I used to work in a grocery store when I was sixteen.  After a few weeks bagging groceries, the manager moved me inside where I eventually ended up at the customer service desk answering phones and having customers berate me for six hours a shift complaining about how bad their food tasted or how some cashier didn’t give them correct change.  The customer service desk also sat out in front of the office where the shift managers would congregate in between cigarette breaks.  They were mostly miserable 40 year-old women who were in some sort of broken relationship and hated their lives.  They took this out on me on a daily basis.

Prior to the start of every shift I contemplated quitting.  One day, the general manager pulled me aside and told me he was giving me the Employee of the Month award.  I was pretty happy; this was a large store and was a nice recognition of all the crap I had put up with.  Well, until one of my co-workers came up to me in the break room and told me that he’d heard I only received the award because the GM felt sorry for me.  Happiness: crushed.

I couldn’t help but think of this story when I read the remarks surrounding Tuesday’s Gold Glove announcement.    Read the rest of this entry

According to Joe Morgan, “Moneyball” was a book written by Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane that depicts Beane’s controversial tactic of eschewing decades of proven scouting techniques in favor of a more objective statistical analysis.  Well, it was actually written by Michael Lewis and was an examination of economics in baseball, but some people like Joe took it way too personally, kicking off a “Jocks v. Nerds” Battle Royale that continues to this very day.

Anyway, it was a pretty neat book that made the statistical revolution in evaluating baseball players a mainstream topic of discussion.  I’ve read the book a few times and found it thoroughly entertaining as well as informative.  In fact, it’s one of the few non-textbooks that I actually took notes in.  But unless you’re a baseball geek like me, there isn’t much intense drama or sexy violence that keeps you riveted (ok, well maybe the discussion about Jeremy Brown’s moobs could be seen as pretty racy). Read the rest of this entry