awkwardanimalsrunning submitted this picture.
OH NO BIRD DON’T DO BLACKFACE OH NO OH NO
:(
PS. Not actually racist, I’m just clownin’ around.
The following is not mathematically rigorous, since the events of yesterday evening were contingent upon one another in various ways. But just for fun, let’s put all of them together in sequence:
— The Red Sox had just a 0.3 percent chance of failing to make the playoffs on Sept. 3.
— The Rays had just a 0.3 percent chance of coming back after trailing 7-0 with two innings to play.
— The Red Sox had only about a 2 percent chance of losing their game against Baltimore, when the Orioles were down to their last strike.
— The Rays had about a 2 percent chance of winning in the bottom of the 9th, with Johnson also down to his last strike.
Multiply those four probabilities together, and you get a combined probability of about one chance in 278 million of all these events coming together in quite this way.
When confronted with numbers like these, you have to start to ask a few questions, statistical and existential.
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NATE SILVER, The New York Times, “Bill Buckner Strikes Again” (via inothernews) Wow. (via brooklynmutt) Math, people. We have it. |
There was one special band I had a really strong feeling for… it was this really nice bunch of kids, they were real clean cut, good, God fearing kids. They drank their milk. They never swore. They never messed around with women. I can’t remember the name of that band, however I did know these assholes: Braid!
-Mayor Don Gerard of Champaign, IL (x)
My Kansas City Goodbye, by Joe Posnanski
The following is excerpted from writer Joe Posnanski’s story, “My Kansas City Goodbye,” in which takes a final drive around the city he’s called home for 15 years before moving his family to Charlotte.
One of those landmarks he visits is the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which reminds him of Buck O’Neil, a man of great faith with whom Posnanski wrote the book, The Soul of Baseball.
**
I came to Kansas City knowing nothing at all … not even what I wanted. I vaguely knew that I wanted to be a big city sports columnist. That was the biggest thing I could imagine when I was 29 years old.
The big city was New York, of course, it had to be New York. Well, Chicago could suffice. Washington might do. Los Angeles had a nice ring. Cleveland was home. Boston … oh, I loved Boston. It took time to figure out that the size of the place didn’t matter. It took time to understand that what I really wanted was to become a part of a place, to become a big voice in that place, maybe even to have a sandwich named for me in a local restaurant, to have my photo on billboards, to have my columns talked about in offices and factories and around the corner.
