Those Silly Chinese

We've had our share of crazies in America's history, but I never knew how hilariously dysfunctional ancient China used to be. I mean, you've got a guy whose solution for invaders is to build a huge wall, which of course kills more workers during its construction than any invasion force likely would, and in a desperate search for immortality, ingests anything that anyone claims is the elixir of life, including mercury pills, which ironically probably did him in. I love it!

Oh, and there was a guy whose only claim to fame was having a giant penis.

Anyway, I ran across this (admittedly old) incredible story about Chinese parents who pay $200,000 for a prep program designed to get their kids into Harvard. And I have to ask: if you have $200,000 laying around (and presumably another $120,000 for tuition), WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SENDING YOUR KID TO COLLEGE FOR? Presumably, the very point of college is so you can make $320,000 through your life in the first place so you can stop licking people's asses at the office and start working for yourself and your own ideas. Why not skip the 4 years of drinking and getting ignored by rich white chicks and just read a couple of books and start your own business or venture capitalism immediately? What's the point of going to Harvard?

It's like...well, killing your entire workforce by forcing them to build a wall to protect them from invaders.

Shame on Eliezer Alfonzo

Not for his PED suspension, but for his typical lame what-could-possibly-have-happened excuse, the second most annoying excuse right after "I just wanted to get back quickly from an injury because I LOVE THE GAME SO SO MUCH."

For once it would have been nice if he had said, "Look, my career OPS is .648 and if I'm not playing baseball for $400,000, I'm going to be cleaning the fry machine at McDonald's, so yeah, I took steroids."

I can respect that kind of candor. Not that it makes it okay to break the rules or anything, but I know plenty of people who inexplicably think it's okay to cheat through high school or falsify their resumes in the holy name of advancing their own interests, and then hypocritically turn right around and tut-tut the rash of athletes on PEDs.

TL;DR - Everyone's a douche. So why won't anyone just admit it?

Another Year of Not Buying NCAA Football

I vowed never to buy NCAA Football again until they put Division I-AA teams back in, and four years into the boycott, they still refuse to do it. I know you can download individual teams from Teambuilder, but that's so ghetto, like having your own name put on the back of an NFL jersey. I thought the most fun in that game was taking William & Mary to the BCS championship after 3-4 years of struggling to beat I-A teams and land recruits.

But my own idiosyncrasies aside, I don't know why they won't just put them in already. It won't take much extra space or time if they just give them all generic stadiums like they used to. I feel that NCAA is one of those games where if you don't have a personal connection with your team, there's really no motivation to play it. Why the fuck would I want to be USC or Boise State? Even in NFL games it's fun to be the Vikings for a game or two, but playing as a different school just feels wrong.

With that said, I once wrote a post a long time ago about colleges having to take the blame for their shitty graduates if they were going to take credit for the great ones, so in the interest of fairness, I apologize on behalf of my institution to the entire United States for producing Michele Bachmann, LLM '88, and Eric Cantor, JD '88 (What was it about 1988 and crazies coming out of the law school? Must have been something in the water).

Moneyball, Starring...Brad Pitt?

Brad Pitt? Did anyone even bother calling Seth McFarlane?

For the record, I did read Moneyball and I enjoyed it a lot. But it bugs me when people talk about it like it's a book about the A's and how they'll always be successful. They'll look at guys who never panned out like Jeremy Brown and conclude that the A's were actually nothing special after all.

But the book was never really about how the A's had a secret statistic or some kind of magical way of evaluating players; it was simply about exploiting the inefficiencies of the system, wherever they were. In baseball it was scouting with your gut and the over-reliance on overrated stats like batting average. It's been interesting to see that as other front offices have started to populate their staff with advanced statisticians, like the Blue Jays and the Rays, the A's have been struggling mightily. The "arbitrage" opportunities are gone.

With all that said, let's judge the A's by their Moneyball draft picks because it'll be fun and less depressing than thinking anything substantive about the Orioles:

Jeremy Brown: It feels like half the book was about this guy and how he was going to rake despite being really fat. He actually did hit for quite a bit of power (caveat: he put up those numbers in the Texas League and PCL) and put up a .370 total OBP in the minors. DFA and retired after only 10 ABs in the majors, but can say he retired as a .300 hitter. Surprised he didn't get more of a chance - I'm not sure about his defense and he probably wasn't even as good a hitter as Kurt Suzuki, but he has to have been better than Adam Melhuse.

Nick Swisher: Flew through the system until he hit Midland where he put up some horrific numbers and an inability to control the zone which soured him on more than a few scouts. Was inexplicably promoted to Sacramento, where he proceeded to tear the cover off the ball. Has settled into a pretty good hitter/middling fielder groove good for about 3-4 WAR per season.

Joe Blanton: I seriously don't know what they expected from a guy who put up a 4.59 ERA in the SEC (yeah yeah, I know ERA isn't everything, but for some reason I can't find any of his peripheral college stats), but he's been an effective innings-eater. Did have one spectacular season in 2007, worth 5.6 WAR.

Mark Teahen: Pretty much the definition of "league average" player. Had one really promising season in 2006 and never flashed that kind of power ever again. Currently owns a career .327 OBP.

I don't remember who else they picked, but they I assume they all suck.

Now, while I am NOT faulting the A's for one second for not picking the following high schoolers, since hindsight is 20/20, I do think it is interesting that in the first 4 rounds they COULD have picked:

Cole Hamels
Joey Votto
Jon Lester
Jonathan Broxton
Brian McCann
Josh Johnson

I'm not sure if the 2002 draft was an outlier, but it seems like the high school picks experienced a greater level of success than the college picks did.

Not This Again...

Look, I can forgive someone for panicking about the economy or the stock market if he/she is a layperson and doesn't really know about the economic intricacies of the Great Depression or the Savings and Loan Crisis, or whatever. But Jesus, we went through this already IN 2008! Yet again, people are wringing their hands and wondering if they should take their money out of the stock market and hide it in their mattresses.

So let's go through this again:

1. If your stock market holdings drop in value, you don't actually lose money, UNTIL YOU PANIC AND SELL IT OFF. Then you've lost that money.
2. The surest way to lose money is to hoard it in cash. If your grandpappy stuffed a dollar in his mattress in 1920 (which could have bought an entire dinner at the time) and you found it today, it wouldn't even be enough for a bottle of water. Incidentally, that's what I'm counting on for my loan balances. Ahem.

For the record, priced at 11.5x forward earnings and collectively flush with revenue, the S&P 500 is very attractive right now. In fact, the greatest appreciation I've ever realized from the market was through buying shares during the last stock market crash. Granted, I'm not 60 years old so I can stomach some volatility, but regardless, I don't understand the constant obessession with wanting to buy into already-appreciated assets.

Don't get me wrong; I still think the entire market is a gigantic Ponzi Scheme, but you could do much worse than a Ponzi Scheme so inexorably ingrained into our society.