→ July 31, 2010
→ By

Another music update.

I’ll be filing reaction pieces all day as we learn about trades (but only when we know all the parts). Keep an eye on my twitter feed for links to articles as they go up.

—

I’m not sure if my tastes are narrowing as I get older, or if there really just isn’t as much great new music coming out now as there was five to ten years ago, but I’m definitely not spending as much on music as I did early in the last decade. Here are ten songs I’ve heard this year – not all are new releases, and one is from 2006 – that are in heavy rotation for me at the moment.

Manchester Orchestra – “I’ve Got Friends”

At the Team USA trials in July and the Tournament of Stars before that, both held at the USA Baseball complex in Cary, the music played during BP and between innings was mostly atrocious, including crap like the Veronicas’ “Untouched” and OneRepublic’s “All the Right Moves,” which includes the line “All the right friends in all the wrong places.” Of course, that just put me in mind to hear Manchester Orchestra’s similarly-worded song, which has the chorus “I’ve got friends in all the right places/I know what they want, and I know they don’t want me to stay.” There’s a tension in the music and vocal style that matches the desperation of the lyrics, and it’s the best new (to me, that is – it’s from 2009) song I’ve heard all year.

Tame Impala – “Solitude is Bliss”

Only available on iTunes right now, as far as I can tell. It’s an Australian trio with a psychedelic edge to most of their songs, but of what I’ve heard from them, this is the one track with a real hook that made me want to hear it again. The layered production hides a minimal instrumental approach, and the idiotically-simple guitar riff in the chorus gains a new currency from effects that make it sound like it’s enveloping your head. The video is by turns comical and disturbing – and doesn’t the lead singer remind you of Dave Grohl?

Features – “Lions”

Reminds me of a cross between the Arctic Monkeys (first album) and the Black Keys, combining the shout-along chorus of the former with slower, sly verses where the singer is apologizing for something … without really apologizing.

Neon Trees – “Animal”

I have a feeling I’m going to be sick of this song in about six months, as it’s already crossing over, and I’m generally not a fan of this slightly nasal style of vocals, but it’s a pretty strong pop-alternative track if you can get past the cheesy lyrics.

Broken Bells – “The High Road”

I’m pretty sure that for my debut album I’m going to have to work with Danger Mouse. I do love the lines “The dawn to end all nights/That’s all we hoped it was,” with the unspoken fear that it’s something a lot worse, and the way James Mercer sings in two different voices that seem like they couldn’t have come from the same person.

Pinback – “From Nothing to Nowhere” (right-click to download the song free from their official site)

From 2007, but I first heard it the weekend I went to see Stephen Strasburg pitch in Altoona in early April. Pinback’s music is mostly understated emo, not exactly my style, but “From Nothing to Nowhere” has some velocity to it that’s missing from other songs I’ve heard by the group, making it a great driving song. I’m still skeptical of the lyrics I found online for this song – it sounds like he’s saying “who sung my lyric?” rather than the bizarre “co-sign my letter” listed on all the lyrics sites. The visual effects behind the band in the official video elevate it beyond the usual mailed-in band-playing-song clip. I have no idea why Rob Crow wanted to look like the Unabomber without his hoodie, though.

Alkaline Trio – “Help Me”

Power-pop is kind of a lost art right now, and this wouldn’t stand up to the 1990s stars of the genre like Sugar, Jellyfish, or Sloan, but there’s something about Matt Skiba’s singing on this track that got stuck in my head, even though the lyrics are nothing special. I did like it better when I thought I caught the word “jejune” in the line right before the chorus, even though I knew that was about as likely as a Jason Tyner shot to the upper deck.

Muse – “Supermassive Black Hole”

This song should have been on my top songs of the 2000s – a list I’m going to have to revise at some point – but it came out right three weeks after I quit the Blue Jays to join ESPN … and four weeks after I became a father. I was oblivious to just about anything that happened that summer, whether news or popular culture or non-baseball sport, so this song, an obvious homage to vintage Prince, escaped my notice, and I didn’t hear it until this spring. I’m sure Muse fans would disagree, but this is the best song I’ve heard from them since their debut album, with the incomparable “Sunburn” and “Muscle Museum,” purposefully over-the-top without the derivative feel that’s ruined a lot of their recent work for me, featuring a slithering guitar riff behind a falsetto vocal that will call to mind the Purple One at his peak.

Arctic Monkeys – “From The Ritz To The Rubble”

The second-best song off their 2006 debut album, when they were still ultimately a punk band with intellectual stylings and the appropriate sneer the critics wanted to see. The brief up-to-11 guitar lick leading into what you might call the chorus – the song defies conventional structures – grabs you up front, but the way Alex Turner turns shouted lyrics into another instrument is what hooked me, and how could you not like a song that rhymes “this one’s a scary’un” with “totalitarian?”

Cold Cave – “Love Comes Close”

This is so close to early ’80s new wave that it almost feels like parody – is it Joy Division? Camouflage? Early Ministry? I’m not in love with the vocal style – it reminds me of the guy from The National – but Cold Cave just nailed that new wave/synth-pop sound in a way that would fit perfectly on a compilation CD from that era.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ July 30, 2010
→ By

The Patron Saint of Liars & The Whore’s Child.

Ann Patchett’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, showcases the kind of insightful, compassionate writing that helped make her magnum opus, Bel Canto, such a critical and commercial success, although Liars lacks the same degree of storycraft found in Bel Canto or in The Magician’s Assistant. It is, however, one of the best sad books I have ever read, as the story of a woman who is hopelessly broken inside and yet can’t help but damage the people close to her through her inability to deal with her own fears and insecurities.

The primary liar in the book is Rose, who flees a comfortable marriage in California when she discovers she’s pregnant and “realizes” – or decides? – that she isn’t actually in love with her husband. She ends up at a Catholic home for pregnant girls who want to have their babies and give them up for adoption, but Rose ends up staying on well past her ninth month – and keeps her daughter as well, only to find herself unable to be a mother to her child or even much of a wife to her second husband. Patchett gives us a window into Rose’s sadness but never much of an explanation for it beyond the death of her father in a car accident when Rose was three. Her own daughter, Cecilia, reaches her early teens before her mother leaves the picture, but Rose is unable to mother her and Cecilia ends up forming bonds both with the nuns who run the facility and the girls who come in for six or seven or eight months and then mostly disappear from her life.

The book comprises three sections, and though Rose is the central character in the book, she only narrates the first third, and her motives for lying and leaving were never fully clear to me. Son, the groundskeeper she meets and marries at St. Elizabeth’s, narrates the second part, and Cecilia handles the third, and both were more compelling, deeply drawn characters with the ability to process and communicate their own complex emotions in ways that Rose’s character cannot. And Sister Evangeline, a sort of grandmother-figure/mystic in the group of otherwise grey, dour nuns is a scene-stealer whenever she appears.

The Patron Saint of Liars is a sad book, but not a bleak one. Rose is clearly depressed and her lack of progress or recognition is heartbreaking, especially as it threatens the lives of those closest to her. But there are streaks of hope not for Rose but for Son and especially Cecilia, who wants her mother to be a mother but has also has the strength to find that nurturing from others and is, at the book’s end, developing into a healthier, fuller person than her mother ever was. It is imperfect, from Rose’s scant motives to her ambiguous fate in what becomes Son’s and Cecilia’s story, but Patchett writes about emotions so clearly and empathetically that I moved through the book’s pages as I might through a novel of action.

—

Richard Russo’s first short story collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, feels almost like a collection of rarities and B-sides, with a few outstanding entries that, in total, wouldn’t be enough for a full volume, so the publisher stuck in a first draft and a few throwaways to provide some bulk, although the hardcover edition still barely reaches 200 pages even with generous line spacing. The highlights are vintage Russo, though, and it’s worth going through the collection to find those stories and moments.

The main thrust of these stories seems to be failure, especially confronting failure of the past with the uncertainty of the future among his mostly middle-aged protagonists, many of whom are professors, writers, or other sorts of artists. The title story is told by a creative writing professor who has an unusual student auditing his class, one who becomes the star of the show for her brutally honest writing that turns out to be an exploration of her own sad childhood. Several stories revolve around failed marriages – I found “Monhegan Light,” in which a successful cinematographer chooses to meet the man who cuckolded him, only to find himself the loser in the confrontation, very disturbing – and “The Farther You Go” is the ancestor of his novel Straight Man, condensing the story of the narrator’s daughter throwing her husband out of the house.

My main problem with the novel is that the inherently brief nature of the short story limits Russo’s ability to introduce the local color of side characters and the comic relief of subplots and running gags. Instead, we’re left with a sort of stark, gloomy fatalism about lives lived wrong without hope of a turnaround or just a temporary uptick. Only the final story, “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” brought that mix of humor and sadness in a sort of of coming-of-age story with a number of baseball-related scenes, but the attempts to decipher a complicated adult relationship through the eyes of the ten-year-old title character felt blurry.

I’ve enjoyed the five Russo novels I’ve read, especially Empire Falls and The Risk Pool, but I’d recommend The Whore’s Child for completists (like me) only, as the title story alone isn’t enough to justify buying the whole book.

–

I received a review copy of a new short story collection by Justin Taylor called Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, but the collection doesn’t live up to the title. I found the stories crude and immature, with the young writer’s obsession with sex (and with using sex as the primarily vehicle for meaning in the lives of his characters) and an evident lack of life experience. The characters were uninteresting, sometimes two-dimensional and largely self-absorbed, and their actions struck me as forced.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ July 26, 2010
→ By

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

My Dan Haren analysis is up for Insiders, and I’ve got another post up on Omar Vizquel’s Hall of Fame case with some other notes and links.

—

Who actually wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Is it possible that an uneducated moneylender and son of a Stratford glover could write over thirty plays that display the knowledge of a world traveler and the vocabulary of an alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge? This question has interested critics and scholars for two centuries, a story recounted in Columbia professor James Shapiro’s book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a thorough and surprisingly balanced look at the controversy and the cases for the two major alternative candidates, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere.

Shapiro explains in the introduction that he believes that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the glover’s son, but he presents the cases for Bacon and de Vere thoroughly and fairly – I might even say a little drily – before providing his rebuttals to each. He also lays out the arguments for Shakespeare and explanations why the doubts about his authorship are likely unfounded, based on erroneous assumptions about Shakespeare’s life and the times in which he lived. Even though I’m only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s works – I’ve only read three of his plays and have seen stage or film adaptations of three others (including the impeccable Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing) – I didn’t find that a handicap in reading or enjoying the story, which lays out a little like a mystery and a little like a psychological study of the people who so readily embrace conspiracy theories about why Shakespeare’s name appears on 33 plays and dozens of sonnets that he didn’t actually write. Along the way, Shapiro tells the story of the American Delia Bacon, of no apparent relation to Francis, whose support of her namesake became the monomaniacal focus of her life; of Sigmund Freud’s own obsession with the authorship question and belief that the Stratford man didn’t write his plays; and of the fact that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights on at least five of his plays, a point that poses many problems for proponents of alternative candidates.

One of the funniest parts of the case for Edward de Vere is the inconvenient truth that he died in 1604, yet as many of nine of Shakespeare’s plays didn’t appear until after that date, one of many problems with so-called “Oxfordian theory” (de Vere was the Earl of Oxford) that Shapiro says de Vere’s supporters handwave away or spin in a way that supports their man. There’s even a corollary to Oxfordian theory that has de Vere as both the son of Queen Elizabeth and her lover, and the two as the parents of the Earl of Southampton, which brings to my mind the funny image of a bunch of Elizabethan-era Britons running around with tin foil hats over their powdered wigs.

Despite Shapiro’s embrace of the glover’s son as the man behind the quill, he does acknowledge some of the aspects of the case that have led to the rise of alternative theories. There’s a lack of documentation of Shakespeare’s life; his books and manuscripts are gone, and much of what we do have about his life pertains to his work as a moneylender and investor. His plays have a worldly quality that he himself seems to have lacked, although that objection may arise from our own tendency to assume his world was far more like ours than it actually was. Difficulty reconciling what we do know of Shakespeare the man with what we see in his works has led to the search for other candidates, but Shapiro slyly demonstrates that such sentiments arise from conscious or subconscious class prejudices – how could an uneducated man, the son of a working-class father, have written such beautiful, erudite plays and poems?

Shapiro does mention some of the other proposed candidates for authorship of the play, but there are over fifty and the number seems to keep growing, so he focuses on the two with the strongest cases and most devoted followings. The argument for Bacon has lost steam over the last fifty years or so, and I found the lengthy explanation to get a little dry in spots, but the case for de Vere is more complex and unintentionally fun while also allowing Shapiro to delve more into the psychology of his supporters and the way that changes in how information is disseminated have allowed fringe theories to prosper, such as the “fairness” rules in media and the rise of sites like Wikipedia, where expert opinions and amateur opinions sit side by side without extra weight on the former. (For a funny, uneven, but thought-provoking polemic on this very subject, check out Andrew Keen’s 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur.) I entered this book with no knowledge of the authorship question beyond the question’s existence, but Shapiro sets up the cases for Bacon and de Vere and knocks them down in a way that I imagine would make it hard for those candidates’ proponents to recover without adding another layer of foil to their headgear. He does veer a little too deeply into explanations of “textual analysis,” which seems like extremely dangerous ground that leaves the door open for almost any interpretation the interpreter likes, but as someone who enjoys analyzing meaning and metaphor in literature I found the explanation of how attempts to identify Shakespeare’s works as inherently autobiographical led scholars down the slippery slope into thinking that space aliens from Phobos wrote them sobering. It won’t change anyone’s enjoyment of the plays, but Contested Will is an intelligent look at one of literature’s most enduring controversies.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ July 23, 2010
→ By

What the Dog Saw.

I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, since even when I disagree with the conclusions he presents, his writing is interesting and thought-provoking, and he is unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom by looking at the underlying data. His most recent book is a compilation called What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, bringing together nineteen essays from Gladwell’s tenure at the New Yorker, uneven as compilations typically go, but anchored by several very strong essays that, again, challenge some pretty basic assumptions of our society and daily lives.

The most relevant essay to my day job was “Most Likely to Succeed – How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?” which is available, like all essays in this book, for free on Gladwell’s site. The essay deals with the difficulty in hiring for certain positions where the qualities required for success are either poorly understood or difficult to measure in candidates, with a focus on teachers and on NFL quarterbacks. (That intertwining of two seemingly unrelated stories is a Gladwell conceit, and, from a narrative perspective, a highly effective one.) NFL scouts have a hard time evaluating amateur quarterbacks because the college game is so different from the professional game, and that difference is most pronounced in areas that directly affect the quarterback, notably the style and quality of opposing defenses. Gladwell mentions the Year of the Quarterback draft in 1999, where just one of five first-round QBs (Donovan McNabb) had a first-round career, and cites a study by two economists (David Berri and Rob Simmons) that showed neither Wonderlic scores nor draft position had any correlation to NFL success for quarterbacks. (For more on this, there’s an excellent blog post by Jason Lisk at pro-football-reference.com.) And he carries the analogy back over to the teaching world, where hiring criteria like master’s degrees have done nothing to improve teacher performance.

There is, of course, an obvious parallel in baseball to what Gladwell calls “the quarterback problem:” The fact that most high school and college baseball programs use composite metal bats, making the amateur game (exclusive of top summer leagues and showcase events like ESPN’s Area Code Games) substantially different from the professional game. Scouts from MLB clubs (and non-scout evaluators like me) are always grappling with the question of whether a particular hitter’s swing will translate to pro ball, or which pitchers will take advantage of the ability to pitch to the inner half when the sweet spots on hitters’ bats are reduced by more than half with the switch to wood. Amateur catchers almost never get to call their own games, as pitches are called from the bench, while ignorant college and high school coaches employ brain-dead small-ball strategies completely unsuited to the high-scoring environments of metal-bat baseball. And, as the guys at CollegeSplits have shown us, there are often large differences between the pitcher a hitter faces on Tuesday night and the one he faces on Friday night. It’s not the same game, and those differences are part of what makes the MLB draft seem, at times, like a “crapshoot.”

There’s another sports-related essay on the difference between choking and panicking, starting with the story of Jana Navotna’s epic collapse in the 1993 Wimbledon women’s singles final and ending with Greg Norman’s final ten holes at the 1996 Masters. (He mentions another collapse by Novotna in the 1995 French Open, but omits her 1998 Wimbledon title, and doesn’t mention Norman’s two British Open championships, which both raise the question of how deep the psychology of “choking” runs in any individual.) More interesting within this essay, to me at least, was the issue raised of “stereotype threat,” where an individual’s performance on a task or test may be negatively affected by stereotypes of his or her ethnic/racial/gender group:

Garcia gathered together a group of white, athletic students and had a white instructor lead them through a series of physical tests: to jump as high as they could, to do a standing broad jump, and to see how many pushups they could do in twenty seconds. The instructor then asked them to do the tests a second time, and, as you’d expect, Garcia found that the students did a little better on each of the tasks the second time around. Then Garcia ran a second group of students through the tests, this time replacing the instructor between the first and second trials with an African-American. Now the white students ceased to improve on their vertical leaps. He did the experiment again, only this time he replaced the white instructor with a black instructor who was much taller and heavier than the previous black instructor. In this trial, the white students actually jumped less high than they had the first time around. Their performance on the pushups, though, was unchanged in each of the conditions. There is no stereotype, after all, that suggests that whites can’t do as many pushups as blacks. The task that was affected was the vertical leap, because of what our culture says: white men can’t jump.

Gladwell goes on to explore some of the psychological reasons why we see these significant correlations – and no, it’s not because women are naturally bad at math or white men really can’t jump. In baseball, scouts often have players run the 60-yard dash and perform other athletic tests, often in groups at showcases … but what if the “stereotype threat” is in effect? Are we getting bad reads on white or black players because of this psychological issue?

The second essay in the collection explores, of all things, the markets for condiments, asking why we have many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup. The answer to that specific question isn’t all that interesting – in a nutshell, Heinz has struck a nearly perfect balance across various dimensions of flavor that appeals to a mass market because it doesn’t stand out in any one dimension – but the discussion of the science and statistics of taste was. Gladwell veers off into a conversation with Howard Moskowitz, a researcher in the realm of psychophysics, who uses taste tests and user feedback to identify clusters of taste that might be targets for new variations on existing products, such as the “extra-chunky” tomato sauce category he uncovered through research for Campbell’s to fix its flagging Prego brand in the 1980s.

Other essays of note include one on Nassim Taleb, an investor now known as the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness; puncturing the myth that genius burns bright when young but fades early; and calling the entire field of criminal profiling into question. The essay on the hair dye industry covered a couple of very interesting characters, but the essay on Cesar Millan managed to make him – and the subject – boring. (Disclaimer: I’m not a dog person.) Gladwell gets personal with one section on a case of plagiarism that involved the use of material from one of his articles in the Broadway play Frozen, but I couldn’t quite come around to his ultimate conclusion that we are too protective of authors’ intellectual property rights.

I listened to the audio version of What the Dog Saw, read by Gladwell, who has a fantastic voice for reading audiobooks and, of course, can always use the perfect tone for what are, after all, his own words.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 21, 2010
→ By

March.

One of you tweeps sent along this Financial Times article on board games, which gives a nice overview of the current state of the industry for those of you wondering why I make such a fuss over these games.

I’ll be on ESPN Radio tonight at 5:40 pm EDT and again on the Herd at some point on Thursday, followed by a Klawchat around 1 pm EDT.

—

Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with March, a work of derivative historical fiction that tells the story of the father (Mr. March) from Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women, although he’s absent for the first half of that book and more of a background character in the second half. Brooks chose to follow March during his tour as a chaplain for the Union Army in the south, with flashbacks to his life in Concord before the period covered by Alcott’s work.

I am generally not a fan of parallel novels or continuations because of the difficulties in maintaining consistency with a character of someone else’s creation and the change in prose styles, although the latter wasn’t likely to bother me in this case since my only experience with Little Women was in one of those abridged Moby Books versions, which I read close to thirty years ago (along with most of the titles in that series). But the lack of continuity in March’s character was apparent because of the way Brooks infused him with some distinctly modern ideas and sensibilities, and I found Brooks’ depictions of other characters to be thin, such as the southern plantation owner whose racist views and animalistic treatment of his slaves, while probably well rooted in history, came straight out of central casting, and made March’s reactions to him trite as well.

Perhaps more infuriating is Brooks’ fabrication of a weird, pseudo-love triangle subplot where March has romantic feelings for a slave he met – in an extremely unlikely coincidence – twice across a period of nearly two decades on two separate journeys to the American south. The improbable nature of the romance is bad enough, making it seem as artificial as it is. But when March ends up in a Union hospital in Washington and his wife travels from Concord to see him – all of which occurs in Little Women – Brooks uses a miscommunication device better suited to a Wodehouse novel, and not for comedy, but to create a lasting crack in the foundation of the Marches’ marriage – one that doesn’t (to the best of my recollection, or my wife’s, since she read the unabridged original work) exist in Alcott’s novel.

So … why did it win the Pulitzer? I’ve read about 40% of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, including the ten winners prior to the most recent one (Tinkers, on my shelf now), and there seems to be a recent trend favoring books that dwell heavily on race or ethnic identity. You might argue that that subject is central to the American experience, so an award given to an American novel each year should rate those books highly. My personal view is that a book on race or racism can indeed be a compelling read, but not if the author crams the Big Obvious Idea (“Slavery … is bad!”) down the readers’ throats or wraps it up in stock characters who sit firmly on one side or the other of the question. Brooks’ characters lacked complexity in their moral worldviews, making the book seem inconsequential as a whole; the most believable character, in a strange way, was John Brown, one of a few historical figures to appear in the book (Thoreau and Emerson also have cameos), as Brown’s monomaniacal view on slavery and liberation was built on a nuanced rationalization of killing to save others from being killed. Brown only appears briefly – Brooks postulates that the Marches’ financial run came from supporting Brown’s endeavor – but his was, for me, the most interesting passage of the book.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars. And yes, I’m several books – not to mention a game and a few songs – behind in my blogging.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 1, 2010
→ By

Twitter ads, for a good cause?

UPDATE: I donated $250 to Children’s Hospital of Boston as a result of this ad.

—

So I’ve received an offer from a reputable company to run a single, sponsored tweet through my Twitter feed, for a fee of over $200. My initial thought was to decline, but it occurred to me I could run the ad and turn the proceeds over to charity – Children’s Hospital in Boston would be an obvious choice, since we’ve been there more than once over the past few years and they have always given my daughter superb care, although I would spread the money around if I did this more than once.

My hesitation comes from the my assumption that everyone who follows me on Twitter signed up with the implicit understanding that there would be no ads. I’d like to feel like the bulk of my readers/followers are on board with any decision to take ads and ship the money off to charity, so I’m putting it up for a vote. If you have specific thoughts to share, feel free to throw them in the comments, but if you simply have a yes/no opinion, please vote and let me know how you’d like me to handle this. Thanks.

[poll id=”2″]

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ June 7, 2010
→ By

Draft day 2010.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS tonight during the draft, probably once a half hour, starting at 7:10 and 7:40 pm EDT. When I’m not in the studio I’ll be live-blogging with Jason Churchill on ESPN.com, and there’s a Cover It Live event as well. Also scheduled to be on The FAN 590 in Toronto tonight at 6:05 pm.

All my draft content is up now. The last full mock draft is up, and you can see the full index of player cards, maybe 110-120 … I lost count. I chatted today and will chat again Tuesday at 1 pm.

Thank you all for bearing with me over the last few weeks. I should have a dish post or two up later this week before I head out on vacation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ March 3, 2010
→ By

The Droid.

Klawchat Thursday at noon EST.

I’ll be on ESPN 1250 in Pittsburgh on Thursday at 11:40 am EST and on KNBR in San Francisco at 12:20 pm PST. Wednesday’s hit on Mike and Mike is now online, although my voice doesn’t sound very clear. And on that note…

—

So my Blackberry Curve stopped making any sounds last week, which meant no ringer on the phone and no alarm on the, uh, alarm, and after a year of getting annoyed with how difficult it was to access the Web even with the superior Opera browser (the Blackberry’s native browser was apparently coded in 1997), I decided to upgrade to a Droid – specifically, the Motorola DROID A855, which is just $50 if you get a new account with Verizon but $529
without the plan. Several of you asked me for thoughts on the phone, so here goes:

* Web browsing rocks. Clear, simple, and compatible with most sites so far. Happiest with this feature by far. In fact, switching applications and moving within applications, all of which is accomplished by tapping or sliding a finger on the screen, is easy and intuitive, and I’ve experienced no lags.

* The screen quality is absurd. This is far, far easier on my eyes than any other phone I’ve seen. Video quality is also very high.

* Pretty good set of productivity apps available. I guess this doesn’t quite compare to the apps available on the iPhone, but given time I think they’ll catch up, and while I’m disappointed that I can’t get Zooloretto on the Droid yet it’s hardly the end of the world.

* Sound quality from the speakers sucks but is better through headphones. It’s still not replacing my iPod, but it’s serviceable.

* Typing sucks. There are three options for typing – a slide-out landscape keyboard, a virtual landscape keyboard, and a virtual portrait keyboard, with the latter two depending on how you’re holding the phone. The virtual portrait keyboard is awful – the key size is appropriate for my three-year-old daughter’s hands. The true keyboard is awkwardly spaced and doesn’t play well with the protective case I bought for the device, which overlaps with the tops of the first row of keys. The virtual landscape keyboard combined with the Droid’s predictive-typing feature works best, but I think I’m only typing at about 75% of the speed I could achieve on the Curve. (I could type on the Curve with my eyes closed, which will never happen with the Droid.) A better mechanical keyboard design would have remedied this.

* I don’t think the call quality on the phone is as clear as it’s been on phones I’ve had before, although I haven’t had trouble completing calls or with calls dropping. I don’t know if the issue on Mike & Mike was my phone, my location, or both.

* The worst feature is the Sync feature, where Google syncs your contacts with … I don’t know, the master server in California where they hold all the data in the world so that they can continue to control our lives through radio waves directed at our cerebral cortices. When it’s syncing, your contacts may become temporarily unavailable, and if the sync fails, you are SOL until it syncs successfully. It’s just a stupid idea – the Contacts should reside on the phone and be accessible at all times.

Despite all those flaws, I do like the phone, since the way I use my phone has changed so much over the last two years. The ability to look things up or stay on top of information has become as important as the ability to communicate outward through the device, but that balance will vary depending on your job and travel schedule.

Also, I’ve found these apps to be useful so far:

* chompSMS. A solid management system for text messages.

* NewsRob. Excellent RSS reader.

* Seesmic. Pretty intuitive Twitter client.

* Google Maps. Impressive. If the voice giving the directions didn’t sound like a computer-generated voice from 1976, it would be a viable replacement for a GPS device.

* RingDroid. I made my own ringtone from Handsome Boy Modeling School’s “Rock and Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This).” Win.

* Pandora. I used this once for an hour and its selections were pretty good despite the fact that I had only uploaded eight songs to my Droid.

* Secrets. Password-protected password storage.

* WaveSecure. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean Google isn’t after me.

I’ve downloaded several others, included MLB At Bat, Astro Player, Shazam, and Urbanspoon, but haven’t used them enough to comment.

—

Unrelated, but if any of you have new suggestions for Phoenix-area eats, I’m all ears. We’re staying in Scottsdale and most of my travels will keep me near the various major league parks, with one brief detour to Tucson.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 19, 2010
→ By

Draft blog is live.

Incredibly premature ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up now, for Insiders, as is my piece on Bryce Harper, Levon Washington, and a few JC arms. Jason Churchill’s first piece on the draft blog, previewing the first weekend in the Division 1 season, is also live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ January 27, 2010
→ By

The prospect package.

My ranking of all 30 farm systems went up this morning, and it will all be followed on Thursday morning by the master ranking of the top 100 prospects plus top tens for all 30 organizations and an article on the ten guys who just missed the main 100. ESPNDeportes.com will have my ranking of the top 40 Latin American prospects in the minors, limited to players born outside the U.S.

I’ll chat Thursday at 1 pm, and I believe we have two other prospects chatting tomorrow, including #1 overall prospect Jason Heyward.

And on Friday, I’ll have an article on at least one sleeper in each organization who could make the big leap on to the list next year; last year’s list had around 32 names in total, and I think 14 ended up on this year’s top 100.

As for the dish, I hope to resume regular blogging tomorrow night, probably with a long-overdue writeup of Power Grid. Thanks for your patience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: