Fantasy Baseball - common issues

It's about that time when we start having those fantasy baseball drafts. One issue that always comes up is the question of which categories are most appropriate. A couple points below...

1) Fantasy baseball can a) try to imitate real baseball, or b) not try to imitate real baseball.

2) If the league organizer chooses a), they are choosing technical stats like OPS, OBPA... things that are difficult to keep track of and hard to find posted on websites or in newspapers. (Moneyball freaks or nerdy sabermetricians might be love these categories however)

3) If b) is chosen, the common stats like W, R, HR, RBI, ERA are chosen. These are easy to keep track of but not particularly great predictors of baseball success. Fantasy baseball resembles more of a game, possible even gambling, than real baseball.

So which is the correct one? I actually prefer the common stats. They make it more fun. Also, for the stats nerds out there, you can still do a statistical analysis of sorts to maximize your season points, though you might just end up with the ESPN or Yahoo rankings. However, I am in a league where I purposely boot stolen bases. I standardized several of the variables and got some new rankings, so was able to pick up some good players (except stolen bases) at a bargain.

Dunkin' Donuts Review, Evanston IL

I have been going to this place for almost 4 years now. Here's some interesting things I've noticed.

1) 2 notable employees - an Indian guy and an Eastern European guy.
The Indian guy is a clever businessman. When I fractured my ankle, he'd see me approaching the store before I even entered the building. Once he found out I liked jelly doughnuts and medium coffees, he'd prepare them before I even hobbled in through the door. It was kind of difficult to change from ordering doughnuts to chocolate doughnuts or zero doughnuts. I'd have to trick him by parking far away and hobbling in faster than he could prepare my order.

The Russian guy loves it when me and my friends come to buy coffee or doughnuts from him. He also once asked me about my nationality and for some reason decided to make all the other employees guess what nationality I was too. I think if the Indian guy were there he might have guessed right. He also sometimes says "I have a special treat for you" and then gives us some random coupon.

2) Coffee rating... 9.5/10. Never tastes like dishwater (dining hall) or charred rat feces (Starbucks) and never contains lumps of curdled half and half (McDonald's).

3) Atmosphere... great for dates... NOT.

DemoCRAP

McCain may have something more than mountain-fresh snow-colored hair going for him with the current policies of the Democrats. Thanks to Greg Mankiw's blog, we get valuable insights and links to articles: 

Article 1: Democrats don't like NAFTA

Article 2: Obama does not like NAFTA or Wal-Mart

Article 3: "If the Patriot Employer Act is anything to go by, we are in trouble if Obama wins."

Article 4: Apparently Ethanol sucks but certain candidates continue to pursue it. 

Article 5: Mexico and Canada disapprove of the Democrats. (NAFTA again)

I should also mention this highly credible site documenting certain sinister tendencies of the Clintster. 

Alright, so where does this leave us? I believe this leaves us in excrement-hole, because Probability(latrines)=0.54+0.11=>65% as of February 20th. 

"Dan Bear Always Gets Shit On": A Character Study

I was there when the pigeon pooped on Dan Bear’s forehead. Though he denies it, I can say with absolute certainty that his first reaction was to throw his head back, his palms raised towards the sky, and then scream “Why Me?” Does this reaction seem like too much of a cliché to take seriously? Maybe. But it is the very cliché itself which is worth our examination. Let me try to explain.

For all practical purposes, there are two Dan Bears. The first Dan Bear is the “Real” Dan Bear. He goes to Harvard, and is interested in Biology, the Red Sox and the Patriots. The second Dan Bear, however, sometimes overshadows the first; he is Dan Bear the Myth, who lives in the imagination of his closest friends from high school. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we know the two are distinct entities, but with a wink we can overlook that detail. The Mythic Dan Bear is stereotypically cranky, geriatric, bookish, and down on his luck; in short, a perennial loser. Before we knew him for even a year, already we could describe by heart the time Dan Bear was at an IMAX theater, and the person sitting one row behind threw up all over the back of his head. We all loved to recite the story Dan told us about his first whale watch. He was looking out over the railing on the first level when a sea-sick passenger atop the second level vomited over the deck, directly on to poor Dan’s 9-year-old head. These stories helped give shape and substance to that nebulous myth of Dan Bear, still forming in our minds. As Nambew frequently reminisces, “Dan Bear always gets shit on.” He then eagerly reminds us that he means “shit on” to be taken both literally and figuratively (thanks for the help, Nambew). So, on that fateful walk between Comm. Ave and the Fenway Train Station, where the pigeon pooped on Dan’s forehead, there were already several anecdotal precedents.

At the very moment that fateful globule of aviary excrement impacted Dan’s cranium, undoubtedly the same thought ran through both our minds: this story would soon headline the canon of Dan Bearisms; irrefutable examples of his terrible luck. Suddenly, his “friends” had more ammunition to use against him. Of course, this stereotype was that of the Mythic Dan Bear, and not the "Real" Dan Bear, but for this one sublime moment, the two lives intersected. The “Real” Dan Bear suddenly became the Mythic Dan Bear; their identities conflated. Rather than try to deny it, Dan embraced the role, throwing his head back and screaming to the fates: “Why Me?!” For a brief moment, Dan embodied the myth itself. He had no other choice. Thus, like Oedipus’s futile attempts to outrun his fate, Dan Bear’s rebellion against his own caricature indeed had the effect of cementing his status. The Myth, Dan Bear’s blessing and curse, would not soon disappear.

Great Ideas

A few Ideas to improve the world:

1. The automobile apology light: This is device could cure road rage as we know it. All I propose is to add a simple light (any kind of signal works, though) to the top of the car that when lit, indicates an apology. Imagine you accidentally cut somebody off, and you realize you were at fault. Instead of exchanging honks and profanities, the entire dispute could be resolved with the easy pressing of a button. This invention may sound trivial, but it could save lives. According to Wikipedia, 300 road rage-related altercations result in serious injury or death.Now, you may be thinking that in really serious traffic disputes, neither party is willing to accept blame. Maybe the invention won't really save lives, but it might at least make the world a friendlier place.

2. Treadmill Power Generator: Every day, millions of Americans climb atop a treadmill or elliptical machine or exercise bike, and try to burn calories. These machines convert calories into mechanical energy, but this energy doesn't really ever do anything. If there were some way to harness this power, just imagine the possibilities. American is a country obsessed with exercise, but it is also an overweight nation. That means that there are billions and billions of fat calories out there that we could be burning. As long as out-of-shape people are willing to slog away for 45 minutes on an exercise bike, we should have some way to harness that energy. We could literally convert our fat into power.

Thar be Giants here

There was a time when giants roamed the Earth. Intellectual supermen like Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart cast shadows that tend to obscure the accomplishments of individual latter-day artists, scientists, and thinkers. “Where are the Shakespeares and Mozarts of today?” aficionados sometimes ask. Were these men’s talents so rare that they may never again to be matched?

These men were certainly of transcendent genius; transcendent in the sense that their prodigious creative power either surpassed the limits of their professions, or redefined them in a radical way. Leonardo Da Vinci, a prototypical “Renaissance Man” was simultaneously an inventor, artist, and philosopher. To his contemporaries, Isaac Newton was simply a “Natural Philosopher.” Were he alive today, however, he would be considered a chemist, physicist, mathematician, and theologian. Moreover, the creative strides these men took were gargantuan. Today, even highly intelligent researchers are lucky if their names are transcribed in the footnote of a textbook, whereas Charles Darwin managed to radically redefine the entire field of biology with the publication of a single book.

Logic and probability tells us that men of equal brilliance must still walk the earth today. Where, then, are their monumental accomplishments? The sciences and the arts continue to progress, but advances increasingly resemble a steady shuffle of baby steps, instead of the leaps and bounds of a giant.

The geniuses have not changed; their environments have. During the Enlightenment, the potential gains to be made were enormous. Moreover, the pursuit of scientific progress today requires a degree of specialization that thinkers like Newton simply never needed. Science had not yet become delineated into thousands of subfields. This rule applies to the arts as well as the sciences. The advent of music theory, for example, allowed truly brilliant artists like Mozart to venture far into the unexplored depths of his artistic medium. Composers today have to watch carefully not to tread where Mozart has already set foot.

Stephen J. Gould makes a similar argument to explain, among other things, why legendary baseball player Ted Williams was probably no more talented than Alex Rodriguez, despite putting up much better numbers. Conservative baseball fans cling to the notion that Ted William’s accomplishments surpass those of modern players, but logic tells us that the increased average excellence of play in major league baseball imposes a more confining ceiling on the limits of human ability. An exceptionally talented baseball player in the 1940s might bat .400, while in the 1990s, bat only .350. Likewise, there are undoubtedly men as gifted as Shakespeare alive today whose work cannot match that of Shakespeare simply because of the difficulty of avoiding treading on the toes of past authors.

Thus, the reign of the giants seems to be ending. Nowadays, scientific knowledge advances incrementally, and progress within established artistic genres is likewise slow and often retrograde. Art differs from science, however, since the innovation of a new medium can create new avenues for creative expression and critical discussion. There will never be another Mozart who writes classical music because the genre is almost exhausted. Brilliant directors like Ingmar Bergmann and Stanley Kubrick, however, have only just begun to explore the potential of cinema. Likewise, popular music has attracted some true visionaries, from the Beatles to Pink Floyd to Radiohead. Conservative critics will be tempted to dismiss these newer genres as inferior to established ones like literature or classical music, but who is to say whether cinema and music may not be scrutinized some day with the same vigor we reserve for Dante or Milton. The next Shakespeare will likely not be a playwright; he may well be a director, screen-writer, or, god-forbid, a rock musician. The ways we communicate today are changing in profound ways, and giants always roam the frontiers of artistic progress. We should therefore keep open our eyes, lest we miss one.

Is Bush Demon of the Underworld?

Ok, it's probably an exaggeration to say that Bush is the anti-Christ. But maybe we can blame him for being one of those lesser demons of the underworld, perhaps of similar nature to the Nambew.



Upon reading two articles spotted by my economics professor and my favorite economics blog, I can no longer take the optimistic stance that Bush isn't so bad. According a column by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate, Bush's crimes include widening of the inequality gap, vastly increasing the budget deficit and debt, being at the root of the increase in bankruptcies and mortgage problems, not to mention the little Iraq problem. Ultimately, as asserted by Larry Summers of Harvard, the economy is headed for recession next year and "there is the risk that the adverse impacts will be felt for the rest of this decade and beyond," consistent with Stiglitz's even more dismal claims. I highly recommend reading the Stiglitz article; it's very comprehensive and interesting, but also demoralizing.

By the way, I don't read Vanity Fair.

Mike Lowell: To Sign or not to Sign?

[In honor of the Red Sox winning the World Series, my next few posts will be related to baseball’s latest World Champions]

Amid the champagne showers and the celebrations and the accolades for his clutch performance during the regular season and the post season, Mike Lowell must be feeling a twinge of anxiety. His contract ends this season, and his future with the Boston Red Sox is at this point unknown.

In the euphoria of victory, many fans have loudly expressed their desire to see Mike Lowell re-signed. Their argument is persuasive; Mike Lowell had a career year in 2007. He was the 2007 World Series MVP, and he led the Red Sox in RBI. He also batted .324. Clearly, he is a good ballplayer. He is also a good defensive third basemen, and an invaluable clubhouse presence; a composed veteran fluent in both English and Spanish.

Mike Lowell is also 34, and it will probably take at least a 4 year deal to sign him. Will Boston really want Mike Lowell manning third when he’s 38? 39? 2007 was something of a career year for Mike Lowell, so his stat line for 2008 will probably reflect his career averages; envision a .280 batting average, with 20 home runs, and 80 RBI. Further, expect not only his offensive production, but his defense, to decline in subsequent years. Despite this, I still say sign him.

Here is the most compelling reason for Boston to sign Mike Lowell: if they don’t, the Yankees will. Brian Cashman threatened that he would not try to resign Alex Rodriguez if he opted out of his contract, which, to the delight of Yankees-haters everywhere, he did. Assuming the Yankees hold true to their word, they will have a gaping hole at third base. If Mike Lowell, the only other attractive option at third base, is available, they will quickly snatch him up.

Boston has a unique opportunity to severely handicap the Yankees for 2008. If Boston resigns Lowell, the Yankees will have few remaining options. After Lowell and Rodriguez, the best free agent third baseman is Mike Lamb, a 33 year old who in 2004 hit a career high 58 RBI. New York would have difficulty finding a solid third baseman through a trade, and to do so, they would probably have to give up at least one of their prized prospects. Finally, the Yankees have no notable prospects waiting in wing to take over third base. In short, they will be in a no-win situation.

Losing Alex Rodriguez was a huge blow to the Yankees. His WARP-1, a sabermetric statistic describing the number of wins a certain player is worth over a replacement player, was 11.1. Mike Lamb, as a point of comparison, had a WARP-1 last season of 2.5. If the 2007 Yankees had started Mike Lamb at third instead of Alex Rodriguez, they would have won between 85 and 86 games; not 94. That’s how bad they look to be if they lose A-Rod. Mike Lowell last season had a WARP-1 of 7.0. If the 2007 Yankees had started Lowell at third instead of Rodriguez, they would have won 90 games; just enough to snag the Wild Card. Do us a favor, Theo Epstein, and keep the Yankees out of the playoffs; re-sign Mike Lowell.

I can haz immortality now?

So recently, I've been thinking of immortality and how I can achieve it. Naturally, when attempting anything, it's usually prudent to look into historical precedents for insight and guidance. However, I didn't have much to go on, except for human literary works and mythologies. While reading these, I came across something that really bothered me:

In these works involving immortal beings, so many of the immortals want nothing more than to be able to die. This strikes me as incredibly strange. The main contention seems to be that if you were immortal, you would exhaust all the interesting things to do in the world, or otherwise accumulate so much sadness from people close to you dying, to the point that you'd no longer want to live.

Are you serious? Sick and tired of the world? In an unchanging one, maybe, but just think of how the world has changed in even the last 20 years. In 20 years, could you have exhausted all there was to do in the world? There are things to do now you couldn't do 20 years ago, and things you could do 20 years ago that you can't do now. I find it impossible to believe there is so little to do in the world that diminishing marginal utility actually results in no further gains for any possible activity. People that would get bored need to loosen up and learn how to make their own fun.

As for the other claim that you'd get tired of befriending people and losing them to death, I personally think friendship is one good thing you can never have too much of. If you make friends and lose them, you had some happiness and some sadness. If you don't make friends, you're just sad (in multiple senses of the word). Why stop seeking happiness?

Faced with these silly portrayals of pathetic immortals, I can only conclude one of two things: either the creators of these characters were suffering from jealousy, and made their characters miserable to compensate, or none of the characters that were granted immortality were smart enough to appreciate it. Since the first scenario would only occur with fictional characters... whoever it is out there that goes around granting immortality, you can stop wasting your gift on the ungrateful -- I've got just the right person for you right here.

LOTR vs. HP

Here’s a long-standing debate that I’ve been meaning to throw my 2 cents into for a while. The Lord of the Rings vs. Harry Potter. The stalwart cornerstone of a genre vs. the young hot upstart. In terms of popularity, there should be no contest. To date, the Harry Potter books have sold more than 350 million copies world wide in the span of a decade. The Lord of the Rings series, in contrast, has sold roughly 100 million since the first publication in 1954. Indeed, Harry Potter has sold more than three times as many copies as The Lord of the Rings in less than one-fifth the time. Further, there should be no doubt that Harry Potter is here to stay. Though its days as a cultish cultural phenomenon are coming to a close, the Harry Potter series is all but assured of enjoying a long shelf-life as a staple of childhood reading.

Believe it or not, I have done some research on this debate. If you google some variant of the phrase ‘Lord of the Rings vs. Harry Potter’ as I did, you will find the sites of many bloggers who have tackled the exact same question. They break into two camps; the Harry Potter camp, and The Lord of the Rings camp.

Each side tends to parrot one of the following arguments. The Lord of the Rings fans contend that the Middle Earth universe is far more comprehensive Harry Potter’s. The meticulous mind of JRR Tolkien imagined every detail in the Middle Earth universe; he even wrote an extensive back story in the Silmarillion. Harry Potter, on the other hand, is riddled with inconsistencies and plot holes that tend to be repaired by magical technicalities, and a heavy reliance upon the Deus Ex Machina technique. Lord of the Rings fans also allude, somewhat mysteriously, to their series’ depth, which apparently far exceeds that of Harry Potter.

Harry Potter fans counter that at least Harry Potter is exciting. A valid point, considering the Lord of the Rings can be somewhat dull in comparison. They also argue that Harry Potter is not shallow because of the historical parallels to World War II. The rise of the Death Eaters is easily analogous to real historical movements like Nazism. Lord Voldemort, with his infatuation with blood purity, sounds a lot like Adolf Hitler. This, they assert, constitutes depth and complexity.

Clearly, depth must be an important status-marker, since both sides invoke it to justify their allegiance. Many bloggers throw the word around, but few actually explain what makes the books deep. Lord of the Rings fans refer to the overwhelming detail in books’ mythology, but they seem to confuse detail with depth. To actually understand the depth of the Lord of the Rings, we should look to the early 20^th century, when the series was first conceived.

The Lord of the Rings universe was forged in the trenches of World War I, where Tolkien served as a communications officer. JRR Tolkien actually witnessed the Battle of Sommes, one of the truly horrifying events of European History. Upon becoming ill (disease actually accounted for the majority of deaths in WWI) he left the frontlines to recover. The war that killed an entire generation of young European men took Tolkien’s three closest childhood friends as well. It also utterly shattered Europe’s intellectual traditions, and seemed to reveal the violent, irrational nature that lied beneath nationalism, technology, and modernity itself. To all those it affected, World War I represented a failure of Enlightenment thinking and Western Civilization as a whole.

Tolkien began to elaborate upon the Lord of the Rings universe in the dark years that followed World War I. On a personal level, it was an escapist fantasy that was easier for him to face than everyday life. On a more universal level, The Lord of the Rings was his attempt to grapple with and re-imagine a destroyed European consciousness. If the Enlightenment had failed, what was the solution? What could replace Western Civilization? These are the questions Tolkien wrestled with.

The War for the Ring is not a direct allegory for World War I or II, as Tolkien warns us. Instead, we should view it as a more general representation of the violence and cultural shock of the early 20^th century. The war between Orcs and Men is a fight for the modern world. Would the new world be characterized by greed, fear, darkness, and duplicity, which the armies of Sauron represent? Or could a new era of prosperity be built from the ashes of a ruined heritage, much like the fallen race of Numenor?

Tolkien was not the only author to struggle with these questions. Tolkien is actually writing in the same vein as TS Eliot. Both writers believed that Western Civilization had failed. But what would replace it? In The Wasteland, Eliot seems to say we ought to look towards Eastern Philosophy. Tolkien, on the other hand, seems to say that Europe’s salvation lies in its distant past.

The Lord of the Rings is written in the style of Beowulf, the 9^th century epic of a mythical war hero. By deciding to write in this antiquated trope, Tolkien seems to be saying that Europe must look deep into its own past in order to escape from its devastating malaise. Look beyond the Enlightenment, beyond even the Renaissance, and start from scratch, Tolkien commands us. In order to revive Western civilization, we must return to its very foundation.

Our readers who are familiar with the series may notice that there are many avenues wide open for interpretation that I merely glazed over. This is precisely what makes the Lord of the Rings a deep novel. There are innumerable levels of allusion and historical relevancy that simply do not exist in Harry Potter. Rowling’s allusions to World War II are largely extraneous, and further no greater purpose within the novel. Often times, it seems Rowling alludes to World War II to give her novels a sense of depth without too much serious consideration.

I will try not to overstate my case. Harry Potter is a wildly entertaining and engaging series, and likewise it is very possible to enjoy the Lord of the Rings even on a superficial level. Further, I don’t want to elevate The Lord of the Rings to the same level as The Wasteland, a work of unrelenting complexity and beauty. I just want to settle the debate once and for all: Harry Potter is fun reading, but in terms of literary merit, it cannot stand up to the Lord of the Rings.