Old News

It is a bit disconcerting to get scooped on your own move, but, well, this is the world where we live.

You may have heard … I am leaving Sports Illustrated for a new venture. I can't really go into details about the venture except to say that it's a joint thing between the new USA Today Sports Group and MLB Advanced Media, and it's obviously very exciting. It is, for me, a chance to work with old friends on new things. I'm obviously thrilled about it.

What I can talk about for a minute is Sports Illustrated. I love the place. I love it with every fiber of my being. I love it today exactly as much as I loved it the day they hired me. I believe it features the best sports writing and sports editing in America … and many of the best people. It breaks my heart to leave. More than once over the last week or so I have thought about that line in Amadeus where Mozart, unable to choose between two wigs, shouted: "Why can't I have two heads?"

I've written this before -- my dream, from the time I was just starting out in this business, was to write for Sports Illustrated. My first story was about how tall Dustin Pedroia was, and seeing that in print was one of the joys of my life. My first cover story was about Albert Pujols, and that took me to an even higher-high. I talked writing with Gary Smith, podcasted with Peter King (twice -- my technology skills aren't the best), chatted baseball with Tom Verducci, hung out with the awesome golf guys and listened to jaw dropping stories at dinners with the legendary Terry McDonell. And much more. At least 100 times, I looked around and thought, "Is this really happening?" It was three of the greatest years of my life, and leaving has been a persistent kick to the stomach ever since I made the decision.

But … tearing myself away from a place as great as SI might tell you just how psyched I am about this new thing.

Sports Illustrated, of course, will continue to be fabulous. And as far as the new thing, well, it is indeed somewhat secretive, kind of a Project X, but I can tell you that I will be doing some writing leading up to it. Details to follow on that. In the meantime, thank you all for reading. I have been pulled in a million directions these last few months, and am still being pulled apart for a while longer, but I can tell you that I have many posts about Derek Jeter, infomercials, Tiger Woods, LeBron, Harry Potter, that impossibly bad Spandau Ballet commercial and pixifoods lined up. Hope you'll stick with me.

Happy Pi Day

Great stuff from High Heat stats -- hat tip to brilliant reader Joe -- on National Pi Day.

High Heat Stats figured out which pitchers had seasons ERAs closest to Pi -- an inspired idea on NPD Day.* So of course I had to get in on this, largely because I'm in Vegas, and if I'm not comparing pitchers' ERAs to Pi I'm out there losing money.

*Through a convoluted series of events -- I took out $100 from the Las Vegas ATM, it gave me a $100 bill, I found that odd, I tweeted "How many places in America will you get $100 from an ATM Machine and they give you a $100 bill," several people tweeted that ATM Machine is repetitive -- I have with help from brilliant readers come up with a pretty good repetitive abbreviation/acronym list, including some sports ones.

-- ATM Machine

-- SEC Conference

-- PIN Number

-- POW Prisoner

-- SSN Number

-- NASCAR Racing

-- NIT Tournament

-- GPS System

-- The TPC (for The The Players Championship not the course)

-- PDF Format

-- The Los Angeles Angels (translated as The The Angels Angels).

-- CSI Investigator

-- NDP Party (for Canadian readers!)

-- SUV Vehicle

-- SAT Test

-- MLB Baseball

Anyway, 38 pitchers since 1901 have qualified for the ERA title with a 3.14 ERA.

The best ERA+ among them was Frank Viola in 1993 -- his 3.14 ERA was worth a 148 ERA+.

The worst ERA+ among them was Clarence Mitchell in 1916 -- the balls as so dead that a 3.14 ERA was an 83 ERA+ which is flat horrible. Pedro Astacio had an 83 ERA+ in 1998; that was a 6.23 ERA.

Four pitchers carry Pi out to three decimal points (3.141), and this included Fernando Valenzuela in 1986. Fernando won 21 games that year and had 20 complete games, in case you were wondering. Twenty complete games. Sheesh.

Three of the four pitchers carry Pi out to four decimal points (3.1415). They are Mel Parcell in 1948, Paul Foytack in

1957 and Jerry Koosman in 1970. All three pitched exactly 212 innings and gave up exactly 74 earned runs. Even more striking, Parcell and Koosman both allowed 13 unearned runs. They did it very differently -- Parcell only struck out 74 batters all year, but he also only allowed seven home runs. Koosman struck out 118 (exact same as Foytack) but gave up 22 home runs.

And -- here's the big finish: Can you name the pitcher with at least 300 innings pitched whose ERA is closest to Pi? Obviously I wouldn't ask unless it was absolutely the perfect -- THE PERFECT -- pitcher for such a thrilling designation. You ready?

The pitcher with a career ERA closest to Pi is … Mike Marshall.*

*CORRECTION. I had figured ERAs wrong ... Baseball Reference, which is the greatest site on planet Earth, has one quirk where in their statistics they mark 1/3 of an inning as .1 and two-thirds of an inning as .2. I have no idea why they do this but whenever i use their stats this messes me up. Mike Marshall threw 1,387 2/3 innings in his career, and is you figure those 2/3 of an inning at .2 he is the pitcher closes to Pi. However, when you note it correctly, Marshall is actually not the closest to Pi. The closes it Mel Queen. Ah well. It's still cool that Dr. Mike Marshall, who was always as much a mathematician as pitcher, finished with a 3.14 ERA.

The Olive Garden

My wife worried, when I worked out an Olive Garden write-off with the great Tommy Tomlinson, that I would poke fun at Marilyn Hagerty's now famous Olive Garden review. This tells me that I did not explain the idea well enough to her. I loved that review.

In case you missed it, Marilyn Hagerty is the 85-year-old author of the Eatbeat column in the Grand Forks Herald, a newspaper in Grand Forks, N.D.*

*At about 50,000, it is the third-largest city in North Dakota behind after Fargo and Bismarck.

Missouri and Kansas and Suspense

I liked the ending of "Say Anything." Do you remember that? What happened (obvious spoiler alert) is that the John Cusack and Ione Skye were sitting on a plane, and she was frightened, and he told her that almost all plane accidents happen in the early part of the flight, before the pilot alerts everyone with a bell that they are above 10,000 feet. We then watch the two characters wait for the bell, and wait for it, and wait for it, and he says something like, "If the bell rings, we'll be all right." And finally, the bell rings, the screen goes to black, the movie ends.

The ending is jolting the first time you see it, no question, because it's so abrupt, so sudden, that my first reaction was to feel just a bit cheated. Wait, that's it? There's no conclusion? What happened to them? How did their lives go? Did they stay together? Did Skye live up to her potential? Did Frazier's father get out of prison? Did Cusack ever convince baseball that he was not a part of the Black Sox conspiracy?

But then, I came to really like it. The rest is left to the imagination.

Kucinich and the DH

You may or may not have seen this, but Dennis Kucinich was destroyed in a primary Tuesday in Ohio. Don't worry, this is not a political column -- it's actually about the designated hitter. But it begins with Kucinich, who was the mayor of Cleveland when I was growing up there. Kucinich is universally seen as a character -- as in "a person marked by notable or conspicuous traits." Love him, despise him, anyplace in between (as if there is anyplace in between for Kucinich) you would probably admit that he's one of a kind. Now, he's out. And The Washington Post sees a trend.

"The one thing that's being tamped down here is we're losing characters," Rep. Stephen C. LaTourette (R-Ohio) told the Post. "The place needs character and characters."

You may or may not agree with the idea that Congress needs characters, but again the point here is not Kucinich or Congress or politics at all. It's the designated hitter.

Bounty Hunters

If you don't care about the Saints bounty hunting story -- barely even see it as as story -- you might as well stop reading now. I know that includes a lot of people. I know there is a strong belief that just about every team in the NFL does this sort of thing, and I suspect that's true (already there is talk of investigating other teams). I know that to be appalled by the Saints story is to be absurdly naive. I know that pro football is a rough and vicious game, that hurting other players is both a natural repercussion of the game's violence and a viable part of the game's strategy. The quarterback must go down, Al Davis said, and he must go down hard.

So all that's said.