As he batters his acoustic with his hands and blurs the strings, he's set the bar high for Kanye for the most stirring performance of the evening.
Fat, steel-cut rolled oats, jumbo oats, organic Scottish porridge oats – each of these will take too long to hydrate in doughs and batters, leaving the finished thing oddly chewy, bitty and dry.
Oakland's lineup is deeper, but relies heavily on batters who had accomplished little before Mr Beane scooped them up off the scrap heap.
At six feet, five inches (1.96m) and 216 pounds (98kg), he throws on a sharp downward plane, forcing batters to hit the ball on the ground a particularly valuable asset in the Rangers' stadium, where the hot, humid air transforms harmless fly balls into towering home runs.
In a 1959 contest, Harvey Haddix famously retired the first 36 batters in a row before the 37th reached on an error.
Baseball teams intentionally design quirky or asymmetric stadiums, so their players will have a familiarity-based edge, and so they can build rosters customised to make the best use of them by, for example, signing powerful left-handed batters for a ballpark with an unusually short right field.
However, batters enjoyed significantly more success against them, on average, than against other types.
And spring training does not last long enough to generate robust samples of performance: a typical player will get just 50-100 plappearancesnces or batters faced, a small fraction of the 600 for hitters and 800 for pitchers that they will see over the course of the year.Yet in spite of all these caveats, the claim that spring-training numbers are useless is wrong.
As the Israeli army batters and besieges his Ramallah office, his survival is at Israel's call.
Batters have no equivalent accomplishment: hitting four home runs in a game might be the closest, but even batters who manage that could conceivably have hit five, or even six, if they had got enough at-bats.
Everything else depends on whether opposing batters hit the ball in the vicinity of the fielders, and on whether the fielders corral those balls properly.
