Another Record, But Still Another Win

Last night flying back to Baltimore on a connecting flight from Des Moines through Chicago, we flew past Camden Yards on our final approach. It was around 9:30 so dark, and the stadium lights were bright in the distance - easy to pick out the park - the Orioles were obviously in town playing. My wife mentioned last weekend that it would be fun to go to a game. I was thinking about that as I looked out the window, and also how I am more interested in how the up-the-road team - the Phillies - are doing because of Jamie Moyer (see the earlier preseason and complete game shutout posts). I quickly Googled Phillies Moyer on my Web browser this morning and came up with the following article - another record set and another win.

Phillies' Moyer Sets Record For Most Home Runs Allowed
Sun Jun 27, 2010 7:30pm EDT

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer gave up a Major League record 506th home run in an otherwise outstanding performance on Sunday.

Toronto's Vernon Wells hit the record-breaking run to left field in the third inning as the 47-year-old Moyer passed the mark held by Phillies Hall of Famer Robin Roberts.

Moyer (9-6) also became the 40th Major Leaguer to pitch 4,000 career innings when he threw seven innings in the 11-2 victory.

The left-hander, who first played in the Major Leagues in 1986, has a 267-201 career record.

(Reporting by Gene Cherry in Raleigh, North Carolina. Editing by Ian Ransom)
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I taught statistics for seven years when I was a university professor in California - before taking a full-time research position at a Federal laboratory in Oregon. In typical fashion for me, as I was reading about Jamie Moyer's new record - not a flattering one - I began thinking about how if a pitcher stands among the elite pitchers who pitch the most career innings, that pitcher is bound to accumulate the most of other pitching statistics as well - cause and effect, more innings - more opportunities for greatness or infamy. As I thought about that, I put it into a statistical perspective. In this case, I remembered a principle called collinearity - concurrent associations among two or more variables that are used to predict an outcome using multiple regression analysis.

I have a book about collinearity that I bought when I was a graduate student. It looked interesting at the time, and was also an interesting read. I used the theory in some of the research papers I wrote so the interpretations were more accurate. Applied to baseball, if you pitch enough innings, you are bound to accumulate more home runs given up - collinearity. The important point with Jamie Moyer is he keeps on going, and going, and pitching....and winning - kind of like the Eveready Energizer bunny. Pretty good for a relatively old man in young man's sport.

I know I am an old man, because when I looked on Amazon for an image of the book cover, I glanced at it's price - I know I didn't pay $100 for the book 30 years ago, back when I was in graduate school - another young man's game.

Long Ways from Home

It is funny how seeing something triggers a thought. A couple of weeks ago while I was commuting to work on Route 50, I saw an orange "O" like this on the back of a car in front of me. My first thought was an "O" for Oregon State. Re-calibrating for present geography, I made the correction that this was an "O" for the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, not the OSU Beavers. When I first started driving in the D.C. Metro area, I had to make similar adjustments when seeing freeway signs for "Washington" which meant District of Columbia, not State of Washington - as in the northern neighbor of Oregon that is at most 300 miles away when in the south of the state, not 3,000 as when in Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay. The same was when I first saw LAX in Annapolis - why so many bumper stickers indicating Los Angeles International Airport? Oh! - lacrosse, the game that every kid here plays like Oregon kids play soccer.

As mentioned in a previous blog about the Washington Irving Biography (named for the General who the District, the State, and a county in Oregon are named as well), the eastern hardwoods are a novelty to me. The forests here in the mid-Atlantic region are unlike the western Oregon woods that are dominated by Douglas Fir with oaks mixed in which still have a pale green appearance in winter from the bearded lichens that hang from the limbs. Back here in Maryland while driving Route 50 every week, I see the progression of the four different seasons displayed in the stands of trees, with autumn's rich mosaic of red, orange, and yellow colors the annual crown. What turned out to be a surprise for me has been the phases of color changes in spring, with different species leafing at different times, and light-colored leaves darkening into deeper shades of green. All the time this is happening, the housing and business areas that are off the freeway and which don't change color with the seasons, become less and less visible and eventually are naturally camouflaged by the time June is here. However, six months later, with all leaves on the ground and none any longer floating in the air, the different shaped and colored stems stand in ranks but are alone, with branches indistinguishable among their crowns.

It is also funny how different people from the same family describe the winter trees here: my wife, longing for the evergreen woods of Oregon, uses stark to describe the woods during this time of the year; my son, the diplomat, prefers to describe their condition as barren. As for me, I speed back and forth from work where as many as ten lanes cut through woods, hoping my speed doesn't drop below 65 miles per hour so my 29 miles can be covered in 35 minutes - a sight far different and far distant from my Oregon commute at 25 mph, not even thinking much about the three miles of two lanes winding up hills and around bends, ending up in a parking lot full of cars bearing the other orange "O".