November 6th, 2006 → 11:37 am @ Seth Mnookin
Last week was the final chunk of concentrated Feeding the Monster appearances for the year, with readings at the Baseball Analysis at Tufts student organization, the Millbury Public Library, a Boston-based investment firm, the annual convention of the Boston chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research, Needham’s Temple Beth Shalom, and the Woburn Public Library. Without further ado…
* Despite the sauna-like heat in a basement lecture hall, the members of Baseball Analysis at Tufts — one of the cooler student groups around — managed to not only stay awake but ask perhaps the most interesting and educated questions of any audience I’ve spoken to thus far. I don’t know what’s in the water in Medford, but it sure makes those kids right smart. Schwag: one extra-large Tufts t-shirt. (Apparently they think I’m built more like Papi and less like Pedro.)
* The best things about speaking at a place of employment are: a) everyone’s happy to see you — it means less time working!, and b) everyone realizes what a good holiday gift a signed copy of FTM makes for their in-laws and loved ones alike. Schwag: peanuts, Cracker Jacks, and beer. (I didn’t partake of the latter.)
* The Friends of the Millbury Public Library make damn good brownies. Schwag: a take-home plate of blondies, chocolate cookies, and some sort of coconut concoction.
* The intimidation factor of speaking in front of a local SABR chapter is outweighed by the intellectual stimulation provided by an audience that has, as should be expected, a different take on almost everything having to do with the game. Schwag: a pen. (Technically that was pilfered, but still.)
* Jews sure do know how to eat. (No schwag at this one, but lots of bagels and lox.)
* Jim Schreider, my 11th-grade math teacher, looks almost exactly like he looked in 1988. He was one of the most enjoyable teachers I had; yesterday I learned that he misses NNHS about as much as I do, and now gives private SAT lessons to Boston-area students. (If, for some reason, you need SAT lessons look this guy up.)
* The Woburn Public Library, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson (who also designed Boston’s Trinity Church), is one of the most beautiful libraries I have ever been in.
* The Mystic River Lakes are gorgeous.
* The New England Mobile Book Fair rules. (I already knew that, but it never hurts to point it out again.)
There are some more dates coming up, including one this Wednesday at the Springfield Public Forum and one next week at a Fenway Fundraiser. And if you’re interested in having me come to speak at your place of employment, let me know…
Post Categories: Feeding the Monster Readings
November 4th, 2006 → 10:52 am @ Seth Mnookin
Derek Jeter won the 2006 AL Gold Glove at shortstop over Alex Gonzalez.
Compared to Gonzalez, Jeter had a lower fielding percentage (.975 to .985), a lower zone rating (4.14 to 4.36) and a lower range factor (.821 to .863), which means Jeter made a higher percentage of errors per chance, got to less balls hit to his area of the field, and made fewer plays per nine defensive innings. (Besides that he was great.)
One thing Jeter is quite good at is making plays other shortstops made with relative ease look as if they require Herculean efforts (think of his mad scrambles to the right, resulting in a pivot, whirl, and mid-air throw across the body; what’s generally lost in all the oohing and ahhing is that said ball was only about two feet away from Jeter to begin with). These are plays that good shortstops (Alex Gonzalez, say, or Pokey Reese or even Alex Rodriguez) make look easy. Heck, even Pokey’s in-the-stands grab in the famous July 1, 2004 game at Yankee Stadium was better than Jeter’s head-first dive…but since Pokey didn’t emerge bruised and bloodied, no one’s talking about him anymore.
Very smart people who know much more about baseball than I do have argued that Jeter is among the worst defensive players in all of baseball; I won’t go there. But his Gold Glove is nothing more than one more piece of proof that baseball coaches and managers are not always the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Post Categories: Alex Gonzalez & Derek Jeter & Gold Gloves
November 4th, 2006 → 10:24 am @ Seth Mnookin
“Pedro Martínez says that if his right shoulder doesn’t return to full strength, he would consider retiring. Martínez had surgery Oct. 5 to repair a torn rotator cuff. ‘To go back I have to recover. I have to be healthy,’ said Martínez. ‘But if God doesn’t want that, then I would have to think about giving it all up.'”
— The Boston Globe‘s “Baseball Notebook,” November 4, 2006.
Coming tomorrow: hours of callers on ‘EEI lauding the Sox’s decision not to offer Pedro Martinez a guaranteed, four-year, $50 million-plus contract after the 2004 season.
Post Categories: Pedro Martinez & Red Sox front office & Sports Reporters
November 2nd, 2006 → 1:37 pm @ Seth Mnookin
The Red Sox front office, in case you forgot, took a lot of beatings in the last 12 months; if a Martian came down and read the coverage of the team, he could reasonably be expected to conclude that Theo Epstein had personally taken a bat to Jason Varitek’s knee, Jed Hoyer had smashed Wily Mo’s hand in a door, and Ben Cherington had spent weeks hiding behind Papi’s car for the sole purpose of startling him to the point of his developing a heart murmur. (After all, if the disappointing season was entirely the front office’s fault, all of the primary causes would have to be laid at its feet.) The local media didn’t help in this regard; as I’ve said time (and time and time) again, the most frustrating (and, to my mind at least, reprehensible) aspect of this was when writers or commentators decried moves they had previously been in favor of…and failed to fully explain the confluence of factors that contributed to 2006*
Anyway, it turns out that at least some people think the Sox didn’t do such a bad job after all; in fact, in Baseball America’s recent ranking of the 2006 draft, the Sox ranked tops in all of baseball. It’s not surprising that it’s a national publication devoted in large part to amateur players that took the time and energy to point this out; in various local writers’ and commentators’ end-of-season rankings of the Sox’s front office, I didn’t see a single instance in which the team’s draft or player development program was included in any significant way.
Now, a worthwhile question to ask is why, if this team is so good at evaluating talent, it has struggled when transitioning these players to the big leagues (and/or seemingly made some missteps when it comes to trading away prospects). One factor — and this doesn’t totally explain things away, but has to be considered — is the reality that playing in Boston is different from playing in virtually every other market in the country. Some players react to the intensity and scrutiny differently than others; just as crucially, the fans and media throng put enormous pressure on the team to put up a team littered with big names and known quantities. Nick Cafardo’s Globe piece today hints at that — the piece begins, “If Theo Epstein or Brian Cashman tried to parade a roster like the Cardinals’ onto the field in Boston or New York, they’d probably be run out of town” — but then fails to explain how this affects what eventually happens on the field. (A corollary, and a valid point, is that if Brian Cashman or Theo put this team on the field in the AL East they’d likely end up with a losing record….but I digress.)
* Related to this is another David Leonhardt column that deals with former Treasury Secretary Robert Robin, a writer-subject combo I’ve brought up before in relation to how sportswriters and sports fans could better understand the game. In yesterday’s piece, Leonhardt addresses Rubin’s recent bet against the dollar…a bet that didn’t pay off. But that doesn’t mean it was an incorrect bet to make. Leonhardt explains Rubin’s philosophy:
“Throughout [Rubin’s] career — as an arbitrage trader at Goldman, as the Treasury secretary who led the 1995 bailout of Mexico — he has argued that decisions should not be judged solely on the outcome. Somebody could do a perfectly good job of weighing the relevant risks, make a call that maximizes the chances of success and still not succeed, because the world is a messy, unpredictable place.”
Unpredictability is hard for sports fans to swallow; I get that. What’s harder to choke down is when sportswriters — either because they’re lazy or because they’re pandering to their audience — don’t take the time to understand and explain this stark reality.
Post Categories: 2006 Wrap-ups and report cards & Red Sox front office & Sports Reporters
November 1st, 2006 → 9:52 am @ Seth Mnookin
That’s right folks: I’m on the road again, which means another day rolling down the track for a week’s worth of Boston-area readings. I’ll be at Tufts tonight, at the Millbury Public Library tomorrow, at the Boston Society for Baseball Research Regional Meeting (at BU) on Saturday, and at the Woburn Public Library on Sunday. Make up for all those disenfranchised voters and come early and often.
Post Categories: Feeding the Monster Readings & Oblique references to iconic songs about trains
October 31st, 2006 → 5:09 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Yesterday, in a parenthetical at the end of a post about Ben Stein (someone who has admirably figured out how to monetize every ounce of himself), I posed this question: Why is Joe Nocera, one of the New York Times‘s most incisive, provocative, and lucid columnists, buried away in the Saturday paper?
Well, I got the answer (from many, many, many, many people), and it’s an obvious one (and one that, at some point, I actually knew). When Nocera was hired, the Times was in a tizzy about the Wall Street Journal‘s “Weekend Edition,” which was designed to offer soft-focus, lifestyle-y features (and which is delivered to empty offices around the country every Saturday). (I kid! It’s delivered to your home. As long as you go through customer service in order to get that one paper re-routed.)
I understand that rationale: while the Times‘s and the Journal‘s audience has less of an overlap than you might think, it isn’t insignificant, and it’s not like any newspaper can afford to lose readers or advertisers these days. (You may ask yourself, ‘Self, why did it made sense to combat an avowedly soft-news edition of an otherwise hard-core business paper with one of the country’s best business colimnists?’ And you may say to yourself, ‘I have no idea.’)
But now, a little over a year later, the Journal‘s “Weekend Edition” is…not exactly a failure, but certainly not a resounding success, either. (In the last reporting period, the Weekend Journal was among the leaders in circulation losses, falling 6.7 percent, compared to 2 percent for the Journal‘s daily paper and about 3.5 percent for the Times and the Washington Post.)
Putting Nocera in the Saturday paper doesn’t reek of the sort of desperate knee-jerkism that resulted in the Times launching a hurried “Escapes” section on April 5, 2002…which just happened to be four days before the Journal introduced its long-planned (and reasonably successful) “Personal Journal.” It does, however, touch on a persistent (and annoying) oddity of the media business: the extent to which newspapers (and magazines) often make decisions based on how their competitors will react as opposed to what best serves their readers. It happens time and time again: if the Post gets a big scoop, the Times will more than likely play it down (if they cover it at all). If Newsweek comes out with a big package on corporate welfare, you can sure as hell bet Time won’t be doing anything similar any time soon (regardless of whether or not they had something in the works). And to what end? How many of the Washington Post‘s readers also read the Times? And would any of that relatively miniscule number be that bothered by seeing a similar story in another paper? The answer, clearly, is no. But for some inane reason, mis-placed institutional pride — we will not follow someone else’s reporting, dammit! — is put ahead of what would best serve customers/readers. (This is the industry, after all, that says it needs to be protected because it’s acting as a public trust…and an industry that has a whole mess of sky-is-falling doomsayers these days.)
So I’ll amend my question: How many of the Times‘s advertisers or readers are currently trying to decide between the paper’s Saturday edition and the weekend edition of the Journal? And how many people are losing out by missing Nocera’s column each week? Anyone? Anyone?
(Oh, also: no, I don’t really think Ben Stein is the world’s best columnist. But gosh darn is he a big cutey.)
Post Categories: Joe Nocera & Media reporting & New York Times & Oblique references to Talking Heads songs & Wall Street Journal
October 30th, 2006 → 8:37 pm @ Seth Mnookin
It looks like the certifiably noxious Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is about the cancelled. Confused by the generally positive reviews? You shouldn’t be: the only people who could possibly be able to keep a straight face while watching a show that acts as if the moral future of the country depends on whether some over-paid narcissistic sketch comedy writer can force a skit about dumb conservatives onto the air are those directly involved in television and those who write about it for a living. (That was quite a sentence, huh?) (Don’t be surprised if the next episode contains some snarky allusion to the playa-haters out there; anyone who’s watched even one episode knows that yes, Aaron Sorkin really is that obsessively solipsistic, and not in a funny, you-need-to-be-in-on-the-joke-to-get-it-but-then-it’s-oh-so-worth-it kind of way.)
(For anyone who wants to watch a good (and occasionally great) show about a Saturday Night Live-esque outfit, check out 30 Rock. There’s no other way to say this: Alec Baldwin is a comic genius. (And Tracy Morgan is a Jedi with four hearts.))
Post Categories: 30 Rock & Oblique references to Arrested Development & Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
