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.

Jon Lee Becomes an Economist

I've been recently receiving these very interesting economics related articles from Jon Lee. While Jon's transformation into a practicing economist may be rational thing to do, the implications for Jon's moral code seem unsettling.

The first article Jon sends me describes how one should safely avoid speeding tickets (reasoning based on allocation of police resources). I presume that he'll reason that he can sidestep other heinous crimes, like stealing puppies and hunting bald eagles too.

The second article describes how once Jon makes a 500k dollars a year in hedge funds (Jon will change his career from engineering to business), Jon's strategic plan for relationships will be to lease his girlfriends while they are still attractive because they are depreciating assets, while his money will only appreciate in the future.