I’ll be doing a 1 pm EST chat on Thursday, 2/21.
→ February 20, 2008
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→ February 20, 2008
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Pittsburgh = Cleveland south?
So the Minor League Baseball site has this fluff piece up on the Pirates’ new scouting philosophy
Five people have been added to the amateur scouting side, and the areas for which each scout is responsible have been shuffled and restructured to ensure that no area goes uncharted. There has also been a complete revision in how scouts evaluate players.
“We’ve put a whole new structure and a whole new system in,” Huntington said. “We have established a Pittsburgh Pirate-type player and established what we’d like from a player at all different positions.”
With the caveat that I may be reading WAY too much into an eight-word quote, that sounds like 1) a recipe for bad drafting and 2) a lot like the problem Cleveland has had in its own drafts, where their criteria in early rounds are quite narrow and they’ve ended up with a lot of low-ceiling college guys who haven’t panned out.
Again, could be nothing, and my general belief on quotes from GMs is that they’re 90% bullshit (what incentive does a GM have to reveal details of his baseball strategy?), but this sounds a lot to me like they’re trying to re-create the Cleveland organization. If that means Huntington can flip Jason “Bartolo” Bay and Ronny “Einar” Paulino for some major building blocks, hey, great. But if it means they’re doing to adopt the same semi-closed drafting philosophy – not the best player available, but the best player available who fits into what we’ve already decided we’re looking for – then the draft is not going to be a major contributor to Pittsburgh’s future success.
→ February 19, 2008
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Cookware question.
From regular ESPN reader JKGaucho comes this intriguing question about cookware:
Keith, I have a non baseball question that I thought would be right up your alley, and maybe a blog entry on the dish if you had the time. My financee and I are in the early stages of registering for gifts and after going around to Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma, I found the experience rather overwhelming. If someone knows about what are the best pots, pans, knives, etc., I figure you do. I should say that when it comes to everything, easy to clean is preferred. How did you find the registering process and is there something that you would certainly avoid? Any suggestions on brands like All Clad vs. Calphalon or whatever if more than greatly appreciated.
Well, at least someone understands what marriage is all about: The gifts. Anyway, what follows is my reply to JKG.
Sure, happy to help. But there are no straightforward answers:
Pots and pans: Brand doesn’t matter as much as material. I had anodized aluminum for a few years; it’s easy to clean because it’s mostly nonstick, but the pans/pots are very heavy and you won’t be able to brown meats as well as you can with other materials. Now I have a better mix of materials based on how I use each pot or pan.
My current setup includes two anodized aluminum skillets (9″ omelette pan and 10″ deep skillet), a 12″ cast-iron skillet (heavy, but the best cooking material on the planet and quite cheap), an enameled cast iron Dutch oven (about $200) an aluminum stockpot, a stainless steel saucier with a cover, and a stainless steel saute pan with a cover. I also have a pressure cooker, but don’t use it all that often. Calphalon and All-Clad are both excellent brands. Avoid Teflon or other “coated” non-stick cookware.
Knives: This depends entirely on your hands. Go to a Bed Bath & Beyond or a Wms & Sonoma and get a salesclerk to open the case so you can hold the knives and see which is comfortable. I have J.A. Henckels’ Four-Star line and am very happy with them. I have one of the Five-Star knives (a santoku), and the only difference is that the handle has a different shape. You should get a chef’s knife
FWIW, the America’s Test Kitchen people rated the Victorinox Fibrox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife
Registering – who knows, that was 13 years ago and I didn’t cook back then. But you named some expensive stores. I’d say register at Bed Bath & Beyond, which has most of the same stuff as W-S or C&B but way better prices on pots, pans, knives, and small appliances; and then use a higher-end store or a department store for flatware and silverware.
Also, if you intend to cook, register for a food processor and a 5-qt stand mixer. They are indispensable and expensive enough that you won’t want to buy them on your own. Other kitchen toys I use often: Stick blender (“boat motor”), blade grinder (for spices, not for coffee!), digital kitchen scale, roasting pans (get at least two different sizes), V-slicer (or a mandoline, if you have wealthy relatives), salad spinner, eight different colanders (and I use them all, often), electric carving knife, and a waffle iron with reversible grids
→ February 19, 2008
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I don’t know the guy, but he needs a kidney and I have two, so…
Phil Sheridan: Phils should give Howard what he wants
Sheridan’s entire argument is as follows:
* The Phillies should lose their arbitration hearing with Ryan Howard on purpose, because…
* Fans will like it
* It will improve their relationship with Howard
I hate to trot out the old appeal to authority, but the truth is these are the words of someone who’s never worked in a baseball front office and doesn’t understand how the business works. Anyway, let’s get at the meat of his “argument:”
They win on public perception. You could do a master’s thesis in sociology on why so many sports fans get upset about the idea that a player like Howard – or Brian Westbrook, to cite another recent example – might be underpaid. Most fans, after all, could work a lifetime without earning what Howard will earn for playing baseball this year – even if he loses the hearing.
I have news for Mr. Sheridan: What fans think doesn’t matter. A GM who gives a shit what his fans think about a player’s salary is going to be out of work in fairly short order. What matters is winning. If the team wins, the fans don’t care how it came about. And paying a player more than you are required to pay him pushes you further from winning, not closer. So if you want to make the fans happy, beat Ryan Howard in arbitration and take the $3 million saved and try to put it towards the pitching problem.
Best of all, they can change the entire dynamic of their relationship with the best young power hitter they’ve ever had. Until now, for reasons ranging from the presence of Jim Thome to the Phillies’ own apparent inability to recognize Howard’s potential, they have paid very little for a lot of home runs, a rookie-of-the-year season, and an MVP season.
Yeah, again, this is what someone says when he doesn’t understand how the business works. He is correct that Howard’s pay did not match his performance during the last three years. So what? That’s the system. And there is absolutely ZERO evidence (not that Sheridan concerns himself with evidence here – the entire article is fluff) that overpaying a player at some point during his pre-arb or arb years buys you anything down the road. It doesn’t get the team a hometown discount on a long-term deal. It doesn’t make the player less likely to leave as a free agent. It just transfers money from the player budget to one player. The Cardinals gave Albert Pujols $900K in his last pre-arb year, and he still held their feet to the fire on a long-term deal twelve months later.
But here’s the worst part of all, the part that Sheridan doesn’t mention when he says, “Lose tomorrow and the Phillies make their fans happy, appease a superstar player, and set themselves up for a better relationship with him for years – all for $3 million.”
This just shows that he doesn’t get the system, because the cost is far more than $3 million.
You see, arbitration isn’t just about comparables, but it’s also about raises. If the Phillies lose their case against Howard – and they might lose anyway – then the baseline for his arbitration case next year becomes $10 million, rather than $7 million. This works against the Phillies simply because players always get raises in arbitration, even if they have awful years. (The only exceptions I know of are players who missed entire seasons and received the same salaries in the subsequent years.) Howard’s agent (Casey Close of CAA) will also be able to argue for a higher raise by looking at the raises comparable players received in percentage terms. For example, Alfonso Soriano received a 38% raise in his second year of arbitration eligibility. If Close argues for a 38% raise for Howard, then that’s $9.7 million if the Phillies win this year’s hearing but $13.8 million if the Phillies lose. The effect of a loss this year is cumulative.
No, losing an arbitration case on purpose is never a good idea, and I hope the Phillies put on a good show in a hearing where the cards are slightly stacked against them. Mr. Sheridan is going to have to show us at least one situation somewhere in baseball history where his idea didn’t come back to bite the team on the ass and leave it with a case of gangrene.
→ February 18, 2008
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The Mailbag of Malcontent, Vol. 7.
Frank D is back!
(253) Frank D (REDACTED) 2008-02-18 11:17:00.0
Toronto misses you. The floors need sweeping. Eric Bedard is a stud. He’s proven that. Prospects are just that. When you can get a young lefty with his stuff, you move heaven and hell to get him. You wouldn’t know that being a total dumbass. laughing at you every time, Frank D. Btw, please go back to obscurity.
I love the fact that my work drives him up the wall. By the way, he still hasn’t realized that he has my email address – as always, this came through my ESPN mailbag.
→ February 18, 2008
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Robert Irvine’s Resume Improbable?
Courtesy of longtime reader Chris L. comes a link to a story in the St. Petersburg Times about Food Network star Robert Irvine, who appears to have fabricated parts of his resume and whose plans for a pair of big-time St. Petersburg restaurants are rapidly falling apart. Good work by the team that worked on this piece, although I would have liked to have seen some comments from the Food Network people (or at least the obligatory “no comment”). I’ve emailed the writer to ask if he reached anyone at FN on this topic.
Update: The article’s main writer, Ben Montgomery, told me that Food Network did not respond to his requests for comment, and that their food/dining blogger has also been trying to get a comment. You can see an update to the story related to the Princess Di wedding cake lie.
5:24 pm EST update: Ben sent me a link to a statement from a FN spokesperson over on the Mouth of Tampa Bay blog regarding Irvine. The gist seems to be that they’re distancing themselves from Irvine already.
→ February 18, 2008
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ESPNEWS today.
I’ll be on the Hot List on ESPNEWS today at 4:10 pm EST.
→ February 17, 2008
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Waitress.
Waitress
The film revolves around Jenna (Keri Russell), a waitress in a pie shop in a small Southern town, who discovers she’s pregnant and is not happy about it. Her husband, Earl – good luck watching the rejuvenated Law & Order after watching Jeremy Sisto in this movie – is a colossal jackass, abusive, controlling, and dumb as a post. (He’s the one real stock character in the film.) She ends up having an affair with the town’s new gynecologist (Nathan Fillion), a married transplant from Connecticut. Jenna is surrounded by characters at the pie shop, from her two waitress co-workers to the gruff head chef to the 80-year-old owner, Joe, played to the hilt by Andy Griffith as a grumpy old man, who gives everyone (including Jenna) a hard time about everything, but also fills the slightly hackneyed wise-old-man role.
The movie is alternately funny and painful. Jenna has a talent for making up new pie recipes, but gives some of them silly names based on what’s going on in her life, like “I Don’t Want to be Pregnant with Earl’s Baby Pie.” (Her co-worker Dawn: “I don’t think we can put that on the menu board, huh?”) Yet aside from the rare moments of pleasure she gets at the pie shop, Jenna is miserable. She’s trying to save up to leave her husband, but is repeatedly stymied. She’s afraid the baby will trap her in a bad marriage forever. She makes a connection with her doctor, but there’s no future in that while both are married. It’s a black comedy in the sense that the underlying life we see is so grim, with Jenna trying to find a way to start her life over but unable to create the opportunity; in fact, she gets her chance through an external source, which sort of makes up for the way that the opportunities she creates are stymied one by one.
Waitress succeeds because the droll humor and the film’s obvious sympathy for Jenna (and thus ours) overcome its flaws. The turning point at the film’s end is a bit too perfect, but writer Adrienne Shelly did set it up throughout the movie. Earl is a one-note character, perfectly defined by the fact that when he comes to the diner to pick Jenna up, he starts beeping his horn before he’s even pulled up to the front door; I found myself averting my eyes almost every time he came on screen because his treatment of his wife was so dated and misogynistic. I suppose such people exist, but Earl seemed too sharply defined and exaggerated. There was something a little too creepy about Dawn ending up dating her “stalker elf,” Okie, even if the point was to provide an example to Jenna. And perhaps the movie’s biggest sin in my mind is the pie-making -pouring cooked custards into unbaked pie shells (you have to blind-bake them), laying the horizontal strips of a lattice top over the vertical ones (they should be woven), and mashing fillings after they’ve been poured into the crust (the juices would turn the bottom crust into mush).
These hiccups don’t interrupt the movie’s undeniable charm, driven by some witty writing and a fantastic performance by Russell in the lead role. It’s a date movie with brains, or perhaps an indie take on the romantic comedy genre, or a film that just defies easy categorization. We could use a few more of those, come to think of it. I’ve been debating offering some sort of easy rating system, but if I had one, this would get my highest mark.
As an aside, no review of Waitress would be complete without a mention of its tragic backstory. After the movie was completed but before it was accepted to the 2007 Sundance festival, writer/director Adrienne Shelly, who also played Jenna’s unlucky-in-love co-worker Dawn, was murdered in her Manhattan office-apartment by an illegal immigrant construction worker whom she caught stealing money from her purse. It’s an artistic loss, as Shelly clearly had a lot of promise as a writer, and a terrible personal loss for her family: Waitress was written a few years earlier as a love-letter to her then-unborn daughter, who appears at the end of the film as Jenna’s daughter as a toddler.
→ February 17, 2008
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Atonement.
Warning – review contains spoilers, since there’s no way to discuss the book’s merits without discussing the ending.
Ian McEwan’s Atonement
The atonement in question revolves around Briony, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Tallis family, and the way she lets a girlish fantasy and her lack of knowledge of adult relations (physical and emotional) spiral out of control, thus ruining the lives of two people close to her. McEwan has to stretch a little to get to the critical sequence where Briony falsely accuses a man of rape, including the use of a vulgarity I won’t repeat here and that would be almost out of the question for the man in question to have used in that fashion, but in general, the way he progresses through the novel’s first 95% is strong. The seemingly omniscient third-person narrator takes us inside the heads of the three central characters, and there’s a single jump in time that pushes the plot forward past several years where nothing of direct relevance happens, which turns out to be a solid decision that allows the second sequence of events to coincide with (and create parallels to) the dark opening of World War II. The book’s pacing and prose have the feeling of classic 19th century British literature, and while there’s no confusing Atonement with Jane Austen’s work, there’s no doubt McEwan drew Briony as the flip side of Northanger Abbey‘s Catherine Morland.
McEwan himself is an outspoken atheist, thus the novel’s central theme of a search for earthly redemption without reference to or hope for a spiritual one or one in an afterlife. (To be clear, religion or lack thereof is not an explicit theme in the novel.) Briony’s search for redemption – what she calls atonement, but what really is an external forgiveness from both of the parties she so directly wronged – affects her choices early in life, driving her away from education into a nursing job that takes on importance after the war comes home to Britain during the evacuation of British troops from France in 1941. Thus limited by the need for a redemption in the here and now, she seeks out her estranged sister to try to bring about a reconciliation through admission of her own crime.
Or does she? McEwan throws the entire book into doubt in a muddled, tacked-on epilogue. Is what came before a full representation of the actual history of events? An incomplete one? A complete fiction? Briony tells us how, as an author, she can play God and rewrite events, but can not ultimately redeem them – or herself, or fix the lives she ruined. But what then is the responsibility of McEwan? This is his universe, his reality. He can give Briony the atonement she desires, in full or in part. But he needs to be honest with his readers. In fact, by not telling us until that 95-percent mark that what we have read to that point is a meta-novel, a fictional work within a fictional work, with most details true to the fictional reality (stay with me) but some not, and oh-by-the-way he isn’t even clear in the final pages how much of the preceding novel is reality, he’s dishonest with his readers, using our credulous nature – that we step into a novel prepared to believe its reality, to suspend our disbelief, to accept the characters as real people as long as they’re drawn true to life – to his advantage to pull a nasty trick on us. Instead of a deeper look at redemption, atonement, or just plain old-fashioned forgiveness, McEwan turns the book into a writer’s lament, that one can not undo reality or even find catharsis through fictionalizing real-life events and altering them to suit one’s needs. Well, no shit, Ian.
On page 334, I was prepared to praise Atonement as a clever, well-written work with expertly crafted characters and brilliant descriptive prose. In sixteen pages, McEwan tore that opinion apart, turning the book into a wicked bit of sleight of hand that still has the same characterization and prose but that proves terribly unsatisfying as an actual novel because of the betrayal of the reader’s trust.
→ February 14, 2008
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Mount Rapmore.
From Bill Simmons’ mailbag:
Q: If they were going to construct the Mount Rushmore of the rap industry, who would the four members be? Keep in mind that it is the four most influential people to the history of the industry, not necessarily the four best rappers.
–Adam, Hillsville, Va.
First of all, I have no idea why Adam asked Bill this instead of me. But Adam lives in some place called “Hillsville” in rural Virginia is probably still listening to his cassette version of To The Extreme, so we’ll cut him some slack.
Bill, however, gets no slack. His answers: Tupac (fine), Dr. Dre (also fine), Jay-Z (awful choice – the man can not rap), and the most overrated rapper ever, Notorious B.I.G.
B.I.G.’s legacy was preserved because he died just as he was becoming popular. He wasn’t a good technical rapper. His lyrics were beyond stupid, crude, and misogynistic, while never being particularly funny or clever. And his rise with Bad Boy Records represented the end of rap’s golden age and helped kill off West Coast gangsta-rap (although Warren G’s “Regulate” was that genre’s self-immolation moment). And maybe it’s just me, but I have never thought Jay-Z was any good as a rapper. His success mystifies me.
I don’t see how you can make any such list without including Rakim, one of the most influential rappers of all time and, I would argue, its best technical rapper, with outstanding flow and meter and plenty of inside rhymes. He’s cited as an influence by most of the best rappers of the 1990s and was revered enough in his prime to be referred to simply as the “R,” although I would be shocked if many current rap “stars” knew who he was.
And I’m also not sure how you can exclude Russell Simmons, who was a major figure in hip-hop’s formative years, co-founded (with Rick Rubin, who would be a good alternative) the first hip-hop record label, and was responsible for most of rap’s earliest cross-overs into the pop mainstream.
Honorable mention would go to Grandmaster Flash, the first rap artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and a highly influential rapper in early hip-hop who probably didn’t have the long-term career to merit inclusion.