The SoapBoxers

It’s a common scene – you’ll come out of a movie and someone will say “It was OK, but I liked the book better.”  It’s far less common to hear someone say that they liked a movie better.  Why is this the case?  There are several reasons.

Budget

Cost to use this house as the setting for your novel? FREE!

Writers can just make up shit with no regard to any sort of budget.  Want a fighter jet flying over a, erupting volcano and having the pilot eject before it crashes into the ocean?  Give a talented writer a thousand words or so, and she can set this scene and you’ll be able to visualize the scene in your mind.  Total cost to the writer?  $0.  It doesn’t matter if the main character lives in a weather-beaten shack or a huge mansion – the cost to use the home is the exact same to the writer.  

Additionally, the writer is actually offloading a big chunk of the work onto your brain.  She’s making use of your own imagination and prior knowledge.  You already know what a jet, volcano, and ocean look like.  There’s not need to spend time on the most basic descriptions. 

On the other hand, the movie is a visual (rather than abstract) presentation.  The director can’t simply describe the jet, the volcano, and the ocean.  He needs to actually procure the use of a jet, get footage of an erupting volcano, and find a way to fake a crash landing into an ocean.  This costs money.  In modern film making, an even bigger cost is special effects.  Effects that a novelist can describe with a few pages of well-crafted text can cost millions of dollars to bring to life on the screen.

In the end, the film maker is forced to make some concessions.  To bring every single detail to life could cost hundreds or millions – or even billions – of dollars.  At some point, a line has to be drawn in the sand.

Casting

When Tom Cruise was selected as the actor who would portray Lee Child’s Jack Reacher character in the upcoming film One Shot, many Reacher fans were aghast.  Reacher is a big guy – 6’5″ and 200+ pounds of pure muscle.  Tom Cruise is officially listed at 5’7″.  It seems to not be a great fit for the role.  Lee Child’s comment on the selection was that Reacher’s size was more of a metaphor than to be taken literally.  One can’t help but wonder if financial considerations came into play.

We’ve all seen movies where actors were a bad fit for a role – or simply had poor acting skills.  Again, a novelist offloads work to your brain when it comes to casting.  While every novelist will describe physical features of a character – some more than others – no author is going to describe every single aspect.  Much will be left to your imagination, and your can mold the characters to fit your preferences.  With a movie, you’re stuck with the bums who were cast for the roles.

Surprise!

Finally, the book has the element of surprise on its side.  While I thoroughly enjoyed watching The Hunger Games and even enjoyed the casting, I definitely wasn’t surprised at various twists and turns during the movie.  How could I be?  I had read the book, so I always knew when they were coming.  In fact, I used my knowledge of the plot to time my mid-movie pit stop (long movie + previews + large soda) so that I didn’t miss any good parts.  When I read the book, these plot twists were just that – surprises.

I’ve come to accept the fact that most movies are not going to be as good as the book – through no fault of the director.  If a movie is “almost as good” as a book, I consider it to be a pretty good movie.
 

 

Image via Wikipedia

Note: This article originally ran on June 3, 2010.

Do athletes make too much money?  The quick reaction to this question is “yes”.

Let’s take a deeper look.  As usual, I’ll use baseball as an example.

The news media reports the big signing bonuses of the first round draft picks – but fail to report that the size of the bonuses drop precipitously throughout the draft.  In the later stages of the draft, a player might received a bonus of a couple thousand dollars – or no bonus at all.  But then they jump into the minors at a hefty salary, right?  Well, if you consider $1100 per month to be a lot of money.  That’s the MAXIMUM a player can earn in his first season, if he signs a minor league contract.  (A very small number of elite prospects sign Major League contracts with different rules).  The salaries increase as you move up through the system, but it’s very difficult to get rich playing baseball in the minor leagues.  Many players have another job in the off-season.

In this year’s draft (which begins on Monday night), 1500 players will be drafted by baseball teams each year. Hundreds more are signed as foreign free agents. The active roster for a Major League team is 25 players (expanded to 40 in September). That means that there are 750 active major leaguers for most of the season. In theory, this could expand to as many as 1200 in September if everyone expanded thie rosters to 40 players (which is not the case).  Obviously, the vast majority of minor league players are never going to make it to the Major Leagues.  Most of the players who do make it to the highest level won’t stick around very long.

What we’re really looking at when we see the “rich” athletes are the elite performers.  But elite performers in nearly every industry are very well compensated.  Find me one of the top 750 bankers in the country, and I’ll bet she makes a few bucks.

Athletes are entertainers.  When we look around the world of entertainment, we see a lot of highly compensatated stars – people who make as much money working on one movie as A-Rod makes for a season of work.  Yet, people seem much more willing to point at A-Rod as overpaid, but not so much at Tom Cruise or Taylor Swift (no, we’re not Taylor haters – we like her).

Why is this?  I’m really not sure.  It may be the perception that actors and singers work at their craft, whereas athletes are just using their “God-given” talents to play a child’s game.  If you subscribe to this theory, watch some of the “human interest” stories during the Olympics.  You’ll hear about kids putting in long hours of practice from the time they were knee high to a grasshopper in order to hone those raw God-given gifts into polished skills – beginning the “apprenticeship” aspect of their career at a very young age.

A typical baseball team has a payroll of about $100 million.  For the same cost, you could produce a Hollywood movie with a couple of big name stars.  I personally see more value in 162 baseball games than in one movie.  People complain about the cost of tickets to sporting events, but in a lot of baseball stadiums, you can actually buy a ticket for the same price as a movie ticket.  The difference is that the baseball team has a detailed price structure based on seat location and the desirability of the game.  When you buy a ticket to a movie, you pay the same for bad seats to a horrible movie as you do for good seats at the best movie of the year.  How’s that for logic?

Are athletes overpaid?  Nah.  Are elite performers in various industries overpaid?  Perhaps – but people pay for elite talent, whether it’s in baseball, acting, or investing.

Did you find this article interesting?  Then you might also like my article regarding whether or not college athletes should be paid.

Note: this article originally ran on September 29, 2011

Yesterday, Amazon announced a new family of Kindle devices, including the Kindle Fire with an advanced web browser and full color screen, the Kindle Touch (obviously, with a touch screen), and a low cost $79 model. It’s mere coincidence that I happened to write about the Kindle for another article that appears on the site today. That article (What I like About My Kindle) was written prior to the Amazon announcements. Let’s take a moment to review the new models.

I listed the prices for the “With Special Offers” and without special offers. For example, the Kindle shows a price of $79 / $109. It’s $79 With Special Offers or $109 without. What are “special offers”? These are offers that appear on the screen saver and home screens of the devices (but not within the text of a book). The “with Special Offers” versions of the devices are $30-$50 less than the standard version. The general consensus seems to be that the deals that appears are good deals (I heard of one person getting a “20% off the purchase of a laptop” deal), so my thought is that most people will want this version. A friend of mine who owns a previous version complained that he couldn’t get Special Offers on his Kindle …

47% of Americans pay no income tax, according to many sources. Is this really true?  Let’s take a look.

First of all, I’m going to present IRS data, so I’m limited to the information from tax returns. According to the 2010 US census the population of the United States was around 308.75 million people. The number of exemptions claimed on 2009 tax returns (the most current data available from the IRS) was 283.8 million. In other words, 25 million people – about 8% of the population – don’t appear anywhere on tax returns.

Who are these 25 million people? [survata]They could be people dodging taxes. They could be people who have paid their share of taxes in their lifetime (retired) or will pay their fair share at a later stage in their life (students). These may even be people who paid some amount of income tax during the year but aren’t filing for a refund (yes, this does happen).

Let’s work with the numbers we have from the IRS. Of the 140 million tax returns filed for the 2009 tax year, just over 58% paid taxes. So this means 42% of the people in this group didn’t pay taxes, right?

Wrong.

It means that 42% of the returns didn’t have any tax liability. What’s the difference?

Let’s walk through this example:

• Sam makes $3000 from his summer job and has no tax liability.
• Danielle and Thomas have three children: Mark, Lindsey, and William. They have tax liability of $150,000.

Looking at this example, what percent of people aren’t paying taxes? Is it fair to say 50? 50% of the tax returns (1 out of 2) have tax liability. Is it 33% (1 of the 3 adults aren’t paying taxes?). Is it 17% (1 of the 6 Americans aren’t paying taxes?) The people who are simply looking at the number of tax returns with taxes paid are going to say 50%. Is that right or wrong? I’ll let you decide.

If you choose 33% or 17%, let’s dig a bit deeper. Take a look on my article regarding how many people make more than $250,000. You’ll notice an correlation between number of exemptions (essentially household size) and income. The lowest income levels have the lowest number of exemptions (1.01), with this increasing until it plateaus around 3 in the $500,000 – $1,000,000 range.

There’s also a correlation between income level and likelihood of owing income tax. Less than 3% of tax returns with under $5000 in adjusted gross income owed any taxes, building to 77%+ in the $40,000 – $50,000 range and near 99% by the time we reach the $100,000+ range.

What’s my point? Let’s look at an extreme example. A million tax returns in the sub-$5000 range represent 1,010,000 Americans (1.01 exemptions per return). A million tax returns in the $500,000 – $1,000,000 range represent 3,050,000 people (3.05 exemption per return). Let’s take a sample of a million returns from each of these groups. Let’s further say that all one million returns in the $500,000 – $1,000,000 group have taxes owed and 160,000 returns in the sub $5000 group have taxes owed. That means that 1,160,000 / 2,000,000 – or 58% – of the returns have tax liability. However, these returns represent 3,211,600 or the 4,150,000 people – in excess of 77%. The basic mathematical concept here is weighted average.

An extreme example, yes. However, it does illustrate a valid point. The 42% of tax returns with no liability is going to represent less than 42% of the 283.75 million people covered by these returns.

Just want the data? Here it is!

Source: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/09in11si.xls (compare column 6 to column 1)

[/survata]

Image via Wikipedia

Note: This article originally ran on May 26, 2010

For several years, President Obama has been dodging the issue of his birth certificate.  His camp has repeatedly insisted that it is genuine and ridiculed those who dare to question the authenticity.  But is there more to the story?  Of course there is.  Here are the cold, hard facts that prove that the birth certificate is a fake.

• The first step was to determine whether or not a genuine birth certificate existed in some other part of the world.  Taking a cue from his last name, we traveled to O’Bama’s ancestral country of Ireland.  In a dark records room in the city of Cork, we discovered a birth certificate insisting that O’Bama was born at a Cork hospital.
• We performed a detailed scientific analysis on the certificate itself.  While the paper does indeed date back to 1961, the ink does not.  Noted forensic inkyologist Marsupial Jones suggests that the ink is no more than 5 years old.
• Information from confidential government sources indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald was being handled by the CIA and was only following orders.
• Why is the state of Hawaii joining in the cover-up?  Our sources within the state department indicate that key Democratic members of congress threatened harsh economic sanctions against Hawaii if they failed to comply.  Planes would have been forbidden to land in the state, cutting off the vital flow of tourists’ money.  The United States would also have ceased imports from Hawaii – notably sugar cane and Don Ho albums.
• While Hawaii became a state in 1959, its citizens did not immediately become full citizens of the US.  Residents of any new states  are under a probationary citizenship during the first five years of statehood.  Only residents born after this five year waiting period are considered to be natural-born U.S. citizens (and thus eligible for the presidency).  Obama was born in 1961 – three years before the end of this waiting period.
• Sites such as Fact Check have shown a photo of a birth announcement purportedly published in the Honolulu Advertiser on August 13, 1961.  However, this evidence does not stand up to close scrutiny.  Once again, Marsupial Jones indicates that the ink is relatively fresh.  Additionally, many of the news stories read more like the The Onion than a serious newspaper.  Look no further than the article about the Cubs-Cardinals baseball game on page 2B, which makes reference to the “reigning world champion Chicago Cubs”.
• Take a copy of Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope.  Beginning at page 12 and going through page 297, write down the first letter of the first noun on the fourth sentence of the page.  You’ll be stunned at the secret message.

On the eve of the Belmont Stakes, the trainer of I’ll Have Another has announced that the horse has been scratched and will not race.  The culprit is swollen tendon in a leg.

The horse racing industry has been in need of a shot in the arm, and I’ll Have Another’s attempt at history would have given it a huge boost.  The last time a horse won the Triple Crown was in 1978 with Affirmed.

Had Another been able to race in the Stakes and come away with a win, the financial reward for his owners would have been enormous.  Not just the substantial stud fees, but also merchandising rights.  There’s a movie about Secretariat – would a triple crown run by I’ll have another generated a multi-million dollar bounty?

I’ll Have Another’s leg woes are also bad for NBC, which will televised the race, and the companies who purchased advertising.  What could have been an electric event with millions of extra viewers will now become just another ho-hum race.  Not only will the race lack Another’s star power, but will also be without Kentucky Derby favorite Bodemeister.

In the end, this is the case of an owner and trainer putting the horse’s health ahead of possible financial riches.  We’ve seen a horse break down on the track in a big race – Barbaro – and it’s not pretty.  Perhaps I’ll Have Another could have girded up his loins for one last race and run into the history books.  Perhaps he would have race poorly and tarnished his image.  Or, worst of all, perhaps this could have led to a broken leg and sent him down the path of euthanization.

As much as I would have enjoyed seeing I’ll Have Another make history, I agree with the call by the owner and trainer in this case.  Better safe than sorry.  As big and powerful as these horses can be, it’s important to also remember that they can be very fragile.

Appel Falls Far From The Tree

Will Mark Appel be leaving The Tree behind and putting down new roots in Pittsburgh?

On the eve of this year’s baseball draft, many observers felt that Stanford pitcher Mark Appel (pronounced A-pell) would be picked #1 overall by the Houston Astros.  Appel and Georgia high school hitter Byron Buxton were 1-2 on most people’s draft board.

Many people had the toolsy Buxton ahead of Appel, but there’s always a risk/reward with high school players.  The Major League teams gets the raw material earlier, before a player learns so many bad habits.  But on the flip side, there’s a lot more opportunity for a player to simply stall in development or be overrun by injuries.  A college player is generally closer to a finished product.

When the Astros finally made their pick, it was Puerto Rican shortstop Carlos Correa.  Correa’s definitely a great player in his own right, and has a great narrative surrounding him (in a nutshell, hardworking parents sacrifice for kid’s dream, poor residents of his flood-prone neighborhood raise money for trips to tournaments).  However, he was generally considered to be a notch below Appel and Buxton – at best the third best player in the draft and probably a bit below that.

Mark Appel slid all the way to the Pittburgh Pirates at #8 – allowing the Bucs the chance to add him to a farm system that already includes stud pitching prospects Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon.

So why was the third best player picked with the top pick – and why did Mark Appel drop to eighth?

The Slotting System

For years, the commissioner’s office has advised teams on suggested bonuses for each spot in the draft.  However, this year there are penalties for exceeding the bonus recommendations.

How does it work?  Each spot in the first ten rounds of the draft is assigned a dollar value, with the number one picked being assigned a value of $7.2 million this year.  Players signed later than the 10th round must be signed for $100,000 or less.

Add up the amounts for a team’s picks, and that’s the amount they are allowed to spend on the players they draft in the first ten round rounds.  Each team will have a different amount – teams with high draft picks will have substantially higher amounts than those with worse picks.  If a player is picked at a slot valued at $1 million, a team could pay him $1.5 million … but they’d need to make up the difference on other players.  If a player does not sign, his amount is deducted from the amount the team is allocated.  In other words, if a team had a pool of $10 million and is unable to sign a player who had a $1 million value, they only have $9 million to sign their other draftees.

The penalties are steep.  Exceed the amount by just 5% and you pay a 75% luxury tax on the excess.  Exceed it by 10% and the tax jumps to 100% and you forfeit the next year’s first round pick.  Exceed the amount by 15% and you lose two future first round picks.

The Effect

Two basic strategies are likely to unfold.  The first strategy is like to make the first round pick based as much on signability as talent, and use the financial savings to sign later guys.  In the case of the Astros, pick a guy like Correa at #1 and offer him a bonus equivalent with the #2 or #3 slot.  They can save a million dollars or so and then picked some fairly tough to sign guys later in the draft (for example, Lance McCullers Jr. at #41) and pay them a bit more than the recommendation for that slot.

Conversely, if you think you are going to go over slot on your top pick, you can save money on the later picks.  For example, if you have picks 1, 25, and 42 you might pick the best player at #1, but opt for the 40th best guy at #25 and the 60th best guy at #42 and get those guys to sign for less than slot.

A possible third strategy would be to trade down in the draft … but draft picks can’t be traded.

The net effect is that the basic premise of the draft is broken.  A draft is supposed to be an efficient means for distributing a talent.  In a normal draft, the top player SHOULD be picked first and the 20th best talent should be picked (roughly) 20th.  With the new slotting rules, the “draft” really becomes more of a math logic puzzle than an actual draft.

A Loophole

In theory, the slotting is an attempt to keep teams with deep pockets (Yankees) from scooping up all the best talent by making it known that they’ll pay huge bonuses.  Studies have show that draft bonuses are actually a cost-effective means of acquiring talent (when compared to alterative methods such as free agency), but obviously most owners would prefer to keep bonuses as low as possible.

However, the system actually does create an unique opportunity for a team willing to pay the penalty.  As I understand it, the largest penalty is the two lost picks and 100% luxury tax if a team exceed the bonus pool amount by 15%.  That is to say, if you have a pool of $10 million, you lose two picks if you spend $10,150,000 or if you spend $20,000,000.  Other than the extra money paid in luxury tax, the penalty is the same.

If a team is pretty sure it’s going to go 15% over slot, they may make it know that they’ll pay way over slot in an attempt to get elite talent to drop to them – basically, shooting the moon and going WAY over budget. 

Let’s say that a team has picks 15, 41, and 48 in the current year’s draft.  The team has several emerging young stars and will likely pick very late in the draft for the next few years.  Let’s project them picking 23rd next year and 25th the year after.

The team makes it known that they will pay big bonuses for premium talent.  The top player in the draft falls to them at #15.  The sixth best guy falls at them at #41 and the 12th best guy falls to them at #48 – all because high demands from the players cause them to drop in the draft.  The team exceeds the bonus pool amount by a lot, and forfeits first round picks in the next two drafts.

Effectively, the team has traded picks 15, 23, 25, 41, and 48 for picks 1, 6, and 12.

Is this a fair trade?  Let’s consult a draft value chart (it’s a NFL-based chart, but the basic premise is similar).  Here are the values for each of the picks:

• 1 – 3000
• 6 – 1600
• 12 – 1200
• 15 – 1050
• 23 – 760
• 25 – 720
• 41 – 490
• 48 – 420

Picks 1, 6, and 12 are worth a combined 5800 points.  Picks 15, 23, 25, 41, and 48 are worth a combined 3440 points.  If you’re the Yankees, you pick those three top prospects, pay them, pay the luxury tax, and forfeit your first round picks in the next two years – because you’ll get more talent that way than by picking talent-appropriate players at each slot.

How to Fix the System

Clearly, I think the system is broken.  It’s fair, then, to ask me to propose a solution.  How would I fix the draft?

I think allowing teams to trade picks would make a lot of sense.  The current rule banning trades of picks (and draftees until they have been under contract for a year) seems to be in place merely to prevent General Managers from making huge mistakes.  Really?  These are supposed to be the best and brightest baseball minds.  Why do they need bumpers in their bowling alley?

If you allow trades, a team without a lot of money could still extract maximum value from a pick.  They might trade the #1 pick for the #15 pick and a couple of good prospects (or even a veteran who could contribute immediately).  The Yankees and Red Sox still might snap up a lot of the good young players, but they’d have to pay for them with talent (draft picks and players) as well as cash.  Currently, they can just throw money at players.

I’ve gone on the record many time as being opposed to any sort of caps on salaries, preferring to allow a free market to set amounts.  But if a cap must exist, I’d suggest an overall cap on player expenditures.  This means combining salaries for current major and minor league players, as well as bonuses paid to any draftees or foreign free agents.  Team A could decide to spend a big chunk of their allotment on draftee bonuses while Team B decides to spend most of their money on free agents – but both strategies would be equally valid.

Another thought would be to replace signing  bonuses with roster bonuses at the end of each season.  This would force a player to prove something before getting money.  However, the team would also be forced to make a commitment.  If they decided that a player wasn’t worth the roster bonus, the player would immediately become an unrestricted free agent.  We could call it the “fish or cut bait” clause.

One of my favorite political sites is Electoral-Vote.com.  The site is run by Andrew Tanenbaum.  Tanenbaum is perhaps best know for creating the MINIX operating system in the late 1980s.

In recent years, Tanenbaum has been hard at work projecting the winners of races for federal office.  Much of the focus, naturally, has been on the presidential elections.  The site does a lot of number crunching with survey numbers, and I generally enjoy the analysis and anecdotes.

A full five months before the election, Tanenbaum has a map of expected winners in each state.  He had Obama with 242 electoral votes locked up and Romney has 165.  The other 131 electoral votes, from twelve “purple” states, are expected to be in play.

You can quibble with the numbers a bit.  Tanenbaum admits to leaning left, so there may be some sort of liberal bias in his numbers.  However, at the high level, there’s no denying the truth.  There are 12-15 states that will be “in play” during the 2012 presidential elections.  The other 35-38 state lean so far one direction or the other that the state is a lost cause for one of the candidates.  Mitt Romney will not will Connecticut, nor will Barack Obama win Alaska.

The net effect is that the candidates will avoid those states entirely, or make only token visits.  Time that Mitt Romney spends in Connecticut is time that he could instead spend in Florida – a state that is in play and has 29 electoral votes up for grabs.

A lack of presidential visits likely won’t bring many Connecticut residents to tears.  However, beyond the lack of visits, there is likely to also be a lack of focus that are important to voters in Connecticut.  And it’s not just the conservative voters in Connecticut who won’t have a voice.  The liberal voters who will almost certainly propel Barack Obama to a victory in the state will also be ignored.

Quite honestly, the voters and issues in states such as Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, and my own state of Iowa will become much more important than the burning issues in California, New York, Texas – and, yes, Connecticut.  Even if a candidate feels strongly about an issue that it important in those states, there’s virtually no upside in championing the issues.  And there’s definitely downside.  You definitely don’t want to lose voters in Florida because you stuck your neck out for voters in Connecticut.

Those who champion the electoral college like to say that the process ensure that the large states aren’t given undue weight.  The thought is that if popular vote were used, a candidate could rack up huge vote totals in California, New York, Florida, and Ohio and make the voters in Iowa and Rhode Island irrelevant.

However, I’d argue that the electoral college process also picks winners and losers – it’s just a different set of winners and losers than the popular vote.  I’d also argue that the popular vote treats each equivalent bloc of voters the same.  A bloc of ten thousand voters in California would have the exact same influence as a bloc of ten thousand voters in Montana.  Sure, a politician can get more votes in California than Montana, but this is simply because there are more citizens in California.  Why shouldn’t a larger blocc of citizens have more influence?

The current process doesn’t pick winners and losers based on size, but based on degree of purple.  The more purple a state, the more important they become; the blue and red states become less relevant.   

Rockies news

My Rockies swept a four games series from the Astros.  Coupled with the Brewers sweeping the Dodgers in a four game series, this means that the Rockies have cut LA’s lead from 14.5 games down to 10.5.    While that’s still a significant deficit, it’s a pretty big improvement – and a weekend series against the Dodgers provides the opportunity to make up even more ground.  Both teams will be without major stars, as Matt Kemp of the Dodger’s re-injured his hamstring and Troy Tulowitzki of the Rockies suffered a groin issue.

The Rockies exploded for 40 runs in the four games series.  Dexter Fowler woke up on Monday with a .237 batting average for the season.  By the time the day was over, his batting average was up to .276, thanks to seven hits in nine at bats (also a  walk and a sacrifice fly) in the doubleheader.  He had a homer and he won the nightcap with a walk-off triple.  I have to think that the walk-off triple must be one of the more rare plays in sports.  Most of the time the runner on first – who generally is taking lead – is going to cross the plate before the batter can reach third … and as soon as he crosses the plate, the game would be over. 

Fowler has been an enigma for years, mixing red-hot streaks with slumps.  However, he’s still pretty young (barely 26) and hopefully is coming into his own as a hitter.  At the moment, he is just a couple of plate appearances short of qualifying for the league leaders list (which requires 3.1 plate appearance per team game).  If he qualified, his .954 OPS would rank ninth in the National League.

When the series picked back up on Wednesday, teammate Carlos Gonzalez took the role of star from Fowler.  Fowler continued to hit – going 4 for 8 with a homer in the final two games of the series, but Gonzalez was an absolute monster.  CarGo went 6 for 9 with four homers.  The four homers were in consecutive at bats – three in Wednesday’s game and one in Thursday’s.  For the month, Gonzalez hit .351 with 10 homers and 26 RBI.  Gonzalez lead the league in runs (44), is tied for the lead in RBI (44), second in OPS (1.054), tied for second in homers (14), and is tied for fifth in batting average (.332)  and has also added 8 steals.  Like Fowler, Gonzalez is just 26.

Pujols Watch

Is Albert Pujols washed up?  Seems that there might still be some magic in his bat.  Pujols hit 8 homers in May (after zero in April), including four in a five game stretch.  Even with the horrible April, he’s still on pace for 25 homers.  It’s not a stretch to think that he can get to 30.

WTF?

Brewers catcher Jonathan Lucroy broke his hand in what can best be described as a freak accident.  While Lucroy was on the floor looking for a missing sock, he wife shifted a suitcase that was on the bed.  The suitcase fell and landed on Lucroy’s hand, breaking it.  His wife has been the object of considerable wrath from Brewers fans.  Seriously?  It’s not as if she ran down Lucroy intentionally with a car.  It was an accident.  These sorts of things happen from time to time.

The Draft

Baseball’s draft kicks off Monday.  This will be the first year of what is effectively a hard slotting system.  Each pick in the first 10 rounds is assigned a specific dollar value.  Teams are then assigned the total value of these picks, and this is the amount of money they can use to sign players picked in those spots.  They could opt to spend all the money on one player (and not sign the others ) or spread it around.  However, penalties from exceeding this cap are very steep.  Going 15% over the cap would cause a team to lose two future first round draft picks.

Picks in rounds 11-40 can receive a maximum of $100,000.  If there is money left over from the pool for rounds 1-10, this money can be spent on later later players.  For example, if $1 million is left, a team could give an 11th round pick $1.1 million.

I’m not a fan of this change at all.  Baseball’s draft has always been a case of each side having leverage.  Due to baseball’s draft eligibility rules, many of the top players often have the options of attending college and being drafted again in a later year.  Teams who are unable to sign a player receive a compensatory pick in a later draft.  At times, talented players slip down to teams with deep pockets, but this could be fixed by allowing teams to trade picks (so that they could extract maximum value from the pick by getting rich teams to bid against each other).

Who will be picked first overall?  USC pitcher Mark Appel and Georgia high school outfielder Byron Buxton are the names that pop up most often.  High school pitcher Lucas Giolito may be the most talented player in the draft, but a minor arm injury has scared some teams away (in any case, high school pitchers are a risky proposition in general). 

I kill people.  I do it for pleasure.  Rarely does a month go by without me killing someone.  Often, I’ll kill several people in the course of a single day.  My weapon of choice is a knife, due to the up close nature.  When I use a gun, it’s always a Glock.  Sometimes I’ll use other methods to kill.

I’m not a violent person.  The killing I do is within the pages of my fiction.  I first create characters, and then kill them off with just a few clickety clacks of my keyboard.  I’ll admit that I love writing murder scenes, and I think I’m pretty good at it.  An acquaintance once told me that a story of mine gave him a bona fide nightmare.  How great of a compliment – a story of mine actually made its way into his subconscious, where it waited for the opportune moment to scare the hell out of him.

In “real life” I’m a pretty mild mannered person.  I could never exhibit the type of brutality that some of my characters do, nor could I cut someone’s life short by plunging a knife into their heart.  When people learn that I write pretty violent crime fiction in my spare time, it often comes as a shock.

When I’m in a particularly mischievous mood, I comment that the murderous energy must come out of me in one of two ways – words or actions.  I choose words, simply to avoid the bloodshed.

My thought is that every person has a dark side.  At some point, the energy from the dark side needs to be releases, or it will build up into a violent climax.  My stories give my dark side a place to come out and play.  The dark side can maim and kill, without causing any damage to the “real world”

The Oracle of Key West, Jimmy Buffett, once said “Therapy is extremely expensive.  Popping bubble wrap is radically cheap.”  Like bubble, writing is a very cheap way to exorcise some internal demos.  It costs almost nothing to start.  Grab a pen and and a sheet of paper, and you’re good to go.