Name: Herr Ubelmann von Ubel
Hometown: Lake Crystal, MN
Town I Currently Live In: Seattle, WA
Profession: Physics Grad Student
Bats: Right
Throws: Right
Positions: Super-futility
Greatest Career Achievement in Baseball/Softball/T-ball: Certainly nothing special. I think the play I remember most fondly is playing catcher in a slowpitch rec league and tagging two different players out at home plate in one game. (I like playing catcher sometimes because most players will blindly assume that whoever is catching is no good.)
Hobbies:Twins, computers, rec softball, rec soccer, music, occasional reading
What are you known for around the WGOM? Soulless number spewing
If you could have a nice, polite dinner with any 3 people - dead or alive - who and why? I could think about this for hours and not come up with the best combination. Okay. I think it would be fascinating to have dinner with Jesus, Hitler, and Jackie Robinson. I'm not exactly sure how that would go down, but I think it has tremendous upside potential.
If you could pick any 3 people - again, dead or alive - to go out and party (or if you're not the party type, go for martini's or whatever it is you do) who and why? Tina Fey circa 1993. (Because, let's face it: I'm still single, she seems attractive, funny, and intelligent, so I'm taking my chance here, however small it might hypothetically be.)
Sports Allegiances: Twins, Timberwolves, Vikings (for reasons beyond my comprehension, I can't help but care when they are on TV), Gopher football, Gopher hockey, football, basketball (what can I say, I went to school there), LCWM Knights
Favorite Books: To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, Catcher in the Rye, Halladay, Resnick, and Krane's Physics, Earl Weaver's Weaver on Strategy, The Great Gatsby, and I'm sure there are others in that category that aren't coming to mind right now
Favorite Baseball Movie: Major League (I can never decide whether it is funnier on TV with the censoring or on video without the censoring), with Field of Dreams a close second
Favorite Non-baseball Movie: Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game
Favorite Music: (in no particular order) Mingus, Drive-By Truckers, Miles, Coltrane, White Stripes, Atmosphere, Blue Scholars, Beck, Eels, Modest Mouse, Ludacris, the Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Outkast, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beastie Boys, the Hold Steady, Bruce, Cake, Spoon, Ben Kweller, Belle and Sebastian, A Tribe Called Quest, Nick Drake, Gustav Holst, J.S. Bach (esp. his works for organ), Percy Grainger, J.P. Sousa, Alan Lomax field recordings (esp. his American stuff), Foo Fighters, etc., etc.
Favorite Food & Drink: Probably hamburgers and beer. (If forced to be more specific, given my current locale, I would pick Red Mill burgers and Red Hook ESB.)
Favorite TV Shows: Scrubs, Sportscenter (when Scott Van Pelt is hosting and they are actually doing highlights), The Office, Daily Show, Colbert Report, CSI: Miami (at least one laugh between every commercial break), and historically, I really liked Sports Night
Favorite Twins Player, historically: Kirby (What can I say? If you tilt my old glove in the light just right, you can still make out his name in the palm.)
Favorite Twins Player, currently: Probably Jason Bartlett. Certainly not because he's the best, but I'm a sucker for fast players. (This answer could well change if Alexi Casilla is even replacement level next year.)
Best Twins Memory: I have no idea which game it was, but when I was a kid (think 8-10 or so), I took the two hour trip northeast to the Dome in a charter bus. My dad and I had upper deck seats behind home plate. I don't remember the score of the game, who the Twins were playing, or anything else like that. I do remember Kirby hitting a triple to right center and jumping out of my seat with excitement.
Favorite Sport to Play: Slowpitch softball
Favorite Sport to Watch: MLB
If I could live anywhere in the world, I'd live in: I wish I knew the answer to this question.
If I was commissioner for a day, I'd: Put expansion franchises in New York/New Jersey (that's right, screw you Steinbrenner) and Vancouver. Then I would re-align to two leagues and four divisions and eliminate the wild card. Interleague play would only take six games out of the schedule each year--a home/away series with each team's natural rival. Teams would play other teams in their division more often than teams from the other division, but not 19 times.
If I had Terry Ryan's job for a day, I'd: It takes longer than a day to stock the organization with replacement level talent, but I would try to look to make a deal for a AAAA outfielder or something. Other than that, given the current roster, I could try to lock up Morneau, but I'd probably just let FOTF, Slappy, and Silva walk and take the compensation picks. (Unless Elias has them as less than Type B free agents, which seems unlikely.) [Ed. note: We prepare these things in advance and then schedule them out. Obviously, we worked with ubelmann before the Castillo deal or his work on whether Castillo or Silva would be a Type B free agent.] Terry Ryan hasn't exactly put the organization in a place where a new GM would have much flexibility, though. I would also have a long meeting with accounting to figure out just how much Pohlad is making (or not making) on his investment with the Twins.
Favorite Ballpark: Even though it was 100+ and I was sitting in the sun, I really enjoyed Kauffman Stadium. (So I guess that means I'm ranking it above: Metrodome, Safeco, old Busch, County Stadium, Miller Park, Great American Ballpark, Comerica, PGE Park (Portland), and Midway Stadium.)
Favorite blogs: WGOM, U.S.S. Mariner (because half of what I know I learned from David Cameron), Will Young, Gleeman, Nick and Nick, TwinkieTown, Sinker, LEN3, and Joe C.
What's your favorite physics joke? I can't really say that I have one.
Which superpower would you want if you could have one? Psychokinesis. Then I could tamper with baseball games to help the Twins win without getting caught.
What sport have you always wanted to try playing but never have? Definitely curling. They canceled that part of the gym curriculum right before I got to it.
Do you wear sunglasses at night? I think I'm supposed to put some witty pop culture here, but I can't come up with something good along those lines. When playing softball night games, though, I have been known to wear sunglasses. It really cuts down on the glare from the lights, so it is easier to track fly balls through the air.
And now, it's time to update our map...
Tina Fey: enough woman for three guys, so qualifies as "three people to party with"???
Ok, I'm nearly appalled. Red Hook is better than Bud, I grant you. And I actually think their Winterhook and Sunrye are quite good. But HELLO! Elysian! McMenamin's! Hales Ales! Maritime Pacific! Rogue! Pike Pub! (ok, maybe not; although the beer is decent). Fresh beer! Great beer! Local beer! (/channeling Seth with all the exclamation marks)
Uh, Red Hook is based in Seattle. I'm not sure what your beef is exactly.
All of those other breweries are just fine. I'm a fan of Hale's Ales Mongoose IPA, Mac and Jack's African Amber, and Georgetown Brewing Company's Manny's Pale Ale. I tend to like microbrews, but it's not something I really feel strongly about.
Mmm. better. I will accept that answer.
re: Red Hook. I'm messin' wif you. I don't think it measures up to the best Seattle has to offer, that's all. But I'll still drink it when offered
Not to mention all the great Alaskan brews, which I'm devestated I can't get now that I'm away the Left Coast.
Blue Scholars! Nice. I saw them play at Bumbershoot last year and they were even better than their studio albums led me to believe, even though they didn't play my favorite song. Somehow they couldn't hear me shouting "selfPortrait" over the thousands of people waiting for Kanye West.
Do you listen to Common Market at all? Do you listen to any other Minnesota hip hop, or just Atmosphere?
I saw Blue Scholars at Bumbershoot last year as well. I was disappointed in Kanye's set. If he would acknowledge that he's a much better producer than he is a rapper, I think he could put on a better live show.
Do you listen to Common Market at all?
I haven't listened to much Common Market, but I intend on exploring more of the local hip-hop at some point.
Do you listen to any other Minnesota hip hop, or just Atmosphere?
I enjoy Brother Ali quite a bit, and P.O.S. has grown on me.
Yeah the Kanye set wasn't great, but it was nice to have Lupe Fiasco come out on stage for a few songs. He is a much better emcee than Kanye.
I am also very glad that you know P.O.S. He is one of the most entertaining performers I have ever seen, and when he has the whole Doomtree crew onstage with him it is a sight to behold. As much as I like him, however, I am a bigger fan of some of the other Doomtree people, specifically Mike Mictlan and Dessa. Mictlan is absolutely brilliant, and I'm pretty sure I want to marry Dessa some day.
Kauffman IS a great ballpark. When I was there several years ago (Steve Lyons' HR proved the game winner for Texas), I was especially impressed with the great parking and seats available.
Tina Fey is one of the brighter folks to trip through SNL. And no physics joke? There must be one about quantum tunneling out there somewhere...
no physics joke? Physics is not funny. It sucks, at exactly 38.0 PSI.
Seriously though, if we start cracking jokes about the sciences, it could get ugly. (I always thought that the FARAD unit for capacitance was too big. Scale that thing back about three or six orders of magnitude! Nanofarads, picofarads, microfarads... I like bigger numbers. Ever seen a 1 FARAD capacitor? Me neither. That baby would fill up the trunk of my car! Actually, not.) See, this stuff is just not funny.
Physics is Phun. But maybe not Phunny. Unless it involves putting an atom bomb up your nose.
SBG, you are showing your age. They had 1F capacitors in Moss' college days, and they were about the size and shape of a can of shoe polish.
I've never seen one, and I have a degree in EE. The size of a 1F capacitor was actually something that a couple of us talked about during some lab projects.
Law School Humor: One of the big jokes was about the case U.S. v. Carroll Towing. Our torts prof kept saying that it (meaning tort law) "all goes back to Carroll Towing." Our torts book had about one or two paragraphs from that case and it never really made much sense to me, so I had to look up the case elsewhere to figure out what the big deal was. And all year long -- it all goes back to Carroll Towing. There were plenty of times where I failed to understood what that meant in a particular context and I think he said that out of a nervous habit or something. No matter what the subject was that first year -- the joke was "it all goes back to Carroll Towing." Property? Carroll Towing. Civil Procedure? Carroll Towing.
Our contracts prof used to tell us that certain contracts cases were good ones to bring up at cocktail parties. I'm not sure what kind of parties she was going to that they talked about seminal contracts cases, but I'm either thinking that they were the most boring parties ever held or all of the parties involved were stoned. Or both.
The opinion was written by Judge Learned Hand (Moss' favorite judge name, bar none). As summarized elsewhere:
That IS some funny stuff.
Actually it looks a bit like a sabermetric formulation. Moss is pretty sure this formula would be beyond the grasp of the Gardentool. Then again, you won't be finding him at your favorite cocktail party, either.
Accounting - Salad Oil Scandal.
Now CS, on the other hand, is a barrel of laughs:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary numbers, and those that don't.
That is a good one.
Okay, I'll help out a little:
Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar. One says, "I think I've lost an electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" The first says, "Yes, I'm positive..."
A neutron walk into a bar. "I'd like a beer," he says. The bartender promptly serves up a beer. "How much will that be?" asks the neutron. "For you?" replies the bartender, "no charge."
One of my favorites (and I'm like 99% sure I heard it here at the WGOM first) was some graffiti that said "Heisenberg may or may not have been here"
that's a famed bit o' Carleton tunnel graffiti. Not necessarily original to there, of course. But one of my favorites.
"Don't drop acid. Take it pass/fail."
Studio Arts Building mens room, University of Minnesota. Circa 1984.
Why'd you pick a school out in Washington? I'm assuming you are at UW.
I am at UW. I wanted a school with a big program, because I wasn't very sure what exactly I was going to do my research in, though I did apply to some smaller schools. I was accepted at 4 of 10 schools that I applied to, and visited tOSU (campus was a little too much like Minnesota's), Penn (decided I couldn't deal with the people in Philadelphia), and UW. It was also a nice bonus that there is major league baseball here, too. I've decided I like Seattle alright, but not enough to want to stick around here after grad school.
Seattle is infinitely better than Tacoma. Tacoma is a wasteland.
Cake brings back some good college memories...we used to sing "The Distance" all the time. I still sing "Stickshifts and Safetybelts" to my wife when we're driving around.
I would try to look to make a deal for a AAAA outfielder
Like, I don't know, Alex Romero? Yeah, I'm sure glad TR let that guy leave the Twins org.
Too bad the modern Malibus don't have bench seats, eh?
You have phenomenal taste in music. And it's even better when you adjust for being a physics student.
Thanks. I used to be (am at heart?) a big band geek, so that probably informs my taste in music quite a bit.
When I went to college, it wasn't that easy dropping music altogether. There was a part of me that thought teaching music would be fun, but then there was a larger part of me that didn't want to deal with high school students. I also could just have easily decided to go into econ (the interest was there, anyway), but at some point you have to pick a side I guess.
the interest was there, anyway
Econ joke?
Not an intentional one, anyway.
+5 for the pun, but -5 for admitting that you didn't intentionally do it.
So a zero-sum game.
I used to be (am at heart?) a big band geek, so that probably informs my taste in music quite a bit.
Percy Grainger gave you away. What'd you play? I played Euphonium through college (Augustana).
Hmmm...Ben Kweller and no Ben Folds. I don't know what to say!
Trumpet. I played marimba/bells/etc. a couple of times because we didn't have percussionists that could read music for those instruments, and I played piano with the band a couple of times, too. I also played piano with the jazz band. I was a lot better at piano than I was at trumpet.
I always liked good low brass players, though. They were usually pretty easy-going guys.
Does the "good" in "good low brass players" refer the the playing, or the player? It makes a difference in my case.
Couldn't have phrased it better, Neil.
Ubes, you should be the VJ.
Sorry. We gotta have him doing the baseball stuff. Our VJs are more than capable.
I accept this award on behalf of bS and the 'wig, SBG.
(Shout-out to frightwig: September is yours.)
tunelessly,
E-6
I readily admit that I have musical ability the way Mike Fratello was a star in the NBA. Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, administrate. I'm a musical administrator.
U.S.S. Mariner (because half of what I know I learned from David Cameron)
I can tell. You definitely have a similar style of thinking and writing about the game. That's definitely a compliment, because Cameron is one of my favorite baseball minds.
I've added U.S.S. Mariner to my daily reading list. Great stuff. Unfortunately, they've had some problems with their comment section -- lots of talk about chemistry and the like. For baseball writing, though, you will be hard pressed to top that site. Those guys are great.
ubelmann needs to get them discussing physics rather than chemistry.
[deleted, OT]
+10 excessive penalty weeks
Ubes, you're scaring Moss. Moss has a draft of BKAC waiting to send off, but now half the answers need to be changed...otherwise readers will think the same thing was posted twice.
Sorry Moss, at some point you had to find out that I was trying to model myself after you.
Come to think of it, I've never seen Moss and ubelmann at the same time...
I would assume both expansion teams would be placed in the AL? Or would you be switching the Brewers back? A different NL team (the Rockies, perhaps)?
Also: What's your opinion on Glenn Gould's Bach work? Have you heard his organ recording of Die Kunst der Fuge?
Also also: I'm with you on Tina Fey.
I would probably switch the Brewers back. I looked at it once, and with those 32 teams, you could divide up into 4 divisions and respect league ties pretty well and make things pretty regional.
I (embarassingly) don't have any opinion on Gould's Bach work. I've been meaning to check it out, though.
So, the Twins would have Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee? Or Chicago, Milwaukee, and KC? Or Milwaukee, KC, and Texas? Yuck. (But, we'd be in the playoffs every year.) Then it would be Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto. Boston, Baltimore, NYY, and Tampa Bay. Seattle, Vanc, Oakland, LAAA.
I would say something like this:
AL East: Yanks, Toronto, Baltimore, Detroit, Boston, Cleveland, New Jersey, Tampa Bay
AL West: White Sox, Texas, Kansas City, Seattle, Angels, Oakland, Minnesota, Milwaukee
NL East: Philly, Washington, Cincy, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Mets, Florida, Atlanta
NL West: San Diego, LA, San Francisco, Colorado, Arizona, Houston, Cubs, Vancouver
It's not perfect: St. Louis is in the wrong time zone and the Cubs had to move divisions, but overall I see that as a less drastic change than when Milwaukee had to change leagues way back when.
As far as interleague natural rivals go, the main problem is that there just aren't enough true rivals to go around. The ones that make sense are Yanks-Mets, O's-Nats, Reds-Indians, Jersey-Philly, Rays-Marlins, White Sox-Cubs, Rangers-Astros, Royals-Cards, Seattle-Vancouver, LA-LA, and Oakland-San Fran. Then you have Toronto, Detroit, Boston, Minnesota, and Milwaukee left over in the AL and Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Colorado, Arizona, and San Diego left over in the NL. Boston-Atlanta kinda sorta makes sense with the Braves-Braves connection. Toronto-Pittsburgh or Detroit-Pittsburgh wouldn't be terrible. After that, nothing really makes sense. The only way to fix that is massive league realignment or to just do away with the natural rivalries. League realignment doesn't really make that much sense to me since you'd be taking teams that would be intraleague rivals and giving them fewer games against each other. So it seems like you either put up with some bizarre "rivalries" or do away with the concept.
I thought you meant four divisions per league, not four divisions. So, you are eliminating a round of the playoffs, too. It would be similar to the old days, but instead of two eight team leagues, there are effectively four eight team leagues with interleague play.
This is what I thought as well. I'd already put together a suggestion for a "AL Great Lakes" division to go along with the "NL Appalachia."
Florida might be the key to solving your Cubs problem. I'm assuming in a few years they'll be playing elsewhere, most likely in the West. That would mess up interleague play significantly, though.
It would be similar to the old days, but instead of two eight team leagues, there are effectively four eight team leagues with interleague play.
Exactly. If we wanted the All-Star game back, we could get rid of AL-NL play altogether, which would be fine with me. This would also make scheduling pretty straightforward. 8 games against teams from the other division and 14 games against teams from your own division. That way everyone within the division plays the same schedule.
LCWM Knights
I drove by thier new school last weekend. I was impressed.
and historically, I really liked Sports Night
YES! A fantastic show! I need to purchase the DVD set
ditto. great, underappreciated show.
A classic chemistry/baseball joke:
Q: Who is basically the best hitter of all time?
A: Al Kaline, of course.
Ubelmann: Just curious, have you ever been presented with a top-secret mission to find codes in various magazines, and report back to Ed Harris?
Not to my knowledge, no.
Any reason my nick is abbreviated in the map, while no one else's is? It's not like it's all that crowded up in the tundra
Also, maybe white stars would stand out more from the text around them?
OMG, tough audience!
SBG is short for Stick and Ball Guy (okay, that's a reach). NBB is short for New Britain Bo (that's not a reach). I don't know why I abbreviated early in the process, I just did. I'll fix that next time out. And I'll look into the white stars.
You can change mine to New Guy too, if you want. I don't plan on using BeenAroundAwhile Guy ever again.
Okay, New Guy.
Okay, I get it -- only the outriggers are abbreviated.
I didn't say you had to fix it, just wondering. You have a half-baked standard to hold to, you know.
major league???? what about bull durham? i like when crash comments that there might be an managing opening in visalia-TWINS farm team. quick bat quick bat quick bat.