In honor of the sweep...

This past weekend, my favorite baseball team -- the Oakland Athletics -- did the impossible.  They swept the mighty, mighty New York Yankees in a four game series.  They hadn't done that in 40 years.  It was pure awesomeness.

What does that have to do with chemistry?  I'll tell you.

First, the main reason that I like the A's so much is chemistry related.  I started my Ph.D. at Berkeley in the late 90s which turned out to be a period of great success for the team.  It was the beginning of the Moneyball era when the A's managed to make the playoffs 5 times from 2000 to 2006 despite having a much lower payroll than a lot of the competition.  When I attended my first game at the Oakland Coliseum in 1998, a limited number of tickets were available for Wednesday day games at $1 apiece.  Since the A's kinda sucked in '98, and the Coliseum was (and is) considered to be one of the worst parks in baseball, fans weren't exactly lining up overnight for those cheapo seats.  On top of the $1 tickets, you could also get $1 hot dogs.  A miserable chemistry grad student would be a fool not to cash in on such a generous offer.  And so I did.  And I fell for the team.

Second, a couple years ago friend of mine quizzed me with the following question:  Who are the five A's players that share a surname with a famous chemist?  If you're not a chemist or an A's fan, you couldn't possibly care less about this.  I am both, so I care a lot.  I'll give you the answer so you don't hurt your brains trying to remember the 2010 A's roster.

1.) C Kurt Suzuki.  Same last name as Nobel Prize Winner Akira Suzuki.
2.) 1B Daric Barton.  Same last name (and homonym first name) of Nobel Prize Winner Sir Derek Barton.
3.) RP Michael Wuertz. Same last name as 19th century chemist Charles-Adolphe Wuertz.
4.) RP Brad Ziegler. Same last name as Nobel Prize Winner Karl Ziegler.
5.) RP Craig Breslow.  Same last name as influential Columbia faculty member and recent originator of the antipodal space dinosaur theory, Ron Breslow.

Three Nobel Laureates on one roster?  Pretty nice, eh?  Well, good enough for a 0.500 season, anyway.  Maybe they just needed a Woodward or Corey or Grubbs to push them into the playoffs.

Okay, that was neat for me.  I'll come up with something a little less obscure for my next post.