God is an American / I'm afraid of Americans

I fear the Suskind article about Bush's faith may ultimately do more to help Bush than to hurt him. Seeing "God Bless America" performed during the 7th inning stretch tonight (will we ever hear "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" again?), and Curt Schilling crediting God for the win in the post-game interview, reminded me once again that this is still a deeply religious country, and the "reality-based community" is likely to stay a minority for years to come.

Recluses a-poppin'

Breaking news: Jandek played in front of a live audience!! "The whole show came about after 7 months of secret negotiations and was done on the basis that Jandek’s name was not used in ANY of the publicity at ANY time."

Baseball geekery

AP has a nice summary of the baseball season in terms of league leaders and season records broken. Most impressively, Ichiro Suzuki broke the single-season hits record set in 1920 with 262, and Barry Bonds's on-base percentage of .609 broke the record he set two years ago with .582. One thing I noticed that wasn't mentioned in that article was that Bonds had fewer strikeouts (41) than home runs (45), for the first time in his career, although he came close in 2002 (47/46) and 1994 (43/37). (Ironically, another record broken this season was his father Bobby Bonds's record for most strikeouts, by Adam Dunn's 195.) I wonder how often this has been done before; I couldn't find any references for this stat, or even a measure of strikeouts per plate appearance. Baseball Almanac does have some records for fewest strikeouts in a season, though, and browsing through that I found that Lou Boudreau did it once (9/18 in 1948) and Frankie Frisch tied twice (12/12 in 1922 and 10/10 in 1927).

Aha, I just found a downloadable database of statistics in CSV form. Time to play around with the CSV Scheme library...

Baseball geekery followup

Turns out having more home runs in a season than strikeouts is not unheard of, but still pretty rare. The last time it happened (with at least 100 at-bats) was George Brett in 1980 (24/22). It was more common before 1960; Joe DiMaggio did it 7 times, and Ted Kluszewski and Yogi Berra did it 5 times each. In fact, DiMaggio's career numbers are 361/369! Johnny Mize did it with the most homers in 1947 (51/42).