Fresh from a tweet, the Athletics have announced that FanFest 2012 will be held Saturday Sunday, January 29th, between 10am and 2pm at the Oracle Arena. It will cost $8 for adults and $5 for children 14 and younger, or free for 2012 Season Ticket Holders.

Here are the bullets so far:

• Free autographs
• Free question-and-answer sessions (via Susan Slusser - Melvin, Weeks, Hatteberg and more)
  
• Free photos with the four World Series Trophies
• Memorabilia sale to benefit the A's Community Fund
• Free parking

As always, this will be the first time for people to buy single game tickets to the 2012 season. You can read more about it from the Athletics official site.

I'm sure all of you agree that this is a very good move. I believe it begins a push to re-establish the connection between the organization and the fans in preparation for the new stadium. It should never have deteriorated as far as it did, however, that time has passed.

I think it's great that it will be held at the Arena, as the weather in January can be dreary and rainy. The arena should be warmer and it should be easier to hear during the Q&A sessions. Not sure if they'll do Coliseum clubhouse tours, but I believe there is a hallway between the two facilities.

edit, fixed the day of the week. It's Sunday, not Saturday.

I'm not a big stathead, but I do like pretty pictures and someone explaining stuff in easy to understand terms. I spend most of my time on Athletics Nation, where there are plenty of people who do great stat work. Recently there was some talk about R, the free statistical and graphing software. I had played around with Matlab back in college and some R a few years ago, but I thought I'd play around with it again. To start with something simple, I decided to take a look at the NHL point for/against distribution as a scatterplot, and play around with the data and see how the Sharks stack up.

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I'm late with this, but since no one has created a DLD for today already, I'll still do it. It's all about me. Me in costume.

Months ago I mentioned that I had dressed up as Dark Helmet from Spaceballs for a costume party. A couple folks wanted to see pictures, and I was able to track down a couple of them to scan in. I ended up winning a gift certificate in the Movie Characters category at the party I went to that year.

via www.lonestranger.net

There is also another photo with the visor up so you can see my Rick Moranis impression.

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I killed the last DLD with my sad story, so I thought it might be my responsibility to breathe life back into another one.

Sports!

Happy 161st Birthday Pete Donnelly! Check out today's other Baseball Birthdays, including former Athletic Olmedo Saenz.

It's not too early to look toward 2012... Might we be looking to fill the same holes as we are now? That is, unless we're worrying about our lives.

In the 'we probably wouldn't have had a chance anyway' category, Albert Pujols is going to be a Cardinal for at least one more year.

San Jose Sharks make their 2010-11 debut in Stockholm at 12 noon today. Head over to Fear the Fin for analysis and game threading. Also, Thornton selected as captain.

Brian Burke's Week 5 N.F.L. Game Probabilities and a little discussion on home field advantage. Doesn't look good for Oakland, but the 49ers have a shot.

Coliseum Authority says the Warriors owe almost $11M in back rent.

And Non-Sports

California has a budget! Apparently there are no new taxes, but we'll hear details on Wednesday.

Jesus gets a 'job and a crowbar.

Those who want iPhones but not AT&T are soon to be in luck.

Microsoft thinks about acquiring Adobe?

If you weren't able to catch their roaring sounds yesterday, look at these pics and hum the doppler effect to yourself.

Part of Bon Jovi's new Greatest Hits album will be released as Rock Band DLC.

What's better than wielding a lightsaber? Wielding two.

Mars sand dunes. Don't hit your golf ball in there.

I'll probably be going to this tomorrow, assuming I don't run into the bad end of a pair of scissors.

And this looks like a fun way to get your Halloween pumpkin on.

Dump away!

The Setup

The first-half champion San Jose Giants (59-48) host the Stockton Ports (51-56) for a three game series starting tonight at San Jose Municipal Stadium.The Giants are coming off of a 2-4 road trip, and are sitting in dead last in the second-half standings at 14 wins and 23 losses.

The Ports, who ended the first half with a record of 31 wins and 39 losses, currently sit in second place in the North division with 20 wins and 17 losses, four games behind the Bakersfield Blaze. These three games comprise the Ports' sorta-road trip, before they come back to Stockton to play the High Desert Mavericks.

All three games are at 7:00pm, and Tuesday and Wednesday's games will be broadcast on Comcast Home Network (CHN) channel 104, or on Comcast On-Demand. You can listen to the game over the Internet Radio feed, starting at 6:30pm.

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Since the A's bats are lacking pop, we'll just have to make due with the kind that comes from culture.

One of the greatest Sword and Sorcery movies of all time is Conan the Barbarian. What if it was a musical? It might sound like this.

If you haven't watched the actual Conan the Barbarian movie, I highly recommend it. You can continue with Conan the Destroyer, but it's not quite as good.  Some would say really not as good, but hey, if you watch the first one you should watch the second one.

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In-game host Kara Tsuboi posing for a photo.
via my Facebook photos

This weekend the Orange and Black Attack come in for a three game set against our beloved Green Machine. There are many of us ANers coming out to one or all the games, so if you're going to be there, let us know!  This thread is to help us arrange some unofficial AN meet-ups before, during or after the games.

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On the next A's homestand, Dallas Braden needs a special walk up song. I think we ought to help the A's come up with some songs, so I've compiled a list of songs I found while perusing YouTube. Something catchy, something that people would probably recognize was special, something that would get the crowd up and cheering (not like they need another excuse, right?)

Dallas' next start is looking like either the 19th ($2 Wednesdays) or 20th (day game) of May.

It doesn't have to be an obvious connection, though I've kept with the Perfect theme. 

Vote below, and if you've got another song you like, link it in the comments!

Lou Reed - Perfect Day (via TaCleoh)

A classic.  Maybe not upbeat enough, but I think it gets the point across, and people are familiar with the song.

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Mychael Urban has tweeted that the A's have signed Ben Sheets and there will be a 1pm press conference to announce it.

The rumored dollar amount is $8m for one year.

We've been waiting for some word of this for a few days now, ever since the rumors popped up that the A's were in the running.  The other rumor, which I hope goes away now, was that the A's were interested in Johnny Damon. With Sheets a part of the rotation, the pressure is reduced for the young arms who may show signs of the Verducci Effect, or a reduction in performance the year after a big increase in innings pitched.

Sheets sustained a torn flexor tendon in his right elbow at the end of 2008, missing the playoffs. He hasn't pitched in a game since, but reports from last week's pitching session were good. If he can stay healthy, he should have a really good year. The Coliseum is a good place for pitchers to reignite the spark in their stalled careers.

I see him as trade bait if the A's are not contending come July, and I'm fine with that. The team still has holes to patch for the upcoming 20-teen Dynasty, and a healthy Sheets could get a patchwork of young'uns in return.

I was reading the Sweeney post which started talking about Rajai Davis and A's .300 hitters.  This got me looking at the numbers and wondering what Rajai could possibly hit by the end of the year.

At this moment, he has played in 106 games with 95 hits and has a .308 batting average in 308 at bats and 344 plate appearances.  If you go back to July 22nd (when Rajai started playing almost every day) he's hitting .340 in 191 AB and 213 PA over 50 games.  If he keeps up this pace, what will he hit at the end of the year?

In those last 50 A's games Rajai's started 45 of them and hit .340 in 213PA and 191AB.  He's had 4.26 PA/G and 3.82 AB/G. 

Let's say he sustains a .340 AVG, 4.26 PA/G and 3.82 AB/G over the next 19 games.  I don't think that's unreasonable (and it's my playground so I say it's ok).  That would be about 73 more ABs and 81 more PAs, giving him a total of 381 AB and 425 PA.  This would also give him about 25 more hits for 120 H on the year.  He would then hit about .315 AVG (120 H/381AB) for the year.  Pretty nice. 

Let's take this further. 

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I went to the game tonight, sans wife and 10 month old.  Bought a ticket for the bleachers and sat in the third row, all the way to the left in right field.  Instead of just sitting there and listening to the radio, I thought it might be neat if I took a small page from emperor nobody's book and wrote some thoughts down.  It looks partially like a play-by-play, but mostly it's just things I thought about.  Nowhere near as poetic as EN, but his is not my style.

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I follow a great NFL stats blog called Advanced NFL Stats, that uses live win-probability modeling to determine which of the two teams is most likely to win. This football off-season the author of that blog has started looking at other sports, hockey being one of them. The post on March 9th was his first about modeling hockey games. In the post, he describes the Poisson equation and how to determine the probability of a team scoring or allowing a certain amount of goals, and through that, the possibility of them winning games.  Go ahead and read his post. I'll wait..... OK! So I thought it might be neat to see what the Sharks numbers were...

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I originally posted this on my blog, but I figured I'd get better readership here.  Oh, and probably more people poking holes in my thoughts. ;) Be gentle! I am by no means close to the skills of grover or salb918 or the other Staturday folks!

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A recent post on the Beyond the Boxscore blog pointed me to another blog entry on Statspeak called Building a sabermatrician's workbench. And as the web will do, I was then pointed to Baseball-Databank.org.

I'm not new to MySQL databases or SQL queries, but the existence of a free baseball database was news to me, so I downloaded and imported the beast. It's quite an interesting blob of data and you can use it to analyize and discover tidbits about your favorite teams and players.

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I'm going to San Diego at the end of the month, and since the A's will be in Anaheim that week, I'm going to make the drive up there on Thursday (May 1st) to watch the game.  I have to be in Escondido for Friday night, however, and I don't want to drive back down there after the game. 

Anyone have any recommendations for places near the ballpark to stay?  How about places to stay away from?

There are a few near within walking distance.  I would probably prefer to be able to walk. Ayers, TownePlace Suites, Hilton and Doubletree.  Are those any good?  Bad?

Thanks in advance!