The Art Neuro Weblog

Don't Try This On Your Home Planet
There's always more to be said on the subject of the great die-back that killed the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretacious Period. Here is an article covering the scenario where an asteroid imapcts on the planet and wipes out most species within hours.

For more than a decade, most researchers have been convinced that an asteroid was responsible for the death of the dinosaurs. Recently however, a handful have argued that a combination of effects -- an asteroid along with perhaps increased volcanic activity and climate change, or even a second asteroid -- caused a slow demise of the giant animals.

It seems to me, if the crater created by that impact is the Gulf of Mexico, then one would have sufficed.

Knee Update, Life Update
I'm still hobbling around, but now I'm gettnig around without crutches for longer distances. It's such a drag being a cripple as well as being an unnemployed bum. :) It's also a drag not being able to play baseball. Now that I'm confined to sedate activities for most hours of the day, I really miss getting out there and hitting, running around, throwing, yelling... generally living through a second adolescence every Saturday. On the upsaide, I'm getting re-acquainted with my CD collection, especially the albums I forgot I had. It's always nice to rediscover such non-gems as Stewart Copeland's 'Sound track to the Equalizer' and the 'dead period' David Bowie albums.

Long Slump
Derek Jeter is still struggling and nobody has a clue why. I thought I was having a bad year, but the Clutch King of the Post-Season is doing it tough in the regular season hitting below the Mendoza line, at .189. The New York Times has this to report, which I found very enlightening.

Jeter's Slump a Mystery With Few Clues
By TYLER KEPNER Published: May 25, 2004

Derek Jeter took the question and drove it right back up the box. Was Jeter surprised, a West Coast reporter asked last Thursday, to have hit a home run off the Anaheim Angels fireballer Bartolo Colón?

"No," Jeter said. "I am capable of hitting."

The people standing around him laughed, but Jeter, the Yankees' proud shortstop, did not.

Mired in the worst extended slump of his career, Jeter insists that he is as confident as ever, and that there is no reason for his .190 batting average.

"If there was a reason, I would have figured it out a long time ago," Jeter said Sunday in Texas, after going 1 for 5 to bring his latest slump to 5 for 45. "Sometimes you get hits, sometimes you don't. There's nothing more to it than that."

The leading theory, advanced mostly by people outside the team, is that Jeter is jealous, nervous or preoccupied because Alex Rodriguez is playing beside him. Jeter greets this notion with a blank stare and incredulity.

"Why would that be?" he said. "We're on the same team. I don't see how you could compete with someone on the same team. I'm just not getting a lot of hits. You can't read too much into it."

Manager Joe Torre also rejected the notion that Rodriguez's presence has in some way thrown Jeter off stride. If it were true, Torre said, then he has been misreading Jeter for as long as he has known him.

"I'd have to change my evaluation of Jeter if this is what's contributing to his bad year," Torre said. "We all have an ego, but he's never worried about someone else getting attention, because there's always someone every year coming on board to get attention. This kid, if that's the case, then I don't know him."

Rodriguez says he tries to be supportive of Jeter. "We're just real positive with each other,'' said Rodriguez, who got off to a miserable start of his own this season but is now hitting .292. "I'm giving a lot of positive reinforcement. Just stay aggressive."

If anything, Jeter should be hitting much better with Rodriguez batting directly behind him. Fearful of putting Jeter on base in front of Rodriguez, pitchers usually give Jeter something to hit. He has walked only twice in his last 13 games and is on pace for 693 official at-bats, 12 shy of the major league record.

The walks have been important; one of the two recent ones came with the bases loaded, and the other started a three-run rally in the ninth inning on Friday. But Torre does not want Jeter to necessarily draw more walks - he has 12 for the season - because that would be asking him to be less aggressive.

"That's not him," Torre said. "I don't want that to happen. He's not going to walk much hitting in front of Alex. They're not going to put him on."

Jeter, who endured a career-worst 0-for-32 stretch in late April, has tried extra work. He called for early batting practice last Wednesday in Anaheim, working intensely for 30 minutes in the batting cage.

But if the hitting coach Don Mattingly sees anything wrong with Jeter, he is not saying. To Mattingly, there is nothing wrong at all.

"He's swinging the bat all right," Mattingly said before Sunday's game. "I think he's fine. We just need to get him hot. You can't get back the past. No matter what he does for a little while, he's going to look like he's struggling. He's got to do it over a long period of time."

Jeter is in such a deep hole that he will have to overachieve to hit .300 for the season. If he maintains his current average of 4.28 at-bats for every team game, Jeter would have 509 remaining at-bats in 2004. He would have to get 173 hits - a .340 average - to hit .300.

If Jeter hits .317 (his career average before this season) the rest of the way, he would end up at .284. He has never hit below .291 in a full season.

First baseman Jason Giambi, who is out with a sprained right ankle, spent much of last season experiencing what Jeter is now going through. Bothered by several injuries, Giambi never approached his career average, then .309, and finished at .250. But Giambi says Jeter has time to recover.

"He can get as hot as anybody in the game," Giambi said. "He's going to get hot this year sometime. It's just a question of taking good at-bats. Probably the hardest part is you can't look at your numbers. You can't worry about them; they're going take care of themselves.

"He puts together a good two weeks, he's going good, because he can throw out as many multihit games as anybody."

Jeter, who said he was not injured, has had more than one hit in only one of his last 10 games. He entered the current trip in a 1-for-19 skid, then went 4 for 26 as the Yankees split six games with the Angels and the Rangers.

He has hit well at times and been robbed - a fly ball to the center-field wall in Anaheim last Tuesday, a sharp grounder swallowed by Alfonso Soriano in Texas on Saturday. Jeter got some revenge on Soriano, his former double-play partner, when he made him pay for dinner that night.

Jeter is the Yankees' captain, and by all accounts he has not brooded. "Derek is the same guy every day,'' the third-base coach Luis Sojo said. "He's the same guy whether he's hitting .320 or .180."

That is important, Jeter said. He often repeats the adage that you can tell a lot about people by how they handle adversity.

"I don't like to see it when a guy's going well and he's joking with everybody, and when things go bad, he doesn't want to talk to anybody," Jeter said. "I never understood that."

Torre has resisted giving Jeter a day off, saying he has considered it only once. The Yankees are in the middle of a stretch in which they are off for 10 Mondays in a row, and Jeter said those days gave him enough of a break.

"The days off have been there," Jeter said. "You're not going to swing better sitting on the bench."

The problem is how to make Jeter swing better, or how to make his good swings translate into hits. For a while, if not for the rest of the season, the scoreboard will remind him of his poor start every time he comes to bat.

"I'm trying not to look," Jeter said.

Yeah, well, he's still my favourite current MLB ballplayer; after all those amazing moments in the post-season I've had the pleasure of seeing, how can I diss him now?

Speaking of Struggling Stars
I missed the NSWRU has dumped Matthew Burke from its squad, dated the 17th. The NSWRU with its usual hamfisted way made the generally right sort of noise, but it still looks bad.

Yet, on the 25th, The ARU announced its Test squad facing Scotland and included Burke. I think my 90s Rugby watching was spent with the rise and fall of Matthew Burke. This is probably his last Test hurrah. Godspeed Matthew Burke, it's been a great career. :)

Key Psycho Moment
In my script, I wrote the line for Johnny Rocco, "All the crimes I ever did, I learnt from television." Today, I find this article.

- Art Neuro