Daily Archives: November 13, 2009
From the Wikipedia: Thor
Thor, as you may know, is the god of thunder in Germanic and Norse mythology. Traditionally, he is depicted as a bearded redhead. Tales of his exploits dominated Germanic documents from the dawn of written language in the area until the late Viking age, because Vikings obviously recognized how awesome Thor was.
Thor is the son of Odin, the king of the gods, and Jörd, who was a Jötunn, or frost giant. He married Sif, a human female, but kept a Jötunn mistress named Járnsaxa, because Thor apparently had an Oedipal thing going on.
Thor’s weapon of choice was his Mjöllnir, which was way, way more than an ordinary hammer. In addition to performing the usual nail-driving stuff, it was capable of leveling mountains, plus featured a boomerang-like quality by which it would always return to Thor after he threw it at someone or something that had earned his wrath. Also, it could emit lightning bolts.
Thor traveled in style, of course, on a chariot pulled by regenerating goats from which Thor would eat whenever he got hungry. The goats were presumably stabled in the garage of Thor’s 540-room mansion at Asgard, not too far from Valhalla.
Thor’s Wikipedia page is positively rife with information, which makes perfect sense, as a Venn diagram of Wikipedia editors and Folklore and Mythology majors would yield concentric circles.
Thor’s life was replete with drinking contests, cross-dressing, competitive eating, and umlauts, and thus was not unlike my cöllege career. According to legend, he will die at Ragnarok, the Germanic-mythological equivalent of judgment day, but only after killing his arch-nemesis Jörmungandr the serpent.
I don’t want to delve too deeply into religion here, since obviously it’s a sensitive issue to a lot of people, but from a purely anthropological standpoint it always baffles me that monotheistic religions have so dominated polytheistic ones in the West. I feel like I’d get so much more geared up to go to church if I was going there to learn about a bunch of hammer-wielding, lightning-tossing badasses like Thor.
For that matter, it strikes me as at least a little bit strange that we read The Odyssey in high-school English classes but the Bible or Torah or Quran would obviously be off-limits, even just as historical texts. I’m not complaining because I thought The Odyssey was awesome, but it is so closely wrapped up with a religion, even if it is a mostly defunct one. Do we separate church and state or do we separate one specific type of church and state? And, if the latter is the case, isn’t that akin to the state endorsing that type of church?
I know that sounds ridiculous in the case of The Odyssey, but my 9th-grade class also read Siddhartha, which is most decidedly a book about a very active and popular religion.
I also enjoyed that book very much so I’m certainly not advocating denying it to our nation’s ninth graders. Don’t mistake anything here as any sort of political stance on anything. I’m just sayin’s all.
As for Thor, he is currently passing the time before Ragnarok as an NFL defensive coordinator. And my, has he let himself go.
Mike Silva of NY Baseball Digest spoke to a “high-ranking official with one of the 30 big-league clubs” about the concepts stated in the book Moneyball (sort of), and the executive said this:
Moneyball geniuses have flopped like DePodesta, Ricciardi, and even the infamous Billy Beane whose exploits have all lacked a World Series trophy. It is all a tool to be used by the uninitiated. I’ll take a good scout and player development people anytime; the statistics are very secondary. How do you account a .220 hitter for being the hero of the World Series or a guy who hits three home runs a year wins the pennant clincher with a home run?
With all due respect to this high-ranking official, this high-ranking official is a dunce.
I do not pretend to have “all the answers,” as Silva suggests many sabermetricians do. I have far more questions than answers, and I’ve never said otherwise.
I know this for sure, though: If you don’t understand why a .220 hitter could be the hero of the World Series or a guy who hits three home runs a year can win the pennant-clincher with a home run, you do not deserve to be a high-ranking official with one of the 30 big-league clubs.
And to him, I’d ask the same question so frequently lobbed at sabermetricians from sanctimonious and misguided old-school baseball minds:
Do you even watch the game?
Or are you suggesting to me that a seeing-eye single is somehow the product of a player’s skill or will? Are you saying that a hard-struck line drive hit right at the shortstop is bad form, not bad luck? Do you really mean to tell me that some .220 hitter — some guy who can’t hit better than .220 in the regular season — can actually magically make himself a better player when it counts more? Good lord, if someone had the ability to make himself a better player when it counted, why wouldn’t he do it all the time? Is there somehow really not enough pressure in a regular-season for that .220 hitter to morph into Albert Pujols? And in that case, wouldn’t he be the exact type of player you’d label a headcase and eschew from baseball?
It’s random. It’s a random game and a random world and randomness pervades everything. Sometimes things don’t need explanations. They just happen, especially in extremely small sample sizes.
I really don’t even want to fight this battle anymore. I recognize that some people will never agree, and they’ll just think A-Rod magically became clutch this year after being unclutch for three postseasons and clutch in the two before those. I mean, hey, it’s the magic of Kate Hudson!
But I bring it up here because it’s scares the crap out of me that people like the guy Silva quotes — who not only demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what Moneyball was really about, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the way baseball actually works, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules of standard written English — are in positions to make decisions for the baseball teams we all love. It’s a pitch-perfect justification of what I wrote about yesterday, asserting that people in Major League front-offices screw things up all the time.
And holy crap, no one ever said that book was about canning every scout and letting calculators make decisions. It wasn’t called Numbersball. It was about exploiting market inefficiency, and just because Beane hasn’t done a good job of it over the past few years doesn’t mean GAGLWEJHRKJ^@#$. I’m done.
“Dadadadadadadada.” – Marcel Duchamp.
The Daily News’ Mark Feinsand and Bill Madden say the Mets “don’t seem to be inclined to get involved with the big free agents such as Matt Holliday” and so should be in on trade talks. They also say the Tigers will cut payroll, but “it’s highly unlikely that any team would take on the mammoth contract of Miguel Cabrera.”
Wait a minute, hold the phone. Would the Tigers really be looking to dump Cabrera’s salary? It’s huge, mind you — he’s owed $126 million over the next six seasons — but he’s not even 27 yet and he’s completely awesome. So awesome, in fact, that Fangraphs valued him at $24.3 million in 2009, more money than he’ll make in any single year in his current contract. Obviously I have no idea what he’d cost in a trade package, I’m just saying. Some team with money should be willing to take him on.
LeBron James will wear No. 6 next season to honor Michael Jordan. Good news for Toney Douglas.
Rex Ryan is riling up Jets fans again. I’d kind of rather he rile up Jets.
