Did you know that the WGA Awards were held Sunday? Me neither. But with so many award shows at this time of the year, it’s hard to keep track of when they all are.

Anyway, if you remember last year, the WGA Awards were held like a commercial due to the strike. Apparently this year they actually had a proper award show, with guests and everything. Once again, Slumdog Millionaire took home best adapted screenplay, and Milk won best original screenplay. I can’t say most of the winners are that surprising, just the usual. You know, 30 Rock, Mad Men, Recount, John Adams, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Wait a minute, Force Unleashed? Oh yeah, this is the award show that actually recognizes game writing!

I think they made a good choice with Force Unleashed, its story was certainly its strongest suit. The only real competition would be Grand Theft Auto IV, which we know cannot recieve anything except critiscm from media outside the gaming world.

If you desperately want a list of the winners, you can check out the LA Times. They’re probably available on IMDb too. But, this just quite isn’t that exciting. I find myself caring less and less about award shows every day.

So the great Seattle Baseball debate has been going on violently for the past few months and with under a week to go until pitchers and catchers report in Peoria, AZ, time is running out for the decision to be made.

Should we bring back Jr.? Most of the Seattle area columnists seem to think so. The sabermetric thinking blogosphere disagrees whole heartily. They argue that statistically Griffey has fallen off the planet much like Edgar and Olerud did in 2004. It wouldn’t be right to sign him and watch the shell of a “kid” struggle and be released come June.

But I say, “I don’t give a shit.” Reports came out that he was suffering from a knee injury all year and that it has been surgically repaired and now he is healthy having lost 20 pounds. I’m willing to bank that Jr. will return to his 2007 form slugging 30 home runs. Hell, I would pay him 5 million to hit just one more dinger in a M’s uniform. These are obvious reasons why I am not a general manager.

But I was thinking of all the scouting reports saying things like “Jr. can’t catch up to a fastball any more,” and “He should only hit against right handed pitching”. I decided to spend my lazy Sunday looking up every at-bat in which Jr. hit a home run using MLB.com’s Pitch f/x data.

Here’s the spread sheet I made.

That took me the better half of my day and I was kind of disappointed with how many different sources I had to use to find all that information.

Some immediate things that jump out at me was that 14 of his 18 home runs were off right-handed pitching. So it would be a safe bet to only allow Griffey to hit off of right handers, who encompass the majority of Major League pitching.

The pitch selection looked like this: 9 Fastballs, 5 Sliders, 2 Curve Balls, and 2 Change Ups. So the myth that he can only hit 70 MPH Curve Balls for home runs just isn’t true. The other thing you could say is that the only reason he hits Fastballs further than Curve Balls is because Fastballs jump off the bat faster, thus going further.

But only 5 of his home runs were off pitches that were 90 MPH or faster, 4 of them being Fastballs. The one that I remember very vividly is the one off Kyle Farnsworth in Yankee Stadium when I made the pilgrimage to New York. He started Jr. off with a 98 MPH Fastball, then a 99, and then he stroked the 97 MPH into the right field seats. If he knows that Fastballs coming he can for sure catch up with it.

The last thing I wanted to look at was the distance and how it compared to Safeco. The Safe’s right field was taylor made for Jr.’s swing but is not as friendly as the Great American Ballpark in Cincinatti. These are very rough estimates and should be taken with a grain of salt but I feel pretty confident in them.

Overall there are plenty of flaws in this analysis because I only looked at his home runs and it does not include all of his other batted ball data. But this is a window into what Ken Griffey Jr. can still do what he does best. And coming into the season healthy I think Griffey can be an impactful player for the Seattle Mariners in 2009.

I think this has been going on for at least a month now, but I am just now becoming fully aware of the shit that hath been going on over at YouTube. Apparently the deuchebags over a Warner Music Group (WMG) were all “give us mo’ money!” And YouTube was like, “mo’ money mo’ problems.” So WMG started pulling their content from the website.

This would be mildly aggravating if they were just pulling music videos or something to that effect. But, sadly, that is not the case. It seems like any content that could in any way contain something that WMG owns is getting muted. So, for example, some videos of Rock Band DLC have had their audio tracks removed. Or, and this is where it really hurts, What’s With The Fifties. I guess they own “Great Balls of Fire.” Never again will viewers around the world get to hear the first half of that special video.

This whole concept is quite terrifying, I mean, what if more labels follow suit? What if shit gets so serious that anything that possibly violates a copyright gets pulled? It would completely destroy YouTube. I don’t want that. I like YouTube. I go there like every day.

So, in conclusion, fuck you WMG. Fuck you hard. You’re killing creativity, the Internet, and freedom of speech. Or something like that.

Though I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Steelers big win yesterday, giving them the most superbowl wins out of any NFL team to date, I felt that I should briefly acknowledge Superbowl 43 with an own analysis of yesterday’s events.

The Game
I wasn’t planning on watching the Superbowl this year considering I had little to no interest in either team succeeding, but the time came and I decided I’d give it a shot. To be honest I really enjoyed watching these two teams duke it out. I figured the Steelers would just womp Arizona right out of the gates but by golly Kurt Warner and company gave them a run for their money. There was even a point that I thought it was over for the Steelers but leave it to a risky toss to Santonio Holmes and you got yourself one helluva ball game. Not to mention there was linebacker James Harrison’s ridiculous interception leading to a 100-yard touchdown. Sometimes I find it’s a nice change of pace to watch a game that I’m not so emotionally involved in, by which I mean watching two teams I have no preference towards. So overall it was a pretty good game, pretty, pretty good.

Half Time
Been a lot of great classic rockers filling this spot for the last four or five years and this year was no exception. Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen and The E Street Band brought fourth one of the most energetic and entertaining half time performances I’ve seen in many moons. The boss commanded the stage leaping all over the place, giving Clarence a high five, chatting on stage with Steven and even power sliding into a camera. They pumped up “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”, “Born to Run”, “Working on a Dream” form their latest album (Picked that up last saturday and it’s awesome) and “Glory Days” (with football revised lyrics). Topping it of with some fireworks here and there the performance proved be to be a solid showing.

The Commercials
I’ve never cared Superbowl commercials, because I really don’t like commercials in general. The ones they show at the Superbowl are no different aside from the fact that they cost like infinity million dollars to make and then air. It was pretty weird to see a MacGruber ad for pepsi, featuring Richard Dean Anderson (the original Macgyver who was also on Macgruber on last week’s SNL) so that was interesting. It seems like almost half the commercials were for Bud Light, mostly featuring a bunch of horses with the exception of that one with Conan O’Brien and H. Jon Benjamin.

For the most part I more of look forward to new movie trailers, so I was glad to get a brief look at The Year One with Jack Black and Michael Cera. It was like 30 seconds long but I’m still excited. Land of the Lost looks like it could be entertaining and as for the rest I really don’t know. I still can’t believe they’re making a G.I. Joe movie, that sounds like a train wreck just waiting to happen.

Other Thoughts
It was pretty cool that NBC aired a new extended episode of The Office after the game. I enjoyed it and especially liked Dwight removing the face from a CPR dummy. I’d seen Rainn Wilson interviewed by Al Roker earlier that day about the episode and was glad to see Rainn wearing a seahawks jersey (He’s from Seattle for those that don’t know.) He was all like “Yeah go Seahawks! We did it, we made it!” funny guy.

That’s all I got for now with the second time I’ve reported back ti you my thoughts on the Superbowl. I did it last year too on my blog The Ottman Prophecies.

Right when we finished up with Back Beat I sent it in to a plethora of music review websites. One I was excited because I had never used it before like I had with garageband.com. I donated some money to the site so it would move our que up, but it turns out my credit card was not working so I thought they would be pissed at me and not review it. But just tonight I got an email that told me our music had finally been reviewed. Theres some good and some bad.

Enjoy.

I’m gonna post my top ten films of the year in just a second, but before that I thought I’d throw up a quick recognition of the Presidential Inauguration that just occurred.

Um, what can I say that hasn’t already been said a million times by now. For the first time in our history, someone who is not white holds the highest office in the land. That is something I am unbelievably proud of, and I hope something that future generations can look back on and ask, “what took them so long?”

Almost more important to me, George W. Bush is out of office. For good. He got in a helicopter and flew away. Cheney too. They’re gone. In their place, we have a charismatic, inspirational new hope. How about that?

Oh, and how about Obama messing up the oath itself? That was so tense. I think most of the press is ignoring that though. For now, at least. Let’s focus on the positive.

Things have changed, and they’re not going back. Yes, we can make a difference.