What to do when your baseball team has been blown out.

WGN radio personality John Williams is a bit of a trivia buff, in the sense that the most trivial things can sometimes fascinate him. This must be one of the reasons that I like John, because I too have this interest for useless information.

Many things about John's show frustrates me — he can be frighteningly shallow sometimes when he attempts to become serious — but for the most part, he is very fair and (to me, at least) entertaining. On several occasions throughout this baseball season, John has wondered aloud about the number of actual baseballs used in a regulation major league game. He asked one woman going to a game to count for him, but he never really heard back from her.

My wife surprised me with tickets to the Cubs-Expos match-up on my birthday (Labor Day), and while it was nice to see the Cubs win one for a change (I almost always seem to catch losses at Wrigley), in this case the Cubs were winning so handily that I was getting as restless as my two-and-a-half year old daughter by the seventh inning. So I let my mind wander, thinking about the "counting baseballs" thing. And i devised in my head a way to score the baseball. Not the baseball game — the baseball.

We caught another game on Sunday — Cubs-Marlins this time — and after having run a few test innings through the week, I tried a whole game of watching the baseball and home plate umpire Bill Hohn closer than the actual action. The result was a rather thorough report, which I compiled (with analysis) for John Williams and sent to him yesterday afternoon. He teased it at the end of his show yesterday, so it looks like he'll be talking about it on the air sometime soon.

If you're interested in useless information as much as the next person — and hey, you're already reading a blog, fer chrissakes, so you must have a little extra time on your hand! — you are welcome to download my report (in PDF format). (This document will only be available on the server for a limited time, so if the link doesn't work and you're interested in seeing it, click the "Email me directly" link on the left and I'd be happy to provide you with your own copy.)