This is completely unrelated to real estate, but I wanted to share some incredible news. This morning at church my pastor walked up to me and told me privately that an anonymous person in the community wanted to give me a gift as a way to say thank you for my work in the community. He then proceeded to hand me an envelope with two tickets to a Boston Red Sox game for the first series of the new season versus the world champion rival New York Yankees. I’ll admit that I teared up.

My wife and I are celebrating our ten year anniversary this month and over the past year we’ve been planning a trip to Boston to celebrate in style. Though it’s been a dream of mine for twenty years to go to Fenway Park, tickets were sold out to every game during our stay. We tried to get tickets, but it just didn’t happen, so we gave up. We looked on e-Bay, and we found some for $500 or so, but that was out of our price range.

I was not expecting something like this to drop in my lap today and I am completely speechless that someone would do something like this for us – and without recognition. I feel completely humbled and very well loved by such a generous gift. I am truly and deeply thankful as well as inspired.

I make trend graphs for my real estate appraisal work nearly every day on the job, and since I’m a huge baseball fan, I figured I’d make a scatter graph of the speed of pitches for the Los Angeles Angels during the last game of the American League Championship Series on 10-25-09. I know, it sounds a bit geeky, but when I get a random idea like this, sometimes I just have to make it happen. I would have also plotted the New York Yankees, but Fox did not display pitch speed for the Yankees’ entire first inning, and I was also feeling like tracking two teams was going to be way too tedious for a relaxing Sunday evening. Here is what I came up with:

If you notice, there is a gap of data between pitch 23 and 35, and that is because Fox did NOT supply the data for whatever reason. It seemed that most of the time Fox displayed pitch speed, but oddly they missed nearly all of the second inning for the Angels (as well as the first inning for the Yankees). You’ll also notice I missed a few pitches on accident (17, 123) and that during the 8th inning I called it quits. Between spending time with family, having two toddlers running around, and getting tired of watching more intently than I usually do, I figured it was time to hang up my MLB statistician hat and simply enjoy the rest of the game.

Key Points:

• The spread of speed varied by about 20 mph.
• Joe Saunders pitched from pitch 1 to pitch 115.
• Ervin Santana pitched from pitch 116 to 130.
• In the 8th inning when I called it quits, there were two more pitchers from the Angels who went to the mound (Scott Kazmir & Jered Weaver).

This was just for fun. Feel free to comment if you’d like. Or if you have any ideas for what sort of baseball stat I might experiment with graphing during the World Series, let me know what you think.

www.SacramentoAppraisalBlog.com The Speed of Pitching for the Los Angeles Angels: ALCS 10-25-09