Wednesday, June 30, 2004

 

Kill. Crush. Destroy.

I have come to a conclusion.

It will not be enough to merely win the division. Sure, it will have been great wresting it from the Dodgers in June, then watching them plummet to the bottom of the standings in an avalanche of broken bats and recriminations.

No. We must crush their spirits as well.

We must break Gagne's streak.

I'm in a Ghengis Khan sort of mood this morning...

Jefferson 8:05 AM

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Wednesday, June 23, 2004

 

Gotta Love The View

Okay, I have to admit it. I should never, ever lose faith in Brian Sabean. We may not always understand what he's up to, but he continues to prove the doubters wrong. His strategy this year was to collect as many pieces as possible, and try to find a few that would exceed expectations. Sometimes you have to sort through a lot of chaff before you find the wheat (like this April), and sometimes you find it right away (like last April). But as of today, the entire season is exceeding expectations. I did not expect the Giants to be in first place in June. I expected them to be close, but I figured this would be a year like 2000 where we would be looking up at first place most of the season.

After April, I didn't think we'd be in first at any point in the season. Play like the 2003 squad that won 100 games? Forget it, you must be high. But they are, and they are. I don't know if it will last. Can Deivi Cruz be a .300 hitter all year? Can Alfonzo keep coming through with men in scoring position? Can the pitching staff continue to improve? I don't know. Even if they don't, this is already a season to remember.

Please note that the Giants are playing their best ball of the season, and Barry Bonds has not been on one of his patented hot streaks. He's been merely excellent over the last month. In April, when the Giants were losing, he put up the best month anyone has ever seen. What if Bonds goes nuclear again while the rest of the team is hot? Scary.

So once again, I have to give Sabean credit for what he's done. His job is to see opportunities that the rest of us can't. He has done that with Michael Tucker, Deivi Cruz, Pedro Feliz, and even A.J. Pierzynski. Sure, there's the list of those who didn't make it--Estrella, K. Walker, Veres, Crudale--but again, that was the strategy. Diversify, find the winners, and play them.

Then kick the Dodgers' asses and take over first place. I love that part.

Jefferson 10:43 AM

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BEAT L.A.!!

And lo, so came the summer, with a peal of thunder and the crack of the bat. The mighty Alfonzo did smite down the wicked Dodgers, and threw them from the mountaintop.

And lo, there was much rejoicing.

Jefferson 7:42 AM

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Tuesday, June 22, 2004

 

Beat L.A.!

Had seats in Section 333 last night. The Giants really should label every seat from Sections 333 on up as "obstructed view," because you can't see anything hit deep to left field. But we had a great time anyway. The crowd got going early, and really picked up steam later in the game. I sensed that the fans are starting to believe that the Giants just might be a good team, even as flawed as they are.

Good team? Well, it's getting harder and harder to argue with a 23-9 stretch that doesn't include all bad teams. The Red Sox are certainly a good team, and the Dodgers are either good, or the best of a bad lot.

Kirk Rueter was very impressive last night. The first three Dodgers he faced hit the ball hard, and I was worried. After that, he settled into his usual mix of dinks and dunks and even a big strikeout of Shawn Green. He was in the form that has caused sabermetrics types to scratch their heads for years now--underwhelming and extremely effective. He didn't get the win, thanks to Matt "Vulture" Herges, but he deserved it.

Huge thanks to Cody Ransom for winning the game in the bottom of the ninth. I was steeling myself for a long, cold night of bitterness, and he allowed us to go home smiling. It was a sweet win.

Jefferson 2:52 PM

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Saturday, June 19, 2004

 

Korroloka Tunnel, Land of Opportunity

Not too long ago I talked about wanting to find "new" places to level my character in Final Fantasy XI. This week, thanks to my friend Hugo, I got try a thoroughly excellent alternative to the Valkurm Dunes. It's a dungeon called Korroloka Tunnel.

The tunnel has got to be one of the best-kept secrets in the game. It is literally just a couple minutes from Bastok Mines. To get there, go into the Zeruhn Mines and talk to the NPC at the gate. He will warn you that the Korroloka Tunnel has been closed for a hundred years because it's so dangerous. Don't believe him. Once you pass through the gate, you will cross a bridge over an underground river. Keep running for another 20 seconds and you will cross into Korroloka.

The best comparison for Korroloka is the Maze of Shakrami. Lots of tunnels filled with bats and worms. Unlike the Maze, though, Korroloka utterly lacks aggressive monsters in its upper reaches. The bats do not aggro! Even better, there are no goblins whatsoever. Korroloka is also bigger than the Maze, and there are about twice as many worms.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the giant worms are ideal monsters to fight. They don't move, so you can fight them from a distance fairly safely. They do cast spells, but you can prevent them from doing so fairly easily. So while they're usually rated as "incredibly tough," they're actually pretty easy if you use the right tactics. A party can get 200 XP from most fights, which is the maximum before "chaining bonuses."

Overall, the tunnel looks really promising for leveling from 13th level on up to 20th and maybe higher. We haven't tried fighting the huge spiders deeper down, but I suspect you could hunt them to level up to 25th level. Hugo and I started as a duo of 15th/16th levels, and found great success. After two sessions, I got my white mage up to 18th.

Each time, it was only a two-minute run back to the Auction House, where you can sell the stacks and stacks of ores and earth crystals and flint stones the worms drop. By comparison, it takes about 15 minutes to run from the Maze of Shakrami to Windurst.

Why don't more people level up in Korroloka? The first time you're playing through your teen levels, you're looking to finish the subjob quest. That means you have to really be in the Valkurm Dunes. So it makes sense to go to Valkurm the first time around. When you're leveling your subjob or advanced jobs, though, you don't need subjob items any more. But people return to Valkurm because it's familiar, and it's "fast." Well, I'll tell you--Korroloka will get you XP even faster, because the travel time is so short and the place is so safe. Give it a shot--you won't regret it!

Jefferson 10:05 AM

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Thursday, June 17, 2004

 

Making Order Out of Chaos

I'm having a hard time figuring out the Giants this year. Heck, I'm having a hard time with the entire National League West, top to bottom. The Giants have occupied first place, last place, and all places in between. They've won ten in a row, they've been .400 as late as May. They've shuffled players in and out like a Twilight Zone episode featuring a clown car.

But lo and behold, the mists are rising and the sun is seeping through. I checked the standings this morning, and saw this lovely sight at the top of the NL West:

Los Angeles    34  28  .548  --

San Francisco  34  31  .523  1.5

San Diego      33  31  .516  2

The Giants are now in second place (and of course they're not going back down to third ever again). The race for the NL West is now as it should always be--a tussle between the hated Los Angeles Dodgers and our boys, the Giants of renown and legend.

Oh boy, this could be a great summer!!

I can't quite tell you if the Giants are a bad team on a good streak right now, or if they're a fair team who came out of the blocks and ran right into a minefield. For crying out loud, Pedro Feliz has walked nine times already this year, and Grissom 14 times! Can you possibly explain that? I can't.

And right now, I don't care.

It's the Giants and the Dodgers, and that's exactly how it's supposed to be. Somebody call Paul DePodesta and tell him we want to see Lasorda on the field at Pac Bell next week, waving and stirring up trouble. Let's rock the foundations with chants of "Dodgers suck!" Somebody find Krazy Krab and have him lock LoDuca into a locker at the Transbay Terminal--just in case. (Then we'll lock the Krab into the next locker, to keep him from getting any bright ideas about coming back.)

Forget the stupid Red Sox. Let's clear the rest of the year's schedule and replace it with 97 occurrences of Giants v. Dodgers.

Let's find Brian Johnson, Bobby Thomson, Marvin Benard, Joe Morgan, and every other Giant who ever broke the Bums' hearts with a walkoff home run and bring them out for another curtain call. Before every inning.

Let's drive Eric Gagne crazy from boredom from having no games to save. Let him take up origami or macaroni sculpture to keep him busy.

Let's have some fun.

What? Yeah, I have tickets for Monday night's Dodgers/Giants game. Why do you ask?

Jefferson 7:48 AM

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Friday, June 11, 2004

 

Tarutaru Wizard Caught Juicing!!!

I'm still playing Final Fantasy XI a little bit almost every day. Recently I've been concentrating on diversions that I can easily do by myself. For instance, Gryffyn has spent quite a few evenings practicing his cooking skills. Cooking is very important for characters of all types, because you get real performance enhancements from juices and foods. That's right, in Final Fantasy XI, not only is juicing legal, it's expected! If you don't juice up, you're not considered to be fulfilling your potential. Or maybe you're just too cheap to shell out a few hundred gil for apple juices and meat mithkabobs.

I've also been fishing a lot. Yeah, fishing on a computer. Sounds lame as hell, but I like it for a couple of reasons. First, I can cook up my own insect paste very cheaply now. So when I sell the fish I catch, it's almost all pure profit. It takes me about an hour to catch a dozen moat carp, which I can sell at the Auction House for 5000 gil in no time. That's pretty decent. The other reason I like fishing is because I can do that and paint miniatures and the same time. Fishing only requires me to hit a button every 10 seconds or so. I don't really need to look at the screen much. Fishing and painting at the same time makes me feel extra productive, in an unproductive way.

Now I'm ready to resume the levelling grind; I need to raise my white mage job from 13th level to about 20th. Well, I don't *need* to, but it'll make some of my future plans a lot easier. Anyway, if I were to do the usual and expected thing, I'd make my ways to Valkurm Dunes, where everyone levels from 10th to 20th level in a full party of six.

The thing is, I'm getting tired of the lockstep conformity that plagues this game. There's apparently only one way to play it, and if you don't follow it, you're lame. To heck with that. I want to do different things, and not just sit around in a camp for hours hitting the same macro over and over. So my friend Hugo and I decided we would make a party of two characters, and hunt in Tahrongi Canyon instead. We didn't camp, we roamed around hunting dhalmels and other monsters. In about 2 1/2 hours, we each went up one level and got loads of treasure.

Sure, maybe if we'd gone to Valkurm and done the usual thing, we might have levelled up in only 2 hours, but it would have taken 20 minutes to get there and maybe another hour to find a party and then start playing. So I think we came out ahead, especially in entertainment value. Since it was just the two of us, I was able to experiment with non-standard white mage tactics. Like fighting in melee, or using summoned monsters to help fight. Not all the experiments worked, but it was nice to have the freedom to try.

From here on out, I will continue to find non-standard ways of playing whenever possible, and report on them here. Maybe I can help free my fellow players from the rut of Valkurm-Qufim-Kazham-Crawlers Nest etc.

Jefferson 8:05 AM

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Friday, June 04, 2004

 

Up Against the Wall

The de-Brewer-fication of the Giants has begun.

Jeffrey Hammonds was given the Donald Trump treatment last night, after the Giants lost horrifically to the Snakes. The losing streak is now at three. The team is again looking up at .500, and the view isn't pretty. It looks like...Coors Field. Oh wait, that's just today's destination.

Just before the Giants began their 10-game winning streak, Brian Sabean was quoted in Chicago newspapers as saying that he might have to "eat" quite a few of the vets on his rosters. I think he was referring to their contracts, but I've never underestimated the power of cannibalism as a motivational tool. Shawn Estes claimed that one of the Giants owners told him that the team almost released six veterans before the winning streak. I thought that had the ring of truth then. I think we're seeing the beginning of the purge now.

Hammonds may be just the first to go, especially if the Giants have their usual Colorado vacation this weekend. You could also see the likes of Wayne Franklin, Neifi Perez, A.J. Pierzynski, J.T. Snow and Brett Tomko dismissed in the next week or two. They would all be replaced by prospects.

Why release these guys? Why not trade them? I'm sure Sabean's been trying to trade them all. I'm sure he's gotten no offers worth even considering. Better to write them off as sunk costs, and give folks like Lance Niekro, Cody Ransom, Todd Linden, David Aardsma a chance to prove themselves. Will they? Probably not, but we know for sure that the vets aren't doing the job.

The only problem with my list of potential transactions is that it concentrates on the hitters. The Giants are really living and dying with their pitching. The winning streak was due to great pitching; the current losing streak is due to poor pitching. The Giants offense, while not great, has been chugging along all right for a month or so. I can't give it a great vote of confidence, but I'm personally more worried about Tomko, Hermanson, Franklin, Herges, and Rueter.

Should be a hectic month, one way or another.

Jefferson 7:34 AM

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Wednesday, June 02, 2004

 

Streak Is Over

The Giants gave away the winning streak last night. After a very odd, but very welcome four-run rally in the top of the seventh inning, Scott Eyre wasted no time in giving up the lead. There are nights when pitchers just don't have good stuff, and then there are nights when pitchers serve up batting practice. Eyre had the latter sort of night. In mere moments the thoughts of an 11-game winning streak were pretty much gone.

The loss left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. You'd think that after ten straight wins, I'd have a bit more patience. Not at all. Losing is harder to take when it's rarer. When you lose 6 out of 10, individual losses don't sting as much. When you lose 0 out of 10, they sting a lot.

Get ready for the losing streak to reach two tonight. I'm not being pessimistic here--it's Randy Johnson vs. Brett Tomko. C'mon, that's pretty much a lock. It'll be fun, though. Any time The Big Unit faces off against Home Run Jesus, it's a great time.

Fun fact: Who has hit more home runs off Randy Johnson: Bonds or Neifi "El Malo Grande" Perez? It's a tie. Each has three homers off Johnson. Of course, Neifi hit all his at Coors Field...

Jefferson 12:42 PM

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