Complaint Hub

The shelf-life of a baseball reliever

Ever since I read Moneyball, which turned me into a baseball stat super genius, as it did for everyone else, I have wondered about the value of a relief pitcher. For the most part, they come and go pretty quickly. Today’s top set up guy is tomorrow’s DFA.

Mason Miller, the A’s closer, has been fantastic. A lot of people think he’ll move at the trade deadline, as the A’s certainly don’t need him to finish last again. How much would you give up for him? If we’re just talking “We need a top closer to win the World Series this year”, fine. But how many years is he going to be a top closer?

My theory was three years is the max except for really top-end guys. The corollary to my theory is that this doesn’t apply to Mariano Rivera, who was the best reliever ever by a large margin. To test my theory, I finally got a subscription to FanGraphs, dumped all data for relievers from 2000-2024, ranked them by WAR each year, and then counted how many times a guy was in the top 25.

Player	Years in the top 25 in WAR
Mariano Rivera	12
Kenley Jansen	9
Joe Nathan	8
David Robertson	8
Craig Kimbrel	8
Aroldis Chapman	8
Trevor Hoffman	7
Rafael Betancourt	7
Jonathan Papelbon	7
Francisco Rodríguez	7
Billy Wagner	7
Joakim Soria	6
Octavio Dotel	5
Liam Hendriks	5
J.J. Putz	5
Greg Holland	5
Francisco Cordero	5
Edwin Díaz	5
Ryan Pressly	4
Roberto Osuna	4
Raisel Iglesias	4
Matt Thornton	4
Mark Melancon	4
Ken Giles	4
Keith Foulke	4
Josh Hader	4
Jonathan Broxton	4
Joaquín Benoit	4
Huston Street	4
Heath Bell	4
Emmanuel Clase	4
Devin Williams	4
Dellin Betances	4
Byung-Hyun Kim	4
Brad Lidge	4
Brad Hand	4
Bobby Jenks	4
B.J. Ryan	4
Andrew Miller	4

There you go. 39 players since 2000 have been top 25 relievers more than 3 years. I might redo the analysis a bit – WAR may not be the best way to rank a reliever.

I was definitely right about Mariano Rivera.

Rivera warming up — Mariano Rivera throwing in the bullpen, spring training, 2013. Photo by the author

Of the 318 players who ranked in the top 25 in WAR in the 2000’s, 192 did it once. 60 did it twice and 27 three times. The rest is the list above.

Everyone involved here is wrong

While 1) banning the resale of legally purchased tickets should be illegal and 2) TIcketmaster totally deserves this, I wonder if anyone told them that every time the barcode changes it’s a separate felony charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.
https://www.404media.co/scalpers-are-working-with-hackers-to-liberate-non-transferable-tickets-from-ticketmasters-ecosystem

Red lights – optional if you’re very special

I just walked down the 800 block of Park Rd NW, just near my house. This block contains a police station, though the only reason you can tell is there are always police cars double parked all down the block.

At both ends of the block, a driver ran the red light. And not a “oops, I should have stopped on that late yellow”, but “I see the light is red and I am consciously choosing to ignore that”.

At the New Hampshire Ave end, a driver heading east crossed the center line to pass two other drivers who were stopping for the yellow.

At the Georgia Ave end, a driver stopped in the crosswalk then floored it after the light turned. Honestly couldn’t tell you what he was thinking.

I sometimes wonder why we even have police.

Remembering family history, Willie Mays edition

I have long had it in my head that my grandmother was at the game where Willie Mays made The Catch. I just confirmed with my uncle that it was NOT that game, but rather another fantastic catch by Mays that they saw at the 1962 All Star Game at RFK Stadium in DC. They were sitting in straighaway center field and the catch was right beneath them so they didn’t actually see it until later on tv.

There’s a lot of old family history that gets misremembered here and there. I write the REAL stories down and spoil the fun for everyone because that’s how I roll.

RIP Willie

Solving software problems the hard way

Many years ago, I wrote software for the federal government. Our application helped a couple of agencies produce the documents they send to the President and Congress to ask for money. I mean their official annual budget request, not like “Hey, Joe, you got five bucks on you?” I assume they did that in person. The basic process was our code produced some boilerplate, some tables based on numbers they uploaded, and then inserted text documents that they also uploaded. It then spit out a completed document. With modern technology, this would be pretty straightforward, but this was 2008 federal government tech, so it was held back by all sorts of things.

The code mostly worked fine without major changes EXCEPT for one thing. Treasury liked to change the table heading colors every year. This was a HUGE problem. At the time, we were using a very old document type called Rich Text Format. Maybe you are old enough to have seen an RTF file. It was made by Microsoft to be compatible with non-Microsoft Word programs. In hindsight this is sort of hilarious. To change the color on an RTF file, the code ripped the header off the file and inserted a new one. Then you ran the code and hoped that you did it right. Usually, you did not, so you tried again. It was an ENORMOUS amount of work for something that I thought should be trivial – there were all sorts of escape characters and weird abbreviations and none of it made any sense. It was sort of like HTML with a CSS file except where CSS is supposed to be simple and straightforward (Cascading Simple Straightforward, that’s CSS), this was the opposite.

So I thought, surely there is software out there that we can use to do this instead of rolling our own. And there was! We were a Java team, and at the time, Apache POI was what everyone in Java used to do text documents. I was excited! A polished open source program that was free to use! No more headaches!

And then there were headaches. You see, our Java code lived inside an Oracle database. And the Oracle database version we were stuck on only supported Java version 1.4. Apache POI required 1.5. There was no way I, a lowly software contractor, could get them to move to a newer Oracle version that would support 1.5.

So I did what any young software person in that situation would do – I wrote my own code to create and manipulate DOCX files. Do not attempt to read this code, you will cry, I promise. Interesting note – most (all?) Microsoft Office files (.docx and .xlsx for sure) are just a zipped folder of human-readable XML files. You can just unzip them and look at the files. During my time writing this code, I looked at those files A LOT. More than was healthy, probably. Much longer and I would have been able to open a Word document and see the XML, Matrix-style.

But in the end, it worked! You can see some of the documents my code produced if you look at the Congressional Justification and Budget in Brief at treasury.gov. I don’t know how many years they used my code – I left the project in 2010 – but I’m sure they used it in 2008. I get a kick out of knowing that budgeting decisions were made in part using a document I coded.

Crash right in front of me – thankfully no one injured

I was in Annapolis to have lunch with my mom today and made a quick stop at the complex with the Best Buy on Generals Highway. As I was leaving, at the light to turn out, I noticed a car to my right waiting to turn left into the complex. I noticed the car was pretty far back – it’s a HUGE intersection, and I would have come towards the middle to make the left shorter.

As I sat there, she began to turn. Oncoming traffic still had a green, and an SUV with the right of way smashed into the turning car.

Everyone seemed to be ok – I called 911 and I commend Anne Arundel county for their responsiveness. I think a police officer was on site in 3 minutes and the ambulance in maybe 5. The SUV driver was pretty freaked out – I think she was driving with her mom and son, 3-ish years old. I don’t blame her for being freaked out. The other driver hadn’t gotten out of the car when I left but I overheard a woman who had spoken to her tell another witness that the woman was upset she’d have to tell her daughter she’d “gotten into another accident”.

It got me thinking a lot about how our car-dependent areas really hurt us as we age. This woman was coming from somewhere west of Annapolis, so no chance she could get anywhere without a car. My grandmother was like this – she never learned to drive, and it never mattered until they moved to the suburbs and then my grandfather passed away at 61 and she was stuck in that house until someone came and picked her up.

The woman in this crash today probably shouldn’t be driving anymore, but how are you going to tell her that when that’s her only way out of the house?

Parenting perks – trolling your kids

Parenting is hard sometimes. Kids are THE WORST. They’re always there, wanting things, complaining, making messes.

But they’re also great. And one of the side benefits of them getting older is you can troll them to great effect. My younger one has a stack of Principal’s List awards on the dining room table. I’m not sure 1) why she has so many or 2) why they are in a pile on the table. But my wife was teasing her about it and about how they seem to keep multiplying. Of course, this is a GOOD thing, as being on the Principal’s List is a nice achievement and we are of course happy that she is doing well in school.

So I had to take it a step further. When she was at school one day, I scanned one of the papers, put some new dates on, and printed out copies. I taped one to her bedroom door and put one under her pillow. And I added two to the stack on the table. And, my favorite, I mailed one to her. It’ll probably arrive tomorrow after she’s mostly forgotten the first batch.

Boycott Bike to Work Day 2025

The main Bike to Work Day (BTWD) pit stop in DC, Franklin Park, is not served by any bike infrastructure of any kind. Unless and until this is remedied, all cyclists and all vendors should avoid this pit stop completely.

This was my 12th BTWD. Ok, 11th if you don’t count Boat to Work Day where it rained so much they had to park a Circulator Bus at Freedom Plaza to give out t-shirts.

I ride a few thousand miles a year, mostly in DC. I’m okay riding in traffic. But the point of BTWD is not to get cyclists like me a new cheap t-shirt and a water bottle with some vendor name on it. The point is to show regular people that they can bike to work. It’s lunacy to expect inexperienced or hesitant cyclists to brave lower 14th St NW. I certainly wouldn’t send my friends and family there.

I can’t imagine sending someone to that stop who wasn’t already an experienced city cyclist. And not all stops are like this. The main Virginia stop at Rosslyn is well-served by bike infrastructure (and the Intersection of Doom is better-ish, I haven’t been nearly killed there in years). The old spot at Freedom Plaza in DC shows off the lanes on 15th St NW and PA Ave NW (and to a lesser extent 11th NW, which is still WAY better than 14th NW).

But Franklin Park has none of this. The lanes on 13th NW and 14th NW end before the park. I St and K St are absolutely not bikeable for an inexperienced cyclist. And you can’t even bike on the sidewalk (legally) because it’s in the weird CBD trapezoid.

We need to demand better.

Before LLMs were cool

Back in 2015 I wrote a Tumblr to try to earn commissions on wine sales on Amazon. That was a thing you could do then, in 2015. I guess I should say “wrote” because the only thing I wrote was code. I certainly didn’t write the wine reviews.

What I did, before anyone had ever said “Language Learning Model” (ok maybe some nerds had said it, whatever), was download the text of about 800 Wine Spectator “Daily Picks”. This was pretty easy because they used integers as keys in their URL so you could just go to /page/1 then page/2, etc etc, and Beautiful Soup just dumped the words into a text file.

I fed this download into markovify, a Markov chain generator written in Python. Someone may come “well, actually” me on this but Markov chains are essentially early LLMs that could run on your basic laptop in 2015.

Then I wrote a script that took a referral link to an Amazon wine and spat out a review and (and this might be my favorite part) a rating that was a random number between 77 and 94.

It then posted these reviews to Tumblr. They’re still there, you can go see them in all their glory. The name, Andrey Wines, sounds like a fancy winery, right? I would totally buy a nice cab from them. It’s named for Andrey Markov, who invented the Markov chain. I thought that was SO clever.

I mean look at that (click the image for the post, I’m not sure how to do alt-text on WordPress. I should figure that out). It had no idea the difference between a red and a white and I didn’t try to explain.

I giggle to myself knowing that OpenAI paid Tumblr to let them train their AI on Tumblr posts, and some of those posts are going to be this.

Cross Site Scripting is not the same as CSS

In my previous life as a coder, I worked for a while in the DHS Office of the CIO with the accountants. We wrote and managed a website to let the DHS components (Secret Service, CBP, etc) submit their monthly accounting files.

First, some background on building websites. Skip this if you’ve ever built a website. To build a page, all you need is HTML. Think of it like your docx file – your word processor reads a docx file and shows you a pretty document. Your web browser reads an html file and shows you a pretty web page. This is a massive oversimplification but we’re moving on.

One optional thing you can have in your HTML file is CSS. You know how links in pages are blue and underlined most of the time? Let’s say you want them all to be orange. You can add CSS to your HTML page that says “make all the links orange”. It uses different syntax but that’s not important. Now your browser knows to make all the links orange.

Nearly every website you have ever visited uses CSS to make things look pretty. It’s like how nearly every car you’ve ever seen uses paint. It’s POSSIBLE to have a car without paint, but it looks dumb and breaks if it goes through a carwash.

Tesla Cybertruck — A bug stupid truck with no paint

So there’s something else called Cross Site Scripting. This is bad. It’s complicated if you don’t understand it already but all you need to know is that this is one method people use to try and steal your credit card or whatever.

You’ll note that Cross Site Scripting could also be written as CSS. To keep people from getting confused, we use XSS for Cross Site Scripting.

Except DHS IT Security. They use CSS for both, and ban both from all DHS computer systems. Or they did in 2012, I haven’t worked there in a while. But know that this was at least as stupid then as it is now, it’s not a new thing. You would think the agency tasked with protecting US computer systems, among other things, would be knowledgeable about those computer systems.