Infinitive Splitter

My credit card number is still good, so DreamHost took its annual bite today, which means I have another year to use this space to broadcast my thoughts.
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What will I complain about now?

Matt Morris, the veteran right-hander added by the Pittsburgh Pirates late last season to stabilize a young rotation, was released Sunday after failing to pitch past the second inning in his latest start.

Morris fell to 0-4 with a 9.67 ERA after giving up six runs, three earned, and six hits in 1 2-3 innings during an 8-4 loss to the Phillies on Saturday night.

The decision to cut him will cost the Pirates more than $10 million, besides what they already have paid him this season. Morris is making $10,037,283, or about one-fifth of the Pirates’ payroll, and has a $1 million buyout for 2009.

Wow!  Who could have seen that coming?

I came up with that title while lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm at 5:30 in the morning about a month ago. I had just had morphine or some other D-Day type potion administered directly into my bloodstream, so I was free to think more about how to describe my first visit to the emergency room than about how to describe the pain in my abdomen. (I told the doctors it was a seven on their stupid one-to-ten scale, since I was hurting enough to spend the dark hours of a Monday morning in the emergency room, but I could conceive of much, much worse.)

I hadn’t been hospitalized in more than 25 years — since the week of my birth, actually — and my only experience with anesthesia and zoo-strength painkillers came when I had my wisdom teeth out in 2003, so once the pain had been quashed, it was kind of neat to be there. I told the chaplain as much when she stopped by to ask indirectly which certified wizard should say magic words in the event of complications, and to my surprise she reacted as if she hadn’t heard that before. People who are healthy all the time, like I am, get kind of a thrill out of our occasional (and straightforward and manageable) medical crises.

I changed my mind by the end, and I’m happy to be free from the possibility of a second bout of appendicitis. But I still like appendexcitement.

Now here’s the most interesting part, to me. According to benefits summaries that have trickled into my mailbox in the last couple of weeks (in two rounds, since the hospital didn’t bother to submit two-thirds of the charges to my insurance company until I asked it to), the hospital determined that I had incurred $19,276 in costs. Of that total, my insurance paid $7,857, and I owe nothing. The hospital was a preferred provider, which means it had agreed in advance to give my insurer a discount on my care. That’s a 59 percent discount just for having the right insurance and going to the right hospital.

Since I had chosen the hospital by myself, at 2 a.m., while in seven-out-of-ten pain, on the basis of the hospital’s reputation as the facility of choice for ailing political fat-cats, this outcome was fortuitous.

Also fortuitously, this whole episode occurred at the beginning of my last week at the job that paid for this insurance; I’m on a different plan now. That’s a hassle, but at least I still have coverage. Almost 50 million people in this country don’t have that, and about one in 15 will have some appendexcitement in their lives.

Heck of a way to run a health system.

The Associated Press dropped this piece on Saturday, perhaps thinking no one would notice.

Despite big salary, RHP Matt Morris thinks he fits in with Pirates

He may be correct, but only because he’s bad at baseball, like most of his teammates.

Matt Morris is, in many ways, exactly the type of pitcher the Pittsburgh Pirates need.

This is untrue in two important ways. Way one: the Pirates need a good pitcher, and he is not a good pitcher. Way two: the Pirates need to make smart deals in order to meet tight, self-imposed payroll priorities, and Matt Morris took $10 million last season (more than any player in Pirates history!) to allow a run in two out of every three innings.

He’s a dependable starter with a quality pedigree who welcomes the opportunity to mentor a young staff.

He is dependable in the sense that charts of his performance follow dependable, downward slopes.

At the same time, he seems to understand that his status is tenuous at best because of his $9.5 million salary, roughly 20 percent of the team’s $50 million payroll.

Morris’ position isn’t tenuous because he makes that much money. It’s tenuous because he makes that much money and he isn’t a very good pitcher.

The Pirates’ new management tried to trade him this offseason and undoubtedly will continue to do so.

Note that the “new management” — General Manager Neal Huntington — was necessary because the old management did things like give Matt Morris $10 million. The trade to acquire Morris was the last personnel decision the old management — Dave Littlefield — ever made.

Morris understands that raising his value for his pending free agency — he can be eligible after the coming season if a $9 million club option is bought out — might be easier elsewhere. The Pirates have had 15 consecutive losing seasons and made few roster moves this winter.

“It’s obviously harder on a team that’s not as experienced,” Morris said. “To come over here and try to raise your stock is not a good move, but it’s still baseball, it’s still competing, and it seems like the organization is going in the right direction. I’m happy to be a part of it.”

It’s hard to get a lot of wins on a team that only scores 4.4 runs per game (12th out of 16 National League teams last year), so Morris’ 3-4 record in 11 starts doesn’t mean much. But in 62 innings last year, he allowed 42 earned runs and posted a 1.61 WHIP.

Morris’ ERA+ for the part of the 2007 he spent with the Pirates was 71, which means he was 71 percent as good as the average Major League pitcher. The Pirates won 68 games last year, which is 84 percent as good as the average Major League team. Maybe he’d fit in better somewhere else.

Here are some things I would have written during the last three fortnights if I were a more disciplined (and cocky) blogger:

• When the Steelers make the playoffs, I am sure that my sister’s ex-boyfriend will send me the $100 he bet against them when we last saw each other, in May 2007.
• I’ve been telling people for a year that Mike Huckabee would be the Republican nominee, and his win in Iowa proves he’s unstoppable. Also: look out America, here comes John Edwards!
• I have played poker only three or four times in the last year, but I still expect to win a lot of money playing against strangers in Las Vegas. I certainly won’t lose more than a couple hundred dollars!
• Roulette looks like a fun game.
• The Giants are 25/1 to win the Super Bowl in some Vegas sports books during the week after the wild-card playoff weekend. Even with that kind of payoff, what idiot would bet on them?
• I’ve never listened to anything by the Fiery Furnaces, but a lot of the hip kids like them, and they’re playing a show with two talented bands. They’ll probably play a very enjoyable set.
• My bowling average will keep going up, up, up!

The previous post is embarrassingly full of errors: the Times’ website doesn’t normally have ads in that sidebar position or in a banner under the newspaper’s main logo. Still, as I said in my partial correction in the update to the post, the ad is impressive anyway.

But in the interest of pushing incorrect information down the page, here are what I figure are the Steelers’ four potential playoff-making scenarios. If any of them happen, I’ll celebrate with an Iron City beer and a cool $100 from my sister’s Browns-supporting ex-boyfriend:

• The Steelers win both of their last two games (against the Rams and Ravens)
  The Steelers would finish 11-5 and hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Browns, so Pittsburgh would win the AFC North even if Cleveland also finished 11-5.

• The Steelers win one of their last two games AND the Browns lose one of their last two games (against the Bengals or the 49ers)
  The Steelers and Browns would both finish 10-6, with the Steelers still holding the tiebreaker, so Pittsburgh would win the AFC North.

• The Steelers beat the Ravens in week 17
  The Steelers would be 10-6, at worst, with a conference record of 8-4; the best the Titans can do (even with victories over the Jets and Colts) is finish 10-6 with a 7-5 AFC record, so Pittsburgh would win a Wild Card spot.

• The Titans lose one of their last two games (against the Jets or the Colts)
  The Titans’ record would be 9-7, equal to the Steelers’ worst-case outcome. The Steelers would have, at worst, a 7-5 AFC record, versus the Titans’ 6-6, so Pittsburgh would win a Wild Card spot.
  

I prefer the first scenario.

I captured the image above while watching a new PC/Mac ad from Apple on the New York Times home page this morning.

Advertisers buy space like this in coordinated ways all the time. But for this ad, John Hodgman and Justin Long actually interact with the sign in a way that makes sense given their position under it, which seems to mean they shot the ad with the Times’ specific page design in mind.

I don’t remember seeing this kind of thing before — certainly not with such recognizable characters. Maybe it’s new; maybe Apple did it so well that I think it’s new. Either way, it’s very impressive.

UPDATE: I’ve just realized that there isn’t normally a sidebar ad in that position.  Impressive anyway!

Facebook’s News Feed — the front-page stream of updates about my friends’ relationships, movie tastes and weekend plans — includes advertisements intended to be “more relevant and more interesting” to me, based on my interests and personal information. Since I’ve voluntarily provided Facebook with my name; age; location; book, movie and music tastes; and other personal stuff, Facebook’s advertisers have a great opportunity to sell me things I’m likely to want.

Here’s what I got today:

Facebook knows I was born in 1982, so I can’t possibly relive the 1960s. I guess there are still some bugs to work out.

When he isn’t analyzing cheerleader uniforms or insisting on the benefits of climate change for homeowners in upstate New York, professional contrarian Gregg Easterbrook sometimes writes clever things about football. His recap of last night’s Steelers-Dolphins game in today’s ESPN column is pretty weak, so I’m borrowing one of his conventions to describe it here.

Result of all possessions: interception, punt, punt, punt, downs, fumble, punt, punt, punt, punt, halftime, downs, punt, punt, missed field goal, fumble, punt, punt, field goal, end of game.

That’s entertainment!

There’s a hole in the roof of my car that appears to have been made by a swiftly moving, cylindrical projectile with a diameter roughly equivalent to that of a ball-point pen. Naturally, I’m interested in the origin of the projectile — and the manner in which it was originally propelled — and I’m thankful not to have been in the vicinity of the car at the moment of impact.

I noticed the hole last week as I prepared to leave Washington for Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh. The light rain I encountered en route does not appear to have penetrated the roof (now sealed with duct tape) with the same success as the unidentified object, so I have crossed aggressive precipitation off my list of suspects.

Likewise, I have cleared the foul ginkgo berry of culpability. Amassing by the thousands in the local trees (which could only have been assigned to the neighborhood by a malicious or anosmatic civil engineer), the terrible seeds have made a mess of our sidewalks and cars, and filled northern Columbia Heights with the strong odor of vomit. But the berries are soft — thus easily crushed to release their perfume — and the evidence available all over my car indicates that they are more likely to smoosh than to smash. That’s a shame, since I’d love to give the city a reason to cut all the trees down, and “they’re blasting holes in our automobiles!” would be a good one.

The car survived DC’s annual quasi-legalization of fireworks last summer without a scratch, and I don’t imagine that the area birds are eating anything sturdy enough to be so destructive upon digestion.

What could it be?