Rain... er, Life... Delay

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."       - John Lennon

Hey everybody! I'm back! Yes, it's been a while. Actually, it's been quite a while. Do I have any excuses? Probably; excuses are pretty easy to come by. Are they good excuses? Probably not, but at least they're fun and interesting.

My life is still full of knitting and full of baseball. On the baseball side, I was the Official Scorer last summer for the Fond du Lac Dock Spiders, a new team in the Northwoods League (a collegiate summer league). This season, I'm with 2080 Baseball, doing behind-the-scenes work like database construction/administration, video compilation (you should the see the prospect video library I've helped build!), intern management, you name it.  On the knitting side, I've gotten a couple patterns published (including a scarf modeled by the fabulous Jenn Decker), and I have a few more in the pipeline that will come out later this year. (No spoilers, sorry, but I'll let you know when they're up.)

Taffy Twist Tam, pattern at Knit Picks

Tescherae Scarf, pattern at Knitty

And, because it's me, I did find a way to mix knitting (well, yarn), baseball, and scientific research. As you probably recall, one of the bigger stories last year was the Home Run Surge. There are clearly myriad contributing factors (swing mechanics, hitting strategy etc.), but a Saber Seminar talk last summer by Alan Nathan got me thinking that part of the difference might be the ball itself. Therefore, I spent a lot of time over the last 6-8 months systematically tearing apart baseballs and gathering data on their contents and construction. (Yes, no doubt some of you know I have a history of tearing apart baseballs to get at the yarn. Here, though, I was tearing apart baseballs for science. If that yarn gets used in the future, so be it. For now, it's still a source of data.)

The exciting news is that, yes, there's a difference! (I'm in the process of writing everything up now.) Thanks to Rob Arthur, I even got the chance to talk about my findings on NBC Left Field.



So now, finally, I'm getting back to my sweater reproductions. I'll give you details on the status of the Ty Cobb Sweater in the next post, but suffice it to say that it's coming along very, very well. Thanks for being patient with my hiatus. Let's get this ball rolling again!