Fred's Ramblings

The end of Shohei Ohtani’s six-year run with the Los Angeles Angeles has come to pass and he now begins a new chapter in his career as a Los Angeles Dodger. He has signed a 10 year deal worth $700 dollars that is supposedly heavily deferred allowing the Dodgers to remain competitive in the free agent market going forward. That at least indicates that Ohtani’s desire to be on a winning team was real. He will likely become the next Bobby Bonilla, collecting a yearly salary long after he has retired.

Now come the questions…Is he actually worth that kind of money considering the injuries he has had lately. It is common knowledge that he will not be pitching in 2024, already placing him in the “normal” category of many other free agents. Assuming he will be able to pitch in 2025 and beyond, you have to assume that the $700 is money well spent. Time will tell however and history has shown that these long term contracts turn out to be albatrosses in the latter part of the deal.

Spring training is not that far away and as a Dodgers fan, I for one am looking forward to the coming year. Now to get some pitching to go along with the offense. Let’s Play Ball…

Another College Football Playoff, another chance for Alabama to win the National Championship.

After this year’s selection committee decided to give the 4th seed to Alabama instead of Florida State, you have to seriously wonder if College Football is run by the SEC in general and Alabama in particular. There is absolutely no reason (other than money) that Florida State should have been left out of the Championship tournament. They went undefeated, beat number 16 Louisville for the ACC championship and were rated highly for strength of schedule. Alabama , meanwhile lost to Texas. Yes, they beat Georgia but they still had the one loss. This is all about the money because Alabama has the “bigger” name and are expected to draw a better TV audience than Florida State would have been.

The selection committee however, decided in their own mind that Alabama is the better team but in this case they weren’t better than Florida State. At this point, what is the purpose of the regular season if after you accomplish everything you are supposed to accomplish, you still don’t get a chance to play for the national championship. I will own up to the fact that my interest in college football is pretty low and I only pay attention to the final weeks of the season, but this decision has really soured me on college football and I don’t believe I am the only one that feels this way.

Well I bet that the TV network that will carry this year’s World Series are worried about how much time people will spend watching this classic. No one could have imagined a World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers. If memory serves, the last time the Diamondbacks were involved in a world series was in 2001 when they beat the NY Yankees after 9/11 took place. As for the Rangers, the last time they were in a world series was in 2011. This should be interesting.

In spite of all the discussions that took place regarding the MLB playoff format, you have to give these two teams credit for gelling at the right time and that is usually the formula needed to pull off this playoff run for both teams. It will now be up to which of them can continue their run to become the latest World Series champion. My pick is the Texas Rangers…I have been wrong before believe it or not so don’t take my prediction to the bank.

When I was stationed in Germany during my Air Force enlistment, I bought many Vinyl LP’s that were then available in the PX. Making that statement should give you a pretty good idea of the decade I am talking about so I have had some of these LP’s for over 50 years. Lately I’ve been thinking that I need to convert these albums to digital music so I set on the journey I am currently traveling to accomplish my goal. I keep thinking that I’m coming up on life span of an LP and don’t want the music to go away.

You would think that with today’s technology, this shouldn’t be a big project but when you don’t have the tools needed to accomplish the project, then it is a big deal. First of all, the turntable I have does not have any means to output any of the music…no rca output, no usb output, no nothing. So the first purchase I had to make was to get a turntable that would have one or both of those options. Got that out of the way when I bought a relatively “cheap” turntable that has both of those outputs and also has two small speakers. I am good to go.

The next thing I needed was a piece of software that would manage the music as it came from the new turntable to my laptop. As you might expect, there are quite a few pieces of software that will accomplish that feat, but for the most part they are not free or open source. I found an application that is free and does the job needed to move the music to my laptop. Unfortunately, it converts the music in a .wav format which plays the music just fine, but will take up a lot of hard disc space considering the number of albums I will be converting. Audacity is another piece of software that is free and does a good job converting music but it requires too many steps to accomplish the same thing, although it converts the music directly to mp3, which is the format I need/want.

After some research, I found another open source application that converts all types of format into whatever format is needed. That application is called Freac. So, now all I need is the time to convert the music. Luckily for me I am retired and have the time that I can spend finishing this project.