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Thank you, Randy

It's time for the third installment of my thank yous to the 2009 Giants. Unfortunately, this post is based around a story that isn't someone getting an award, but rather the news that Randy Winn has been asked to look elsewhere for work in 2010. While he didn't have a particularly good offensive year (especially batting right handed), he continued to be a defensive stalwart in right field and a great personality. Most importantly, he gave the Giants a good four years from a running start.

The Giants acquired Winn from the Seattle Mariners in July, 2005, for Yorvit Torrealba and Jesse Foppert. In September, 2005, Winn had one of the greatest months by a Giant in franchise history. (He hit .447 with 51 hits. He hit 11 homers in 30 games after Sept. 1.) He parlayed that month into a three-year, $23.25 million extension.

While his production tailed off, nobody could dispute that Winn was a good Giant. He played hurt without complaint and got himself ready to be on the field every day. He gave a consistent effort. He’s a smart defensive player and baserunner. Those are the kinds of things managers appreciate most in players. From a beat writer’s perspective, he was accessible and his dry sense of humor made him an asset in the clubhouse. He was our Good Guy award this past season after finishing high in the balloting in previous years.

As Landis said to me today, “If anyone tells me they don’t like Randy Winn, that makes me wonder about who I’m talking to.”

Thanks Randy! We're going to miss you.

Reflections on pigs and humans

"I look at the pig as a great animal model for human lifestyle diseases. Pigs like to lie around, they like to drink if given the chance, they’ll smoke and watch TV.”

Dr. Lawrence Schook, pig researcher at University of Illinois via NY Times but read the whole story, it's filled with great quotes and general pig funniness.

The real impact of Tim Lincecum’s marijuana bust

For those who missed the story, Tim Lincecum got busted for marijuana possession in Oregon on October 30th. It got pleaded down to a misdemeanor and shouldn't make a difference on anything. But Andrew Baggarly, the Merc's Giants beat reporter has fun with the story:

The embarrassment might be the worst thing to come out of this. I’d be surprised if Lincecum loses any endorsements. And besides, it’s not like this comes as a shock. Lincecum dresses like he’s a cross between Jimbo Jones from “The Simpsons” and Jay from “Clerks.” Maybe he’ll drop all pretenses and start wearing dreads.

via blogs.mercurynews.com

Al Michaels traded for an 80-year old cartoon

Gotta love Hollywood. Buried deep in a New York Times piece about how Disney is re-imagining Mickey Mouse is the wonderful tidbit that Disney and NBC Universal settled an 80-year old dispute by trading a well known sportscaster for a cartoon character:

Mr. Iger solved a right problems [sic] with the game by making a deal with NBC Universal in 2006. In the negotiations, Mr. Iger persuaded NBC Universal to trade the Oswald rights for rights to Al Michaels, the sportscaster. NBC wanted Mr. Michaels for its new football franchise and Mr. Michaels wanted to go, but Disney held him in a longtime contract through its ESPN unit.

For background, Oswald was a cartoon rabbit that Walt Disney abandoned in the late 1920's in a dispute with Universal but Disney wanted to resurrect for a new video game, Epic Mickey. Al Michaels is a sportscaster with a little more humility about his value on the trade market.

The long drought begins

Only 101 days until pitchers and catchers report.

Louis on HotWired's anniversary

Great to read Louis Rossetto's memories of HotWired. I'd forgotten about a lot of the machinations that led up to its creation. We were essentially starting a start-up from within a start-up and risking both:

Even internally, people were skeptical – our first business wasn't profitable yet and here we were starting another? In effect, we were taking the money that Condé Nast had given us for growing Wired circulation and investing it a completely unknown, untried, potentially dangerous project to invent Web media.

Still can't believe it's been 15 years.

Bill Sunk Hillary’s V.P. Chances

“I still think Hillary has a lot of what I am looking for in a VP:  smarts, discipline, steadfastness. [However] I think Bill may be too big a complication. If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship.”

Barack Obama as quoted by David Plouffe in his new book (via blogs.abcnews.com)

Perky Jerky

ThinkGeek, how I love you. Full disclosure, I'm on the board of its parent company SourceForge, Inc. so I'm biased. But probably the better disclosure is that I'm also a total geek and wish TG existed 20 years ago (OK, 25 years ago) when this would have been the coolest thing ever to eat. Now it's just the coolest thing ever to blog about (and probably buy as a holiday present for my son and a few others on my list):

It’s 5am and you’ve been gaming hard since you woke up twelve hours ago. A twinge of hunger gnaws at your belly. Your eyes droop from the exhaustion of intense competition. Do you go make coffee? Do you call for your mom to get you a sandwich? NO! You reach for caffeinated beef jerky! Satisfy your craving for caffeine and your hunger all without going idle. (Buy at ThinkGeek)

Their food section is developing quite nicely. Did I mention Baconnaise?

Happy birthday, HotWired!

Fifteen years ago today, HotWired (my second start-up) was launched, introducing the banner ad onto the internet. It's very hard to imagine it has been that long and quite frankly that anyone on the internet even remembers although it was wonderful to see AdAge magazine commemorate the anniversary with a very sweet piece by Frank D'Angelo, whose agency (Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer) ended up buying 4 of our first 14 advertisements. Frank writes:

Has any one item in our industry been encased with so much debate -- at times even disdain -- as to its true value, role and contribution to marketing communications from its inception in 1994 to this day? Yet the display banner is the impetus to the creation of the online advertising category that will reach beyond $24 billion in 2009, according to eMarketer. Perhaps more important, no other development since has advanced advertising measurement, effectiveness and accountability than the display banner.

Given the amount of time gone by and how fast things change on the internet, one article in AdAge is probably the right amount of celebration (although we are throwing a small party later tonight to get as much of the gang back together again). And I will say that probably 80% of what you read about that time period (I'm looking at you Wikipedia) is somewhere between incomplete and the intentional rewriting of history. But hey, I'm still too young to be an old bitter man, I'll write that post on the 25th anniversary.

Love them or hate them, advertisements on the internet have funded a lot of great content, applications and services that we all use for free every day. If we hadn't launched HotWired with ads on October 27, 1994, no question someone else would have brought the model online soon thereafter, so we don't claim any genius on the idea. But someone had to do it first, in scale and with a lot of original content behind it to support the model and that ended up being a group of us at Wired magazine. Yay us!

I hope you'll join me in the celebration!

Thank you, Timmy

Moving on with my thank yous to the Giants for a much better than expected 2009, big time shout out to Astrid's favorite, Tim Lincecum. Cy Youngs aren't announced until November but he's a strong candidate. He did just get named National League pitcher of the year by Sporting News for the second consecutive season.

We ended up seeing more of his games on TV than live this year, but in many ways that's a much better place to see just how good he is. Thanks Timmy!

"In a lot of ways, he was actually better," Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti said.

Lincecum trimmed his ERA from 2.62 to 2.48. Opponents hit .206 off him this season, compared to .221 in '08. After walking 84 in 227 innings a year ago, he improved to 68 walks in 225 1/3 frames this season.

The NL's starter in this year's All-Star Game, Lincecum validated that status by leading the league in strikeouts (261) and quality starts (26) while ranking second in ERA and opponents' batting average and third in innings. He also tied teammate Matt Cain for the league lead with four complete games and joined four other pitchers atop the NL list with two shutouts.

via SFGiants.com