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4th and 5

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  1. Bastos: translated in to English, it means if you think you’re eating here and then going to get fucked up and have sex, well that’s not happening. 

    There is a ton of talent on PN today. 

    Golf carts are available at ixchel. PM sent for a better rec

    • Like 1
  2. 13 minutes ago, Teddyballgame said:

    Just got to the island. Electricity out for whole island. PA lost my reservation so we are in room the size of a closet. Electricity not expected to be on until sometime tomorrow. It is very steamy currently. Sitting a dark bar drinking cold beer so it could be worse I guess

    Y’all put some beer on ice for me. See you tomorrow. 

  3. 9 hours ago, wild_turkey said:

    So what makes it so great? Cost? Proximity?

    It's close, easy to get to, cheap, great laid back and old school Mexico vibe, tons of places to eat great meals for cheap, Playa Norte is a beautiful beach with no seaweed, world class sailfishing in winter, whale shark watching in summer, no huge monolithic resorts like in Cancun, the native people are cool, I've made friends with people from Europe to a dude that has a vacation house around the corner from mine. It's just a great place to chill. Go read the old thread on Shaggy or the one on this forum. There's a reason there is at least one of us assholes on Isla at all times.

     

    http://www.shaggytexas.com/board/showthread.php/68775-Just-got-back-from-Isla-Mujeres

  4. I don't know that this warrants a new thread but it's gotta go somewhere, read this story and check out this guy's Twitter account

     

    The Athletic

    The ‘Pitching Ninja’ gives fans insight into the game — and helps major leaguers steal each others’ grips

    GettyImages-493353296-1024x683.jpg
    By Lindsey Adler Jul 20, 2018comment-icon.png 42 save-icon.png

    At his home in a suburb outside of Atlanta, Rob Friedman checked Twitter. In his notifications, people are quote-tweeting his GIFs of the best pitches of the day with fire emojis, and in his direct messages are established major-league pitchers reaching out and asking for his help in finding a competitor’s changeup grip. He’s the rare outsider ushered inside by the most talented people in the game.

    Friedman has a slew of his own pitching contraptions arranged in his unfinished basement. Some nets, a wedge mound, and a Rapsodo pitching monitor — a $3,000 portable sensor system similar to a Trackman sensor.

    It’s here that Friedman helps his son train as a pitcher. It’s also here that his dogs, Roo and Darvy (as in Yu) chase down baseballs of varying weights and sizes for their personal pleasure. It’s here that Friedman hands me a standard-issue ball and invites me to try out the Rapsodo system, showing me the interface on his iPad that will instantly show him the spin rate, the spin axis, the ball trajectory — all of the components of effective pitching that have become increasingly well-known as a result of MLB’s proprietary Statcast system.

    The first ball I throw isn’t skilled enough to even be registered by the system. Friedman goes to check on the set-up, wondering if he has it turned on and calibrated properly. It doesn’t register the second throw, or the third, but when Friedman gives it a shot and fires a strike, the machine lights up blue and within seconds shows us exactly how the ball traveled, and why.

    Friedman is part of the social family surrounding the guys at Driveline Baseballin Seattle. But he is not making his name and livelihood maximizing the playing abilities of established major leaguers or operating a fully functional gym with attendant branded products. Instead, he’s a dude with a day job and a hobby.

    On Twitter, Friedman is a beloved phenom who goes by @PitchingNinja. He spends hours of his free time watching for great pitches in major league games, isolating them with a video program on his laptop, and turning them into quick and easy GIFs with labels of their pitch types and velocity. His biggest passion, and seemingly most popular work, are the GIFs in which he combines two different pitch types from the same pitcher to show how long the two follow the same trajectory before breaking off in opposite directions, known as “tunneling.”

    “Sometimes I’m just trying to illustrate like ‘Boy, this is just crazy,’ and get people more excited about pitching,” Friedman says. “I view my role as to just make people more excited about baseball — pitching specifically. Pitching is kind of unique from hitting because it’s more like golf, or a sport where you’re totally in control of what you do. The batter has to react to you. You control where that ball is going to go, how it’s going to come off your hands, the way it’s going to spin, whether it’s gonna mirror another pitch or not.”

    Friedman doesn’t do this work with the intention of building a business — though after MLB shut down his account earlier this year over copyright violations, he says they sent over a contract to make him a paid “independent contractor” so they could benefit from his work — but instead to share the art and skill of major-league pitching with fans. Friedman wants his work to shorten the knowledge gap between what major leaguers do, and what fans at home see.

    But it’s not just the can’t-dos at home who find themselves riveted by his account. Major leaguers love him. There’s the simple vanity and excitement of finally making it to the @PitchingNinja timeline, but his collection also serves as an open-source database of pitcher grips and releases, which some of the game’s craftiest players use to tinker with their own pitches and deliveries.

    Friedman has no meaningful background in pitching himself. “I played growing up, but I wasn’t all that great,” he says. “But I always enjoyed the game like a lot of folks and it really changed more when I had a kid and my son started playing baseball.

    Image-from-iOS1-768x1024.jpg
     
    (Photo by Lindsey Adler)

    “I started, at first, like everybody. You find people to take your kid to — the local guy who teaches everything — and you know he was a successful player, and I started wondering why they were teaching stuff that wasn’t what I saw actual successful pitchers doing.”

    Friedman says that he has a habit of “digging deep” into his interests (he used to be a lawyer), and from there, he says he “went on a quest to kind of find what I thought would be the truth.”

    He began to replicate things he saw successful pitchers do, to understand how a certain muscle group affects movement or velocity, and brought those lessons with him as a travel ball coach. As his son, Jack, got older and became more serious about pitching, Friedman’s home set-up became more extensive.

    The science of pitching turned into an obsession for Friedman, one that’s flipped the script for him on the conventional narrative that you can’t be a baseball expert if you haven’t played at a high level yourself. That transcendence is something that drives Friedman to share his knowledge with more casual observers of the sport.

    “I wasn’t personally successful, but I think that actually shows more being able to teach it, rather that to be able to do it,” Friedman said. “Just because you are successful doesn’t mean… you might have just been born freakishly talented or strong or fast, and maybe you can’t communicate that to anybody, and you can’t explain why that is and you try to replicate yourself in everybody.”

    At his home he uses a simple system to create his GIFs, a PC laptop on which he runs a video capturing program. Between his computer, iPad, and television, he can monitor most games on any given night with fair regularity. With a 76,000+ Twitter following, he often receives suggestions from fans on pitches he might have missed. To streamline it even more, he knows by now which pitchers tend to produce the most interesting work — Kyle Hendricks, Lance McCullers, Blake Treinen, Jordan Hicks — and monitors them specifically.

    “Some send me messages that say ‘Hey, this pitch this is kind of interesting,’” Friedman says. “I can’t call anybody out, but some will tell me what they were trying to do and say ‘Hey, I was trying to tunnel these two, can you check on that?” Or they’ll say ‘You might want to take a look at this pitch a guy threw against my teammate.’”

    “Last night a major league pitcher was DMing me about trying to get slider grips from certain pitchers they were interested in,” Friedman said. Subsequent interviews with pitchers around the league revealed this to be a not-rare occurrence.

    It takes Friedman only a few minutes to create his work, especially if it’s a straightforward single-pitch GIF. For his overlays, he visits ESPN Gamecast and looks at their pitch tracking icons to look at pitch location and result, following the rule of common sense that if a major league hitter swung at a slider five inches out of the zone, it must have looked like another pitch they’d been served — until it broke.

    It’s this phenomenon, the pitch tunneling, that Friedman believes best explains what might otherwise look inexplicable to the layperson watching from home. Why would a hitter swing at that slider? Take a look at it now, overlaid with a four-seamer, and see for yourself how long they followed the same trajectory. It shows how deceptive an elite pitcher can be.

    “I’ve also had major league hitters ask me about how to combat tunneling stuff with, What would you do? And I thought that was really interesting, because I can say ‘Hey pitchers, you should do this’ but I couldn’t necessarily tell you as a hitter how sometimes you kind of have to guess because there’s really no way to figure it out,” Friedman says.

    Friedman says he began tweeting out pitching GIFs because he wanted amateurs and fans to have a place to find examples of expert pitching, but it can also serve as a de facto database for established major leaguers to rip off each others’ pitch types and grips.

    “Everyone has been doing that for a while,” Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman says. “He’s just centralized it.”

    The most notable example of this — though not the only one who has used Friedman’s account for his own research purposes — is Indians starter Trevor Bauer, of course.

    At the major-league level, clubs receive reams and reams of data every night and have access to all varieties of video from their games (and others) for the purpose of scouting and breaking down their own mechanics when needed. Ostensibly, all 30 clubs could pull video from pitchers around the league to distribute to players who might want to learn more about, say, Luis Severino’s slider or Corey Kluber’s breaking ball. But Bauer says that a database like Friedman’s simply doesn’t exist elsewhere.

    Bauer could ask the Indians’ video research department to pull and overlay, say, two of Stephen Strasburg’s pitches from the previous night, but as he said, “it’s just not a streamlined process.”

    “Plus,” Bauer adds, “it’s hard to watch every game to know what to ask for. Like, I’m not watching when the A’s play the Astros because we’re playing the same time.”

    “There’s very few other people who actually do pitch design work, but it’s a hobby of mine to try to find the best pitches around the league and try to steal them and add them to my repertoire. It’s very convenient to just go on Rob’s account and say ‘Ok, well, let’s see here. What was the nastiest pitch today?’ and just scroll through and say ‘That one’s pretty good, so now I need to check into Stroman’s slider and see what the characteristics are,’” Bauer says.

    “So I would go to Brooks Baseball or something like that and find pitch movement on his pitch type on average. Then I’d compare that to other sliders around the league — ‘oh wow, he happens to have one of the most laterally moving sliders in the league, and he has a similar arm slot to me.’ Then you can find like slow motion GIFs of it or replays of it on Rob’s account as well, so you can kind of see how it comes out of his hand and how it’s spinning and whatnot.”

    Stroman’s not just being stolen from, though. He often retweets GIFs of his own pitches from Friedman’s account, and before a recent game in Toronto he offered up that he’s one of the players who reaches out for close-ups of grips and releases.

    “I reach out to him all the time,” Stroman said. “I’ve asked him for changeup releases on guys, or Scherzer’s grips. Certain guys he’s able to find the video, then zoom in at a pretty high quality and get the grip. He’s a pretty good resource, man.”

    Add Braves starter Brandon McCarthy to the list, too.

    “I enjoy the visuals of his account because I can look for specific releases, as well as the overall tunneling of pitches. But behind-the-scenes-only things I’ve asked him for are other GIFs that I couldn’t find on my own.”

    For some pitchers, the allure of Friedman’s account is less experimental.

    Mets reliever Jerry Blevins likened the @PitchingNinja feed to a regular segment that aired on Baseball Tonight called “That’s Nasty,” that focused specifically on pitches.

    “You’d see a lot of Corey Kluber two-seamers, Rich Hill curveballs, it doesn’t exist anymore,” Blevins said. “Now it’s all about home runs and highlights on defense. You don’t see much pitching anymore, and that’s the craft that I’ve chosen.”

    Still, Friedman is just a guy in Georgia. Baseball players, and pitchers in particular, can be cagey about their work, and some of the smartest ones in the game have chosen to accept a professionally inexperienced guy as one of their own?

    “He shows really interesting picks,” Blevins says. “You know he knows the game from a pitching standpoint.”

    It doesn’t hurt that Friedman chooses to show the best these players have to offer. Typically you’ll only see a GIF of a pitcher embarrassing himself if he’s an AL pitcher striking out in a three-pitch at-bat.

    But while it’s clear Friedman is somewhat blown away by his own proximity to established major leaguers, he insists that’s a side effect, not the main pursuit of his hobby. He’s passionate about making good pitching — and what that entails — more accessible.

    “I have the time to do it,” Friedman says of his claim to fame in his kitchen as a Nationals-Yankees game gets underway on his TV. “And I’ve accumulated all this knowledge about pitching, and I want to make sure it doesn’t die with me.”

    (Top photo of Stroman’s slider grip: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

  5. 5 hours ago, BurntEyes said:

    I'm torn on this one. I have zero issues with the police using a gun in this situation (meaning shooting back after being shot at). I'd need to know more about the specifics of the pursuit/perps to decide where I fall on the gun fire.

    Murder case. They were shooting at the police pursuing them.

    Amazed (yet predictable) at the loss of fine motor skills and critical thinking at the end.

     

     

     

  6. On 7/14/2018 at 11:51 AM, Gil Bang said:

    In CA, there's a term; "committing waste".  Let's assume it's a nice single family home, and somebody begins demolishing it, they may be committing waste, and the bank can file a lawsuit. 

    Spray-painting the garage door?  That's a city code enforcement issue.  Not  a bank issue.

    Don't ya think maybe, just possibly, there's a chance based on what you can see from the outside, that there is more going on there than just spray painting the garage? And that a lender might be concerned about their collateral? 

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