San Francisco

While it’s all a whole lot of fun to try and figure out if Don Mattingly has truly gone off the deep end on us or if he’ll even be managing this team tomorrow — Dylan Hernandez says yes, but we’ll see, and I am terrified about publishing on another topic right now — it only masks the fact that is team with some serious, actual problems. There’s about eight different directions I could go with after a lead like that, but today we’ll start with “so… just what is Brandon League‘s deal?” Let’s be clear: few, if any, thought the extravagant three-year deal bestowed upon him by Ned Colletti last winter would actually be worth it. We all know that Colletti’s multiyear deals for non-elite relievers never work out, and so far this one looks worse than any other. But to be completely fair, I don’t think anyone really expected this, either. League’s 5.19 ERA is close to what a 5.40 FIP says he ought to have; whether you’re using standard stats or advanced metrics, he’s been garbage. That’s surprising, because we all remember his outright dominance last August & September after a mechanical change implemented by Ken Howell & Rick Honeycutt. If not enough to make the contract worthwhile, it did seem to be a viable reason to expect some return on that investment, and gave us all ammunition to strike back at those who just looked at his 2012 as a whole. Through nearly two months of the season, League has been a complete mess, striking out an atrocious 4.15 per nine. This isn’t due to bad luck that should even out — a .279 BABIP isn’t that far off average — it’s quite simply that he’s not missing bats. Well, that, and that he’s giving up homers at a pace like he’s never done before. At first I thought, well, okay, perhaps he’s just failing to stick with the mechanical changes and is going back to the old way that cost him his job in Seattle. But in looking through the video, nothing stands out as being obviously different, and as we can see from Brooks Baseball, the change that happened near the end of last year in his vertical release point looks to have stuck so far in 2013: If charts aren’t your thing, take a look for yourself at two pitches chosen at random over the two seasons. At left, a pitch that struck out Joaquin Arias last October against San Francisco; at right, giving up a double to Miami’s Adeiny Hechavarria on Mother’s Day. Other than the high socks and pink Mother’s Day shoes, do you see much of a difference in his mechanics? I can’t say I do, nor does it seem that he’s moved his position on the rubber. So he’s throwing it the same way, from the same position. That doesn’t seem to be the problem. How about his pitches. Are they flat? Are they simply not not moving? While he’s lost some horizontal movement on his pitches, he’s increased the vertical movement at the same time: Here’s where we get into the weeds where I fully and completely admit that I am not a pitching coach, because if you were to ask me, “well, is one movement better than the other,” I’d say “sure, why not”; the truth is, I don’t have a good answer to that. But you don’t need to be a pitching coach to know that this next part is a problem. While League has slowly been throwing his sinker less over the years — he used to get grounder rates in the 60-73% range, down to 56.1% this year — his splitter seems less effective because his velocity has been on a steady downturn as well. That seems damning, but I’m hesitant to put this all on reduced velocity, because it’s not like he was throwing 99 last September and he was doing just fine. But it’s a bad trend, isn’t it? Last September, League got swings on half of his splitters, half of which were missed, result

TaskRabbit, the San Francisco startup that has made a name for itself by helping people connect with odd jobs, is now a place where you can find a real job too. Today TaskRabbit is launching a new set of tools in its three-month-old TaskRabbit for Business portal that are designed to help companies hire ongoing temporary workers for jobs that will span over multiple days, weeks, or months. The TaskRabbit for Business portal launched in early March at South By Southwest, with the aim of helping companies there bring on staffers to help out over the course of the several-week festival. Since then, TaskRabbit for Business has emerged as the company’s fastest-growing segment of users, chief revenue officer Anne Raimondi told me in an interview this week, with 16,000 businesses signing up over the past several months. TaskRabbit now has 11,000 workers on its platform, 10 percent of whom use TaskRabbit as their sole source of income. With the newly expanded features, now businesses in all nine markets throughout the US where TaskRabbit is active can use TaskRabbit for Business to bring on a W-2 employee for work that takes up more than 15 hours per week. TaskRabbit, which will take a 26 percent commission on all W-2 classified jobs (normal tasks charge a 20 percent fee), will handle all compliance paperwork, including payroll taxes, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. Traditional temp agencies typically take a 40 to 60 percent commission, Raimondi says. It’s a big launch for the 65-person TaskRabbit that puts it squarely into competition with a new set of companies — the temp hiring industry is estimated to be worth some $230 billion annually and is dominated by huge global firms such as Adecco and Manpower. But in a way, it’s a very natural evolution for TaskRabbit, Raimondi said. “We built this out because it was the single biggest ask from our business users. Customers were already trying to do it on the site,” Raimondi said, pointing to TaskRabbit’s practice of running comprehensive background checks on all the people working in its system. “But the pieces that were missing were behind the scenes — paperwork processing, tax compliance, W2s, workers compensation, payroll, unemployment insurance, time sheeting.” Temp jobs will appear in the same stream as regular tasks on the TaskRabbit dashboard, but with a small icon of a briefcase to designate that they’re for ongoing positions. There are some small changes with how errand runners will display interest in the positions — pulling in more detailed resume information from LinkedIn, writing a cover letter, and the like. Small business task posting already accounts for 30 percent of the company’s sales, despite being a minority of the company’s users, Raimondi said. It stands to reason that making it easier for companies to do more things through TaskRabbit could allow the company to capture a bigger slice of the cash that goes back and forth in the business world. With enterprise hotter than ever, it’s no surprise to see startups that have made their names on the consumer front home in on the enterprise world as well. This could be a big boost for TaskRabbit’s revenue, if it all works out well.

An unidentified cyclist was killed early this morning when he/she collided with a garbage truck in the city's Mission District. Police, who are still at the scene, didn't have too many details ...

Fueled by a burst of summertime energy, I’ve been feeling quite productive at home and work and was looking forward to clearing many more items from my to-do list this week.  But plans... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

A San Francisco family had an unwelcome visitor come for dinner last night when a pickup truck crashed into their Outer Mission home, according to police. Officer Gordon Shyy says police star...

TaskRabbit for Business unveiled a major upgrade today, as the popular p2p marketplace evolves into a source for small and medium businesses to hire temporary and part-time employees. TR4B was first released in January with a SXSW portal for businesses attending the event in Austin. “Small businesses are already our fastest growing customer segment,” says Anne Raimondi, TaskRabbit’s CRO. “They account for over 30 percent of our revenue. So this move is about listening to our customers as they tell us what they want and also seeing how they use our platform.” And it’s not just the businesses that are driving this development – it’s the rabbits as well. “People have said our success is partly due to the economic downturn and while that may be true, something deeper is happening,” Raimondi says. “We have highly educated people–75 percent of them have at least a bachelor’s degree. They are choosing this because they don't want a full-time job. They want a lot of flexibility and diversity in their lives and control over their destiny.” Traditional temp agencies may want to pay attention to what’s happening here. They have been long been known to charge large fees (40-60 percent), to often be slow, and do not always provide much attention to detail when matching people with companies. TaskRabbit’s online job-matching process, by contrast, is fast and transparent. It takes a flat 20 percent fee, and can often fill positions within 10-15 minutes. Businesses can see a worker’s resume, their video, their ratings, and their cover letter. The workers have all cleared a background check, and those who are most highly rated rise to the top of the site in terms of visibility. “We get asked all the time who really are the Task Rabbits,” notes Raimondi. “So we're doing more to present their stories. They are people who voluntarily want to be rated and evaluated on what they do every single time. They take that much pride in their work!” These are people like Chris Mok, who’s developed a reputation as the best handyman around town, and who earns over $5,000 a month through jobs as a Task Rabbit. He’s one of a growing class of micro-entrepreneurs building their reputations and businesses through TaskRabbit (and other p2p platforms). TaskRabbit has some 11,000 people for hire at present, across nine markets, and is on-boarding new workers at the rate of 1,000 per month now. One benefit the company offers small businesses is that it handles all that paperwork (a W-2 or a 1099?), including timesheets and payroll in the background, so all the task posters have to do is pick someone and leave the rest to TaskRabbit. It also offers live chat support, all handled locally, not at a distant call center. Over the past year, the company says it has quadrupled its user base and quintupled its revenue. It plans to open its first international office this year, in London, and currently employs 65 people in its Soma office. Sixty percent of Task Rabbits are female, many self-employed as freelancers or contract workers part-time.

MuteTab is a Chrome extension created by Jared Sohn that allows users to manage sound coming from individual tabs. The extension shows which tabs are making sound, and users can pause or mute them individuall or automatically mute all background tabs. MuteTab is currently available to download from the Chrome Web Store. image via MuteTab via Anthony De Rosa

“From left: Greg Orme, Kelli Allman, Barack Obama and Megan Hughes at Allman’s parents’ house in Honolulu.” TIME magazine unearthed some photos of a 17-year-old Barack Obama sporting a white suit jacket and a lei on his way to the senior prom with friends in 1979. The photos come from Obama’s classmate at Punahou School in Hawaii, Kelli Allman (née McCormack). image via Kelli Allman/Contact Press Image via TIME via Digg

It is 7:30 and 51°, headed to 60° and sunny today. Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a national immigration bill to move to the full senate. The bill includes an easier green card process for graduates of math, science and engineering programs at American universities, the New York Times reports. Facebook and other tech companies have lobbied for this measure in order to let more engineers stay in the...

Bonus Coins Make sure to look for the hidden bonus coins. They can help you to find difficult objects and can give you some more time or even some bonus points. Save your hint and fast forward coins for when you really need them (the objects are harder to find as the rounds progress). If you don't use them immediately, they are saved for use in future rounds. You can use the time bonus coins just before you finish to get a higher time bonus, even if you aren't running short of time. Game Play If you like a more relaxed pace of game, try turning on Relaxed mode and you will no longer run out of time. Try and find objects quickly to earn a quick find bonus. Match the groups mini-game Try and create large groups of the same object in order to earn more bonus objects and to get a bigger score. This mini-game can become hard in the later rounds if you don't plan ahead. The key is to use the bonus objects (the blue or red ones with the arrow shapes) to destroy entire rows of wooden blocks. So plan your moves so that you can create groups of 5 or more objects (that is how you earn bonus objects). Then when you click on these larger groups, make sure you click on one of the objects in the group that is on the row you wish to clear. The bonus will appear on the object you clicked on. If you follow this strategy, you should be able to get through these rounds - but it may still take a few tries. For the Entire Big City Adventure: San Francisco Walkthrough, Visit CasualGameGuides.com! Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments