27 December 2005
4. Scott Boras, Professional Baseball Player Agent
Happy Holidays, Red Sox fans! This is the guy who packed our center fielder onto his sleigh, which was already overloaded with other teams’ favorite players, dolls, toy trucks, foodstuffs, and holiday decorations; forced his haggard little dog to haul the huge, ill-gotten load up a great mountain peak; and then hid everything in his secret lair like a sicko-billionaire pack rat.
Sox pitcher Curt Schilling said it best about Boras and other Agents of Evil: “[They] are the ONLY people in baseball that take from the game, and give nothing back. There may be the odd case in which this might not fit, but I haven't seen it. I haven't seen any agent, or agency, opening up inner city youth programs, helping under-privileged kids get baseball gear, etc.”*
Now, TBA knows the players are not blameless in these contract debacles. Lord knows, if someone can explain to us how a person like Damon, who surely is already a multi-millionaire, is better off with $13 million per year than he is with $10 million, we are listening!
We believe the Red Sox made a fair offer (4 years, $40 million). Especially considering that at the end of the deal, Damon will be 37.
What really grinds our gears about this whole contract process is the lawyerly and statistical mumbo-jumbo of the Agent. Witness Sunday’s Boston Globe article, where chief baseball scribe Gordon Edes quotes the Damon/Boras manifesto, which player and agent cobbled together to market the center fielder.
Of course Damon did those things in Boston. He was a fine player here. But is he possessed of a sorcerer’s secrets? Can he, after reaching base, then conjure doubles down the line that allow him to advance to third base? Is he able to summon the mighty home-run that plates himself?
No. And do the Yankees have people to bat behind Damon of the Manny Ramirez/David Ortiz octane? Most certainly not.
We assume the manifesto continues, but it is doubtful that it asks any tough questions. How many weak Damon fly balls to Right Field did Friendly Fenway turn into home-runs? How many other balls hit to Right at Fenway became triples instead of close plays at Second Base as they would in other parks?
More: in the three-year period 2003-05, Damon’s batting average at Fenway park was .318. Away from Fenway, it was .278. His Fenway OPS was .836; away OPS was .773. In the same period, Damon's batting average at his new home, Yankee Stadium, was .265. OPS? .702.
Compare and contrast these numbers with those in their manifesto. Note that they use a 3-year period when referencing the Yankees numbers, but only a 2-year span when citing Damon's achievements. Whither 2003 in their analysis?
And, damn your eyes, Boras, but what the hell does Chuck Knoblauch have to do with anything?
In closing, we cannot resist a final parting shot at you, Mr. Damon. We liked you. You were a good hitter and you always played hard. We will always fondly remember you as a member of the 2004 World Series winning team. But, TBA and Mrs. TBA saw the house in our town that you were supposedly going to buy this summer, and it is as plain as the nose on our faces that you do not need all that extra money.
Some house! It was a castle.
___________
*This quote came from somewhere on Sons of Sam Horn (SoSH), a few years ago. SoSH is a message board run by Red Sox fans. It was then quoted by this guy. TBA apologizes for not being able to attribute the source material more accurately. SoSH is a wonderful baseball resource.
Sox pitcher Curt Schilling said it best about Boras and other Agents of Evil: “[They] are the ONLY people in baseball that take from the game, and give nothing back. There may be the odd case in which this might not fit, but I haven't seen it. I haven't seen any agent, or agency, opening up inner city youth programs, helping under-privileged kids get baseball gear, etc.”*
Now, TBA knows the players are not blameless in these contract debacles. Lord knows, if someone can explain to us how a person like Damon, who surely is already a multi-millionaire, is better off with $13 million per year than he is with $10 million, we are listening!
We believe the Red Sox made a fair offer (4 years, $40 million). Especially considering that at the end of the deal, Damon will be 37.
What really grinds our gears about this whole contract process is the lawyerly and statistical mumbo-jumbo of the Agent. Witness Sunday’s Boston Globe article, where chief baseball scribe Gordon Edes quotes the Damon/Boras manifesto, which player and agent cobbled together to market the center fielder.
Of course Damon did those things in Boston. He was a fine player here. But is he possessed of a sorcerer’s secrets? Can he, after reaching base, then conjure doubles down the line that allow him to advance to third base? Is he able to summon the mighty home-run that plates himself?
No. And do the Yankees have people to bat behind Damon of the Manny Ramirez/David Ortiz octane? Most certainly not.
We assume the manifesto continues, but it is doubtful that it asks any tough questions. How many weak Damon fly balls to Right Field did Friendly Fenway turn into home-runs? How many other balls hit to Right at Fenway became triples instead of close plays at Second Base as they would in other parks?
More: in the three-year period 2003-05, Damon’s batting average at Fenway park was .318. Away from Fenway, it was .278. His Fenway OPS was .836; away OPS was .773. In the same period, Damon's batting average at his new home, Yankee Stadium, was .265. OPS? .702.
Compare and contrast these numbers with those in their manifesto. Note that they use a 3-year period when referencing the Yankees numbers, but only a 2-year span when citing Damon's achievements. Whither 2003 in their analysis?
And, damn your eyes, Boras, but what the hell does Chuck Knoblauch have to do with anything?
In closing, we cannot resist a final parting shot at you, Mr. Damon. We liked you. You were a good hitter and you always played hard. We will always fondly remember you as a member of the 2004 World Series winning team. But, TBA and Mrs. TBA saw the house in our town that you were supposedly going to buy this summer, and it is as plain as the nose on our faces that you do not need all that extra money.
Some house! It was a castle.
___________
*This quote came from somewhere on Sons of Sam Horn (SoSH), a few years ago. SoSH is a message board run by Red Sox fans. It was then quoted by this guy. TBA apologizes for not being able to attribute the source material more accurately. SoSH is a wonderful baseball resource.
21 December 2005
3. Backpacks with Wheels
We here at TBA take it on faith that if you are in the market for a backpack, it is because you intend to put things into it, sling it across your back, and be about your business. Students, hikers, and soldiers have all used this well-conceived, hands-free equipage for generations without hazard or ill-effect. Advances in the field, including light-weight fabrics, padding, and various belts and straps to distribute the weight of one’s load, have made for even better packs.
However, as is the case with so much else in our world, this is not enough anymore. It is now apparent that many people seek to put things into a backpack, extend a telescoping pull-handle, and tow the backpack away like a personal U-Haul trailer.
Let us be clear. We are not talking about suitcases here. What we are talking about is backpacks. A mass of fabric, stitched together to form a sack-structure, with straps attached that are then hoisted onto one’s shoulders and secured under the arms.
Have you, Mr. or Ms. Commuter, become so enfeebled or lazy by this modern life that you must pull your workday necessities, your committee meeting minutes, newspaper or magazine, your umbrella, and your sack lunch if you got up early enough to put one together, behind you like the chains of Jacob Marley? You will say that you cannot carry all of these things in your hands. Fine. But if you must put them into a backpack, can you not then strap this backpack to your back and pound it out like you mean it? Like you have some rememberance of life before your fall? You could at least derive some sense of physical accomplishment from your toils.
And do your children really need to tote around so much crap that it has to be towed? Have the impedimenta of the school-day become too heavy to sling back-wise like we did as a youngster?
You owe it to your children to not allow them to appear to be a flight attendant or businessman on a two-day junket to Minneapolis, or a part of the apparently lost pioneer colony waiting for the school bus near our house with their backpacks circled around them like Conestoga wagons.
However, as is the case with so much else in our world, this is not enough anymore. It is now apparent that many people seek to put things into a backpack, extend a telescoping pull-handle, and tow the backpack away like a personal U-Haul trailer.
Let us be clear. We are not talking about suitcases here. What we are talking about is backpacks. A mass of fabric, stitched together to form a sack-structure, with straps attached that are then hoisted onto one’s shoulders and secured under the arms.
Have you, Mr. or Ms. Commuter, become so enfeebled or lazy by this modern life that you must pull your workday necessities, your committee meeting minutes, newspaper or magazine, your umbrella, and your sack lunch if you got up early enough to put one together, behind you like the chains of Jacob Marley? You will say that you cannot carry all of these things in your hands. Fine. But if you must put them into a backpack, can you not then strap this backpack to your back and pound it out like you mean it? Like you have some rememberance of life before your fall? You could at least derive some sense of physical accomplishment from your toils.
And do your children really need to tote around so much crap that it has to be towed? Have the impedimenta of the school-day become too heavy to sling back-wise like we did as a youngster?
You owe it to your children to not allow them to appear to be a flight attendant or businessman on a two-day junket to Minneapolis, or a part of the apparently lost pioneer colony waiting for the school bus near our house with their backpacks circled around them like Conestoga wagons.
16 December 2005
2. All Things Chipotle
There comes a time in the life-span of all things when it is time to face the music and head for the last roundup when the fat lady sings a song about cashing in all of your chips. This time has arrived for the chipotle pepper.
For those who do not know, a chipotle pepper is merely a smoked jalapeño pepper. It is not even a certain or unique type of pepper. What it is though, is in every food product there is nowadays. Chipotle sauces, salad dressings, mashed potatoes—-we have even seen recipes for chipotle chicken soup.
The fast food industry is largely responsible for chipotle overload because they keep putting it in stuff and making obnoxious commercials about it. If TBA has to witness the current Taco Bell commercial for the Chipotle Grilled Stuft Burrito* one more time, we may have a seizure. This thing has not one chipotle-ized ingredient, but two: Slow-Smoked Southwestern Chipotle Sauce and Spicy Chipotle Rice.
We will not even go into their usage of ‘Stuft.’
And, we do not lay claim to any great culinary knowledge or skill, but we have never heard of smoking a sauce. We smoke meats, cheeses, fish, but a sauce? Do they make the sauce and then put it into a smoker? TBA does not believe it.
It is as if some entity declared 2005 to be the Year of Chipotle. Every restaurant and brand has a chipotle version of everything. It is the new king of ingredients/condiments. The new ketchup. Kind of like a couple of years ago when the color orange was deemed the new black. Or maybe brown was the new black.
Anyways, it is time to move on. It is time to crown the new chipotle.
____________
*TBA does not endorse or recommend Taco Bell. We have never even eaten there.
For those who do not know, a chipotle pepper is merely a smoked jalapeño pepper. It is not even a certain or unique type of pepper. What it is though, is in every food product there is nowadays. Chipotle sauces, salad dressings, mashed potatoes—-we have even seen recipes for chipotle chicken soup.
The fast food industry is largely responsible for chipotle overload because they keep putting it in stuff and making obnoxious commercials about it. If TBA has to witness the current Taco Bell commercial for the Chipotle Grilled Stuft Burrito* one more time, we may have a seizure. This thing has not one chipotle-ized ingredient, but two: Slow-Smoked Southwestern Chipotle Sauce and Spicy Chipotle Rice.
We will not even go into their usage of ‘Stuft.’
And, we do not lay claim to any great culinary knowledge or skill, but we have never heard of smoking a sauce. We smoke meats, cheeses, fish, but a sauce? Do they make the sauce and then put it into a smoker? TBA does not believe it.
It is as if some entity declared 2005 to be the Year of Chipotle. Every restaurant and brand has a chipotle version of everything. It is the new king of ingredients/condiments. The new ketchup. Kind of like a couple of years ago when the color orange was deemed the new black. Or maybe brown was the new black.
Anyways, it is time to move on. It is time to crown the new chipotle.
____________
*TBA does not endorse or recommend Taco Bell. We have never even eaten there.
14 December 2005
1. Charging Extra for Cheese on Sandwiches
In the cafeteria at the TBA workplace, they hit you for $.50 to add cheese to your sandwich. We are bad at math, but we will try to work with these numbers. Seems like an awful lot to pay for cheese.
Let us say a slice of cheese is 2/3 of an ounce. We will use this as a given because the deli lady refused to weigh a slice of cheese for this investigation. Two-thirds of an ounce is the size of a Kraft Single* . In the cheese world, and especially in the Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product world, Kraft Singles are about as standardized as you can get.
Just as an aside, and please excuse us for it, but, what if they had Kraft Fives, or Kraft Fifties? Imagine a Kraft Single 50 times its normal size. Or what about Kraft 100's? Kraft Benjamins. They would be these huge sheets of oily orange blubber the size of infield tarps.
Anyways, we actually think the slices at the the cafeteria are bigger than 2/3 oz. (for all cheese types)--they are pretty hefty--but we will use the Kraft data for the sake of scientific advancement.
You get two slices of cheese when you elect to add cheese to your sandwich at the cafeteria. No more, no less. That is 1.33 oz. of cheese for $.50. So, 16 oz. in a pound, carry the 1, divisor times the quotient is the dividend, etc.....$6 per pound.
Ah, crap. This is actually not a lot to pay for cheese, as the reader may have already deduced. At least, not at our grocery store. It is as much of a surprise to us as it is to you. Sometimes, we here at TBA do not end up where we set out to go. It does not matter. We are still entitled to our outrage.
Because, is cheese really that much more expensive than such freebies as tomatoes or olives or roasted red peppers or alfalfa sprouts? In unlimited quantities, now! To say nothing of your mayonnaise or mustard. And what about bread? Without bread we have no sandwich, yet, it does not cost extra. Some may argue that these items are built into the cost of the sandwich, like how the "free" delivery service offered by some furniture stores is part of the price you pay for a new sofa. But, by this logic, can they not also build the cheese-cost into the sandwich?
Furthermore, serious difficulty arises in the case of the cheese sandwich. Bread, toppings, and cheese. What should be the pricing scheme of this sandwich? Under the above system, it should cost $.50; however, a cheese sandwich is listed on the deli counter menu for $2.75! Are we therefore to understand that toppings and bread have their own cost after all, independent of the main sandwich ingredient?
Cannot the deli counters of the world stop charging extra for cheese on sandwiches, and thus simplify what has become cause for, at best, bewilderment and, at worst, indigestion?
We think they must. Because until then, TBA will just keep having the deli lady pile on the free toppings until the cheese is obscured so the cashier lady cannot see it. Cheese? No. No cheese.
_________
*TBA does not endorse and/or recommend the film Fantastic Four. Or Kraft products, for that matter. We had to rely on the link above because we could not find the size of a Kraft single at the main Kraft website. We have not yet seen Fantastic Four. It is in our Netflix** queue, though (Short Wait).
**TBA recommends Netflix.
Let us say a slice of cheese is 2/3 of an ounce. We will use this as a given because the deli lady refused to weigh a slice of cheese for this investigation. Two-thirds of an ounce is the size of a Kraft Single* . In the cheese world, and especially in the Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product world, Kraft Singles are about as standardized as you can get.
Just as an aside, and please excuse us for it, but, what if they had Kraft Fives, or Kraft Fifties? Imagine a Kraft Single 50 times its normal size. Or what about Kraft 100's? Kraft Benjamins. They would be these huge sheets of oily orange blubber the size of infield tarps.
Anyways, we actually think the slices at the the cafeteria are bigger than 2/3 oz. (for all cheese types)--they are pretty hefty--but we will use the Kraft data for the sake of scientific advancement.
You get two slices of cheese when you elect to add cheese to your sandwich at the cafeteria. No more, no less. That is 1.33 oz. of cheese for $.50. So, 16 oz. in a pound, carry the 1, divisor times the quotient is the dividend, etc.....$6 per pound.
Ah, crap. This is actually not a lot to pay for cheese, as the reader may have already deduced. At least, not at our grocery store. It is as much of a surprise to us as it is to you. Sometimes, we here at TBA do not end up where we set out to go. It does not matter. We are still entitled to our outrage.
Because, is cheese really that much more expensive than such freebies as tomatoes or olives or roasted red peppers or alfalfa sprouts? In unlimited quantities, now! To say nothing of your mayonnaise or mustard. And what about bread? Without bread we have no sandwich, yet, it does not cost extra. Some may argue that these items are built into the cost of the sandwich, like how the "free" delivery service offered by some furniture stores is part of the price you pay for a new sofa. But, by this logic, can they not also build the cheese-cost into the sandwich?
Furthermore, serious difficulty arises in the case of the cheese sandwich. Bread, toppings, and cheese. What should be the pricing scheme of this sandwich? Under the above system, it should cost $.50; however, a cheese sandwich is listed on the deli counter menu for $2.75! Are we therefore to understand that toppings and bread have their own cost after all, independent of the main sandwich ingredient?
Cannot the deli counters of the world stop charging extra for cheese on sandwiches, and thus simplify what has become cause for, at best, bewilderment and, at worst, indigestion?
We think they must. Because until then, TBA will just keep having the deli lady pile on the free toppings until the cheese is obscured so the cashier lady cannot see it. Cheese? No. No cheese.
_________
*TBA does not endorse and/or recommend the film Fantastic Four. Or Kraft products, for that matter. We had to rely on the link above because we could not find the size of a Kraft single at the main Kraft website. We have not yet seen Fantastic Four. It is in our Netflix** queue, though (Short Wait).
**TBA recommends Netflix.
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