Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Off-day rant: Hey, Microsoft big brains, why do you run the stupidest box scores on the planet?

Now and then, in search of answers to ultimate questions, I click on a Yankee box score via the Microsoft Bing search engine, and I am greeted by this.


And there you have it: Microsoft - with its fancy-pants algorithms - bothers to calculate that  Gleyber Torres - having gone 0-for-5 - has a batting average of zero - .000 - zero. 

Ladies and gentlemen, this is dumber than lice... the stupidest online thingy since My Space.

Hey, hipster techie billionaires, does anybody even read the box scores you're troweling out? This is Cat-5, What-Me-Worry, felony-grade stupidity. I don't even know where to start, but let's try...

1. You don't list the actual batting order. Why is Isiah Kiner-Falefa first? Somehow, you managed to scramble the lineup provided by the teams. This took creativity on your part. You took the original and subverted it. How? Why? Do you pay people to mangle the original lineup? Or is it the work of your vaunted artificial intelligence? Does anybody ever check this? WTF?

2. As stated above, you calculate batting averages for one game. Wow. This is a serious Dopy Dildox move. Who cares about batting averages for one game? John Sterling refuses to give them until at least a few weeks into the season. Do you think he would breathlessly announce that, if Aaron Judge is 2-for-2, he's batting a thousand on this game? I mean, that's nearly three times higher than Babe Ruth. By your one game calculation, Aaron Hicks (.500) is having a far better year than Anthony Rizzo (.000.) Hello-o? Anybody there? 

3. You take the time to add the OPS (On-Base Plus Slugging) stat - again, for one game. A lot of fans don't give a squat about OPS over the season - but to calculate it for each game - hey, that's a serious level of idiocy. Why would you bother to do this? Insane. 

For the record, here's how a box score should look.


It's a framework invented by Henry Chadwick, an Englishman who came to America at age 12 and who died in 1908. Here's one from 1876. Take a good look. It beats the ones you supply.


Saddest part of this: It's been going on for years. Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Get your act together, nerds. Don't make me take off my belt!

11 comments:

JM said...

Bing is one of my all-time favorite singers (mostly the very early years, which are amazing) but one of the worst search engines ever. It makes you yearn for Netscape. It can't find its way out of a paper server. In short, it blows.

Why even bother using it, ever? Get thee to the Settings of your browser and change the default search engine--or in this case, the search horse and buggy.

DickAllen said...


Better yet, get Firefox. Leave that shit behind.

But it begs the question: why would you be wasting your time looking at Microsoft for anything other than Word or Excel?

Unless, of course, you're just looking for something to bitch about on a day when there is nothing Yankees to bitch about?

Stang said...

LeMahieu is batting .750 and you're complaining?

Doug K. said...

Well, it's a better box score than the one I used to get on AOL.

It was blue and rectangular and only gave a percentage but they never explained of what.



HoraceClarke66 said...

Chadwick—"Father Baseball"—was a huge promoter of the game. Died of pneumonia contracted at the Dodgers' home opener that year.

Hated the home run. Hey, everybody's got a theory.

Mildred Lopez said...


DickAllen...

Wife works for one of those high fallutin' medical diagnostics companies, uses Google docs and sheets for that stuff. Microsoft is "Edge-ing" toward obsolescence

ranger_lp said...

What does Microsoft know about baseball?

Here's a joke for you...Why is it called Windows 11? Because it has 11 backdoors...

el duque said...

DickAllen:

"Unless, of course, you're just looking for something to bitch about on a day when there is nothing Yankees to bitch about?"

Bingo.

AboveAverage said...

BING has a fairly robust and scalable image search engine - if you're in need of finding an image, its a good resource to use in conjunction with other image search engines.

I've found better sources on numerous occasions then google.

So with that out of the way - allow me to ask all of you the following question:


WHY THE HELL(o) is GALL(o) still on our MLB RO(o)SETR?


(he is sorta, kinda BIRD-LIKE as a human being, if yah know what I mean)

I hang up now and listen to your answer on the air.

Alphonso said...

The answer is that no one who works for Microsoft ever left their garage to play game of baseball.

Their only acquaintances also grew up tinkering in garages.

Now, they live in McMansions but don't watch baseball.

Sometimes I run across people who write cross word puzzles who also don't know baseball. But pose baseball clues.
It is sad.

Rufus T. Firefly said...

These dweebs weren't in the garage.

Mom's basement.