→ June 19, 2008
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The Next Food Network Star.

Anyone else watching The Next Food Network Star? I finally caught this week’s episode – it didn’t record Monday, long story – so I figured I’d throw some thoughts out there.

First, the format: The show is little short of a hazing. The contestants are asked to do some ridiculous things, like cooking brunch on a moving train or throwing together a potato dish that is “personal” in thirty minutes with zero advance notice. The connection between the tasks and an actual cooking show is tenuous at best.

Also, there is way too much crying. Stop crying. All of you.

As for the contestants, they’ve whacked some pretty clear not-going-to-win-anythings so far, although they still have some serious weeding to do before they get down to the legit contenders. Here’s who remains after Jeffrey – whose delivery is all wrong for TV, and whose mouth appears to naturally form a frown, even when he’s smiling – was eliminated in week 3, ranked from worst to best:

7. Nipa. Pro: Sounds like she can actually cook. Con: Her range is limited to Indian cuisine. She never smiles. She’s not inventive in her cooking. And if she’s not a wicked little witch, she should sue the show’s editors for making her look like one. The whole took-all-the-cayenne thing? If I was Aaron, I would soak Nipa’s entire wardrobe in cayenne water … and her sheets too.

6. Lisa. Pro: Appears to have some solid food ideas and be willing to go outside the box; she’s got a reasonably well-articulated culinary vision. Con: The vision doesn’t always sound appealing. Incredibly weird looking. Squints when she talks to the camera. Has a nose ring.

5. Jennifer. Pro: Big on comfort foods, which are always marketable, and she wants to keep it kid-friendly/family-focused, which is also a great niche. Con: Totally boring on camera. Mashed potato pizza is a disgusting idea, too.

4. Adam. Pro: High-energy. Camera likes him. Into guys’ food (his dishes in week three were bacon cheese fries and, in the “make your own jarred product” contest, a barbecue rub). Referenced Alton Brown in this episode. Con: Dorky, but maybe in a passable way. Served raw food each of the first two weeks. Not sure he’s much of a cook.

3. Kelsey. Pro: She’s very cute. High-energy. Pretty good food concepts, although I can’t figure out why she thought she could cook a gratin in 30 minutes. Con: Comes across as too polished, on which the judges really hammered her this week. No one is going to tune in to see a cute girl cook if she’s fake.

2. Shane. Pro: I think this kid – he’s 19, the youngest ever on TNFNS, apparently – can really cook. He’s good-looking and the camera likes him. Con: Very unpolished, and gets nervous easily; I think both of those can be fixed with training. Tried to do vichyssoise in 30 minutes without stock, which was just a bad judgment call.

1. Aaron. Pro: Can flat-out cook; he’s won plaudits for everything he’s made on the show, and his ideas are rock-solid. Also seems to get time management. Very charismatic; the camera loves him and he presents well. Con: His delivery could use some polishing, and he can trip over his words sometimes, but that’s very fixable. He’s my pick to win.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food, Media Tagged With: , ,
→ May 16, 2008
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The Boston Herald/Spygate affair.

So, as a friend of beleaguered Boston Herald writer John Tomase, I’ve been wrestling with how I might address the topic without coming off as too biased on John’s behalf. Seth Mnookin spared me the trouble with his excellent post on the subject today:

But the vitriol and derision being directed at Tomase is over-the-top. (And getting angry at him or at the Herald is a bad way to displace frustration/anger over the Pats slightly-less-than-perfect season.) He had what he thought was a big story, and he thought he had made the limitations of his story clear in the piece itself. The allegations contained therein logically followed from what was already known. And nobody he interviewed would say, flat out, that the piece was wrong.

This was, more or less, going to be my main point. The calls for Tomase’s firing – there’s even a Facebook group dedicated to it – don’t make much sense to me. Is he accused of malfeasance here? No one seems to be making a credible accusation along those lines. He got a scoop that appeared legitimate, and ran with it. One would assume that at least one Herald editor knows about Tomase’s source(s), and was sufficiently satisfied with the sourcing to green-light the story.

Is he accused of frequent mistakes along these lines – viz, running a story without giving the target(s) enough time to respond? To my knowledge, this is the first time John’s been charged with this kind or, in fact, any kind of journalistic error. So what is the justification for calling for Tomase to lose his job? Doesn’t some of the responsibility lie with the editors, as Seth says, to rein the writers in?

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 9, 2008
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Name-checked.

I’m working on that top ten cooking mistakes post I promised in chat – wrote six of them on the plane today – but in the meantime, here’s an interesting and slightly testy interview with St. Louis’ scouting director/director of player development Jeff Luhnow. Luhnow name-checked me in the following answer (the bolded section is the question, the unbolded section is his answer):

Pete Kozma wasn’t considered to be a “sexy” pick at the time he was drafted. A lot of different media outlets said that while he had solid tools across the board, other then power, he possessed no real standout tool. Yet so far Pete has been played extremely well. Are you surprised at how well Pete’s performed early?

If we wanted a “sexy” pick, we would read Baseball America, read Keith Law’s articles, and pick based on their opinions. But we don’t, and neither do any other clubs, because while the journalists are doing a good job of expressing their opinions based on the information they have, we have to live and die with our selections and the future of the organization is impacted by these picks. If the journalist is wrong, he just admits it (maybe) and keeps writing about the next guy or the next draft. They will still sell papers or get eyeballs. If we are wrong, we’ve missed a huge opportunity to make our organization better, and nobody wants to do that.

He’s dead on about two things there. One is that my process is nowhere near as thorough as a major league club’s process is on high draft selections. I might see a player twice – once over the summer, once in the spring – and the depth of my evaluation doesn’t match what a good scout will do by seeing a player five or six times just within a spring. I don’t have to worry as much about makeup and barely think about signability outside of the context of projecting the first round.

The other point Luhnow scores is on the consequences of a bad evaluation. If a scouting director doesn’t have productive drafts, he could lose his job. If my rankings turn out to be totally off base, the most I’ll lose is some credibility, and some pride as well, since I actually like to be right now and then.

Where he’s wrong … well, I think I’ve hit on it above. My looks are limited, and I make evaluations based on what I’ve got, but I take the task very seriously because I find it embarrassing when I make a poor evaluation, and I know that I do have to answer to the readers, including members of a lot of front offices and a lot of scouting departments. Their respect for me as an analyst is predicated on me getting stuff right, and making sure my opinions are backed up by strong arguments. And I feel an obligation to the wider readership to present objective opinions backed up by strong arguments, fact-based wherever possible.

I also think it’s silly to say that “the journalist” (first time I’ve been called that, I believe) won’t admit he’s wrong. If Pete Kozma turns into an above-average major-league player, of course I’ll admit I was wrong. And if I was foolish enough to try to finesse the bad evaluation, I doubt that futureredbirds or vivaelbirdos would let me get away with it anyway.

Luhnow, who is among the most intelligent people I’ve met in this industry, is using a lot of small verbal cues to put the “journalists” in their place, but really, isn’t our place on the outside anyway? I could shout from the rooftop that Pete Kozma was the worst first-round pick ever (he wasn’t), but it won’t have any influence on his career as a player. What I write and say doesn’t influence what happens on the field, so for any exec to worry about what I say is a waste of his time.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 1, 2008
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On race and baseball.

This BP Unfiltered post from Kevin Goldstein is a must read.

My own experiences inside the game did, unfortunately, expose me to some of that unpleasant side of human behavior as well, and I was glad to see Kevin address it head on as he did.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ March 4, 2008
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Gary Gygax dies at 69.

AP story on Gygax’ death

How many times will we see this referenced in sports columnist rants against statistical analysis over the next week?

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With:
→ February 29, 2008
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Robert Irvine Redux.

Brian Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times dropped me a note this morning to point me to the most recent twist in the Robert Irvine saga. They’ve got statements from FN and Irvine on their site; the gist is that Irvine’s contract won’t be renewed after the current season, although Dinner: Impossible will (probably?) continue with a new host.

Filed Under: Food, Media Tagged With: ,
→ February 28, 2008
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Keith Law, a Captain among Rabbits.

So I have a Google Alert set up with my name so I can catch when I’m quoted by sportswriters or various blogs. Of course, there’s some noise in there, with occasional crime stories popping up (the hazard of having my last name) and, well, things like this:

But Geoff’s master stroke has been to appoint Keith Law as his Rabbit Captain. … Certainly, Keith is the man for this Mission Impossible and it will crown what looks like being another fabulous year’s golf at Hebden Bridge Golf Club if he can pull it off. Watch this space.

I have no idea what any of that means, but I might use “Rabbit Captain” as my title on my next set of business cards.

Filed Under: Humor, Media
→ February 24, 2008
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The facts will bend to the will of my premise!

From reader Eric L. comes this bit of sloppy journalism from Sports Illustrated football writer Don Banks:

But Long isn’t taking a backseat to anyone these days. Not even his dad, the square-jawed and crew-cutted Howie, or his younger brother Kyle, who is a highly regarded left-handed high school pitcher who might go first overall in baseball’s June draft.

Kyle Long is, in fact, a left-handed pitcher who graduates from high school this year. He didn’t make my ranking of the top 60 amateurs back in November. But don’t take my word for it – Baseball America placed him 58th in its preseason ranking of the top 100 HS prospects for this draft, which would place him somewhere in the fourth round, third at best.

I don’t really expect Don Banks to know a lot of specifics about prospects for the upcoming baseball draft, but would it be so hard for him to reach out to someone – like Kevin Goldstein, who has contributed some pieces to SI – to check a fact? Or is this, as Eric put it in his email, “just a case of a football writer talking about something about he doesn’t really know that much about and then stretching the truth to make a cute parallel?”

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ February 21, 2008
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Iron Chef America exposed?

Reader Matthew S. pointed out this Village Voice article called “Iron Chef Boyardee“, in which the writer, restaurant critic Robert Sietsema, details his experiences at a taping of Iron Chef America. The basic gist is that what you see on TV is not terribly reflective of how things actually work.

His next column will be titled, “Sun to Rise in East Tomorrow?”

Sietsema starts off on the wrong foot by claiming that the “chairman” in the U.S. episodes is an actor (true), while the “chairman” in the Japanese episodes was “the rich guy sponsoring the gladiatorial game show” (false, and easily disproven – the guy was an actor). But then he reveals several facts about ICA that should have been patently obvious to anyone who watched the show:

  • The chefs know the “secret” ingredient ahead of time. Food Network has acknowledged (on its behind-the-scenes show) that chefs are given a list of three ingredients that includes the secret one. I’m not a fan of the pretense, either, but let’s be realistic – for the chefs to come up with five complex dishes on the spot and then parcel out work to two sous-chefs doesn’t seem remotely realistic to me.
  • The challenger isn’t choosing the Iron Chef against whom he wishes to compete. Again, it’s a silly pretense, but it’s not a surprise, either.
  • The frenetic activity seen on the broadcast is a product of editing; the actual cooking on the show is far more methodical. Again, I’m not sure why this is news. If you’ve ever seen a real restaurant kitchen in action, you know no one’s running around like a maniac, because that’s a good way to screw up a dish, fall, or impale yourself on your chef’s knife.

Sietsema discusses one pretense that’s a real problem, which is that the dishes prepared in the hour of the contest are not the ones presented to the judges. I always wondered how they got around the issue of having one chef’s dishes wait around for a half-hour during the other chef’s tasting period, and the answer is that they don’t: Both sides prepare the dishes anew shortly before the tasting. That’s the one point Sietsema makes that does undermine the validity of the contest.

He also makes the very valid criticism that the “judging” is, at least when Jeffrey Steingarten’s not there, insipid. He mentions Ted Allen making two pointed criticisms during the taping, which floored me, because on the edited shows Allen is the biggest chef-apologist on the planet. The judges are charged with rating two sets of dishes against each other, so the onus is on them to identify the small differences that allow them to rate one set higher than the other, yet the commentary on the show (and apparently in the tapings) is almost uniformly positive. That’s an easier problem to solve, of course – find some judges who aren’t afraid to speak their minds and piss people off. I wonder where they might find someone like that…

Filed Under: Food, Media Tagged With: , ,
→ 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.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , , ,