Book Review Clearinghouse: The Master and Margarita

I was very excited to read this book, due to references to it in Everyone Drunk But Me, not to mention that Keith Law put it as #1 in the Klaw 100. I came away disappointed though, finding the main characters unlikeable and the plot too scattershot to keep me very interested.

One of the main things that bothered me about the book is that you don't really meet the title characters until halfway through. The Master is a tortured writer, shattered by the fact that his bizarre (and interesting, from what we see of it) history of the death of Christ from Pontius Pilate's point of view, and mopes around an insane asylum. Margarita, his lover, makes a deal with the Devil (who has shown up with a cast of amusing cohorts to make mock of Soviet society) to bring him back to her so they can live together. Shenanigans ensue and she gets some measure of revenge, and the quasi-religious stuff from the Master's book is folded into it as well. I didn't really get either of them I guess. - I thought the Master was a jerk and can't really understand why Margarita would be in love with him.

As for the other (human) characters, I found them pretty unlikeable/uninteresting as well. The first half of the book was pretty much the devil and co wreaking havoc on all the social climbers etc within the communist society. I guess this was supposed to be a scathing indicment of the communists, but it all seemed pretty tame to me. Maybe I would have liked it if I was reading this from the perspective of someone who thought atheism was inconceivable or that soviet society itself is amusing in and of itself. Social climbers tend to be idiots, no matter what form of government you're operating under.

What I did like about the book was the excerpts/history from the Master's book about Pilate. I'm really just a sucker for biblical history (true or not), so I thought all of that was pretty cool. You do end up feeling sorry for Pilate in this account, but he's a pretty pathetic guy. The Devil's retinue were fairly amusing, especially Behemoth, the flippant giant cat who had "an affection for chess and vodka".

Maybe I'm just a Philistine, I don't know. But this book was not very enjoyable.

Fun with reference sites, part 1

Over at ACB, we were talking about the awesomeness of Bob Gibson. As these things tend to go, I spent the next half hour or so poking around b-ref and fangraphs looking at the careers of other big name pitchers. I'm not going to make an attempt to rigorously rank any of them vor various reasons (valuing peak v longevity is hard). I just wanted point out their awesomeness.

Bob Gibson

Gibson was a fantastic pitcher, and famous for his intensity. His numbers suffer a bit though, as he pitched in one of the most pitcher-friendly eras in baseball history.

Year	FIP	ERA+
1961	3.58	137
1962	3.02	151
1963	3.13	106
1964	3.02	127
1965	3.33	126
1966	2.76	148
1967	2.34	110
1968	1.77	258
1969	2.30	164
1970	2.29	132
1971	2.70	119
1972	2.54	139
1973	2.83	133
1974	4.17	95
1975	4.50	76
Career	2.89	127

Cubs week in Review: 6/1 - 6/7

This week's Record: 3-2 (and one rainout)
The Cubs split the series with at Atlanta and won the series vs Cincinatti. Four of the five games went into extra innings, including a five hour and thirteen minute game on Sunday that kind of shot my afternoon. At least the Cubs won.

Current record: 28-26
Cubs Sweep!:2
Series won: 6
Series split: 5
Series lost: 4
Cubs Swept!: 2

Team Stats
wOBA This week:.291, Season: .323
FIP This week: 3.57, Season: 4.28
UZR Season: 0.2

Team Leaders
wOBA: Fukudome, .388
FIP (starter): Wells, 2.63
FIP (reliever): Guzman, 3.12
UZR: Theriot (SS), 3.5

Team Trailers
wOBA: Soto, .284
FIP (Starter): Marshall, 4.84
FIP (Reliever): Gregg, 5.13
UZR: Fontenot (3b): -3.3

Hitting performance of the week:
Carlos Zambrano hit what turned out to be the game-deciding HR to win his 100th start.

Pitching performance of the week:
Randy Wells took a no-hitter into the 7th inning of tuesday's game vs the Braves. He was taken out in the 8th after giving up a HR to Garrett Anderson and, in what should be familiar to him now, watched the bullpen blow the scant lead that the offense had given him.

Random thoughts on cub fandom

I've got a terrible secret - I actually haven't been a Cubs fan for all that long. I grew up as a Cubs fan (and pretty much a baseball-only sports fan), but I never really knew anything about the team. I imagine that's the way it goes with most kids growing up, especially if they don't live near the team that they root for. I knew that Ryne Sandberg was the best player on the team and I knew the names Mark Grace and Andre Dawson but that's about it. My baseball fandom really just amounted to watching the World Series and watching the home run chase in 1998. Since I was basically just watching the playoffs, I enoyed watching the Yankees teams in those years, kicking ass and taking names in the height of their mini-dynasty. It wasn't until my cousin got me hooked on fantasy baseball back in 2001, not to mention the fact that when I got to college I suddenly had easy access to WGN and had the time to actually watch a decent number of games, that I took another look at this whole baseball thing.

I loosely followed the ups and downs of the 2001 and 2002 teams, but 2003 (and what might have been in the playoffs that year) is when I was really drawn in. What a team that was - Cubs legend (and soon to be shamefully treated Cubs pariah) Sammy Sosa was declining but still carrying the sub-par offense on his back, Hendry fleeced Pittsburgh in the Ramirez trade and brought in Kenny Lofton to spark the offense, and the pitching, oh, the pitching. The Cubs had a pair of aces in Wood and Prior, backed up by an on-his-game Matt Clement, some goofy Venezualan kid named Carlos Zambrano, and, inexplicably, Shawn Estes. It was just my luck that Estes was pitching the only game that I saw in person that season. It's no conicedence that this team had my three favorite Cubs players of all time (Prior, Sosa, Z). It sucks that it didn't work out for that team, but as Santo likes to say, that's baseball.

What got me thinking about this, though, is the 1998 Cubs. A year or so ago, my in-laws bought me a cd that was made at the end of the 98 season with various audio clips and songs from the season (and of course, Go Cubs Go) and listening to it makes me both really nostalgic about that team and bummed that I completely missed out on it. It feels strange to feel this nostalgia even though I didn't experience any of this stuff at all, aside from the HR race.

• The 98 HR race between Sosa and McGuire


• Getting to the playoffs for the first time since '89


• Kerry Wood's rookie season


• Kerry Wood's 20-K game


• Harry Caray's death before the start of the season and the ensuinge tributes to him


• Rod Beck being Rod Beck


• And probably half a hundred other things that I've forgotten or don't know about, because I wasn't there

Maybe it's just because I still know who many of these players are that I'm feeling this, I don't know. After watching This Old Cub, the '69 Cubs are also up there too but I just don't get that same shiver I get when thinking about the '98 or '03 Cubs, even though I suspect that the '69 club was a better team than both of them.

UPDATE
I just went back and looked at the '98 Cubs roster and am floored. Despite all the nostalgia that team had going for it (above), that was NOT a great team. Any Cubs team since the 2003 run (excluding 2006, which we all should try to block out of our minds) was better than that one.

Book Review Clearinghouse - The Omnivore's Dilemma and thoughts on food

Since I'm waiting out a hailstorm in a Starbucks here in Los Alamos, I thought I'd finally get to work on clearing out my list of things I've read. Many of these books I read *a year ago* while here at Los Alamos, so I'm shamefully behind.

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

This was a fascinating read, albeit pretty depressing.

The first half of the book is all about industrial farming. I knew that corn is in just about everything, but the stuff he reported on in the book went even above and beyond what I thought about corn's dominance of the food market. The thing that surprised me the most is that a vast majority of the corn we see growing in the fields is not edible as it is grown - most of it goes to huge processing plants where it is broken down into 'corn commodities', like corn syrup and the myriad of corn-derived chemicals that you see on your food labels. I don't remember if it was this book or somewhere else (but probably this book) that pointed out that agriculture is incredibly susceptible to Prisoner's Dilemma-type situations. The price of corn (or whatever) goes down, which entices you to plant more and more crops on your land, which further drives down prices and continues to suck the nutrients out of your land. Smart policymaking *could* fix this, but the dept of agriculture is very much in the hands of big agriculture and is geared for large-scale farming, which is incredibly short-sighted and where monoculture farming fits their profit models much better. Current agricultural policy vastly discourages diversity in farming (unless you consider switching between growing nothing but soybeans and nothing but corn 'diversity'), which is much better for long-term farming outlooks. Pollan didn't mention it much in this book, but the Corn industry's lobbying power is why HFCS is cheaper than sugar in the US.

The other big topic in the first part of the book is where most of our meat comes from. Probably the most interesting fact that I came away with was that the old 'corn-fed beef' cliche that we've been inundated with for years is a fallacy in and of itself. Cow stomachs were evolved to digest grass, and are not able to correctly digest corn. Industrial meat 'growers' use corn as a method to fatten up their cows quickly. It does lead to that nice marbled steak which is the gold standard of the meat industry, but in order to keep the cows healthy while they eat all that corn, they have to pump them full of medicine and antibiotics etc in order to make sure that they stay alive long enough to be slaughtered. It's similar for chickens, though for different reasons. Most industrial chickens are heavily medicated due to their close conditions, as opposed to eating an unnatural diet (corn fattens them up too, but chickens are more versatile). The living and slaughtering conditions are quite disgusting too (lakes of manure = gross), but somehow I don't have quite as much of a problem with it. Maybe because it's not a chemical issue, I don't know, but I think it's something that can be more easily fixed, even if it means more expensive meat. I know that both problems come from large-scale production, but somehow I see the first problem as more fundamentally wrong, while the sanitation stuff is more of a cost-cutting type thing. But I digress.

The rest of the book was about sustainable farming, with a brief final chapter on hunting and foraging (that I didn't find all that interesting). The sustainable farm that he visited (and worked in) was in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and was quite fascinating. Their farm was incredibly integrated with nature and natural patterns, and he had several cool methods for his farm. Probably the coolest was the pest control/sanitation - his chickens moved around in a mobile henhouse (which I think was an old schoolbus, I can't remember) that followed the cows around as they rotated pastures. Eash day he'd let them out and they'd eat all the bugs that inevitably bred in the cow manure that the cows left behind. His chickens laid the most incredible eggs, according to the Charlottesville chefs that bought them, because they ate what chickens evolved to eat - bugs (not grains). There was a long section describing his various battles with the ag department (mainly over his chicken-slaughtering operation), and it was pretty cool all around.

The problem with his farm (and larger scale organic operations), is that they only work because they are so small-scale. They do not scale well and require a lot of manpower to generate the amount of food that people require. In my opinion, though things are getting better as far as awareness goes, nothing will change until there is a FULL change in food culture, which I do not see happening. Due to the economics of industrial agriculture, the cheapest foods are the foods that are most processed and soaked with chemicals. which adds another dimension to the culture wars in this country. It's no surprise that the right jumped all over Obama when he made his infamous 'cost of arugla' comment during the primary season. But until prices get a lot closer, fast and processed food will be a large part of our consumer culture.

American food culture is spreading too, especially as regards to meat, and ingrained food habits are very hard to change. 2 years or so ago I was challenged by a fellow mathematician that I met (who was a vegetarian) to try to go a whole week without eating meat, or even go a whole week only eating meat once a day. It was a lot harder than I thought - it's been ingrained that a meal isn't a meal without some meat in it. It doesn't help that I find most protein substitutes unappetizing, for the most part. I like tofu and other soy stuff *sometimes*, but for the most part, it subtracts from my enjoyment of what I eat. I think I do eat less meat now than I used to, but I'm not too broken up about it. I like most meat, a lot. The biggest thing I (usually) remember to ask myself is when I'm making a meal is whether having meat in/with it really necessary? I've more or less stopped eating meat on the few occasions when I have breakfast (unless I have a bacon jonesing), often omit it from pasta sauces, and usually choose other toppings for pizzas that I make/order for myself. The other key thing that I try to remember is Pollan's mantra from his other book (In Defense of Food): "Eat food, not a lot, mostly plants". I do a pretty good job at the first one, though not as good at the other. I've found that I like vegetables a lot more than I used to, but it's still hard to get over my childhood prejudices against vegetables - they're still too complementary in my head.

Making the most of the Scrap Heap

Let's take a look at the Cubs' collection of scrappy middle infielders, all of whom have seen much more playing time due to Ramirez's injury. Note, per media parlance, Bobby Scales cannot be a 'scrappy' middle infielder - we'll just have to call him 'athletic' instead.

The projections here are taken from the Updated ZiPS projections on Fangraphs, which take into account performance so far this year for the end of season line and as inputs to the rest of season projection.

Player	Slash Line	wOBA	K%	Projected Slash Line	Projected wOBA	Career K%
Fontenot	.193/.290/.361	.289	21.8%	.235/.317/.392	.315	20.1%
Miles	.207/.255/.272	.243	15.2%	.255/.300/.319	.282	10.3%
Scales	.286/.429/.536	.421	28.6%	.268/.349/.414	.338	N/A
Freel	.120/.267/.120	.209	28%	.235/.321/.336	.303	17.4%
Theriot	.276/.343/.454	.351	16.4%	.281/.348/.397	.336	10.8%

Fun fact: Theriot is projected to hit 4 more HR by ZiPS.

The clear 'winner' in these projections is Bobby Scales, who should be playing every day with Ramirez out. Fontenot has been terribly unlucky (more on that in a moment), but even when readjusted for luck it appears that he isn't nearly as good as some of those optimistic .340+ wOBA projections were giving him. To be fair though, ZiPS was the most down on Fontenot of any of the projection systems on Fangraphs. From what I recall PECTOA was really down on him, but I don't have my annual with me here in NM. Miles and Freel have been especially awful. Freel will probably be sent packing when Ramiriez comes back, though it would behoove the Cubs to give Scales and Fontenot some reps at SS, because Miles's ability to play that position is the only thing keeping him on the roster.

There is some reason to suspect that Fontenot (especially) will bounce back - he's had some terrible luck. Looking at the numbers:

Player	BABIP (2009)	BABIP (Careeer)	LD% (2009)	LD% (Career)
Fontenot	.205	.315	11.7	19.7
Miles	.244	.313	23.4	19.9

I left off Scales and Freel for sample size reasons, and because we don't have any career data for Scales. It actually looks like Miles has been even more unlucky than Fontenot - despite a LD% significantly above his career norms, Miles has a terrible BABIP.

What this boils down to is that even though Fontenot doesn't appaer to be nearly as good as we were thinking he would be going into the season, he's not *THIS* awful. It's pretty tough to sustain a .205 BABIP, and it's not like he's hacking any more than usual either. The Cubs should run him out there against every RHP, and Scales too.

Last night's trainwreck, Bullpen reshuffling

As you may have heard (or worse, seen), Chad Fox's elbow fell apart mid-pitch during the Brewers' blowout of the Cubs last night. He wasn't really a great pitcher anymore, but you have to admire a guy for coming all the way back from three separate Tommy John surgeries. The Cubs placed him on the DL today, and his career is likely over. However, while on the DL, he will accrue more time towards his MLB pension, which will hopefully go a long way to helping him recover from all those injuries. Best of luck to you, Chad Fox.

Speaking of last night's game, what a mess. Gallardo did not bring his A-game at all last night, and the Cubs did not take advantage. They had guys on first and third with no outs in the second and failed to score, had two runners on in the third and fourth and failed to score, and had the bases loaded against the Brewers bullpen in the 7th and failed to come away with any runs. Following that, Lou put Dempster out for another inning despite the fact that he was at 110+ pitches. He promptly gave up back to back HRs to Counsell and Braun before being removed. Cotts and Patton then came in and (hopefully) finally punched their tickets off the roster by coughing up another 4 runs. The Cubs finally showd some life and Fukudome actually got a hit with runners in scoring position, but it was too little too late. After Fox's injury, Heilman came in and walked three straight batters and coughed up a single and sac fly before striking out Weeks and their pitcher. The final score was 12-6 Brewers.

Ascanio was recalled to replace Fox, and he was probably the guy the Cubs should have called up in the first place. Ascanio has been red-hot in AAA, putting up a 2.26 FIP in 26.2 IP thus far. He's not that good (his projections hover around a 4.7 FIP in the bigs), but I've always liked his stuff and he has to be better than David Patton, who is pitching his way off this roster. Patton has a 5.71 FIP thus far, pretty close to his projection of 5.6. No one should be surprised that he has pitched so poorly.

Speaking of AAA starters, Randy Wells wasn't half bad on friday, filling in for Zambrano. He had some early jitters, which were to be expected, but then he settled down and struck out 5 Brewers in 5 innings without giving up a run. Lou seemed impressed by the outing and has hinted that Wells would stick around when Z returns. Sadly, it will probably mean that Ascanio will head back to the minors, but we can hope that he replaces Patton instead.

Other pitchers throwing well in the minors (small sample size caveats apply)

Jeff Stevens, RHP (AAA) - 3.06 FIP
John Gaub, LHP (AA) - 1.04 FIP, career 2.42 FIP v LHH
Esmailin Caridad, RHP (AAA) - 4.77 FIP
Jay Jackson, RHP (AA) - 3.93 FIP
Jeremy Papelbon (AA) - 3.92 FIP, 1.61 FIP v LHH

Watch your back, Cotts and Patton.