MVP?

Today it was announced that Joey Votto of the Reds won the National League's Most Valuable Player award in Major League Baseball. One of the men he beat out was The Cardinal's Albert Pujols. As a Cubs fan, I could care less who got the award between these two players, as both of them are players for Central Division rivals of the cubbies. The problem I have is how by awarding Votto the MVR, they have taken away the integrity of this year's Silver Slugger and Golden Glove awards for First Base.

Albert Pujols won both of those awards, showcasing that he was considered the best offensive and defensive player at first base among all national league first base players. Hold up, Pujols was voted the best offensive AND defensive player of the year among all national league first baseman, but Votto, another first base player, won the MVP? He must have stole 60 bases then to counter those and win MVP! Nope.

It appears that the awards were decidedly split to give Pujols a "second place" trophy, which just diminishes the value. The voters should have given all three awards to votto, or split the slugger and glove awards between the two, because now the league has just created a glaring contradiction in the forms of the three shiny trophies.

I'm going to bed

A different kind of nerd

I haven't posted on here in forever, but that doesn't mean I have forgotten about this blog. Recently I saw a commercial on ESPN where two jock looking high school students wearing letterman jackets are sitting in the cafeteria discussing baseball statistics. To be more specific they are arguing about the ERA difference between San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum for home games versus away games. Then several geeky looking kids are seen standing over the jocks and one of the dorks says: "Nerds."

No, this article isn't about the stereotypes of the commercial, but rather how much truth there is to that commercial. I have always been a sports fan. When I was in junior high I watched basketball. In high school I started watching football and more recently for me, I have gotten into baseball. One of the things that the people I work with and talk baseball with have noticed I have become a fan of the stats side of baseball and I believe this is one of the main reasons I have really connected with the sport as of late. More than any other sport, baseball allows me to bring my nerdiness and use in a sport!

When basketball fans talk, they reminisce of the spectacular jam. Football players talk about an amazing hit, or great touchdown run. Baseball players talk in numbers. Pujols went 3 for 5. Zambrano lasted 6 and 2/3 innings with only 1 earned run. While I have never been good at math, exploring different formulas and ways of calculating a player's worth has kept me fascinated well past the final inning of a great game. So much that I actually went to a SABR meeting!

Baseball. The sport of nerds...unless you count chess.

Big Brother is always Watching

Bear with me for a second, I promise this isn't a video game spiel...

Recently, Conan O’Brien announced that he will be returning to TV with his new show on TBS. Before he settled with TBS, he was in negotiations with several different offers, the most surprising negotiation being with Microsoft.

Microsoft was in talks with Conan to bring his show to the software giant’s Xbox 360 subscription based online service, “Xbox Live.” If the deal went through, Conan’s new show would have been streamable from any xbox live subscriber’s xbox 360 video game console and could be watched at anytime if they happened to miss the live broadcast.

ESPN recently announced that ESPN 3 would be coming to Xbox Live in an instantly streamable format, showing that Microsoft is heavily looking at bringing more than videogames to its live subscribers.

This type of media broadcast is nothing new. The internet allows users to stream content live or watch pre-aired programs from their computers and this type of video streaming may be the future of television programming.

One thing this type of broadcasting does much better than television, is it opens up a much more accurate rating system. The current rating system for television is not nearly as accurate as you might think. For one, college students are not taken into account in this system, as no rating boxes are offered for kids living away from home. Another thing that leaves this sytem inaccurate is that the at home rating boxes don’t account for when the television is on, but nobody is paying attention and telephone surveys leave the information to trust that the person being interviewed is being honest about what they watch.

Accurate ratings are important to broadcasters. The more people watching a program, the higher they charge for advertising spots. Low ratings can mean a show gets cancelled. In Conan O’Brien’s case, he had low ratings, but a large part of his audience was believed to be in the ignored demographic of college age kids, mainly males.

Xbox live and most other online game services already constantly monitor the user’s interaction with the service. For gaming, it is used as a way to gather information and discover glitches for the games people are playing. Say, a game developer looks at last month’s game statistics they compiled through xbox live and notice that in, say, halo 3, the use a certain weapon shot up 300% from the last month.

This monitoring systemlets the developers know there is either a glitch being exploited, or possibly the weapon is overpowered and needs to be fixed. This type of “rating” system lets developers monitor the gameplay and make adjustments where they see fit. Gone are the days where if a game ships with a few glitches, it is overlooked. Now, games can constantly be tweaked and updated, correcting overlooked problems during the game’s development.

Using this type of program monitoring on broadcasted programming seems like it could correct the problem of unreliable ratings, but it has one huge draw back: privacy concerns.

Gamers don’t mind constantly being monitored to offer the chance of helping developers find the bugs, but programming viewers may. Knowing that what programming a person is watching is traceable by the developers seems a little bit like “Big Brother” is watching. Maybe the viewer is watching something he doesn’t want others to know they are watching. Maybe sometimes unreliable is the best that can be done.

Except in the case of World Cub Soccer officiating and for blown “perfect game” baseball calls.

Everything that happened happened (sort of)

I haven't been on here in ages, but I aim to get back to writing on here as regularly as possible.

Recently, I came into a lot of free time. Lost just aired its series finale and that has led me to not only gain an hour that I would normally be spending, but has also saved me time from looking up theories online. I am one of the 50% of the fans out there who actually loved the ending, but that is way off topic and is to be discussed somewhere other than here.

However, one way that Lost will continue on with me is through its influences. Show runners Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse have included references or flat out inclusions to their favorite literary works. One of those books is Kurt vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. I had friends who discussed Vonnegut before, but I was always hesitant to read it, because for some unknown reason I always thought his writing style would be way above my head. That is not the case. Vonnegut is accessible, yet still very intelligent. Much like Chuck Palahniuk.

What drew me in even more is the content in Slaughterhouse-Five. It is a somewhat autobiographical accounts of Vonnegut's World War 2 experiences, but rather than make an accurate re-telling, he decided to throw realism out the door and mix his real-life events with Sci-fi elements. I absolutely love that! Maybe that would have been a better route for all the memoir authors out there who seem to fudge their life story (like the A Million Little Pieces author).

In the first chapter, Vonnegut recalls a professor asking him if his book is an anti-war book, as it may as well be an anti-glacier book. Because you can't stop a glacier just like war. Global Warming seems to be stopping the glaciers, but can it stop the war?