Wildlife in suburbia

Suburbia?

Suburbia .... I gather that it's considered much cooler to live in an urban environment, where you can walk to coffee shops and food carts, ride your bike to work, and all that. Meanwhile, suburbia is the land of SUVs and 2.5 kids.

But apart from the livability advantages that suburbs can offer for families with kids (yards, parking, generally strong public elementary schools), they are also aesthetically pleasing in the Pacific Northwest.

This is especially true where I live. The development touched as little of the native trees and environment as possible, so it looks nothing like the hideous display in the nearby picture. I basically live on the edge of a natural forest. And it's a forest that teems with wildlife, and wildlife being wild, we get visits from North American critters - sometimes even in our backyard!

For all I know, we have snakes in our grass, but they wouldn't be easy to spot. I do see them occasionally when I go running, though.

Enjoying the sunshine

So hot even the snake had to shed its skin

I've also seen a coyote on a run, but when I followed it a bit to try to take a closer picture, it scurried away into the forest, so I can't show you what it looked like. But we see them once in a while. Another time, a coyote scampered across our backyard. My wife was mildly concerned, my dad thought it looked beautiful, and I thought it was immensely cool that we had a coyote in our backyard.

Raccoons, too. This one popped out at night:

"You looking at me?"

Deer, of course, are quite common in North American forests. Like coyotes, they seem quite adaptable to human civilization.

Seen while running

I came across the two little guys (girls?) in the picture below earlier this afternoon. I pulled into the driveway and thought I saw a dog in our sideyard. When I got out to examine, I saw that there were two deer calves, smaller than a full grown retriever. They ran behind the bush to hide from me. I managed to get this picture with a full zoom on my smartphone a full moments later.

"Where's Mommy?"

Despite my backing away and leaving them plenty of room, they wouldn't leave that corner. So I went inside and was prepared to open the gate from the backyard, because I know that deer sometimes cross from our backyard to other yards. When I opened the back door, I saw why the calves were hanging around:

"Come here, babies!"

I am still not sure how Mommy Deer ended up in our backyard separated from her calves. The wooden fence is 6 feet high, so I don't think the calves could jump it, but I'm not an expert. Anyway, I wanted to open the gate so the family could be reunited, but I didn't want to get charged by the mom, and I was worried about scaring the calves ... or being bitten by them. After consulting with my neighbor, I slowly approached the gate from the front side, carefully watching the calves to make sure they stayed behind the bush of safety. I pushed the gate wide open and backed away cautiously. When I was far away, one calf tentatively went through the opening, and then the other.

To be clear, I'm not knocking the urban lifestyle. It has its appeal, and I'm sure there are people who love it. But suburbia has its benefits too, including - at least in my situation - a good dose of wildlife.

Would Ichiro have been the "Hit King" if he'd started his career in MLB?

Ichiro Suzuki got his 2978th hit in Major League Baseball last night, which combined with the 1278 he had from the Japanese League before coming to the U.S. in 2001, gives him 4256. That happens to match Pete Rose's career total. None too pleased, Rose had this to say:

I don't think you're going to find anybody with credibility say that Japanese baseball is equivalent to Major League Baseball. There are too many guys that fail here and then become household names there, like Tuffy Rhodes. How can he not do anything here and hit [a record-tying] 55 home runs [in 2001] over there? It has something to do with the caliber of personnel.

I don't disagree with Rose that it makes little sense to count Ichiro's hits in Japan as being equivalent to MLB hits. But the interesting question is, what would Ichiro's MLB hit total be if he had started his career in the U.S.?

Ichiro debuted in Japan as an 18-year-old, but I don't think we can assume that he would have reached the major leagues at that age. Or, if he had, that he would have had success right away. Alex Rodriguez came up to the major leagues at age 18, and hit .204/.241/.204 in 17 games. The next year, he hit .232/.264/.408. And then he exploded into a near MVP season at age 20.

Ken Griffey Jr. arrived in the major leagues at age 19 and hit .264/.329/.420. And then he too became a superstar the next year.

Like Griffey, Mike Trout came up at age 19. He hit .220/.281/.390. He's been the best player in baseball since then.

Bryce Harper, who rivals Trout as the best player in the game today, came up at age 19 and hit .270/.340/.477 - a decent year but far from superstar status. His next two seasons were pretty similar. Then, at age 22, he won the MVP.

Now, I'm not saying Ichiro was as good at his peak as those guys, but it's not unreasonable to think that he could have reached his peak at his kind of game (lots of ABs with a ton of singles and some extra base power) fairly quickly, say somewhere between ages 20 to 22.

If you take the 217 hits/year that he averaged as a full-time player with Seattle from 2001 to 2012, and use that as the baseline, then the five years from 22 to 27 would give him 1085 more MLB hits, plus whatever he might have amassed in earlier formative years. If you start at age 21, he would have 1302 more MLB hits.

So he'd be somewhere around the missing 1278 hits between him and Rose, either above a little, or short by a couple of hundred.

But here's the thing: of Rose's 4256 hits, at least 159 of them are pretty illegitimate. In his last two years, Rose hit .264/.3195/.319 and .219/316/.270. While playing a power position, first base. In that last year, he ranked 18th in the team in OPS, behind two pitchers and every position player who played more than 12 games, except the shortstop. It's not like Cincinnati didn't have good players who could have played first base over Rose - Kal Daniels only got 200 at bats despite leading the team in OPS.

Why did Rose suck up so many precious at bats? Who in their right mind would have started Rose?

Well, um, Pete Rose did. He was a player-manager for those two years, so he started himself in all those games, because he was chasing the hit record. It's one thing if a team decides to start a legendary player to see if he can reach some record. It's another if the player himself gets to start himself.

Without those 159 hits, and even with a relatively late MLB arrival age of 22, Ichiro would be within striking distance of Rose's "earned" hit total.

Resisting the cult of the new

About a year and a half ago, my wife gave me a Garmin Forerunner 220 for my birthday. Before that, I had just relied on Runkeeper on my smartphone (which necessitated getting a new smartphone when my Galaxy Nexus's GPS started to become erratic and unreliable). Once I experienced the advantages of a GPS watch -- much faster GPS lock, more accurate tracking -- I was sold. I've been super-satisfied with the 220.

Today, I took my dad to Road Runner Sports to look at GPS watches. For his purposes, Runkeeper would be perfectly adequate, but he doesn't want to run with a phone. We looked at the Forerunner 25, 230, and 235, and then I came home to do some research -- i.e., reading DC Rainmaker's reviews. It didn't take long to determine that the 25 would be the most cost-effective option for my dad. (He mostly runs laps at a non-standard track at the local elementary school.) I don't think he would use the fancier features on the 230/235.

However, as I read DC Rainmaker's review of those higher-end watches, I started thinking, hey, those sound like pretty cool features.... I use my Galaxy S5's step counting app, but it would be nice not to be tethered constantly to it, which the 230 or 235 would allow with their activity trackers. (That recent study about cellphones and cancer seems pretty questionable, as this column argues, but it wouldn't hurt to be cautious.) And the 235 has a heart rate monitor based on the wrist pulse, meaning no need for an uncomfortable chest strap.

I began to toy with the idea of offering my 220 to my dad (clearing all the settings, of course), and then getting a 235 for myself.

"Hey, wasn't that a present from Mommy?" my pre-teen son asked.

"Um, yeah," I answered sheepishly.

My wife was non-plussed. (She's so awesome!) "Go ahead and get it if you like," she said.

I got maybe 75 percent of the way toward pulling the trigger by ordering from Amazon, but I read some more reviews/comparisons. The third post in this thread from Let's Run included the following suggestion:

The GPS function of the 230 and 235 are both spot on, so tracking your run is fine. between the two I would get the 230. Less S*** to fail on you. better yet, save money, buy a Forerunner 220 (best running watch by Garmin currently in my opinion)

That threw some cold water on my idea. I did some more reading and it seems that the optical reader in the 235 is pretty new technology, and hence good but not great at picking up the HR. It would make more sense to wait for Garmin to work out all the kinks before adopting it.

The thrill of getting something new faded, and I told my dad that I thought the Forerunner 25 was the best choice for him. If/when my 220 dies, I'll upgrade, but until then, I'll stick with old reliable.