second, from Lost: "If you don't see me in this life, you'll see me in the next."

The idea that perception is reality. Not necessarily that I believe this idea, but that nothing is seen or experienced the exact same way by two different people. How I feel the cold air on a snowy night is different from how you feel it, and if you and I are together, whose reality is correct? There's a quote from the final Harry Potter book (and yes, I opened the book for this quote, instead of the movie clip) that is absolutely perfect for this:

"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?"
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

My hero

I think Dave Grohl just because my favorite person of all time.

He might have actually been atop the list to start with, but the more I learn about him, the more I love him. There's this element to him that just oozes a deep understanding of music and the human connection that it fosters. If you have some time for yourself, watch this interview. Some of the things that he says are just absolutely perfect, about the kind of music he wants to create and the process he wants behind it. Absolutely worth the watch.

In a related matter, here's an incredible video of "My Hero" during the Foo Fighters' concert at Wembley Stadium in 2008. There was a line that Dave Grohl had in the interview saying that the audience was the sixth member of the band. I think this video is a perfect testament to that.

5 lists of 5

5 things I miss about college that I didn't think I would
1. Correcting TA homework while watching Patriots games on Sunday
2. Fat brunches on Saturday and Sunday mornings
3. Little walks around campus, e.g. to the library or to print something
4. Watching full movies during the afternoon
5. Waking up at noon

5 ways I would speed up the game of baseball
1. Eliminate pitching coach, catcher, infield mound visits
2. Immediately award intentionally-walked batters first base
3. Limit warmup pitches in between innings to five
4. Spinning around to second base from the mound without throwing is a balk
5. Batters who do not swing are not allowed to leave the batter's box

5 songs I've never listened to until this week
1. Gracious - Ben Howard
2. Neon Cathedral - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis feat. Allen Stone
3. I Can Feel a Hot One - Manchester Orchestra
4. The Riff - Dave Matthews Band
5. You & I - Local Natives

5 articles from ESPN the Magazine / Sports Illustrated that I've kept
1. "Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building"
2. "A Theory About Aaron Craft"
3. "Mourning Glory"
4. "What Makes Roy Run"
5. "The Art of Winning an (Even More) Unfair Game"

5 reasons I might actually like autumn
1. Sweatpants
2. Cold air feels pretty nice
3. Cold bedsheets/pillows feel really nice
4. Apple cider and pumpkin beer with cinnamon sugar
5. Listening to Bon Iver every day for four months is totally cool