Rabbers' Ramblings

One away

This is a strange one, and, as far as I'm aware, only different in the specific context of baseball.

The phrase 'one away' can mean many things, even in baseball itself. A team might be 'one away' from the World Series, which means that they are one win away from securing a final berth. Or a team might make a mistake at the end of a game, lose it, and give 'one away'.

But when a commentator says 'one away', they are usually talking about the number of outs. In other words, there is currently one out in the inning.

But what I hear when they say 'one away; after a play which ends in an out, is that the team are one out away from ending the inning. In other words, there are two outs.

Confusing, no?

Describing rugby league as the toughest sport in the world is a big, big claim.

Especially when some people haven’t even heard of it.

Invented in 1895, it is a relatively young game. Unsurprisingly, rugby union (what most people think of as ‘rugby’) came first, and the rules of league gradually changed with the purpose of producing a faster, more entertaining game. It is played in a number of countries, with England, Australia and New Zealand the strongest nations.

So why is it so tough?

First of all, there will always be a strong argument to say that one-on-one combat and fighting sports are the ‘toughest’. Indeed, ESPN conducted a survey among a panel of ‘experts’, and Boxing came out as the most ‘difficult’ sport after analysis in numerous categories.

These debates are, as ever, a matter of opinion, as it is impossible to universally quantify ‘toughness’. When I think of ‘toughness’, I think of the most physically demanding, rather than the hardest to master or learn. As a result, coordination, strategy and skill levels (which are extremely high in most sports) are not attributes that I consider here. Also, while risk obviously plays a part, I wouldn’t say that the severity of the consequence of error is necessarily an overriding factor.

The comparative sports that spring to mind are the nauseatingly high endurance sports, such as cycling, rowing, long distance running, triathlon and cross-country skiing, and the all-round physical sports rugby union, soccer, American football and ice hockey. On top of those, you have the high-risk sports like fighting and racing.

Of all of those, it is rugby league players that miss the most hours per 1000 as a result of injury. They miss 220 hours of playing time, compared to 112 for American football, 80 for ice hockey and 40 in soccer.

Additionally, some of the injuries suffered are frightening. A rugby league player once played 25 minutes with a cracked skull. Another played on after fracturing the roof of his mouth and finally, and most eye-wateringly, one player once continued after rupturing a testicle, which later had to be removed.

Of course, other sportsmen suffer horrendous, sometimes fatal injuries, but few play on (Patrice Bergeron of the Boston Bruins might have something to say about that).

The point is, the players themselves are obviously ‘tough’. They wear no pads or protective gear, like they do in football and hockey, and the speed and intensity of the game is immense. There are two 40-minute halves of almost non-stop action, during which players can expect around 10 impacts per minute, with the force experienced in some such collisions reaching upwards of 10G. That’s like the force felt when a car travelling at 45 mph stops in 0.2 seconds. In other words, ridiculous.

What is more, there are few substitutions or time-outs, meaning the endurance levels need to be exceptional. It is well known that rugby players who switch codes from union to league need to work on fitness for months before they are ready for a full game of league, such is the step-up in intensity.

Comparing that to American football, with the offensive and defensive switches, breaks in the game and briefness of each play, or to ice hockey, where stints on the ice are commonly 60-90 seconds and each player can expect to play 20-30 minutes total during a game, and you see what rugby league players go through. F1 drivers are amazing specimens, and a lot fitter than they are often given credit for, but they aren’t often regarded as the toughest of all sportsmen. Similarly, runners, cyclists and rowers are incredibly fit, so much so that various factors including VO2 max scores point to them being the 'fittest' athletes. However, while their physical exertion is amazingly high, the lack of impact and physical contact makes it hard to label them as the ‘toughest’. And, it could be argued (because I am), that given the attributes associated with ‘toughness’ as opposed to ‘difficulty’, even fighters, with the constant impact and energy-sapping rounds, don’t match the world’s most elite rugby league players.

It is quite some game. And the World Cup starts this Saturday.

Tune in.

Badly

This isn’t an Americanism as much as a grammatical error made more by Americans than Brits.

Me. Ow.

Here's the dilemma: is it, 'I feel badly about it,' or, 'I feel bad about it'? Ask Cyndi Lauper, and you'll get the correct answer. Ask Donald Trump, who famously 'corrected', or uncorrected, poor Cyndi on Celebrity Apprentice, and you'll get the wrong answer.

Here’s the problem. The verb ‘to feel’ can be a linking verb or an action verb. Linking verbs, like ‘to be’ are described using adjectives, and action verbs, such as ‘to write’ (you wouldn't, would you?) are described using adverbs.

Now, ‘bad’ is an adjective and ‘badly’ is an adverb.

The fact that ‘to feel’ has dual roles is confusing and leads to errors.

‘I feel bad’ describes emotions. In this case, ‘feel’ is used as a linking verb. To check, you can replace ‘feel’ with ‘am’ (from the verb ‘to be’) and it still makes sense. ‘Bad’ in this case might mean guilty, or sick, but it is still an emotion, or a state of being, so ‘bad’ is correct.

However, ‘I feel badly’ is only correct when you are describing how good you are at touching something. You might feel badly, for example, if you had burns on your fingers and less sensitive tips as a result. Again, replacing ‘feel’ with ‘am’ results in the nonsensical non-sentence ‘I am badly’. Here, ‘feel’ is an action verb. I am describing my poor ability to feel, and so I describe it with an adverb.

Why an Americanism? Or at least an American-only error? It isn't, probably, but in my experience...

People say things like ‘I feel badly about not giving her my seat on the bus’ over here. In England, we would only say that if we were talking to a man called Lee: ‘I feel bad, Lee, about …’

In other words, we talk proper.

KKKK

Baseball is a traditional game, steeped in history and statistics. No wonder I like it.

For you uninterested or ill-informed Brits, here's the lowdown.

Baseball is like rounders. Teams of 9 (though there are many substitutions in a game) alternately bat nine times each. Three outs (either on strikes, caught or run out) are required to end an inning. So there are 27 outs per team in a game. Runs are scored if a batter makes it all the way round the four bases (not necessarily in one go - a home run) and the team with the most runs after nine innings wins.

Some call it boring, or slow. I find it fascinating and lot deeper than meets the eye.

And then there's those 'impossible' statistics that make you (well, me) smile.

Remember I spoke of getting out on strikes? It's a touch complicated, with foul balls counting as strikes until the third, but essentially three strikes and you're out. Three strikeouts in an inning, though a pitcher's dream, is not all that common, though, with run outs and catches just as common and only three outs in all needed to bat again.

But what about four strikeouts in an inning?

How is that even possible?

Remember I said it can get complicated?

A strikeout is only recorded as an out if the batter doesn't reach first base after the strike. Runners can run on 'wild pitches' and those that are spilled by the catcher, so if a pitcher strikes a batter out swinging but the batter reaches after an error behind home plate, the inning continues. Hence the possibility of four strikeouts (only three recorded as outs) in an inning.

Such a thing happened last night at Fenway Park. Detroit pitcher Anibal Sanchez (once of the Red Sox) recorded four strikeouts in an inning for only the second time in the history of postseason baseball and for the first time in 105 years. (Incidentally, the first guy to do it in the postseason was for the Chicago Cubs. His name? Orval Overall. What a name!)

I can't think of another, equally improbable and rare, event in any other sport. Maybe a break of 155 in snooker, but that's about it. It's certainly an interesting and confusing feat that relies so heavily on an unusual technicality as well as the skill of the player.

Coffee Cake

I love cake. And where I come from, the adjectives used to describe cake are universal and unambiguous.

If you order 'chocolate cake', you'll get a cake with chocolate in, and probably on, it. And probably some chocolate flavouring for good measure. 'Carrot cake' has carrots in it. Lemon drizzle cake has sweet lemon juice drizzled on it. Cheesecake (is it even a cake?) has cheese in it. Fruit cake has fruit in it. I could go on.

The point is, coffee cake has coffee in it. It's like chocolate cake, but instead of putting in slightly less flour and substituting for cocoa powder and some chocolate chips, you put slightly more flour in (to balance the liquid) and add some espresso. Top the baked cake off with coffee butter icing and you have yourself a delectable treat. To enjoy however, wherever, whenever and with whatever you choose.

In the US, they don't see it that way. 'Coffee' doesn't refer to the flavor (notice the deliberate change in spelling) of the cake. It refers to the drink you enjoy with your cake. So it doesn't really describe the cake at all. In fact, it can be anything you like, as long as you enjoy it with your latte, sorry, Americano, sorry, iced double mochacinnespresso.

What a terrible way to describe a food. You have no idea what you're ordering when you order coffee cake! Who knows what the baker likes to eat with his coffee?

Maybe it's me that's weird. Maybe I should start calling my breakfast my 'orange juice bowl'. The food part of my breakfast is in the bowl, and it is whatever I like to eat when drinking orange juice. A BBQ will from now on be referred to as 'beer meat'.

My son has not yet been alive 89 days and already, it seems, he has been called that many names.

Fret not. They aren't insulting or nasty names. No one does that to a poor, defenseless, adorable infant.

Here are a few.

Finnegan (his actual name), and its short forms: Finn, Finny and, dreamt up by more than one female friend, Mr. Finn.

Then there's the mistakes: Flynn, Finnius and Ferdinand (I have no idea.)

And then there's the affection nicknames: mate, buddy, bud, sweetness, doll, little one or, simply, 'baby'.

And, last but not least, my two nicknames for him: Harry and Larry.

Harry, because he is exceedingly strong and is quite the escape artist when it comes to freeing his arms from swaddles, a la Harry Houdini.

And Larry, because about four weeks ago he started smiling, so now we know when he is happy. He smiles so much, I call him Larry. Because he is as happy as Larry much of the time.

"What?" you might ask, quizzically.

It's a simile used in England. However, it is thought the phrase originated in New Zealand and/or Australia. The etymology is sketchy, but the earliest record of its use is in 1875 by G. L. Meredith. Larry, it is supposed, is either the successful boxer Larry Foley, who was presumably happy with his lot, or not a person at all, and in fact a shortened form of the word 'larrikin', which means hooligan (which, apparently, is fun if you are one) and from which the phrase 'larking about' was derived.

So there you go.

My son. Larry Harry Ferdinand Robson.

Following on from my alphabet, I thought I'd write the number equivalent for the order the first twenty natural numbers, or counting numbers. (It gets quite predictable after a while).

Maybe I'll teach the numbers in this order to my son. He'll either look like a spelling-number genius, or incredibly stupid. You decide.

Here goes:

8, 18, 11, 15, 5, 4, 14, 9, 19, 1, 7, 17, 6, 16, 10, 13, 3, 12, 20, 2

This (the spellings of numbers) reminds me of one of my favourite brain teasers. It drives a lot of people mad. And it goes like this:

"How many letters are there in the answer to this question?"

I love this family.

I took this picture with my new camera two whole weeks ago.

Feels like a lifetime.

"The what?" you may mutter.

What if we decided to write the letters in alphabetical order of their phonetic spelling?

The we would argue if A was simple, ‘A’, or ‘Ay’, or ‘Eh, and if I was ‘Aye’ or ‘Eye’.

The best discussions are ones with a bit of an argument.

Here’s my list.:

A, H, R, I, B, Q, D, W, E, F, L, M, N, S, X, G, J, K, O, P, C, T, V, Y, U, Z.

Agree?

I hope not!

Hello there, tumblers!

I'm breaking my blogging exodus to have a go at every driver's enemy: cyclists.

In case you were wondering, I have still been rambling over the last few months. Just in a more high-pitched and expressive voice, to my oblivious infant son, rather than online.

Back to my rage against the two-wheelers.

First things first. I am a cyclist myself. I enjoy it and I commute to work every day on my bike. I have occasional scary moments and encounter some poor drivers, sure, but my route isn't so long or too bad, and if I keep my wits about me, I have no concerns about riding twice a day in rush hour.

The problem I have is that many other cyclists are at best careless and, more often, dangerous and selfish. Laura Trott, Britain's current golden girl of cycling, since she won double Olympic gold in London, thinks the same: "I see cyclists jumping in and out of the buses and people wonder why they get hit."

When I'm behind the wheel, I curse bad drivers. But when I'm in the saddle, I have more issues with fellow cyclists than drivers.

The main issue is that a lot of cyclists see themselves as cars when it suits them, and pedestrians when it's convenient. They cycle in the middle of a lane of traffic, weave in and out, and then run red lights.

The way I see it, you can't have it both ways. If you're on the road, follow the rules of the road.

One particular incident illustrates my point. And the maddening thing is, the same crime has now been committed every day this week so far, with three different culprits.

On my way to work, right at the end of my journey, I get to a crossroads which is, as most are, governed by lights. The different directions are alternately shown green and red lights. Until, that is, a pedestrian wants to cross. At which point, between the next change over, both traffic directions are stopped while all four crossings are open. The cyclists' error is thus: they see the light is red in the direction they are traveling (on the road). They switch to cycling on the pavement (sidewalk) and stop at the light, press the pedestrian crossing button, and wait. Then when it is time (for pedestrians) to go, with all the traffic stood still, they have free reign of the road to cycle diagonally across the crossing and continue, on the road, on their way. But the thing is, if they hadn't been so selfish, their journey wouldn't have been any longer (timewise), because they would have been able to go with the cars anyway, since no other pedestrians had been waiting to cross. So they save no time. Indeed, they actually cycle further, by going on the pavement and taking a longer route across the road. And, of course, they up the angst among drivers.

Which brings me to my next point.

This driver/cyclist battle is just a vicious  wait for it... cycle. Cyclist misbehave, which annoys drivers. Drivers are impatient with cyclists, so drive more erratically, which makes the cyclists even more determined to avoid cars, and hence run more lights and use more selfish tactics. In turn, erratic cycling gives all cyclists a bad reputation, leaving drivers unsure of what any given cyclist they see will do, and they, in turn, behave unpredictably. Cause and effect? The cause is cyclists.

Exhibit A: I was cycling home last night and stopped at a stop sign. A car traveling on the road onto which I was waiting to turn, slowed down to let me in, presumably because the driver expected my to butt in anyway and didn't want to hit me. Confused, I waited, and indirectly caused a hold up of five cars. Were they being kind? Would they have done that for another car? Was it because other cyclists' past discretions have made them more cautious with me?

Exhibit B: Cycling to work two days ago, I was on a road with three lanes: the right lane was for traffic going straight on, the middle lane for going straight or turning left, and the left lane for turning left only. I wanted to turn left. So, having been on the right of the right lane, I waited, signaled and turned into the middle lane. I stayed to the right of the lane, allowing the odd car to overtake me. Drivers in both lanes around me decided to overtake simultaneously, leaving me in a rather precarious position. Undeterred, I continued, checked behind me for a gap, signaled, and made my left turn, sticking to the outside of the turn, to allow cars to turn inside me. A nearby driver felt it necessary to wind down his window and exclaim, "You could get yourself killed!"

What? By cycling where and how I should do? Sure, I could get killed on the road, but surely I'm at a lower risk of injury if I cycle properly and safely.

The trouble is, drivers don't even expect that, making it more dangerous.

So why not make it mandatory for all cyclists to take a road test, just as drivers are required to? It might improve awareness and habits.

I'm pretty terrible at anagrams.

But not to worry. It just makes them more fun when I spot them, probably years after I ought to.

Like it took me until my fourth year as a teacher to realise that 'algorithm' is an anagram of 'logarithm'. Weird.

Here's another mathematical one I just realised:

TWELVE PLUS ONE is an anagram of...

ELEVEN PLUS TWO.

Wow.

1993 was a big year in sport.

A young cyclist called Lance Armstrong announced himself to the world by winning the World Championship road race. Pete Sampras won the first of his record seven Wimbledon titles and Manchester United won the first English Premier League title. They would go on to win it another 12 times in the next 19 years.

Another seismic shift came in cricket. The lost art of spin bowling was mastered and made popular again by a 23-year-old Shane Keith Warne from Australia. In the oldest and most traditional of cricket rivalries, The Ashes, Warne bowled what would later be dubbed the 'Ball of the Century' in his first ever delivery in an Ashes contest. Incidentally, it came at Old Trafford, just down the road from Manchester United's home ground by the same name.

Warne would go on to dominate spin bowling, Ashes contests and newspaper headlines for the next 20 years, taking a then record 708 Test wickets in the process.

Why am I writing about this today?

It's about time I got writing again. And Warne's logic-defying delivery was ... delivered exactly 20 years ago today.