TedE

Don, in your contributions to this discussion I'm seeing a lot of references to "anecdotal evidence" and "perception" of the decline of these brews. When it comes to evaluation of quality, the expectation of what you are going to be tasting is a powerful, powerful drug. If you expect that breweries taken over by larger conglomerates will produce crappier beer it's going to be almost impossible to disentangle that from what your brain perceives from your tongue. It's healthy to acknowledge that influence (and nobody is immune to this, no matter how much they would like to believe!). I'm not as comfortable as you assigning a strict, linear correlation between quality and production volume; this thread has several examples of breweries that have grown and maintained their quality. Although I'm with you on Urquell, it is a shadow of what was once maybe the world's greatest pilsener. I'll offer up one more personal (anecdotal ) example to illustrate the point: Lagunitas 'A Little Sumpin' Sumpin'' (god, how that name has grown to annoy me ...). This one came on the market towards the beginning of the Belgian pale ale or IPA boom, where primarily West Coast brewers started using Belgian yeast strains for wheat or sour beers in their IPA and IIPA recipes. I thought the results were stunning. This one, along with Green Flash's 'Le Freak', were my go to beers for a period of time. Both have now grown to be bi-coastal operations (I wouldn't be surprised if Lagunitas has 10x the production volume now). I still taste and enjoy Sumpin' fairly regularly, but something is ... just not the same. However, I can't pin down what. Has it actually changed as they shifted production to the East Coast? Has my knowledge that Safeway now stocks 3-4 different Lagunitas styles seeped into the reptilian portion of my beer snob brain and exerted some unconscious influence? Have I just had it often enough that the novelty has worn off, and been inundated with more beers of the same style? In other words, has the perceptual space for Belgian IPAs grown so much that this beer has shifted to another place in my memory? I don't know, and there is no way for me to really figure it out. The brewers could probably show me chemical analysis of this beer today and from 7 years ago., but even if they were identical it wouldn't change my perceived shift in it's quality.

This is interesting. You would think that seemingly dominant players would have a more skewed distribution when they win, e.g. they win dominantly more often (winning 6-0/6-1/6-2 sets) than when they lose (more close outcomes), leading to a point win percentage larger than recorded there. I only skimmed that page and had a hard time determining the range that it represents (whole career vs. recent dominance, I don't believe that is EVERY professional match of his since it relies on volunteer assessment of recorded matches). But, if I'm reading it correctly, that 53% overall points won is backed by "critical" point win percentages all well over 60%. This equates to those stats you see for baseball players' percentages with bases loaded, or RISP with 2 outs, etc. In other words, the "clutch" stats. Maybe there is something to that, and Moneyball ain't everything.

I thought it was an open secret that most crab houses use JO. Old Bay is just too damn expensive, even in bulk. I keep a paper towel handy just to wipe off the excess of either before cracking in. I do find JO to be less assertive, so the over-spicing isn't as bothersome, but it does have a grittier texture. A friend liked to remark "Sawdust is the secret ingredient!".

Stopped in yesterday for a couple of ciders and pinxtos. Cider menu is even more varied than I thought, this is really something exciting and entirely new for DC. More domestic ciders on tap than imports, the interesting Basque offerings were bottled but I think that is just a supply issue with getting kegs (they were listed something like "draft ciders in a bottle"). Beer engines were serving a traditional English cider and perry that we didn't try on this visit. Just hope they can sell at a volume that makes keeping that wide of an inventory feasible. We sampled the marinated mussel (lovely, meaty mussel in shell), mushroom stuffed piquillo (stuffing was a puree and it lost any semblance of oyster mushrooms to me; wouldn't order again), and the sausage montadito (a nice 2-3 bite snack). Many of the larger plates and entrees looked more interesting, but I had dinner waiting elsewhere. All in all, $25 for two drinks and a snack is not a bad deal at the quality they are offering. Sat outside which is a nice space, but predictably noisy given the location on Fla Ave. A bonus in this weather: the building shades most of the patio in the early evening. Lots of families and dogs when we got there. An aside: saw some of these sitting on the patio empty; I had never seen them before. They apparently seem to have caught on with some cider producers. It's like wine-in-a-box, but a keg!

13-0. This has been his late June/July so far: 3-0 0.83 ERA .072 BA WHIP 0.65 I have no problem with them skipping his starts if he tweaked something or has some nagging soreness, because when he is close to 100%: Must Watch Baseball. I am concerned about pulling these young guns up to make those spot starts (Giolito didn't appear to be ready, and Lopez tonight has had a very quick rise through the system), but with Ross out its been tough. How much does it cost you to protect your ace?

But the nits are ripe for picking! The neighborhood of Truxton Circle is bounded on the north by Florida Ave, so ANXO is right on the northern border.

I've read this twice, and I still don't get it. Or maybe I do get it and find it to be a terrible thought piece at best. The chain of reasoning goes: Gose, as a beer style, is disgusting. Craft brewers have jumped on the gose bandwagon and are producing them in non-trivial quantities. Therefore, craft brewing has become a pointless and aimless exercise in one-upmanship. The whole premise hinges on the first proposition being universally true for all beer drinkers. It's not, and everything that follows is just silly. I don't think it actually has anything interesting to say about staying ahead of the crowd for its own sake. It's just saying that the author thinks some sour beers taste like stale sweat. For people who do like gose, tell me again how increased diversity in available beer styles is a bad thing? Look, nobody is doubting that there are novelty beers out there that appeal mainly to people looking to be at the forefront (or radical fringe) of beer: habanero IPAs, chocolate peanut butter porters, mango doughnut ale. It's not my thing, but I recognize it as A Thing that can be ignored if you aren't into it. I think there may be an argument to be made by focusing on those, not historical styles that might have been lost to history but were not precisely because the popularity of craft beer created enough room at the table to accommodate both.

Don, I realize you were ranting on this one, but I'm going to have to disagree on a couple points. "Craft brewing" as a designation of quality measured only in output of barrels per year is meaningless. MEANINGLESS. Beer is an industrial product. Zymurgy is ultimately a science, not an art. The true "craft" part comes with innovation in recipes and attention to quality ingredients. Once you have the recipe down production is limited only by your equipment and budget. Smaller brewers can get away with more experimentation because the risk is so much lower at a small production volume, but even the big micros have small batch labs for this purpose. You can produce really shitty beer in 1 bbl increments, or very good beer at 1 million bbl's. It is literally a question of scale and quality control. I once heard a very well-respected small craft brewer say (I'm paraphrasing): "The brewers at Anheuser Busch don't brew crappy, watered down beer because they have to. They brew it because they want to, that is the exact product they are trying to produce." Macro brewed products are perversely the envy of the brewing world in that they hit the mark they are trying to hit. Every. Single. Time. (Note: I'm talking actual beer here, not the lab-created "malternatives" like Lime-A-Rita or whatever). Cheap beer isn't cheap because it is made in large quantities, it is cheap because it is made with readily available cheap ingredients (adjunct grains, hop extracts, etc.) at the lowest acceptable cost in order to sell it by the truckloads. Brewers like Sierra Nevada show that you can brew beer in industrial quantities and still maintain quality that comes with good ingredients, and do so consistently. They've been doing it for a pretty long time now. There is no magic there. You just need to have the space and capital to scale up, and the drive to maintain quality. Now, back to "craft" brewers. Yes, there are certainly some that have traded quality for consistency on the march towards nation-wide distribution, but that doesn't mean that finding a beer at a supermarket chain means it's crap. I think that is the greatest thing about the craft brewing "revolution". It has allowed brewers to bring their products to the masses due to increased demand for better beer. Some do it well (in my mind: Sierra Nevada, Bell's, Dogfish, Lagunitas, Green Flash, Flying Dog), some have not and succumbed to the siren song of short cuts, whether by choice or at the heeding of their new overlords (the main Goose Island brands, Anchor, Red Hook, Pyramid), and some I don't think were ever very good in the first place but had a product that was palatable and "craft"-y enough to attract attention when there weren't many alternatives (New Belgium, Sam Adams come to mind). Think about it: 20 years ago you would have had a Sierra Nevada and though "Hey, that's a really good pale ale!". It stuck out because, hey!, there were very few good pale ales available at that scale. Now it sits on the shelf with literally dozens of others of similar quality. A relative embarrassment of riches. I'm with you on the skewed production towards hoppy beers, but like the wine and whiskey worlds that is a matter of marketing. Market makers (as the case may be) hype them up and the producers are happy to respond. Then it became a feedback loop as they tried to out-lupulin each other. The fads will always pass, but with the growth they produce comes opportunity. I was at Whole Foods just last night and counted no fewer than 6 brands of gose on the shelf. Gose!! Even knowledgeable beer drinkers couldn't have named a producer of gose 5 years ago, and now Sierra Nevada is making one! Not all of them are very good, mind you, but that they exist at all is pretty incredible. It's an amazing time to be a beer aficionado, and I don't see it dying down any time soon. Lament that fact that you can find good alternatives to BudMillerCoors at 7-11. I think it's fucking great.

Thanks for the preview! Looking forward to seeing the full menu when it's available. Do you have a general price point on the pinxtos and the cider? I've really liked the collaborations with Millstone they've been sampling prior to opening. Is it just domestic ciders on tap, or do they have European producers as well? Shaw Metro entrance is only 4 blocks West.

Opening Wednesday

I highly doubt it was all his choice. After having to scratch the start a couple of weeks ago due to the mild back strain the Nats probably want him to completely rest for the All Star break. In related news I'm sure Mets fans are really happy with the way the team pushed Harvey in the playoffs last year despite concerns coming off of TJ surgery. That seems to have worked out well.

Stats are stats. Somebody will find a way to use them to their advantage. Bettors just make different use of them; their only concern is for the outcome of the combined probabilities of the match ups. Nobody (I hope!) is betting on the outcome of an at bat. Speaking of gambling, the widespread availability of stats in general (not just derivative advanced stats, but free distribution of raw numbers) gave rise to the popularity of fantasy sports. The natural evolution of that pursuit is daily fantasy sports. These companies are like the lottery in that they basically print money from mathematical ignorance. But with the lottery at least you know you really do have the same shitty chance as anybody else willing to part with their $1 for a ticket. With daily fantasy the illusion is that a sports fan with deep knowledge of players and strategy has an advantage over somebody who knows "less" about the game. Nope. All of that money (minus the companies' cut) is funneling into the hands of an exceedingly small minority of players with specialized knowledge of game theory who would otherwise probably be plying their trade creating algorithms for Wall Street. It's an arbitrage game, and without a LOT of capital and the ability to spread it out over a large enough sample size you are throwing money away in the long term.

Bill James' Baseball Prospectus is the genesis and is still the grandaddy of them all. I've only ever skimmed the very, very surface of what is contained there, but it has lots and lots of background reading. If you are a Nationals fan in particular read Tom Boswell, and especially his weekly Monday chats. He usually drops a gem or two in there on some obscure stat he's dug up to make sense of something that's piqued his interest. As mentioned above baseball stats play out over a long time period. They are actually pretty terrible at predicting immediate outcomes and don't even apply very well to individual at bats. If the announcer says a batter is 6-for-10 lifetime with 3 HRs against a particular pitcher does that mean that the probability of the at bat producing a hit is .600, and a home run .300? Of course not. 10 at bats is a very small sample size, and against one pitcher it artificially extracts a non-random sample from the pool. If that hitter has a lifetime .300 BA there are probably some pitchers he's faced where he's gone 0-for-10. And the pitcher does not have an aggregate .600 batting average against. With 1,000 at bats between the two the resulting batting average would be a close approximation of the aggregate average for the hitter against those types of pitchers (say LH, 70% fastball touching 95) and the pitcher against those types of batters (RH, good power to the opposite field). It's why when you hear an announcer say "Well, Bob, this is an interesting choice. They've brought Johnson in to pitch hit, but last year he was 0-for-10 against this guy", you shouldn't pay attention. A good manager these days doesn't care, he pays attention to the fact that his pinch hitter is 15-for-40 all time with RISP against RH relievers. That being said, there are innumerable factors at play that are not quantifiable, but the surprising outcome of all of this is work is how many ARE. So, back to tennis (and it looks like somebody has the leg up on you). The question to ask is how well those stats will predict individual match ups. Those match ups contain lots of individual outcomes (how many points in an average men's match? 300? I really don't know). How much weight do you give to winning a point? My completely amateur opinion about tennis from a distance is that the game is too predictable these days. That may just be a talent gap, though. It seem that the difference between the 1-10 ranked players and say the players ranked 30-40 is really, really big. Upsets are a big deal, and with single elimination that's it! A relatively small deviation in the expected outcome means that somebody goes home. Random events can have an outsized influence. This is also why baseball regular season results are shockingly bad at predicting playoff success. It make some sort of perverse sense that the sport with the best predictive models for the long term is so bad at predicting outcomes in the short term, but I still can't fully wrap my head around it. These models will only get better and better. Eventually some NFL coach is going to buck the stubborn conservative thinking that permeates that sport and just fucking go for it on 4th down a lot. Knowing what a player is "worth" makes it easy to continue to cheer for a guy like Ian Desmond even after he failed to produce for the Nats. On the flip side it takes a lot of the mystery out of the game. It's a good thing that nobody has come up with a way to quantify personality.

It's a data problem. The stats you are looking to build off of may not exist. But I guarantee one thing: in the 21st century if there is money to be made using quantitative math somebody is already looking at how to exploit it. Some sports are more ripe for the picking, and as soon as somebody finds the key it's essentially over. Sports books will be the first to know and the "market" will figure it out and adjust, which leads people to search for deeper ways to understand the game, which in turn leads to better record keeping, analysis and more complex math. Baseball is perhaps unique in pro sports in two ways: - The building blocks of the statistical revolution go back decades. With access to box scores containing the outcomes of individual match ups you can run predictive models on a HUGE number of permutations and see how historical outcomes match up, as well as distill advanced stats out of those building blocks and run further models off of those. Hit on a promising correlation, refine, re-analyze. I don't think the average fan really gets how eerily stats can predict the game on a season-long basis, or the arc of a player's career barring serious injury. - The team game is an aggregate collection of individual performances, more so than anything else. When a pitcher faces a batter the performance of those two individuals are the greatest determinant of the outcome. Other factors like the defense behind the pitcher, how many men are on base and where, the weather, etc. do have influences, but nothing that approaches what pitcher X does when faced with a batter like Y. Sports like hockey and basketball are starting to catch on, but it's harder to isolate the variables enough to exploit them. I'm honestly not sure what has been attempted with football. I personally find the historic revisionism of whether historic greats of the game really were that "great" to be boring. That use of the stats doesn't seem very "fan"-like and doesn't serve an ongoing purpose for me. It's a side hobby that doesn't inform the current game, but I guess it's something people enjoy arguing about.

I come not to bury advanced statistics, but to praise them! When it comes to being a fan of a sport I look at it this way: advanced stats cannot make you a fan, but it can enhance your appreciation of the sport. In this day and age in order to fully understand the ins and outs or pro sports you NEED some insights into how the decisions are being made in the front office in order to make sense of the product on the field. Pythag in baseball is remarkably accurate over a season (or, as the stat heads would day, "Duh!"). Knowing that Danny Espinosa had a really bad April and May (sub-.200, 6 HR)) makes his June surge (.300+, 9 HRs) all the better because based on past performance you literally knew he isn't that bad. And seeing Drew Storen's repeated failure in season-defining situations is all the more heartbreaking because it leaves you wondering what extra-statistical factor (I just made that up!) drives those losses. What I have a problem with is letting stats be the only way you access the game. You can't cheer for stats. Well, OK, if you are one of those people who follow sports via your fantasy teams, I guess you can cheer only for stats. But that also means you are a horrible human being and are dead inside. And when you go out of your way to argue that Jim Palmer is the most overrated pitcher of all time, what is the point? Did he run over your dog? This is the anti-thesis of fandom. It's quantitative chest-thumping.

The rise of quantitative sports "fandom" is worth it's own thread. It has its use in two places, and in those scenarios has been absolutely revolutionary: 1) The front offices of professional sports teams 2) Fantasy sports Everywhere else it's just that asshole at the bar trying to convince you that your home town hero wasn't really all that great because his lifetime BABIP or fWAR+ was merely above average.

Any good Sabermatrician worth his or her slide rule will tell you that win-loss records don't mean shit: For the rest of us an 1x-0 record at the All Star break is something to cheer about.

I meant quiet in the relative media attention it is receiving. More ink has been spilled recently on Kershaw's injury and Arrieta's naked ass.

Yesterday's loss was painful, but it did re-enforce the old baseball adage: just by showing up at the park you'll probably see something you've never seen before. They didn't make any announcement over the PA to clear up the confusion, and even after reading up on it at home I still have no idea how the official scoring for that works. Lucroy was 0-1 without an official plate appearance, Braun was stranded on base and then led off the next inning!!! Speaking of Lucroy, by dint of the MLB participation rules (somebody from Milwaukee has to make the All Star team), Ramos might not be invited at all despite having objectively the best season by an NL catcher. Posey/Molina are neck-and-neck in the fan voting; only one of them really has a case for 2016 based on defensive performance in addition to offensive production ....

This has to be the quietest 11-0 start ever. He'll probably be the 5th or 6th named NL starting pitcher at the ASG!!! Maybe says more about the strength of NL pitching this year than anything else.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Nats haven't encased him in bubble wrap for this latest stint on the DL! Hopefully this is just more abundance of caution than further signs of worrisome fragility. In any case it affords us the opportunity to peek into the future tonight if the rain holds off. A big debut win would do an awful lot to erase memories of that road trip behind last night's hammering of Thor ( sorry )

Snowballs (not sno-cones, there is a difference!) were an integral part of my Baltimore childhood summers. There are stands scattered all over the city, but mostly we got them from enterprising middle or high school kids who would set up shop on the curb right outside of the local swimming pools. There were, and probably still are, ice houses that would sell you a block of ice and rent hand-held ice shavers for the day or week plus supply styrofoam cups, spoons and bottles of syrup at a discount. If it was your gig all summer, though, you would head down to Koldkiss and outfit yourself properly. Then if you didn't have a car or a license you would have to find somebody to help you lug your giant ice block and supplies to the next stop! Some were lucky enough to have a few lucrative spots within wagon-pulling distance from home. It was good money and beat the hell out of mowing lawns (although hand shaving for several hours a day was a workout of its own). In case you were wondering, egg custard is the best flavor. This is not up for debate.

This is probably as close as you get to must-see baseball this early in the season: Washington Nationals Strasburg (10-0, 2.90 ERA) vs. Los Angeles Dodgers Kershaw (10-1, 1.58 ERA) June 20th, 10:10 PM EST @ Dodger Stadium

If you're going to base a fictional world on an unstoppable zombie virus it doesn't make sense to end the story at Chapter 1 The companion show "Fear the Walking Dead" (what an awful title ...) tells that exact story from the earliest days of the outbreak. I have about a season and a half on DVR to catch up on, but I thought the first few shows were compelling enough to keep recording. The logic is a familiar disaster story trope: disorganized government response to an unforeseen threat, late and ineffective attempts at quarantine until they are overwhelmed and order breaks down, further decreasing their ability to battle the zombies. It's another reason for the popularity of the zombie genre: each person defeated by the threat doesn't just reduce humanity's numbers, it increases the strength of the threat itself. You have to figure there is a tipping point of no return. "World War Z" (the book, not the terrible, terrible movie) is better-than-average zombie fiction that deals pretty well with how the undead would be able to take over.

Right, but the continuing threat could be disease, aliens, radioactive fallout, asteroids, cybernetically enhanced mecha-ferrets, whatever. The underlying story about what happens to society doesn't have to change much. The whole zombie thing is gripping because of the literal dehumanizing factor of the threat. Being faced with "things" that were once your loved ones adds an obvious depth to storylines that can be plumbed endlessly. Or played for cheap thrills. "The Walking Dead" has done both, but on balance I think instances of the former have been much stronger than telegraphed ploys in service of the latter.