Bill Roper's Journal

I headed down to Wrigley Field where I met a friend of mine and we watched the Cubs beat the Marlins by a final of 5-2, with all of the Cubs' runs coming in one inning, as did all of the Marlins' runs. Other than those two innings, it was a really well-pitched game by both clubs.

While that was going on, the Cardinals beat the Phillies 3-2 to extend their winning streak to nine games, which is rather remarkable. They remain one game back of the Cubs in the NL Central.

This is being interesting.

The Cardinals, remarkably, are still in first place in the NL Central, a half-game ahead of the Cubs. This is despite losing two consecutive extra inning games to the Angels and being in position to lose today's game to the Angels as well, before the pitching roof caved in on the visitors. The entertainment included my newly-drafted catcher, Ivan Herrera, hitting three homers in the game for the Cardinals, making him the first Cardinals catcher to do that.

If he can figure out how to throw out a runner at second, he *could* be dangerous. :)

I headed down to Wrigley Field for the last regular season game, which is something that I like to do when there's no reason not to. (Conflicts occasionally arise, but not so much when the last home game is on a weekend.)

Lots of Cubs were getting rested, since the game didn't have any real effect on either team. There were some good plays, a lot of good pitching (or bad hitting), and the game went to extra innings tied 0-0.

At which point, the Cubs picked the Reds' ghost runner off second to start the bonus baseball festivities. I had never seen this happen before.

The Cubs then proceeded to do the most Cub thing possible and give up three runs in the top of the tenth, having eliminated the ghost runner before throwing a pitch. The Cubs got the tying run to the plate in the bottom of the tenth, but that's as far as things went on the way to a 3-0 Reds win.

But it was fun, the conversation was good, and the weather didn't suck, which was a major improvement over a lot of late season games that I've been to.

Meanwhile, the Cards beat the Giants to finish up the season tied with the Cubs. I guess the Cubs officially finished ahead of the Cardinals, because the Cubs won the season series. Given the amount of annoyance the absence of tie-breaker games is about to be in the NL wild card race, I think I'll just call this "tied for second" and be happy that it doesn't affect anything except draft position. :)

Finished up a bunch of project work today, which is good. More about that soon.

Realized that I could watch the tail end of the Cardinals vs. Yankees game on my phone and got to see a 14-7 Cardinals win, which was nice. And they beat the Yankees in a road series, which was pretty impressive for a team that has had as many troubles as they've had.

As far as I know, nothing new has broken today. I am encouraged.

And tomorrow, I will be off to the Cubs vs. Pirates game at Wrigley Field on Jimmy Buffett Night. That should be entertaining... :)

After my mournful look at the Cardinals' season a few days ago, they have proceeded to grab two wins against the Brewers in 24 hours. This doesn't improve their position a whole lot, but it beats the alternatives.

I have a couple of things going here at home that involve filing forms. One worked, the other didn't. Now I need to figure out what it was I did wrong on the bad filing and whether or not it just cost me a noticeable chunk of money.

I have some code at work that looks like it's working, but the wrong thing is happening. So I need to find out why that's going awry. That will be tomorrow's problem at work.

Returning to the good news front, I did a load of laundry this afternoon and the dryer appeared to work correctly. This makes me happy. I am hoping to remain happy with the dryer, but at least I got to test it before the weekend.

And the trash has gone out, which is always a good thing. :)

I was down in the studio in and around laundry today (still got to go down and retrieve the towels!) playing with some tracks that I had done a quick mix on earlier so that I could send them to a friend. The quick mix wasn't bad, but it was time to look at it a bit more critically.

The first thing I realized was ..that I wasn't really happy with the sound of my guitar. That track was a direct in from the Taylor ES2 system and it was sounding thin. Pretty much everything that I'm using in terms of plugins at the moment is from Universal Audio and I had thrown the Hitsville EQ on this. It wasn't being a good choice.

When in doubt, try to learn from the experience of others. So I opened up the search engine and asked for suggestions on EQ for the Taylor ES2 system. A bit of poking around found a number of reasonable suggestions, one of which was to try the Pultec EQs. I pulled the low and mid-frequency Pultec EQs onto the track, fiddled with them a bit, and the sound was improved substantially. Yay!

EQ games followed with my vocal until I got it sounding better, as I picked up a bit of low end that had vanished into the ether. We'll call the EQ adjustments good for now.

I want to look at the reverb settings, because I'd thrown everything into a single reverb field, which is probably suboptimal. But that will be tomorrow's project, having saved today's work into a new session.

In the meantime, the Cardinals have swept the Cubs in today's doubleheader, so that will make up a bit for the doubleheader that the Cardinals dropped to the Royals a few days ago.

Now, we just need the Brewers to lose some games...

I went down to Wrigley Field today to catch my second game of the season, which was Cubs vs. Padres.

Imanaga, the Cubs new Japanese pitcher, was tonight's starter and he was quite good, as he has been all season. So was the Padres starter, which wasn't what you would have expected checking out his ERA before the game started. The Cubs led 1-0 going into the top of the eighth. Imanaga had thrown nearly 100 pitches and was about to start his *fourth* time through the order, but he'd been pretty effective. And new Cubs skipper, Craig Counsell, is supposed to be one of the smartest managers in the league. So when he trotted Imanaga out to start the eighth inning, I was surprised.

The Padres brought on lefty pinch hitter Luis Arraez in the nine hole to start the inning and you might have thought that this would be a great time to bring on a lefty reliever. Counsell did not. Arraez promptly singled to right.

Lesser managers might have looked at the situation and said "Let's not put Imanaga in a position to lose this game." But Counsell looked at how Imanaga had retired the Padres leadoff hitter, Jurickson Profar, three times so far and figured that he was likely to see Imanaga retire him a fourth time.

He did *not* figure on seeing Profar hit a two run homer to give the Padres the lead.

Dobbin having departed the barn, Imanaga departed the game.

The Cubs managed to tie up the game in the bottom of the eighth and held the Padres scoreless in the top of ninth.

And then it started to rain, but not so heavily as to halt the game.

Which was good, because Busch hit the first pitch of the bottom of the ninth out to give the Cubs a 3-2 win.

It was a rather spectacular ending.

Elsewhere, in less happy news, Cardinals catcher Willson Contreras was injured by the backswing of a Mets batter and will be out from 6-8 weeks with a broken arm.

*sheesh*

It's baseball season! The Cardinals played their first game!

And they lost badly to the Dodgers. They were one Goldschmidt away from being no-hit in the opener, as he had all three of the Cardinals hits.

The good news is that baseball is a *very* long season.

And the regular baseball season is over. The Cubs executed a collapse of epic proportions. I went to poke around with an Internet search and people are busy debating exactly how bad this collapse was in the annals of Cub collapses. It looks like the consensus is that it isn't nearly the *worst* collapse, primarily because the Cubs had to get really, really hot to get in a position where getting really, really cold would result in an epic collapse.

It was still ugly to watch.

In other news, Adam Wainwright is retiring from baseball and the Cardinals as of today. He had told his kids that they couldn't have a dog until he retired.

Today, the Cardinals presented him with a puppy in a basket. It is apparently an Italian truffle dog (official breed: Lagotto Romagnolo) and is among the class of hypoallergenic dogs.

The puppy is very cute.

(It looks like his wife was in on this, although Waino was not. She has named the dog Louie.)

Adam Wainwright finally got his 199th win for the Cardinals tonight. This is primarily important, because you have to get 199 wins before you have a shot at getting 200. Now, we'll see if he can do it before he retires at the end of the season.

In other news, I have now fixed the thing that was causing the problem as well as the things that were wrong but weren't the proximal cause of the problem. At least, I *think* the thing is fixed. My *test* says it is fixed.

On the other hand, there's *another* thing that I fixed that I'm being told isn't fixed, but when I tested it on my machine, it was fixed. There are days I wonder what's in any given build that is handed off for testing...