Writing in a time of crisis

I don't normally write anything here in the late afternoon or evening. I'm not in the right mood... too tired after a day of classes to think, too bored with the quiet dorm to be interesting.

But today I feel as though I should have something to focus on, because if I let my mind wander, I might hurt somebody. I'm not in the best of moods. It's not just that Al Franken is on the Tufts campus right now (he is), or that I couldn't get tickets (I couldn't). It's also the fact that, unless I'm really fortunate next January, my schedule next semester is going to royally suck.

About a week ago, I had a list of five courses: comparative politics, astronomy, US history, macroeconomics, and intermediate journalism. Everything looked great, and the schedule was perfect, and then came yesterday. I log onto the course offerings website to check on course statuses, just making sure my classes weren't full. I find out that history and journalism each have three slots left, and there are about a thousand sophomores still registering before I get my turn.

So I decide to pick a backup class for each -- judicial politics for history and non-fiction writing for journalism -- and check back today. Today I find that not only are history and journalism gone, but non-fiction writing is too. I don't feel like bothering with a Plan C, since nothing else really appeals to me right now, so it looks like I'm stuck with just four classes. But it really gets on my nerves that the two classes that fill up were the two that I really wanted to take. Oh well. Such is life.

As for this semester's classes, psych is still incredibly boring, but at least I had a night off from studying last night, since my professors were dumb enough to put the same chapter on the syllabus twice. We're studying cognition and language development this week, and then on Friday I'm going to the psych building to be a human subject (everyone needs to log four hours to pass the course). In polisci, I just finished a paper on national character and how it's formed... interesting stuff, but harder to write about than I expected. We'll see how that turns out. And in English, I just read Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers, and I'm in the process of writing a paper on that too.

The whole journalism thing is back in full swing again, and now I'm writing about both baseball and basketball. For the Observer, I did an Eastern Conference NBA preview that came out on the 28th, and I have two baseball articles -- a Hot Stove preview and an opinion piece about the Cy Young winners -- that aren't on the website yet. And for the Daily, I've officially started covering Tufts basketball; my first article came out today.

I'll be the first to admit: it isn't that good. It's not the length that discourages me -- I was asked for 300 to 500 words and I handed in 435 -- it's the simplicity. To me, it just seems like a really lame, boring article. My excuse is the following: I was given walking directions to, and a phone number for, the coach's office, and basically was to figure the rest out from there, and have an article done by 3PM yesterday. So Will, Nate and I, the three basketball reporters, walk to the gym at 9:30 yesterday morning (just being awake at that hour was a big accomplishment for me), hoping to introduce ourselves, get a few quotes, and find contact info for players we could talk to for future research. Of course, he isn't there. So I head back to my dorm, leave half a million phone messages and emails, and pray that he calls me back. By 2:30, I've got nothing, and a half hour to write an article. So I spend the next 23 minutes researching Tufts basketball on the internet and banging out the dullest article in the history of "journalism." Just as I'm hitting the last key to finish typing the last mind-numbingly boring word, my phone rings at 2:53. Of course, it's Coach Sheldon. I ask him all my questions over the phone, vigorously scribbling down every last word of quotableness I can find, and by 2:58, I thank him, say goodbye, and hang up. I spend six minutes reorganizing my article to make the quotes fit well, and at 3:04, it's time to turn in my article. Already four minutes late, I have no time to track down players for comment.

Good story, huh?

And speaking of sportswriting, Alan Schwarz is coming to Tufts on Thursday. I'm really psyched, not only because I just finished his book, but also because it'll be nice to meet someone who actually made it in the sportswriting world, and talk to him about his job. He's also signing copies of The Numbers Game for free. I think I might really like this guy... rumor has it he picked Eric Wedge over Ozzie for Manager of the Year.

Not to be outdone by the history department, my baseball analysis teachers decided to plan a little pregame show for the Schwarz lecture, starting at six on Thursday. To my disbelief, they managed to book Bill Freaking James, the godfather of baseball statistics, the Sultan of Scorebook himself, to come talk to our class before we walk to the Schwarz lecture as a class. I don't know how they pulled it off, but I'm amazed. He's authored or co-authored countless baseball books (Amazon says 174, but that's not counting the Baseball Abstracts he published himself by hand when he first started out), and he's the genius behind tons of baseball stats, among them Win Shares, Runs Created, park effects, Pythagorean wins, similarity scores, and minor league equivalancies. I know I'm rambling, and I know this is Greek to 90% of the people reading this, but I can't help myself. I'm looking forward to this a bit.

In preparation for the coming of my Messiah, I've been working like a dog on my research project, trying to analyze the tendencies of closers in bullpens. I've taken note of every pitcher who's recorded at least 90% of his team's saves in a season in the twenty-first century (there are 45 of them), and my goal is to put every single game from each of these seasons in a spreadsheet, and analyze my data. Right now, it's still early (seven down, 38 to go) but it looks like I could prove that closers perform best when they have a mix of eighth- and ninth-inning appearances, and when they come in in mid-inning with runners on base.

I want to have a good chunk of the data analyzed by Thursday so I can show Mr. James, but I have thousands of box scores to record, and it's a bit time-consuming. My goal is to finish the ten 2005 seasons I'm working on (Rivera, Lidge, Hoffman, Wagner, Nathan, Ryan, Jones, Baez, Cordero, and Guardado), and then draw up some graphs and charts and things Thursday afternoon. Right now I've recorded all the data I need for seven of the ten; I'm right on track.

Anyway, that's enough of my boring project. I would move on to complaining about baseball awards here, but the Rookie of the Year voters got it right for once, and my Cy Young complaints are already in the Observer article that I don't feel like rehashing now. I will say two things though: one, people really shouldn't look for me to concur when they complain to me about A-Rod beating David Ortiz for the MVP. They're wrong. I'm as big a Red Sox fan as anyone, but Alex Rodriguez is a flat-out better player than Ortiz, and always have been. Give up. And two, I will never understand why an MVP has to come from a playoff team. Derrek Lee was robbed in the NL voting, and I'm pretty sure that Reason #1 is the fact that the other 24 Cubs would be better employees of a Burger King than a major league baseball team. That's not his fault! He's still a more valuable player than Albert Pujols, and he shouldn't be denied MVP honors just because he couldn't carry the Cubbies to the playoffs. End rant.

Wow, I should probably write in the early evenings more often. I just cranked out almost 1500 words in a little over an hour. I'd love to stay and chat, but I'm hungry, and plus, the Celtics just might be in the process of handing Detroit their first loss. This requires my immediate attention. Until next time...