Answers to fantasy baseball questions since 1996
By Greg Hanlon – Slate Magazine
I’ve written about this in the past. What this story adds, however, is a better view of what happens when the camera is right behind the pitcher. In order to see the hitter the camera has to be higher. This, it turns out, is just fine for inside-outside calls, but fails miserably to yield better calls on the high and low stuff. The examples are illuminating, in any case.
I found this clip over at boingboing.net and it seems the perfect view with which to remember Michael Jackson, whose music as a young boy is marked by its sweetness and exuberance, but which grew increasingly paranoid and sour as he grew older and it became more reflective of the pains and abuses of those early years.
The football magazine is done (well, I’m waiting for the bluelines right now, but that’s it), so there’s time to think of other things. My fantasy teams are schizophrenic. In the American Dream League I’m in second place. In Tout Wars I’m in next to last. In XFL we’re in fourth or fifth, depending on the day. But this morning I find these sporting pictures delightful!
That’s an ad, because this is an endorsement. It is an ad for Apple iPod touch 16 GB (2nd Generation) LATEST MODEL
I own an iPod Touch 2nd generation model, and yesterday new operating software came out. I downloaded it right away. There was a $10 charge for adding the software to your old machine, which irks some but is fine by me if I get more, and this upgrade promised some cool stuff. I won’t get into that other than to say that the voice recorder alone was worth the fee.
And, last night, I stopped by mlb.com and there was an announcement that the new MLB AT Bat software would allow the streaming of games to the iPhone and the iPod Touch. I upgraded that software, which cost $10 in March, and offers up to the minute Scores, Box Scores, Game Casts and video highlight, and now offers two games a day in live stream.
I didn’t get to try the streaming until today, but it was terrific. The wifi streaming to the phone was superior to the wired ethernet streaming to my desktop machine. The picture isn’t huge but it is viewable, doesn’t go all pixilated or freeze all too regularly. In fact, it acted TV.
The app is offering two games a day, and of course we’d like them all. You can’t get games in your local market, which obviously limits the appeal for homers. But for a fantasy player who wants to check out his out of town guys, the computer package offers more games, the iPod/iPhone app lets you watch them in more places.
MLB At Bat also offers streaming radio for both teams for all games, which also comes in handy a lot more often than you’d think.
I didn’t buy an iPhone because I really couldn’t justify the cost of the data plan, since I work from my home. I travel, but then I usually have my laptop. Plus, I already have a phone. But the iPod Touch does nearly everything that the iPhone does, if you ignore the phone and camera parts, with no recurring charges. I can pick up my mail when I’m out of the house without carrying my computer, and it is a source of all sorts of information via YouTube, Google Earth, and the regular web browser, plus widgets for the weather and stocks and… well, I hope you get the idea. It’s like the internet, only in a sliver of metal and glass that feel great in the hand.
I was happy with the gadget in December, but the addition of streaming major league games with excellent (if small) video, is stepping forward into the future.
A utopia, by the way.
One reads a lot of crap analysis about sports (well, and other stuff too), but this is totally on.
It doesn’t mean that Boras isn’t a problem in the context of organized MLB baseball, but why would us fans choose to side with the owners and their uncounted stores of money, rather than the players, who make the game we like to watch with their talent?
I picked up on a Tweet from an MLB character tonight who says that the White Sox will DFA Wilson Betamit tomorrow and promote Gordon Beckham.
I’m not opposed to this. I’ve been carrying Betamit in the American Dream League, and I recently traded for Beckham, who will certainly play if promoted.
But I’m posting this here because it seems dubious to me that this chain of events will actually happen.
I’m hoping they do, but how reliable is this Tweet? I have no idea at all.
And, if it is, does that mean that future Tweets are more reliable? Or just another indication that information on the internet isn’t always reliable?
Which is why I’m going to bed.
Cheers.
I’m not generally a fan of going on the radio, but Jeff Erickson is a great host. I was on his show yesterday, talking about this week’s free agent pick ups and some other stuff. I haven’t listened to it, but I had a fine time talking.
You can find the conversation at www.blogtalkradio.com, by searching my name.
I’ve mentioned my friend Les Leopold’s book, The Looting of America, here before. But a review at toomuchonline.com, does a better job than I can recommending the book and explaining what it has to do with fantasy baseball. I copy the whole thing here because the website doesn’t seem to offer permalinks to individual pages. Forgive me:
Les Leopold, The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009. 220 pp.
Great teachers love metaphors. To help learners grasp the unfamiliar, great teachers — like Les Leopold, the founder of the respected Labor Institute in New York — latch on to realities students already understand. Leopold has been using metaphors, for decades, to help working men and women understand how our economy really works.
But two years ago, amid the gathering Wall Street storms, Leopold suddenly realized that, as a teacher, he really didn’t understand the high-finance “innovations” just then beginning to crash into the headlines, the CDOs and the swaps, the tranches and the quants.
So Leopold set about to educate himself on Wall Street’s innards, and now he’s sharing what he has learned — in an energizing and remarkably entertaining new book,The Looting of America.
The book’s core, perhaps not surprisingly, revolves around a delightfully insightful metaphor. If you really want to comprehend how Wall Street has melted down our economy, Leopold suggests, give a look to fantasy baseball.
In fantasy baseball, groups of baseball fans create their own “teams” and stock them with players they pick from lists of real-life baseball players. If the players you pick for your fantasy team do well on the real-life baseball diamond — if they hit lots of homers, for instance — your fantasy team will do well.
Your fantasy team, in effect, “derives” value from real baseball. You have no actual relationship to this real baseball. But you can still make money, playing fantasy baseball, if the real-life players you pick for your fantasy team put up better numbers than the players your fantasy league competitors pick.
“In effect,” explains Leopold, “you are speculating on the stats derived from real major league players, but those players don’t know they’re playing on your team.”
This same sort of speculation, over recent years, has been driving Wall Street. We have “fantasy finance.” Bankers and traders have created a sticky global web of “derivatives” — collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and more — that bear the same relationship to the “real” economy as fantasy baseball bears to real balls and strikes.
In the “old” days, bankers and traders bought and sold claims to real things. Owning a stock entitled you to a stake in a real enterprise. Holding a mortgage gave you a claim to an actual home. In fantasy finance, bankers and traders don’t have to hold a claim on anything real. They buy and sell financial products that only “derive” their value from real economic activity.
Bankers, for instance, can sell you a “derivative” that will rise in value if the price of oil goes up. They don’t have to own any oil to sell you this derivative. They can create derivatives based on anything.
But the fantasy baseball metaphor, Leopold notes, only takes us so far. Fantasy baseball players don’t claim they’re “improving” baseball. And they can’t cause any great damage either. If baseball players go out on strike, fantasy baseball leagues simply grind to a halt. No big deal.
Fantasy finance, by contrast, involves trillions of dollars. And the players of fantasy finance have spent decades insisting that these trillions help our economy by “spreading economic risk.” In fact, their derivatives ended up concentrating risk — and wrecking the economy.
At the root of all this fantasy: the concentration of America’s income and wealth that began in the 1970s. With so much money in so few pockets, our real economy couldn’t offer enough lucrative opportunities for the investor class. Wealthy investors would find those opportunities in fantasy finance.
The Looting of America traces how all this unfolded with clarity, wit, and patience. And hope. The bank bailouts and partial federal takeovers we’ve so far seen, Leopold points out, do help clarify the “fateful choices” we now face.
“We can hold onto and supervise the semi-socialized financial sector,” he notes, “or we can return the entire banking system to private investors. We can enact policies that allow workers’ real wages to rise. Or we can keep the wealth flowing upward to the super rich. We can put limits on financial engineering, or we can wait and see what the next orgy of fantasy finance does to our economy.”
Crucial choices. Thanks to Les Leopold, many more of us will understand them.
–The Council on Public and International Affairs
It’s interesting that someone is reviewing Sam Walker’s book years after it came out, but this is someone who doesn’t have any interest in fantasy baseball or fantasy punditry. What is interesting is that he pulls a couple of quotes from the book in which Sam describes how much money he’s spent to win the league. The first one seems like a reasonable investment, but the second, which comes near the end of the book, when it’s clear that victory isn’t in sight, is an alarmingly large figure.
My first thought, upon reading that, was that it mistake, it drained me of empathy for Sam’s efforts. Raoulraoul goes a little further and says that it makes him care not one bit (which he really didn’t anyway, but that’s not the point). But I think he’s overlooking something that Sam had to do in the book to make it work, whether he won or not. He had to make the mountain high enough, and yet, he couldn’t just say that he opponents were geniuses.
They had to know lots more than him, but not so much that he–with his insider access to the baseball clubhouse–couldn’t overcome it by cramming. The 50k he spent trying ups the ante in the book, increases the drama, and makes it better yarn.
No, it doesn’t make him seem a more sensible person, or one you want to be like–and that may be a flaw–but it serves a purpose other than cluelessness.
The one guy in the Ray’s pen nobody ever listed as a potential closer was Randy Choate, right? Now that’s a committee!
