Letdowns

Before I get into this one, let me just say that in general, life is good!  A little busy, but good.  But a few things over the last few days have bugged me, so consider this my Monday Morning Rant.  (Don't know why I capitalized that, not like it's a tradition or anything...but Monday morning does seem like a good time to rant about stuff.)  None of these things are a big deal...more like minor annoyances.  Only one thing is poker related, so I'll get it out of the way first.

1.  Poker Tracker 3 commercial release.  From a customer point of view, they should not have released this without another beta (at least) to work out some serious bugs.  Josh (the developer/main PT guy now) alluded to some business pressures to hold to the 5/15 release date, and being in the software business, I know about release pressure.  But if a release isn't ready, very little can come out of releasing it to a mature market, IMO.  If he just couldn't have worked around getting it released, he should have released a trial version that was not severely crippled, or he should have extended the beta for a bit.  Instead, if you were (like me) using beta software and trying to help out PT by reporting bugs and giving feedback, you had to take a step backwards both in functionality and stability going from the last beta to the first commercial release...or you had to pay for a product that was honestly not ready for prime time.   They've established a great reputation for getting things fixed, and I don't think that this time will be any different, but the way they went about their commercial release will leave a sour taste in people's mouths.  I can tell you from personal experience that a software vendor's reputation (like real life) takes a lot shorter time to tear down than to build up, so you have to be good way more than you are allowed to screw up just to stay neutral.  And they screwed up with this one.

2.  The end of my daughter's softball season.   Her softball coach has been bugging us for a while, actually.  This is her 4th year, actually all with the same coach.  I have always thought he was a mediocre, at best, teacher, but up until this year, he made things fun, and the girls loved him, so when we kept getting him as a coach, on balance it was OK.  Well, something happened with him this year where he was in a sour mood a lot of the time, and lost a lot of the encouraging attitude that made it so fun for the girls.  I don't know him well enough to know whether something in his life changed, or he might be too stressed out coaching.  He coaches his other daughter, too.  I have a buddy whose daughter is on this coach's other team, and he actually asked me if something was different with Coach this season, so it's not just me, and it's not just my daughter's team.  A number of things frustrated us this year, but the biggest one was that he never gave our daughter a chance to be a regular pitcher.  From what my wife said, she did OK in practice, but the coach had a rotation of three that he set at the beginning of the season and pretty much stuck with it, other than when he let his daughter pitch once in a while.  One of those girls was great.  One was OK.  One was unhittable when she threw over the plate, but other than one inning never could strike out more than one girl per inning...in other words she was either great or terrible.  Thankfully, the coach missed the last two games of the season and the assistant worked in my daughter plus a couple others who wanted to pitch.  My daughter got one inning of work the last game of the season.  The results:  2 strikeouts and a scoreless inning (most innings at her level end because the team at bat scores 3 runs...they play 3 runs or 3 outs, whichever comes first).  I know...small sample size.

3.  My son's little league game.  Baseball starts with tee-ball (where the kids hit off a tee, rather than face pitching).  The next step is Single-A, where the season starts with the coach pitching to the kids and ends with a mixture of coach-pitch and kid-pitch.  My son plays this level now.  There's no balls and strikes...the kid pitches 5 times and if the batter puts the ball in play, great.  If 5 pitches go by and the batter does not put the ball in play, then the coach comes out for 2 pitches, and if the kid can't put the ball in play, he's out.  The kid-pitch can present some problems when you have a hard throwing kid because they pitch from pretty close and are not all that accurate.  My son and 3 others have been hit...one poor guy in the cheek, and he's basically a wreck at the plate now.  We are the 2nd-youngest team in the league...in  a league where the kids range from 6-8, that's a big difference.  We also have the fewest kids that played Single-A last year...only 2 of them, where most teams have 5 or 6.  So, the point is that we are small and not really experienced.  We played against the biggest team in the league on Saturday, and as expected, the game was really lopsided.  In itself, that's not too bad.  Evidently, the league doesn't make a particular effort to balance the teams, and so every year, there are one or two teams that pretty much beat up on the other teams, and next year we may be in that position if the kids stick with it.  But it's not particularly fun to have them bat through their lineup every inning, while we only send 4 or 5 kids to the plate.  Again, though, it happens.  The thing that pissed me off was that the opposing coach decided to let his best pitcher throw.  He should have recognized that we were the wrong team to do that against...there are a couple other teams that are just about the same size and experience as these guys.  I watched the kid warm up, and then asked the other coach if he really wanted him to pitch against us.  I knew we would not even get a swing off.  The other coach told me that this kid hadn't pitched for a couple games, and it wasn't fair to him just because he was so good.  I see the point, but what I tried to explain to the coach in the few minutes we had was that he should look at the schedule and pick the better teams to have this guy pitch.  In our league, a coach stands behind the catcher to gather up the passed balls, and to help the kid at the plate (and to help the catcher too, if he's too close or his gear comes loose).  I'm that guy when our team bats.  This was the first kid like I felt I didn't want to be back there...only one deflection off the catcher's glove away from something bad happening.  Can only imagine how our little guys felt at bat against him.  Thankfully, he didn't hit anyone, but as I knew, our guys were so intimidated that they never made a swing.  Instead, they just bailed out from every pitch.  I'm not one for trying to build every kid's self esteem by making sure they all succeed at everything...I think it's better for them to have some failures and some successes, even at a young age.  But no one learned a thing here or got better, so what's the point.  Meh, this is losing something for not being there...really hard to explain just how dumb it was for this kid to be pitching.

4.  Speaking of lopsided competition, the final rant is more just disappointment in what I thought was going to be much cooler.  My niece plays college softball and is also playing on a summer team which is mostly made up of the same group of girls that she has been playing with on a competitive traveling team.  Basically, a regional all-star team.  The U.S. Olympic team has been fundraising by playing college teams as well as these traveling teams.  Last Saturday, they played against my niece's team, so we went to see the game.  I thought it was going to be so cool to see her in action against Team USA.  And it was kind of cool...but more to see how excited she was than any action in the game.  If I knew more about the Olympic team, it would have been neat to see them live, but I don't follow softball whatsoever.  The game itself was so lopsided, it was pretty boring, which was the letdown.  I never thought my niece's team could beat Team USA, but I didn't realize just how lopsided the whole tour has been.  My brother-in-law said that Team USA was like 35-1 on their tour (their only loss evidently came against a pitcher who they cut from the team), and they didn't worry about running up the score.  I figured that they wouldn't show up the hometown teams like this, seeing as a lot of the fans (i.e., ticket and merchandise sales) were friends and family of their opposition.  Not that they would toss a game, just that they wouldn't run up the score.  In getting beat 18-0, though, I think my niece's team had one of the better results from this tour.  Most boring was that Team USA threw (yet another) perfect game, which if you don't know is when not a single batter reaches base.  In fact, of the 18 batters Team USA faced (they only played 6 innings), 15 struck out.  The pitching is that good.  My niece was one of the 3 batters to make contact.  Her hit, as well as the two other batters, didn't make it out of the infield and were really easy plays by Team USA.  All that being said, it was still impressive to see just how good Team USA played, at least when they were on offense...they were so much faster than my niece's team.  As a fundraiser, too, I guess it was a success, but as a vehicle to tune up for the Olympic games, it failed...their fielders spent 2 hours doing nothing more than running in and out of the dugout, and exercising their arms a bit throwing in warm-ups.  They've got a really busy tour, so I wonder when they do get time to actually work hard on their games now...who knows, though, maybe they don't need to...I'm not really sure just how good they are relative to the other teams.  And for all of that, my niece was just as excited at the end of the game taking pictures with and getting autographs from Team USA as she was at the beginning.  Her team knew what they were getting into, and it was a thrill just to be playing with the Olympic squad.  So from that view, everything was cool.