While growing up as a child I was fortunate to attend quite a few major and minor league baseball games.  I spent my summers playing t-ball and little league.  I've spent many years following the Braves watching on TBS when that was the only station to carry their games.  I have even begun in earnest the last couple of years to score games in a scorebook when I visit a ballpark.  So it is to no surprise that I enjoy some good statiscal crunching of the numbers especially when it comes to baseball.

We've all the heard the oft used expression that Baseball is a game of statistics.  Most descriptions and accounts of the game involve some numerical factor whether it is the number of runs score or how many strikeouts a pitcher throws.  As a Braves fan, I pay more attention to individual stats for their players.  The recent trade of Escobar for Gonzalez got me thinking about a player vs player comparsion, but not between Yunel and Alex.

Let's begin with player A and look at his first half season (81 games) in the majors.  Player A had 350 plate appearances, 320 at bats, and a total of 88 hits for a .275 average.  Other stats include 20 doubles, 3 triples, 11 home runs, and 46 runs batted in.  Toss in the statistical black box 23 walks, a few other bases, and it spits out a .326 on-base %, .459 slugging %, and .785 OPS.

Now we take a look at Player B's numbers thru his first 81 games.  Player B had 349 plate appearances to go along with 294 at bats, 81 hits, and a .276 average.  He had 15 doubles, 3 triples, 11 home rumes, and 48 runs batted in.  As for the free passes, 48 walks and a handful of others.  Crunch the numbers and Player A is sporting a .387 on-base %, .459 slugging %, and .846 OPS.

The number of plate appearances really makes this comparsion almost elmentary.  The first interesting statistic is the number of at bats each player has: 320 vs. 294.  Player B has 36 less at bats benefiting from 25 more walks than Player A.  The number of hits, 81 and 88, are close with Player A leading the way.  Average is nearly identical at .2750 and .2755 respectively.  Player A has 5 more doubles, but the same number of triples and home runs as Player B.  Ironically their slugging % is still the same at .459 due to more at bats for Player A.  On-base % is another leading indicator for Player B whose is higher by 61 points.  Consequently Player B has a higher OPS.

Who are these two players?  Player A stepped onto a baseball field way back in 1954.  His 23 season career include 21 All Star selections and 1 MVP award.  He finished his career with 3771 hits and 755 home runs.  Player A would be none other than Hank Aaron.

Player B on the other hand wasn't born until after 13 years after Aaron retired.  He played his first professional game on opening day 2010.  To his credit Player B has already been selected to his first All Star game, but his 11 career home runs pale in comparison to Aaron's total.  Player B is Jason Heyward.

The comparisons between these two players will continue to go on for probably as long as Heyward remains in a Braves uniform.  Hopefully in 20 years we can take a look back at these two men's careers and do a full comparison.  If Heyward's production continues on a similar track to Aaron's, we should all be thankful for being given the opportunity to watch someone so talented.

This weekend I set out to build a raised bed vegetable garden in my backyard.  Why a raised vegetable garden instead of just planting in the ground?  Well the soil in Georgia is poor and growing edibles usually requires a generous helping of "real dirt".  Real dirt in Georgia comes from your local home improvement store in bags labeled "top soil".  I had a general plan for my raised bed in my head before heading to the store which was to build an 8 foot by 4 foot rectangle about 6-8 inches tall.

My first choice of lumber was cedar or redwood to ward off insects and rot.  Unfortunately here in the southeast, neither is easy to come by unless you can find it at a speciality lumber yard.  I had to settle for a couple pieces of pressure treated lumber.  Now some people may be concerned about using pressure treated lumber near veggies.  At first I was concerned too, but then after reading up on ACQ treated lumber most of my concerns melted away.  I won't go into the details of ACQ, but I'm not any more worried about it than all that tuna fish we ate as kids.  So I picked up 3 pieces of 2x8x8 lumber and tossed them on my cart.

Next stop was the decking section because of a suggestion my mother made.  She suggested I use the right angle brackets used to hang deck rafters.  They are right angle connectors that accept 2x lumber and typically sit on top of 4x4 posts.  I picked up 4 Simpson Strong-Tie Rigid Tie Connectors (model # RTC24).  They are made with stainless steel so they should last a long time without corroding.

Final stop was the garden section for the top soil.  I eventually ended up needing a total of 20 1-cubic foot bags which filled the bed nearly to the top.  Don't bother with the expensive name-brand garden soil that is $10/bag.  Get the cheap top soil that is $1-$2/bag and buy fertilizer separately.  The cheap top soil usually can be found out front sitting on pallets or around back.  Ask for assistance if you can't find it because they like to hide it hoping you'll buy the expensive stuff instead.

We loaded up the car and went home to begin assembly.  First I cut one of the 2x8x8 into two lengths 4 foot long.  These would be the sides of the raised bed.  Next I connected all the sides together using the brackets.  I could have used some nails to securely attach the brackets to the wood, but the brackets and wood fit together so well I decided not to use any nails.  With the sides of the bed assembled, I prepped the ground were the bed was to be located by removing most of the grass and weeds.  Next I covered the ground with newspaper 2 sheets deep which would help smother and kill off any remaining grass and weeds.  The newspaper will decompose in a couple weeks.  Finally I filled the bed with the top soil nearly to the top.

Here's a picture of the finished bed:

I discovered this neat little open source application called Console that is effectively a shell for cmd.exe in Windows.  The reason I found this application was because SQL*PLUS that comes with the Oracle 11g client tools is command line/prompt only.  One of the rather annoying behaviors that cmd.exe has is the inability to easily copy and paste.  Console solves that problem and a whole lot more that I didn't realize I had.

Console's features are described as having "multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles."  Now I have not utilized all these features yet, but the text editor-like text selection is very handy.  The multiple tabs feature is also quite nice.

Shortly after getting Console I created a shortcut to load Console and run SQL*PLUS.  First I opened Console's settings (Edit > Settings) and created a tab called SQLPLUS where I set the startup directory for my most common SQL script.  For the shortcut, I used the following:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Console2\Console.exe" -t SQLPLUS -r "/k sqlplus"
The command line arguments I used were -t which tells Console which tab to use and -r to run a command.  I wanted it to use the SQLPLUS tab that I had previously configured under Settings.  The -r argument was a little tricky because when you use cmd.exe as your shell for Console, running programs needs to be preceeded with a /k which is why you see it before sqlplus.

I also created a shortcut that loads Console, runs SQL*PLUS, logs into an instance, and runs a SQL script automatically.  To do this I added my login credentials and the path to the SQL script after the sqlplus command.  It looks something like this "/k sqlplus user/pass@instance @runme.sql".