While looking for a little preview on tonight’s Red Sox - Angels game (which I’ll be heading to), I happened upon these blog posts about Why We Watch baseball and a neat statistic to help find the great matchups. I read them in reverse, but here they are in chronological order:

• Why We Watch
• Introducing NERD
• One Night Only: Now with Pitcher and Game NERD!

Tonight’s pitchers are Clay Buchholz (with bad year so far and a NERD of 0) and Jared Weaver (7), both of whom were scheduled to start Sunday but were pushed back a day for (unrelated?) illnesses. Both teams have a NERD of 4, which gives the game a NERD of 4. I’m hoping that Clay pitches like he did last year, and it could turn out to be more exciting game than the stat predicts.

On Friday, February 13, at 23:31:30 UTC (6:31:30pm EST), Unix time (the number of seconds since New Year’s 1970) will hit 1,234,567,890. I will be visiting several nerd friends in Philadelphia that evening. What drink should we have to celebrate?

1. A power hour, starting at 5:31pm. (Dangerous, sickening, and probably too early in the evening.)
2. 1ml of rum, 2ml of vodka, 3ml of whiskey, etc. (Adds up to almost exactly one nasty-tasting shot.)
3. A single reasonable beer. (YAWN)
4. ...?