Making the Leap: Revisited

Rashard Lewis has reportedly agreed to a max contract with the Orlando Magic which will pay him around $15 million a season. The news reminded me of a long comment from Vish about high school basketball players that I never addressed at the time.

"with your list of players that have gone to the nba straight from high school... aside from lebron james, how many were REALLY ready for that jump and are now better off? monta ellis is good this season, but he was a second round pick. had he gone to mississippi state and shown what he can do at a higher level than high school competition, its likely that he would've gone in the first round. which would have gotten him a guaranteed 3 year contract and more money. aside from lebron james and dwight howard and anyone else taken in the top 5, most of those players could have been better off by going to college because they would've been drafted higher and gotten more guaranteed money. had kevin durant left high school for the nba, he probably would have been picked around 10-15, because as you know, everyone loves to over analyze every detail about a player leading up to the draft, and his small frame surely would have dropped his value."

It's not just Vish, he's just the only written example I have right now. To answer Vish's question, how many high schoolers are better off having made the jump? The answer is nearly every single player who got drafted in the first round. Most people don't know how tight the NBA rookie wage scale is. It's nothing like the NFL. Assuming "high school Kevin Durant" was taken with the 12th pick in the draft, he would only make about $5 million less than the real Kevin Durant will over the first three years of their rookie contracts. But the extra prime NBA year "high school Kevin Durant" gets? That year could net him over $15 million dollars. (Durant is something of a special case, as going to college MIGHT have increased his total career endorsement dollars, but very few players make big endorsement dollars. Most top players make very little through endorsements. Plus Durant may have made the same endorsement money anyway, it's hard to know for sure.)

Let's imagine you're an elite high school player, you've dominated all the local competition, you have the requisite athleticism, and you're one of the top players at the ABCD and Nike camps. Your game has flaws - scouts predict you can fix those flaws over time, but they're still flaws. You've received enough interest from teams to know that you'll be drafted in the first round in the 20s.

Option 1: Enter the draft, get drafted in the 20s.
Option 2: Go to college.

So what if you turn out to be really good? Despite the lower initial draft status, the accelerated development and extra prime years will net you an extra $10-$20 million over your career, examples being Al Harrington or Al Jefferson.

Ah, but what if you never fix that hitch in your jump shot, what if your decision making never improves, what if your left hand never develops? Then, shouldn't you go to college? Again, I'd say go to the pros. At least you'd get $2 million guaranteed. Going to college would either already expose your flaws and drop you out of the first round (Chris Taft) or subject you to injury risk and ruin your draft stock entirely (Chris Marcus). Assuming you're a high schooler who will be drafted in the first round, going to college for 2 years would only make sense if you have a pretty special combination: you will dominate college ball but also be an NBA bust. In that case, it makes sense to go all out to improve your initial draft standing, because your rookie contract would be your only contract, therefore you need to milk every dollar possible out of it.

But truthfully, no high school prospect could possibly think he was going to dominate college ball but also somehow be a huge NBA bust, even though such players turn out to exist. It's also worth noting that some "busts" like Kwame Brown or Darius Miles still received enormous long-term contracts after their rookie deals expired, furthering the notion that if you're big and athletic, you should get your ass in the league as fast as humanly possible.

All of which brings me back to Rashard Lewis. Like Monta Ellis, he slipped into the second round of the draft, and judging from his career stats, would have been much more NBA-ready after two years of college ball. Nonetheless, Lewis went pro, and is now about to sign his second huge long-term deal, this one at a max salary (his last contract paid slightly less than max). Had Lewis gone to college for two years, and been drafted say, #4, he would have made an additional $6 million over the first couple years, but would only be in year 4 of his first large contract. "High school Lewis" has already finished the first big contract and is signing his second one.

Most second round guys don't even make NBA rosters, which is why high schoolers take excessive risk to come out only to be drafted in the second round. But if you're first round material, whether you're awesome or you suck, it's in your best financial interest to enter the draft. It was the right call for Kobe Bryant, and it was the right call for Nnudi Ebi. You don't have to be top 5 for it to be the best long-term financial decision, and you definitely don't need to be a good NBA player for it to be the best decision.

Old & Grumpy

Terrible news: I am getting old. I have finally accepted stage 2 of aging, despite having arrived there a couple years ago. Everyone has different milestones, but I break down the aging process thusly:

Stage 1: Being sore the day after any meaningful exercise
Stage 2: Where I am right now (to be discussed)
Stage 3: Talk endlessly about how much wiser I am than in my 20s
Stage 4: Become reasonably knowledgeable about wine and/or scotch
Stage 5: Regularly watch Leno or Letterman and fall asleep most of the time
Stage 6: Fall asleep before watching Leno or Letterman
Stage 7: Stop watching movies in theaters, perhaps attend opera or ballet
Stage 8: Drink Ensure while I play bridge, argue that vanilla flavor is tastiest
Stage 9: Pose significant danger if allowed to drive
Stage 10: When dismissing all comedians as "not being like that Letterman fellow", no one even knows who Letterman is
Stage 11: Diet is 100% Jell-O

I define Stage 2 as no longer liking new mainstream popular music. I struggle to think of the last new mainstream song I really liked. I'm excluding songs I'm embarrassed to say I find catchy and songs I would like only in a club. Seeing as how my life is not, in fact, a never-ending dance party, listening to Nelly Furtado is sometimes inappropriate.

I find myself making the same complaints of new music that my parents made of the music I listened to: overly repetitive, little singing, stupid lyrics. The feature I like the least in new music is probably the whole "missing melody" thing, which is less horrible in Timbaland's more complex soundscapes but reaches its logical (and horrible) end point in songs like "Tipsy" and "Lip Gloss". I would describe reggaeton as "sharp pain converted into sound", and "Laffy Taffy" gives me shivers of disgust.

Then there's the "American Idol" team, which serves up a broad range of grilled chicken music. It's okay, you can eat it and not feel sick, but it's forgotten the moment it's consumed. So that leaves me the faux-angst of pop punk (which I don't really relate to) and Fergie (who should be shot).

Of course, music will always be popular, the question is merely whether you're along for the ride, or whether you'll stand aside and complain. I've been complaining for years now, so it's safe to say the problem isn't the music, the problem is me.

I'm getting old. Soon it will be time to drink some Vanilla Ensure.

I Haven't A Clue

As Americans, you know what we need to get over? This whole notion that British people are all inherently classier than we are, and what they say is somehow more intelligent and meaningful. At the job I recently left, there was a Managing Director in London who everyone kept telling me was "so sharp and impressive". After a few conference calls with the guy, I noticed he never said anything of substance, and just stammered around like some investment banking version of Hugh Grant. Apparently, using the present perfect ("The client has seen the pages" / "The client saw the pages") is enough to make everyone think you're charming and delightful. Either that or his frequent use of the word "flogging".

I don't think the way British people speak is stupid or that they need to change, but they tend to espouse that they are the only people who speak English correctly. In truth, everyone merely learns a language the way they are taught, and they've gone through zero additional effort to speak "the right way". In fact, that sentiment is generally prevalent in British people, who to this day semi-seriously expect gratitude from their former colonies. If the American problem is to be oblivious to the world, the British problem is to overestimate one's own importance in it.

I wouldn't care, except that Americans succumb to all this. I saw Woody Allen's "Match Point" recently, in large part due to the avalanche of positive reviews from critics. Allen shot London quite nicely (after all, there's only so many ways to film New York) but the film itself was sort of inane. If that script had been read by American actors, people would have laughed their way out of the theater. Instead, by presenting the exact same dull thoughts on infidelity with British accents, everyone went bananas. "He's been reinvigorated!"

So the next time someone tells me, "oh, I just LOVE how British people talk", I am going to yell at them for being backwards and unpatriotic. They will likely in turn think I am crazy and mean, and perhaps I will lose a lot of friends doing this. But sacrifices must be made. Without struggle, there can be no progress.

Summertime

I'm going to take a break from attacking everyone's heroes (firefighters, Cal Ripken Jr.) to discuss something far less substantial: the summer TV lineup. I've been watching a few shows after May sweeps ended, and I can actually tell you that unlike every year since television began existing, this year's summer television programming is awesome. Or what I just said was a total lie. That's possible too.

Top Chef: They've aired a few episodes of Season 3, and it really looks like the caliber of chefs is significantly above least season's debacle. A basic problem of any food-oriented show is that you never get to eat any food yourself, so from a television standpoint, the emphasis has to be on appearances, and how aesthetically pleasing the plates are. Last season had a bunch of cooks who maybe made tasty food, but it looked mediocre onscreen. (It probably tasted mediocre too, but I'm trying to be nice.) As in any competitive reality show, it's a little early to tell, but things are promising.


Real World/Road Rules Challenge Inferno 3: Julius and I might be the only people who watch this preposterously named show, which is winding up next week, but know this - Derrick is on the verge of winning his first Challenge ever, as he enters the final mission with a strongly favored team of Steroid Abe, Kenny, Ev (that's a man), in-shape Tonya, and Janelle. After crushing last-minute losses in Inferno 2, Gauntlet 2, The Duel and Fresh Meat, it appears that Derrick's time may have arrived. In a year when Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl, it would be only fitting for Derrick to finally win a Real World/Road Rules Challenge. 2007 - the year of the loser. Has a nice ring to it.

Last Comic Standing: I tried watching this, and a few jokes made me laugh, but I found it very hard to care. I doubt I'll tune in again, I hate watching the personal lives of comedians anyways, they all think they're tortured souls or something.

On the Lot: Rob told me to start watching this. It wasn't a very good idea. The premise of this (film directors compete American Idol style, filming short films which America votes on) is actually not bad, but the execution is horrible. The studio host is bad, the judges make no sense, and I haven't been altogether impressed with the quality of short films many of these directors are making. It isn't a bad show to TiVo though, because you can FF through all the fluff and just watch the shorts. This would be perfect, except a lot of the shorts are very mediocre.

National Bingo Night: Just kidding....or AM I?? But seriously, no, I don't watch this/know what it is exactly.

Age of Love: Surely you've seen NBC promos for this - former tennis pro Mark Philippoussis, age 30, dates a basket of women in their 40s and a group of women in their 20s. Cougars vs. kittens. (NBC's line, not mine). The premiere was pretty funny, just seeing Philippoussis react to 40-year old women, but this show takes itself sort of seriously (people cry quite a bit), so I think I'm going to stop watching. I do like that when he eliminates a woman, his closing line is "Can I give you a hug?" I love it - I'm going to start saying that whenever I break bad news to anyone. "Oh man, sorry I crashed into your car...can I give you a hug?"

Also, Kornheiser was hating on Philippoussis on PTI, but the guy won 11 ATP tournaments and made two Grand Slam finals. I don't think people grasp just how tough that is to do - I'd say his tennis success is analogous to Stephon Marbury in basketball or Marc Bulger in football. He's no all-time great, but when he was healthy, he could be a real tough opponent. Nonetheless, his presence on this show is ridiculous and has to drop him down a few pegs.

Science of Love: I'm never going to watch this show again, but I urge you to check it out once before it gets cancelled, which could be any day now. Alyssa told me to watch - the premise is insane. A guy chooses one woman on his own (instinct) and a "panel of leading experts in the field of love" chooses a woman (science) for him, and he goes on two dates, and decides if he likes "instinct" or "science" better. I won't get into too many details because this show is so stupid, but suffice it to say, almost every moment of the show made me laugh uncontrollably. I'll spoil one highlight - the team of scientists is trying to engineer scenarios to "make" the guy fall in love, prompting the host to say awesome things like "let's see if science can make love" or "are you ready to make some love?" This shit is gonna get canned real fast, so add it to your TiVo lineup ASAP if interested.

Saving Baseball

Gene Wojciechowski casually references a notion in his recent column that bothers me to no end, namely, that Cal Ripken Jr. "saved" baseball. I don't know why this phrase became engraved into our sports lexicon, but the notion that Cal Ripken somehow saved baseball is ludicrous on like six different levels. If I were a better person this wouldn't bother me so much, but alas.

Supposedly, the 1994 baseball strike had everyone so disgusted with the greed of professional baseball players that we were all going to swear off baseball forever, until Cal Ripken got into the "saving" business. Clearly, the '94 strike wasn't fantastic, but baseball wasn't in dire straits as many suggested. Although it appeared that the NBA was the new force to be reckoned with, that league would soon learn that only Michael Jordan drew a 20 rating, even with a '94 final involving the New York Knicks. Hindsight is even clearer: the mid 90s would deliver a steady stream of body shots to the NBA - a decline in scoring led by excessive hand-checking, failure of would-be stars to reach their potentials, and, worst of all, rising perception that the league was full of thugs.

Of course, baseball's trouble wasn't only about the competition - stadium attendance was down. I'm sure there were a lot of fans who cancelled their season tickets for 1995 (and the numbers do bear this out), but they were coming back eventually, Ripken or no Ripken. The inescapable truth is that people love going to baseball games. Although a number of cities showed meaningful attendance declines, seven cities actually posted higher attendance in 1995 versus 1991. The attendance decline was further exaggerated by the 1993 introduction of the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins, as expansion teams draw huge numbers initially, but quickly settle at smaller levels.
Baseball was never going to die.

I can put this even more simply: of the "Big Four" sports during the 1990s (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL) only two continue to have a substantial percentage of white Americans in 2007. I'm confident you can do the math from there, and if not, go talk to a NASCAR fan.

I never understood what was so impressive about the streak. Baseball players have professional trainers, the best doctors, professional nutritionists, fly first class or on chartered jets, don't carry their own luggage, work only 8 months a year and get tons of days off. They make physical contact with another player once every 25 games and spend about 2 hours and 56 minutes out of a 3 hour game either standing in place or sitting down. When you think about it, the wonder isn't that Cal Ripken could play in so many games - the wonder is that all the other guys get hurt so freaking often. If you were to go play a baseball game right now with some friends, you would estimate your personal chance of injury at somewhere between 0% and 1%, with the only meaningful difference being that the tension on your body trying to hit 90 mph pitches is different from trying to hit 70 mph pitches. (As a sidebar, I just saw Derek Jeter have to leave a game after injuring himself trying to change directions quickly on the basepaths, which is pretty much what a basketball or football, or hell, soccer player does every single play every game. And Jeter is TOUGH for a baseball player!)

What separates Ripken from, say, Miguel Tejada is nothing more than pure chance. Well, except that Tejada is a lot better, at least versus Ripken at that point. Ripken had a '95 park adjusted OPS of .746, which is roughly comparable to second-half-of-their-careers Omar Vizquel and Royce Clayton. That was at least an improvement over '92 when he was REALLY mediocre, posting an OPS of .689. The logic in giving a .689 OPS guy 715 plate appearances is somewhere between dicey and really dicey.

In summary, we had in "1995 Cal Ripken" a guy who by chance did not sustain a major injury in a sport where you really shouldn't be having major injuries who continued to get every possible plate appearance at the expense of his team winning games. We were really lucky to have him around, because without this overpaid and overrated shortstop (he had at least 6 undeserved all star selections) we would never have been able to save a game that did not need saving in the first place.

It's A Magical World

Have you ever seen anyone taking roadkill off the street? I never have. Broad estimate here - I've probably seen anywhere from five thousand to ten thousand animals run over on the street in my lifetime, and never once have I ever seen anyone remove any of them. Yet they always vanish. Also, given my schedule and age, I'm often on the road late at night, so the "it happens when you're sleeping" answer doesn't satisfy me. I know that there are roadkill removal companies and services, but I think they are merely sham companies set up for money laundering purposes. (Anytime something stays in business longer than it should, I declare that it must be around for money laundering. I think there is a lot of that going on.)

After much deliberation, I have determined that the answer to this quandary is that there is a roadkill fairy, which is invisible, and removes roadkill whenever people are not looking. I have also decided that the roadkill fairy's name is Terry, which is good in this situation because it's a gender-neutral name.

Along similar lines, one of the things I've learned to block out living in New York are fire truck sirens. As a kid, if I heard a fire siren, I'd feel a palpable tinge of concern, and hope that everything was okay. But in New York, fire sirens are so common that any sense of worry has been completely numbed. I must see 3-4 fire trucks with their sirens on each week, if not more, yet I pretty much never see or even hear of any fires. I understand that small apartment fires might still necessitate the fire department despite no visible flames or smoke to outsiders, but I don't even hear people say "oh, there was a fire in my building this weekend". And I personally speak with at least 1-4 people in New York a day. That's a lot of people. (Granted they're often the same people. And I have an imaginary friend.) By my rough estimation, in New York, I've seen around 300 fire trucks with their sirens on, have heard of two fires, and seen zero. The disparity is ridiculous.

There may be a fire siren fairy, who turns on sirens for no reason, overriding the controls of the New York Fire Department. I'm sure that is the explanation and there are no other possible explanations, so don’t even bother to suggest your own ideas.

Where Are The F*$%ing Updates?

Sorry everyone, I don't know what happened there. The weather got warm, I started running in my spare time, I slept more, I had bouts of writers' block - it all added up to no posts, and that's just plain unacceptable. Well that stops now, and that's a promise you can hold me to. If I break it, there's really nothing you can do about it, but that's what I do best: make empty promises. That and the worm. I do the worm really well. Although I think I do it sort of incorrectly because my chest always hurts a lot afterwards.

So what else have I been doing during the blog layoff? There's been a bit of domestic travel - Vegas, DC, Northern California. I flew to San Francisco a couple weeks ago and had to drive to this tiny town called San Martin for a client event at a golf resort & spa. Even people who live in San Jose, Palo Alto and Cupertino had never heard of San Martin. I went on Wikipedia and learned it's fighting to gain official consideration as a town, which is just about the saddest thing I've ever heard.

I rented a car, and just went with the generic midsize sedan, but when I got to Avis, the guy said he only had two cars available: a Ford Mustang and a Ford F-150. Thinking it might be a bit awkward to drive a pickup truck to this client event at a resort, I went with the Mustang. How the hell do people drive that car? It's ridiculously jerky - I guess that's meant to give you a "sports car" feel or something. Just going from 0 to 10 mph practically made Sara vomit all over the dashboard. Sara kept making fun of me for how douchey I looked driving a Mustang - it really is a car for overcompensating. If you're not rich. Because middle class guys need to overcompensate too. And as we drove around, I realized there were tons of Ford Mustangs on the road. I'm not sure if that says something about society as a whole, or if I was just seeing a lot of rental cars since I wasn't too far from the airport.

Sara and I decided to kill some time and see "Ocean's 13", and Sara did the navigation to her home movie theater in Mountain View, which is on the short list for most boring cities in the universe. We exited the freeway, but there was no movie theater - instead there were a bunch of Google buildings. Thankfully we drove a little more, and saw a sign that said "Movies" with an arrow to the right. I turned right...and more Google buildings. So we circled around the block and eventually found another sign for the movies, telling me to turn left. Went left - still all Google. Google everywhere. I started to get scared, everyone was wearing Google clothes too. We eventually asked someone and found the theater - apparently Google employees are keeping a movie theater all to themselves, because the theater could not have possibly been a real business. The movie cost $7.50 - $7.50!! - what is this, 1991? The ticket they gave me wasn't even perforated, the lady at the door just rips it down the middle. Damn you Google and your underpriced retro movie theater. One day lightning will strike a computer that's showing a Google search and the computer will turn evil even though Google means no harm and we will all die after we are attacked by our computers. It's just like in the movies "I, Robot" and "Stealth". Technology is dangerous, and Google must be stopped. Otherwise we'll all die. Don't say I didn't warn you - it's pretty much a known fact that lightning causes technology to turn evil.

Okay, that's the update on me - more standard blog fodder to come soon. Really.