Before I get to the pitcher factors, I'm happy to say that I've upgraded the ratings, and they are clearly the better for it.
As it turns out, regressing the ratings 50% toward preseason projections was much too conservative, so now they're only being regressed 30%. The Vegas lines, which remember are the sole inputs of my system, are so good that even just 20 games worth of lines is enough to produce a very clear picture of team value. The ratings now have a much truer look and I don't have the bunching problem I mentioned the other day.
Secondly, I was doing my opponent adjustment wrong. Not to get into it too much, but for example, I had the Yankees' unadjusted rating of about .600 being adjusted down despite the factor that their opponent rating was .530, which is obviously not right.
The last thing I've cleaned up is to finally add in opponent values for interleague games. I had debated what to do with this. Because the AL is vastly superior to the NL, some additional adjustment beyond home-field seemed necessary, I just wasn't sure what it should be. Some searching let me know that the adjustment should be between .050 and .060 per team, meaning an NL team should be deducted and an AL team given that much. This is a big number. For instance, adding in the deduction, the best NL team, Philadelphia, when playing the AL is only as good as Milwaukee. Or going the other way, Kansas City versus the NL becomes as good as the Angels. Anyway, after explaining all that, I decided not to add any adjustment at all. All AL teams play the same number of interleague games (18), so it wouldn't matter. And in the NL, twelve of the teams play 15 games, while only four play 18. Those last four teams are the only ones who'd be affected by an adjustment, and it would be just .050 per opponent over just three games, which equates to a shade under .001 per game. I decided this wasn't worth the effort. Create your own damn system if you feel otherwise.
Here then are the fixed ratings, updated through games played last night.
Yankees .619
Red Sox .574
Rays .550
Twins .538
Rangers .522
Angels .514
White Sox .510
Mariners .497
Tigers .495
Athletics .487
Indians .477
Royals .454
Blue Jays .453
Orioles .451
Phillies .5752
Cardinals .5748
Braves .554
Dodgers .550
Rockies .540
Cubs .524
Brewers .512
Marlins .5093
Giants .5092
Dbacks .506
Padres .482
Reds .480
Mets .476
Astros .447
Nationals .438
Pirates .426
The Braves are the one team that looks clearly odd. They are in last place with an 8-14 record, and have lost 9 straight games, and yet they're not terribly far behind the two best teams in their league according to my numbers (you could just as easily say "according to Vegas" here). So let's look a little closer at them.
Their lines have been coming down lately, but not hugely so. Their schedule has been very difficult, averaging .542, second-toughest in the league. In four recent games played at St Louis, they were actually the favorite in one of them. In a three game series at home vs Philly, they were somewhat large favorites in both of the non-Halladay games. I don't know what to say, other than I fully expect their rating to come down in the coming weeks.
Now, on to the pitcher factors. I say "factors" and not "ratings" because these are not ratings of each pitcher's quality, but just a measurement of how each pitcher affects his team's rating. In spite of this, the list I'll unveil in a second is still largely intuitive on its own. This owing to the fact that usually good pitchers play for good teams, and--within each team's pitching staff--there is usually a pretty similar drop-off from the top guy on down to the replacement starters, so that while Zach Greinke is awesome and the Royals are poor, so too is Dan Haren awesome but his teammates weak.
Each rating is based on 100. (Mostly for looks. They ought to be based on 1.00, really.) To adjust an individual team line, just multiply the pitcher factor (Lincecum is 1.25, not 125) by the team rating. Simple.
The top ten from each league:
AL
1. Felix Hernandez 120
2. Zach Greinke 120
3. Justin Verlander 112
4. CC Sabathia 110
5. Brett Anderson 108
6. Ricky Romero 107.5
7. Shaun Marcum 106
8. Jake Peavy 105.5
9. Mark Buehrle 105
10. Matt Garza 104
NL
1. Tim Lincecum 125
2. Roy Halladay 121
3. Johan Santana 115
4. Dan Haren 114
5. Ubaldo Jimenez 113
6. Adam Wainwright 113
7. Chris Carpenter 112
8. Josh Johnson 112
9. Yovani Gallardo 110
10. Ricky Nolasco 108
10. Cole Hamels 108
For completeness, there are four pitchers with factors below 90: Kris Benson, Todd Wellemeyer, Dan McCutchen, Chris Narveson and the worst: Dontrelle Willis. Vegas hates them some Dontrelle Willis, so much that his mere presence in the Tigers rotation increases the factors of every other Detroit starter by a point or two.
Finally, some errata from the pitching numbers.
- The Braves' opening day starter, Derek Lowe, is only his team's fourth-best. Their best is actually their youngest, Tommy Hanson.
- Barry Zito's resurgence is not lost on Vegas. His first start rated around 95, but his most recent is up to 102. Mike Pelfrey of the Mets has had a similar increase, but to a lesser extent.
- Going the other way and getting worse: Rich Harden, John Maine, and sorta Jake Peavy.
- Jon Lester has overtaken World Series Hero Josh Beckett as the ace of the Red Sox.
- Vicente Padilla, Joe Torre's genius pick to start opening day for LA, is very nearly the Dodgers' worst starter.
- The recently-demoted-to-the-bullpen Carlos Zambrano was still very clearly rating as the Cubs' best starter.
- The most balanced pitching staff is pretty obviously the Reds, with four starters rating between 99 and 101, and the fifth is a rookie who overall rates at just 94, but his most recent game scored a 100. Honorable mention to the Angels, with all five between 97 and 102.
- The biggest possible mismatch within leagues would be Roy Halladay at home facing Pittsburgh's Dan McCutchen. Philly would be expected to win that game over 83% of the time. For an interleague game, CC Sabathia at home against McCutchen would produce a win expectation of over 88% for the Yankees.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Quite the Racket
This past weekend, I got into a small argument about the lottery. It was part of a larger discussion, but the key point was me telling the other person that playing the lottery is a very foolish thing to do if your intent is to actually win money at a reasonably fair rate, and that because a lot of poor people who don't know any better play the lotto regularly, it in effect functions as a tax against the lower class. My opposition in the argument was saying how the lotto is a good thing both because it's revenues help to fund public schools, and because it gives those same poor people some hope to win.
The point about state lotteries funding schools is true--they do--but so is the fact that a huge majority of people who play the lottery are low-income, so it's sorta impossible to argue that of the lotto income that funds schools, most of it is being paid by low-income people. That's a hidden but clear tax against anyone who plays the lottery. This has been said many times before, and I don't think my fellow arguer disputed this.
The point that bothered me as an analytical thinker was the one about how playing the lotto is a losing game, that the numbers are stacked against you. My assumption had been that of all the money coming in to the state for the lotto, they skim some off the top and pay out to the schools, then they skim a little more to cover the expense of running the lotto, and then the prizes constitute the rest. This is in fact how it works. What shocked me when I did some simple investigating this morning was how small the prize money is as a percentage of the intake. I'd assumed it might be something like 80-90%. Most sportsbooks will pay out around 91% of their income, keeping just 9% for themselves. Casino games have similar pay-out rates, if usually slightly higher (more fair to the player) even. Many slot machines actually pay-out much higher, up to 99% (mostly because the cost to operate them are so low--no dealers, etc).
According to the website of Mega Millions, the largest interstate lottery in the country, they pay out a ridiculous 50%. Stop and think about that for a minute. Playing the lotto is exactly like playing a 50/50 raffle, and those pretty obviously primarily exist as fund-raising tools. People who play them know that their buy-in is going to fund the school band, or the volunteer fire hall, or whatever else.
But people who play the lottery are not doing it to help fund others, in their minds when they buy the tickets, they are trying to win for themselves. Again, remember who buys most of the tickets. These people can't afford to be so charitable. Often, what they hope they're buying are literally tickets out of poverty.
And the system is only paying out 50%.
Let's do a math exercise to fully illustrate how stupid buying a lottery ticket is.
Assume one hundred $1 lotto tickets are sold. You buy one of them. Assume then that you're chance of winning is one-in-one hundred, or 1%.* Using the Mega Millions structure, the prize available to you is $50. You have a 1% chance of winning that prize, so your expected return for each $1 investment is 50 cents. On top of that, Uncle Sam will tax the winnings up to or around 50%. So your expected return drops to just a quarter. I don't need to tell you that this is epically bad.
Indeed, when you buy a lottery ticket, you do have hope to win a much larger prize. As a one-time, isolated occurrence, this could be considered a fun and harmless act. But done repeatedly, and spread out over millions and millions of people, it's just flabbergastingly stupid.
For the record, here is where the Mega Millions website says their ticket sales revenues go:
50% -- "goes back to the players as prizes."
35% -- "support government services in the member state." Here is your school funding.
15% -- "goes to retailer commissions and lottery operating costs." Here are bodega guys getting a tiny sliver, and the funding of all those terrible commercials, and rich people getting richer.
Finally, here is another factoid I encountered when searching. According to the Ohio state lottery website, the per capita play for all lottery games was $202. Let's guess that half of all people never played the lotto, so the share for those who did rises to $404. Let's then guess that half of those who played did so for less than $50 total (that's one per week still). The share for the remaining 25% of the population rises to over $750 per. And 25% is a horribly liberal guess as to the active lotto players. If there are 10% of the population that regularly plays the lotto, then those people are spending on average over $2,000 per year, even after subtracting out scratch-off winnings. If you want to pursue it more, you could guess that of these regular players, a lot are at poverty level and make less than say $20,000 per year, so that they're spending at minimum 10% of their gross income on lotto tickets.
This is not a small thing.
*I know that in big number-picking lotteries, the odds are independent of the number of entries, that you always have X% chance of getting 6 random numbers to match. I also know that multiple people can win the same prize in them. For the sake of the example, it will be easier to do it as though it's raffle-style. Anyways, the odds in my example above are far higher, since Mega Millions' odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 175,711,536.
Monday, April 26, 2010
My Baseball Ratings
Emphasis on the "My."
You remember a post several weeks ago, the one where I described my gambling epiphany, where I extolled the virtues of a purely objective analytic approach? Yes, of course. I was happy because I had found such a system, and put it to fairly successful use during the end of the college basketball season. But that system only worked for that sport, and of course that system was completely stolen, mostly from Ken Pomeroy's ratings.
So now that college basketball is over, and I've promised not to make subjective bets, I basically have to sit on my hands until the fall, when I could try stealing another system, this time applying it to football. Of course that's not a preferred course of action for someone like me, especially with probably my favorite sport--baseball--occurring daily over the next several months.
Baseball is a tricky sport to handicap, but it does provide about 15 games per day, and its every-day nature does force books to produce lines on extremely short notice, so the chances that a rogue line appears and blesses me with a wonderful edge opportunity are high. I only needed to find a rating system to do the work for me.
This would seem an easy task, what with the proliferation of high-level statistics and statistical analysts working on the game. Alas, most all of the work being done is for "legitimate" purposes, or, more often, on the individual level, not the team level.
As I thought about it, I came to believe that I could just create my own rating system, or at least I thought I would enjoy trying. What follows is the surprisingly satisfactory result of this effort.
My first choice in creating the ratings was to use actual closing gambling lines. I get them from Pinnacle, which runs a site that is the go-to spot for intelligent gamblers (no, I don't have an account there, so I officially am still not "intelligent"), largely because their lines are so good and fair. For each game played, I convert a team's moneyline into a win%, then adjust that based on home-field advantage. I then just average all the individual game ratings to produce an overall team rating. This is pretty simple, converting to an opponent-neutral requires more work. For each team, I had to input their schedule, and add a formula to the spreadsheet to automatically adjust the opponent's rating, again factoring in home-field. Once I took the time to enter this stuff once, I never have to do it again.
All that gives me both a team rating and an opponent rating for each team. To combine the two and create the master rating, I weight the team rating twice as heavily as the opponent rating, then regress the team rating toward it's preseason projection and the opponent rating toward an average opponent (I haven't yet decided how much to regress these, but for now I'm using 50%. If that is right--and it seems pretty good--then I'll just need to lower the amount as the season progresses).
Now that that is out of the way, let me reveal the actual results. First, the National League, updated through right now:
1. St Louis .54841
2. Philadelphia .53803
3. Atlanta .53528
4. Los Angeles .53119
5. Colorado .52630
6. Chicago .51071
7. Milwaukee .50699
8. Florida .50060
9. Arizona .50055
10. San Francisco .49811
11. Cincinnati .48843
12. New York .48437
13. San Diego .48317
14. Houston .46747
15. Washington .46143
16. Pittsburgh .45581
The great thing about the rating is that it doubles as an expected winning percentage, neutralized for home-field, against a theoretically .500 opponent.
To my eye, it looks like the extremes aren't quite extreme enough. St Louis would finish a 162 game season with just 89 wins given that percentage, and Pittsburgh with a relatively robust 73 (though you'd need to subtract one or two from PIT's total there because they wouldn't face a purely .500 schedule, just because they won't benefit from playing their sorry selves. Still, the numbers look just slightly too centralized). Over time I think this will work itself out, especially after I start regressing less, and anyway, if your system has a slight bunching problem rather than an outlier problem, then you're in much much better shape.
Here is the American League:
1. New York .56907
2. Boston .55092
3. Tampa Bay .53248
4. Minnesota .52342
5. Texas .51473
6. Los Angeles .50679
7. Chicago .50555
8. Oakland .49436
9. Seattle .49213
10. Detroit .48937
11. Cleveland .48890
12. Kansas City .47113
13. Baltimore .47070
14. Toronto .46143
A quick look at these and we can get an instant sense of where our gambling opportunities lie.
- Oakland jumps out. They're currently in first place, but still I think most people think they are terrible. Their pitching is actually quite good, and bookies know this. In fact, depending on neutral pitching matchups, Oakland playing at home ought to be favored over Minnesota every time, and over even Tampa some of the time.
- The Yankees are very very good. There is necessarily some public bias in the ratings, because lines are often goosed in favor of popular teams. This doesn't happen as much at a book like Pinnacle, but it's still there. It's instructive, though, to know that they've played the toughest schedule in the AL so far, they've been the favorite in every game but the three at Boston (this includes series at Tampa and at LA), and that even their individual game lines playing at Boston produced close to 50-50 expectations.
- The Florida Marlins, Atlanta Braves, and Washington Nationals are three teams all in the same division who rate higher than expected. This despite the fact that Philly is very nearly the top team. The NL East is for real. Washington has played the toughest schedule thus far in the NL, tougher even than the Yankees mentioned above. The Marlins have played 12 road games already, but were actually favored in six of them, including one against Philly and the first two games of the season at the Mets (special wow-factor that they were favored at NY on opening day, opposing Johan Santana). I've got two eyes on them for the time being.
- Easiest schedules so far: Phillies at .450, Detroit and Toronto at .477. Compare these to Washington at .546 and the Yankees at .532. Phillies have essentially played all games against Pittsburgh, while Washington has played all games against a team like St Louis.
I still need to add a category for future schedule strength. This will actually allow me to create predicted end-of-season standings, very valuable for futures betting on division winners. (I can tell you now without even having created these that Washington at 25-1 to win the NL East, while definitely a long shot, is just as definitely a positive value bet. To be positive value, the Nats would need to have just a 3.8% chance of winning the division.)
In addition to futures, this system will of course work for individual game lines. Just take the teams' ratings plus apply a personalized factor for each starting pitcher, and you've got a perfect line to compare to the bookie's offering.
I'm actually almost done figuring individual pitcher factors, too. I'll report back in the next couple days on that, since there are some interesting results. I'll also try to report back with observations and updated ratings, plus a report on the gambling results, once I feel confident enough to start placing wagers (I'm not far away).
You remember a post several weeks ago, the one where I described my gambling epiphany, where I extolled the virtues of a purely objective analytic approach? Yes, of course. I was happy because I had found such a system, and put it to fairly successful use during the end of the college basketball season. But that system only worked for that sport, and of course that system was completely stolen, mostly from Ken Pomeroy's ratings.
So now that college basketball is over, and I've promised not to make subjective bets, I basically have to sit on my hands until the fall, when I could try stealing another system, this time applying it to football. Of course that's not a preferred course of action for someone like me, especially with probably my favorite sport--baseball--occurring daily over the next several months.
Baseball is a tricky sport to handicap, but it does provide about 15 games per day, and its every-day nature does force books to produce lines on extremely short notice, so the chances that a rogue line appears and blesses me with a wonderful edge opportunity are high. I only needed to find a rating system to do the work for me.
This would seem an easy task, what with the proliferation of high-level statistics and statistical analysts working on the game. Alas, most all of the work being done is for "legitimate" purposes, or, more often, on the individual level, not the team level.
As I thought about it, I came to believe that I could just create my own rating system, or at least I thought I would enjoy trying. What follows is the surprisingly satisfactory result of this effort.
My first choice in creating the ratings was to use actual closing gambling lines. I get them from Pinnacle, which runs a site that is the go-to spot for intelligent gamblers (no, I don't have an account there, so I officially am still not "intelligent"), largely because their lines are so good and fair. For each game played, I convert a team's moneyline into a win%, then adjust that based on home-field advantage. I then just average all the individual game ratings to produce an overall team rating. This is pretty simple, converting to an opponent-neutral requires more work. For each team, I had to input their schedule, and add a formula to the spreadsheet to automatically adjust the opponent's rating, again factoring in home-field. Once I took the time to enter this stuff once, I never have to do it again.
All that gives me both a team rating and an opponent rating for each team. To combine the two and create the master rating, I weight the team rating twice as heavily as the opponent rating, then regress the team rating toward it's preseason projection and the opponent rating toward an average opponent (I haven't yet decided how much to regress these, but for now I'm using 50%. If that is right--and it seems pretty good--then I'll just need to lower the amount as the season progresses).
Now that that is out of the way, let me reveal the actual results. First, the National League, updated through right now:
1. St Louis .54841
2. Philadelphia .53803
3. Atlanta .53528
4. Los Angeles .53119
5. Colorado .52630
6. Chicago .51071
7. Milwaukee .50699
8. Florida .50060
9. Arizona .50055
10. San Francisco .49811
11. Cincinnati .48843
12. New York .48437
13. San Diego .48317
14. Houston .46747
15. Washington .46143
16. Pittsburgh .45581
The great thing about the rating is that it doubles as an expected winning percentage, neutralized for home-field, against a theoretically .500 opponent.
To my eye, it looks like the extremes aren't quite extreme enough. St Louis would finish a 162 game season with just 89 wins given that percentage, and Pittsburgh with a relatively robust 73 (though you'd need to subtract one or two from PIT's total there because they wouldn't face a purely .500 schedule, just because they won't benefit from playing their sorry selves. Still, the numbers look just slightly too centralized). Over time I think this will work itself out, especially after I start regressing less, and anyway, if your system has a slight bunching problem rather than an outlier problem, then you're in much much better shape.
Here is the American League:
1. New York .56907
2. Boston .55092
3. Tampa Bay .53248
4. Minnesota .52342
5. Texas .51473
6. Los Angeles .50679
7. Chicago .50555
8. Oakland .49436
9. Seattle .49213
10. Detroit .48937
11. Cleveland .48890
12. Kansas City .47113
13. Baltimore .47070
14. Toronto .46143
A quick look at these and we can get an instant sense of where our gambling opportunities lie.
- Oakland jumps out. They're currently in first place, but still I think most people think they are terrible. Their pitching is actually quite good, and bookies know this. In fact, depending on neutral pitching matchups, Oakland playing at home ought to be favored over Minnesota every time, and over even Tampa some of the time.
- The Yankees are very very good. There is necessarily some public bias in the ratings, because lines are often goosed in favor of popular teams. This doesn't happen as much at a book like Pinnacle, but it's still there. It's instructive, though, to know that they've played the toughest schedule in the AL so far, they've been the favorite in every game but the three at Boston (this includes series at Tampa and at LA), and that even their individual game lines playing at Boston produced close to 50-50 expectations.
- The Florida Marlins, Atlanta Braves, and Washington Nationals are three teams all in the same division who rate higher than expected. This despite the fact that Philly is very nearly the top team. The NL East is for real. Washington has played the toughest schedule thus far in the NL, tougher even than the Yankees mentioned above. The Marlins have played 12 road games already, but were actually favored in six of them, including one against Philly and the first two games of the season at the Mets (special wow-factor that they were favored at NY on opening day, opposing Johan Santana). I've got two eyes on them for the time being.
- Easiest schedules so far: Phillies at .450, Detroit and Toronto at .477. Compare these to Washington at .546 and the Yankees at .532. Phillies have essentially played all games against Pittsburgh, while Washington has played all games against a team like St Louis.
I still need to add a category for future schedule strength. This will actually allow me to create predicted end-of-season standings, very valuable for futures betting on division winners. (I can tell you now without even having created these that Washington at 25-1 to win the NL East, while definitely a long shot, is just as definitely a positive value bet. To be positive value, the Nats would need to have just a 3.8% chance of winning the division.)
In addition to futures, this system will of course work for individual game lines. Just take the teams' ratings plus apply a personalized factor for each starting pitcher, and you've got a perfect line to compare to the bookie's offering.
I'm actually almost done figuring individual pitcher factors, too. I'll report back in the next couple days on that, since there are some interesting results. I'll also try to report back with observations and updated ratings, plus a report on the gambling results, once I feel confident enough to start placing wagers (I'm not far away).
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Fandom
The quarterback of my favorite football team was suspended six games the other day. Suspended 3/8 of a season. Suspended, essentially, for being a disrespectful, slightly sociopathic asshole.
You could argue all you want over whether this punishment was just (and, at my instigation, my friends and I have been doing just that the last couple days), but I'm not here to do that.
I'm more interested now in what it means to be a fan of a team. Jerry Seinfeld had a joke where he said that rooting for sports teams is like rooting for laundry. Of course he's got a good point. Another team's villain could tomorrow very easily become your team's hero, and your opinion of him would change accordingly. I've heard many people hope for scandalous events to befall the star player of a rival team, not so much so that the player would be distracted and then perhaps fail, but to give the fan a more tangible reason to dislike him. The cliche of a player who is hated by seemingly everyone except fans of his own team is well-known.
I think a lot of this is made possible by the simple fact that football is a team sport, and fans can have loyalty not just to a specific player or a specific team, but to a more inanimate franchise, which is of course usually tied to the fan's hometown.
A lot of Pittsburgh fans have been upset in the last few years because the team's offense has been skewed toward passing. This is because Pittsburgh has a history of being a rushing team, and its fans identify not just with say the 2008 version of the team, but with the whole history of the franchise. It doesn't matter to them that their line can't run-block, or that their top running back is no good, or that the personnel dictates passing to be a good idea, because the team they root for usually runs the ball.
Even though I think this way of thinking is completely stupid, I do have sympathy with the idea. If you don't have something tangible in your team's identity to latch onto, then you really are basically just rooting for laundry.
Back to the main point, though--the suspended quarterback (who'll be referred to as as "Fathead" henceforth).
A Pittsburgh fan such as myself has two recent championship seasons, and Fathead was instrumental to both. Thus, for the most part, Fathead is/was rather beloved by the team's fans. No surprise there. As a player, he has his flaws, but they have almost always been overcome. As a person, he also has his flaws, but they have been kept innocuous enough so as to disregard. Not anymore. In light of his recent sexual assault accusation, lots of negatives stories have filtered out about the man, so much so that even though man of these are unfounded anonymous rumors and he's never been officially charged with anything, the breadth and the consistency of them paints a pretty clear picture of an genuine asshole (if not a criminal). So much of an asshole, in fact, that unless I'm mistaken, he's the first athlete to be suspended for substantial length without charge or conviction, and without doing anything to specifically harm his team, just sorta to besmirch the league itself.(1) So, we're talking about a real prick.
How am I supposed to feel about the prospect of rooting for this man? Should I support his return, because he wears the right color laundry? Should I support him because of the good experiences he provided me with during those two championship seasons? Should I support him because I've been supporting him for 6-7 years now? Should I hate him because he got suspended and therefore hurt the team? Or should I jeer him because he's an asshole? Does it make me a hypocrite, or worse, if I don't?
I think it's those last two questions that are the most interesting. Relating only to personal judgment and not the games themselves, is there really an arbitrary line over which an athlete can pass to cause a fan base to turn on him? Of there must be, but for cases which don't include a criminal conviction, it's hard to define. If a player were exposed as a blatant racist,(2) would that do it? What if a hidden camera followed him around and found out that he never recycled, always left his lights and AC on, and constantly spit on sidwalks? What if he never reciprocated with his friends and bought a round? What if he privately sold a car or something else expensive that he knew to be a lemon? What if all of the above?
Football is intrinsically a team sport. It isn't like baseball, where you can boo the first baseman who abused his pregnant wife, while still cheering for everyone else. If you boo the quarterback during a game, you're essentially booing the whole offense. (I suppose you could do the fantasy-football thing and hope for him to have a terrible game while the team still wins.)
Ultimately, none of this matters, of course. The team will succeed or fail on their own; your support will mean almost nothing. Most of the players are mature individuals who will handle this bit of sociological justice effectively. I think as a fan, the best thing for me is to let the players sort it out. If they come to the defense of the Fathead and want to move forward as a complete unit, then who am I argue.(3) Presumably, the aspirations of the players are the same as me: to win. If you are rooting for a team for a reason other than to hope for it to win, then you're really wasting your time. If it's only about the pageantry, don't pick a side. If it's mostly about feeling good morally and ethically, don't get invested in sports. Sports at its best is a perfect capitalist structure, a perfect meritocracy. Don't be a socialist when it comes to being a fan. Most importantly, don't delude yourself into thinking you care about much of anything other than winning.
(Now, if you'd like to hear my current, personal opinion on the Fathead matter: I'm willing to forgive and to root him to help my team win, but that's only because I don't really believe that he "raped" that girl. If I did, then this would be more of a black-and-white case, and I'd want the team to get rid of him, pronto.)
1. The best comparison I can think of is Milton Bradley, the baseball player, or Terrel Owens, both of whom were suspended just for being assholes. In their cases, though, their behavior was directly disruptive to their teams, and in fact it was their teams that did the suspending, not the league. Fathead's case is closer to a steroid suspension really, because it incites the league to act and to punish to maintain a show of decorum and justice for the public. But then there is still the issue of steroids being an offense against the integrity of the game, while Fathead's actions were just an offense against human judgment.
2. John Rocker is a perfect example here. I can't remember exactly, maybe a Braves fan can refresh me. I know they were ultimately glad to see him go.
You could argue all you want over whether this punishment was just (and, at my instigation, my friends and I have been doing just that the last couple days), but I'm not here to do that.
I'm more interested now in what it means to be a fan of a team. Jerry Seinfeld had a joke where he said that rooting for sports teams is like rooting for laundry. Of course he's got a good point. Another team's villain could tomorrow very easily become your team's hero, and your opinion of him would change accordingly. I've heard many people hope for scandalous events to befall the star player of a rival team, not so much so that the player would be distracted and then perhaps fail, but to give the fan a more tangible reason to dislike him. The cliche of a player who is hated by seemingly everyone except fans of his own team is well-known.
I think a lot of this is made possible by the simple fact that football is a team sport, and fans can have loyalty not just to a specific player or a specific team, but to a more inanimate franchise, which is of course usually tied to the fan's hometown.
A lot of Pittsburgh fans have been upset in the last few years because the team's offense has been skewed toward passing. This is because Pittsburgh has a history of being a rushing team, and its fans identify not just with say the 2008 version of the team, but with the whole history of the franchise. It doesn't matter to them that their line can't run-block, or that their top running back is no good, or that the personnel dictates passing to be a good idea, because the team they root for usually runs the ball.
Even though I think this way of thinking is completely stupid, I do have sympathy with the idea. If you don't have something tangible in your team's identity to latch onto, then you really are basically just rooting for laundry.
Back to the main point, though--the suspended quarterback (who'll be referred to as as "Fathead" henceforth).
A Pittsburgh fan such as myself has two recent championship seasons, and Fathead was instrumental to both. Thus, for the most part, Fathead is/was rather beloved by the team's fans. No surprise there. As a player, he has his flaws, but they have almost always been overcome. As a person, he also has his flaws, but they have been kept innocuous enough so as to disregard. Not anymore. In light of his recent sexual assault accusation, lots of negatives stories have filtered out about the man, so much so that even though man of these are unfounded anonymous rumors and he's never been officially charged with anything, the breadth and the consistency of them paints a pretty clear picture of an genuine asshole (if not a criminal). So much of an asshole, in fact, that unless I'm mistaken, he's the first athlete to be suspended for substantial length without charge or conviction, and without doing anything to specifically harm his team, just sorta to besmirch the league itself.(1) So, we're talking about a real prick.
How am I supposed to feel about the prospect of rooting for this man? Should I support his return, because he wears the right color laundry? Should I support him because of the good experiences he provided me with during those two championship seasons? Should I support him because I've been supporting him for 6-7 years now? Should I hate him because he got suspended and therefore hurt the team? Or should I jeer him because he's an asshole? Does it make me a hypocrite, or worse, if I don't?
I think it's those last two questions that are the most interesting. Relating only to personal judgment and not the games themselves, is there really an arbitrary line over which an athlete can pass to cause a fan base to turn on him? Of there must be, but for cases which don't include a criminal conviction, it's hard to define. If a player were exposed as a blatant racist,(2) would that do it? What if a hidden camera followed him around and found out that he never recycled, always left his lights and AC on, and constantly spit on sidwalks? What if he never reciprocated with his friends and bought a round? What if he privately sold a car or something else expensive that he knew to be a lemon? What if all of the above?
Football is intrinsically a team sport. It isn't like baseball, where you can boo the first baseman who abused his pregnant wife, while still cheering for everyone else. If you boo the quarterback during a game, you're essentially booing the whole offense. (I suppose you could do the fantasy-football thing and hope for him to have a terrible game while the team still wins.)
Ultimately, none of this matters, of course. The team will succeed or fail on their own; your support will mean almost nothing. Most of the players are mature individuals who will handle this bit of sociological justice effectively. I think as a fan, the best thing for me is to let the players sort it out. If they come to the defense of the Fathead and want to move forward as a complete unit, then who am I argue.(3) Presumably, the aspirations of the players are the same as me: to win. If you are rooting for a team for a reason other than to hope for it to win, then you're really wasting your time. If it's only about the pageantry, don't pick a side. If it's mostly about feeling good morally and ethically, don't get invested in sports. Sports at its best is a perfect capitalist structure, a perfect meritocracy. Don't be a socialist when it comes to being a fan. Most importantly, don't delude yourself into thinking you care about much of anything other than winning.
(Now, if you'd like to hear my current, personal opinion on the Fathead matter: I'm willing to forgive and to root him to help my team win, but that's only because I don't really believe that he "raped" that girl. If I did, then this would be more of a black-and-white case, and I'd want the team to get rid of him, pronto.)
1. The best comparison I can think of is Milton Bradley, the baseball player, or Terrel Owens, both of whom were suspended just for being assholes. In their cases, though, their behavior was directly disruptive to their teams, and in fact it was their teams that did the suspending, not the league. Fathead's case is closer to a steroid suspension really, because it incites the league to act and to punish to maintain a show of decorum and justice for the public. But then there is still the issue of steroids being an offense against the integrity of the game, while Fathead's actions were just an offense against human judgment.
2. John Rocker is a perfect example here. I can't remember exactly, maybe a Braves fan can refresh me. I know they were ultimately glad to see him go.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Of This World
I pass a homeless person almost every morning on my way to the subway. I'm almost endlessly fascinated by homeless people, so let me share this.
I assume she is a woman, but it's hard to tell because she wears the same layers of street-grey sweatshirts with a knit hat pulled fairly low. She pushes a shopping cart that seems always to have about four or five garbage bags stuffed full of empty cans and bottles. The garbage bags are always full, which makes me wonder if she ever cashes them in.
The interesting thing about this woman is that, just like me walking to the subway, she has a routine. In fact, she seems to stick to her routine better than I do, such that I can judge my punctuality by where on the street I see this woman. She comes from somewhere to the north of Borough Hall, stops at the bagel cart on Boerum just south of Joralemon, buys a doughnut (which I'm sorta confident is always a bavarian cream), then walks it and her bulging cart down to between State and Atlantic. She stops here, leaving her cart on the street side of the curb, because there is a large concrete stairway that juts out from the front of this building, the kind that comes out and has a landing which then itself splits down to either side and takes up half the sidewalk space. She chooses the stairs that split to the south and sits down in the shelter there on the lower steps and deliberately unwraps and eats her doughnut. When finished she goes on to Atlantic and turns east, thereby ending our fleeting cohabitation.
The time it takes her each day to pass through the same portion of the world as I do is maybe 20 minutes. The time it takes me to do the same is maybe 5 minutes, but then as I said I'm not as punctual as she is, and my appearance along that stretch of Boerum could be anywhere from 7:55am through 8:20am. There is no way that this woman is not timing her moves.
Does she have a watch? Where did she get it? How does she replace the battery? There is an obvious answer here--that she could very easily just look up at the clocktower near Atlantic Terminal and find the time--but that doesn't answer the deeper curiosity: why check the time at all?
Why does she hold to this schedule? The doughnut-seller will be at that corner for several hours, so it's not like she has to restrict herself on account of him. In the summer months, there is daylight for a very long time before 7:45am, so it can't be that she simply wakes up with the sun and gets her breakfast.
She has to be consciously regimenting her day, perhaps just for it's own sake (sanity?). I'm going to make a gross assumption here, but I don't think she has much of a reason to follow a rigid schedule on any given day. Maybe a soup kitchen serves lunch during a certain window in the middle of the day, and maybe she knows a restaurateur who gives her food at a general hour, but these aren't the kinds of appointments that must be strictly attended at exact times, nothing such that she would do the same things every morning within less than five minutes difference from day to day.
I think that this woman, when she wakes up every morning, knows from habit and experience how much time she has in that day. She must have a few things that she knows she will do, such as buy that bavarian cream doughnut, but outside of those, what happens? Presumably she collects cans, but there is hardly a schedule for that.
What I'm perhaps awkwardly trying to get at is that this woman makes a conscious effort to keep herself on a schedule. Her brain is still organizing. She hasn't totally checked out from this world. And yet there she is, utterly homeless, not the kind who exhorts people on the subway. I've never seen her with another person. Aside from the doughnut guy, I don't think I've ever seen her acknowledge the existence of another human being. This is a person who has been homeless for a long time. And yet she seems to have the same kind of approach to a day as any one of us more-fortunate people. She has her own unknown purpose, but still she has it.
I'm not really sure what the point is for me writing all this. The more I think about it, the more questions seem to pop up. Why, mostly. I guess that's what it means to be fascinated by something.
I assume she is a woman, but it's hard to tell because she wears the same layers of street-grey sweatshirts with a knit hat pulled fairly low. She pushes a shopping cart that seems always to have about four or five garbage bags stuffed full of empty cans and bottles. The garbage bags are always full, which makes me wonder if she ever cashes them in.
The interesting thing about this woman is that, just like me walking to the subway, she has a routine. In fact, she seems to stick to her routine better than I do, such that I can judge my punctuality by where on the street I see this woman. She comes from somewhere to the north of Borough Hall, stops at the bagel cart on Boerum just south of Joralemon, buys a doughnut (which I'm sorta confident is always a bavarian cream), then walks it and her bulging cart down to between State and Atlantic. She stops here, leaving her cart on the street side of the curb, because there is a large concrete stairway that juts out from the front of this building, the kind that comes out and has a landing which then itself splits down to either side and takes up half the sidewalk space. She chooses the stairs that split to the south and sits down in the shelter there on the lower steps and deliberately unwraps and eats her doughnut. When finished she goes on to Atlantic and turns east, thereby ending our fleeting cohabitation.
The time it takes her each day to pass through the same portion of the world as I do is maybe 20 minutes. The time it takes me to do the same is maybe 5 minutes, but then as I said I'm not as punctual as she is, and my appearance along that stretch of Boerum could be anywhere from 7:55am through 8:20am. There is no way that this woman is not timing her moves.
Does she have a watch? Where did she get it? How does she replace the battery? There is an obvious answer here--that she could very easily just look up at the clocktower near Atlantic Terminal and find the time--but that doesn't answer the deeper curiosity: why check the time at all?
Why does she hold to this schedule? The doughnut-seller will be at that corner for several hours, so it's not like she has to restrict herself on account of him. In the summer months, there is daylight for a very long time before 7:45am, so it can't be that she simply wakes up with the sun and gets her breakfast.
She has to be consciously regimenting her day, perhaps just for it's own sake (sanity?). I'm going to make a gross assumption here, but I don't think she has much of a reason to follow a rigid schedule on any given day. Maybe a soup kitchen serves lunch during a certain window in the middle of the day, and maybe she knows a restaurateur who gives her food at a general hour, but these aren't the kinds of appointments that must be strictly attended at exact times, nothing such that she would do the same things every morning within less than five minutes difference from day to day.
I think that this woman, when she wakes up every morning, knows from habit and experience how much time she has in that day. She must have a few things that she knows she will do, such as buy that bavarian cream doughnut, but outside of those, what happens? Presumably she collects cans, but there is hardly a schedule for that.
What I'm perhaps awkwardly trying to get at is that this woman makes a conscious effort to keep herself on a schedule. Her brain is still organizing. She hasn't totally checked out from this world. And yet there she is, utterly homeless, not the kind who exhorts people on the subway. I've never seen her with another person. Aside from the doughnut guy, I don't think I've ever seen her acknowledge the existence of another human being. This is a person who has been homeless for a long time. And yet she seems to have the same kind of approach to a day as any one of us more-fortunate people. She has her own unknown purpose, but still she has it.
I'm not really sure what the point is for me writing all this. The more I think about it, the more questions seem to pop up. Why, mostly. I guess that's what it means to be fascinated by something.
Friday, April 16, 2010
A Quote about Perspective
Apparently, Bob Feller thinks Lou Gehrig was something of a drama queen.
Years ago, Feller was asked what he thought about Gehrig's famous quote ("Today......I consider myself...........the luckiest man....on the face of the earth") and he responded thusly:
"He's wrong. I am. I'm still alive."
Well, then.
Years ago, Feller was asked what he thought about Gehrig's famous quote ("Today......I consider myself...........the luckiest man....on the face of the earth") and he responded thusly:
"He's wrong. I am. I'm still alive."
Well, then.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Rigorous Fealty to an Idea
This is from an article in this month's The Atlantic magazine. The whole article is basically an in-depth profile of Timothy Geithner, and it's worth reading. I'll give you the passage below mostly without comment, only saying that it's usually helpful to take a measured response to situations, especially those that are rather complex. That the current news culture in this country behaves in just the opposite manner is disappointing. That most of the population follows right along is far worse.
Geithner plainly has no patience for what he describes as the obdurate unwillingness of colleagues to subordinate their desire for superficial impact to the larger vision. “That’s exactly the dilemma,” he said. “The stuff that seemed appealing in terms of sharp discontinuity, Old Testament justice, clean break, fix the thing, penalize the venal, would have been dramatically damaging to the basic strategy of putting out the panic, getting growth back, making people feel more confident in the future—solving it without putting trillions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money at risk unnecessarily.”
All of this is extremely interesting because of what it seems to reveal about each man: Summers, whose knock has always been that he’s an academic trapped in a world of theory, has become the politically minded one, while Geithner, the savvy realist, now evinces rigorous fealty to an idea. But it’s even more interesting for what it says about Obama. At every turn, he has sided with Geithner.
In late December, the Commerce Department reported that the economy grew at a rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter, ending four straight quarters of decline. (That figure leapt to 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter.) Then, later that day, Obama told The Washington Post in an Oval Office interview that the most important thing he’d accomplished in his first year was “to ensure that the financial system did not collapse.” Then Geithner went on NPR and stated flatly that there would be no double-dip recession—by Washington standards of caution, a provocative move. Even with unemployment high and anger at Wall Street intense, the mood at Treasury is quietly exultant because the imminent possibility of another depression has disappeared and growth has resumed, all at a fraction of the cost estimates being bandied about last year when it still looked like the government might need to take over large banks.
Geithner likes to point out that after a year on the job, he’s spent $7 billion recapitalizing financial firms while private investors have put up $140 billion. TARP money is being repaid faster than anyone imagined, and if Obama gets the $90 billion tax on big banks he proposed in January, it could eventually be recouped. It’s likely that the cost to taxpayers will be much less than the 5 to 10 percent of GDP that the Cleveland Fed says is typical for a crisis, and possibly as little as 2 to 4 percent—about the cost of the much smaller savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. A recent Treasury study indicates that it could be less than 1 percent. By any reasonable standard, this would be an impressive achievement, and it would owe a great deal to Geithner’s strategy.
And yet, a year into his presidency, the overwhelming criticism of Obama is that he is taking too much control of the economy and spending too much money—which must really sting, because by avoiding nationalization and its colossal costs, he has probably saved an incredible sum. “We’re getting killed from the right and from the left on the basic strategy,” Geithner told me. “The right argues that we unnecessarily socialized the entire financial system. The left says we wasted money on things they’d have rather used to help real people directly. As you might understand, I have no sympathy with either. Neither critique is right. To the right, I would say: ‘No, the strategy we adopted was overwhelmingly designed to try to make sure that private markets came and took us out of this as quickly as possible. That was a conscious choice, a shift in strategy, and a more pro-market approach that will help us deal with our fiscal challenges.’ And to the left, I would say: ‘And that saved the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars that you can use to meet the main challenges we face as a country—health care, education, infrastructure, and our long-term deficit.’”
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Hot Air
Weathermen are worthless. Something I love to do when people ask what the weather will be like today is to say: "Like yesterday, just a little different." Sure it's nice to know whether or not to expect rain, but it's extremely rare for a temperature swing from one day to the next to be at all relevant.
Weathermen know they possess minimal value, and so they have figured out over time how to make themselves seem more important. Go to the TV listings for The Weather Channel sometime. Here are some of the names of shows to be broadcast in the evening this week: "Storm Stories," "Storm Riders," "When Weather Changed History," and Joe Versus the Volcano.(1) They need to remind us constantly of those rare instances of extreme weather so that we live in enough fear that we feel compelled to ask them when to expect the next Big One. Here's a tip: expect the average.(2) Expect small changes from day to day. It doesn't take a specialized degree to record those, it takes a thermometer and at least one functioning eyeball.
I was thinking about this because it's hot today. It was also a little breezy. Why don't we ever hear reports about what the wind chill is in summer? Or the heat index in winter? It's because those would only serve normalize any extremes, whereas the way they do it of course accentuates extremes. If it's July and the temperature is 82, then that's no big deal, but if the humidity makes it feel like 94, well shit, now you can get people talking. But that's not the whole story, though. Maybe the wind is also blowing, so that if you apply the winter wind chill factors to the heat-indexed temperature, then maybe the true "feels like" reading becomes something like 84. Back to where you started, not being really concerned about the weather.
Try not to forget that weathermen are like people in infomercials: always making a big fuss about something, always try to sell you something that you don't need.
1. Yes, Joe Versus the Volcano. I'm just as amused by that as you are.
2. As someone has increasingly viewed the world in a probabilistic manner, this is yet another area where people are stupid. Did you ever notice how in the 10-day forecasts that weather.com publishes, that the temperatures on the last couple days will always return close to the average? Of course. They don't know much more than you what it will be like more than a week from now, so they just make sure their predictions are essentially copies of the historical average.
Weathermen know they possess minimal value, and so they have figured out over time how to make themselves seem more important. Go to the TV listings for The Weather Channel sometime. Here are some of the names of shows to be broadcast in the evening this week: "Storm Stories," "Storm Riders," "When Weather Changed History," and Joe Versus the Volcano.(1) They need to remind us constantly of those rare instances of extreme weather so that we live in enough fear that we feel compelled to ask them when to expect the next Big One. Here's a tip: expect the average.(2) Expect small changes from day to day. It doesn't take a specialized degree to record those, it takes a thermometer and at least one functioning eyeball.
I was thinking about this because it's hot today. It was also a little breezy. Why don't we ever hear reports about what the wind chill is in summer? Or the heat index in winter? It's because those would only serve normalize any extremes, whereas the way they do it of course accentuates extremes. If it's July and the temperature is 82, then that's no big deal, but if the humidity makes it feel like 94, well shit, now you can get people talking. But that's not the whole story, though. Maybe the wind is also blowing, so that if you apply the winter wind chill factors to the heat-indexed temperature, then maybe the true "feels like" reading becomes something like 84. Back to where you started, not being really concerned about the weather.
Try not to forget that weathermen are like people in infomercials: always making a big fuss about something, always try to sell you something that you don't need.
1. Yes, Joe Versus the Volcano. I'm just as amused by that as you are.
2. As someone has increasingly viewed the world in a probabilistic manner, this is yet another area where people are stupid. Did you ever notice how in the 10-day forecasts that weather.com publishes, that the temperatures on the last couple days will always return close to the average? Of course. They don't know much more than you what it will be like more than a week from now, so they just make sure their predictions are essentially copies of the historical average.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Last Trip
I spent three-plus days in Chicago this past weekend, mostly just to visit cause it's Sara's spring break but also to attend our baby shower organized by her sister. I was one of four males attending this shower, all of whom were immediate family members. Baby showers just aren't attended by men. I'm not here to argue that, but I do wonder why we as a gender have been so easily spared them. The main point of a baby shower is for the guests to give baby-related presents to the expectant mother. Since only women can actually have babies, it makes some small sense that only women will give gifts to them, but what if a woman doesn't have very many female friends, what if more than normal of her closer friends are male? Does she then forfeit the ability to receive as many gifts? And what if you are a male and one of your best friends happens to be a woman, does she even invite you to her shower, or do you attend? Being a best friend, of course you'd be both expected and happy to give your friend something, but for this case the arbitrariness of your gender seems to confuse things.
A baby shower is even more simply a vehicle for gift-giving than is a wedding shower, and naturally wedding showers are attended by both men and women. At least at a wedding shower, there is a semi-reasonable desire for guests to meet whichever of the couple that they might not know; this doesn't apply for a baby shower, which is attended by all of the woman's friends who she'd presumably hang out with anyway. The whole point is the gifts. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I were a woman with a single bank account, I think this is one double-standard that I'd actually be pissed about. Glass ceilings, sure, but we're talking about the tight financial noose of the baby shower.
In other Chicago news, this trip had an odd vibe to it in that it's the last time we'll be there together until we've moved there. (I will be making a couple solo trips out to job-hunt, but not with Sara.) There was a little more realism when we walked around a prospective neighborhood or we talked about what we liked about a place. It's also the first time I've been there since Sara got pregnant, so my perspective has changed. In both of these aspects, I'm much more fully prepared to make this move.
We've been pretty set about moving out there this summer for a long time now, but in most of those plans, it was more just an idea or a suggestion, with plenty of room for me to be hesitant or to harbor inhibitions. I guess this trip finally got me fully on board, finally sold Chicago to me.
As we talked about what aspects of a neighborhood were appealing to us, I even started to become more and more willing to live in her hometown of Evanston, rather than somewhere inside the city itself.* I'm going to be 30, with a new baby, so what's the big difference in living in a trendy neighborhood for me? Being in Evanston vs being in Lakeview or Wicker Park or Lincoln Square or wherever is basically just a difference of 15 minutes of commuting time for me to get to work. I'm not going to be going to bars with the same frequency, so moving from having 50 within a mile of my apartment to maybe 10-15 doesn't really matter to me. One of the things I've learned about NYC is that unless you're really getting after it, the bar scene here is really governed by the law of diminishing returns. The real difference between a spectacular bar city like NYC and any other only really manifests itself to someone like me in the variety of options available. You want to play bocce inside? How about sit outside in a 2,000 person (more? I don't know) beer garden? Maybe indulge in a microbrew tasting menu for dirty cheap just down the block? You want to have several different options of places to buy cheap growlers? You want to play pool for free? You want a top-scale cocktail bar? The diviest dive there is? Maybe a place with free pizza, or hot dogs, or popcorn, or cheese? Maybe pitchers for $4 and tons of sports on Sundays? Any kind of rooftop? A shoeless boardwalk bar? A Czech bar, a German biergarten, a Japanese sake house, a Puerto Rican place, a Chinese speakeasy...............this is the greatness of going out in this city, that I can have literally whatever I want. But I just listed a lot of different desires, and I'm not going to want all of them very often, maybe just once a year or less. More often, I'll just want to go to a regular place. Removing this smorgasbord of opportunity will maybe affect my life once every month or two, and that's not even really considering that Chicago isn't exactly limited to just strip-mall bars or Applebees.
Back to my point. I'm happy about our move and I'm mentally ready. I'm also extremely well-equipped for having a baby. Literally, I mean, we now have in our tiny apartment basically everything we might need to care for this baby, and we're still about three months away. There is an infant car seat in my closet where I used to keep sweaters. There is a diaper pail tucked under our table, a changing pad back behind our kitchen storage, a couple sheep's worth of clothes in the bedroom, and much more, even a stroller (currently collapsed). Three months will prove to be about enough for three people to be living in our little place.
* In some ways, this represents only a label, as Evanston is connected on the city's transit line, so it's not like some kind of car suburb. That the city line is drawn where it is as pertains to Evanston-v-Chicago, it's a wholly arbitrary. Rogers Park, the adjacent neighborhood that sits inside the city line, is actually a much less desirable place to live. The real difference in this case of city/"suburb" is that since Evanston is very traditionally liberal, the taxes are higher there, but that in turn successfully leads to better public services. Since we'll at least initially be renting, that tax burden won't really trickle down to us quite as much as it would to an owner.
A baby shower is even more simply a vehicle for gift-giving than is a wedding shower, and naturally wedding showers are attended by both men and women. At least at a wedding shower, there is a semi-reasonable desire for guests to meet whichever of the couple that they might not know; this doesn't apply for a baby shower, which is attended by all of the woman's friends who she'd presumably hang out with anyway. The whole point is the gifts. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I were a woman with a single bank account, I think this is one double-standard that I'd actually be pissed about. Glass ceilings, sure, but we're talking about the tight financial noose of the baby shower.
In other Chicago news, this trip had an odd vibe to it in that it's the last time we'll be there together until we've moved there. (I will be making a couple solo trips out to job-hunt, but not with Sara.) There was a little more realism when we walked around a prospective neighborhood or we talked about what we liked about a place. It's also the first time I've been there since Sara got pregnant, so my perspective has changed. In both of these aspects, I'm much more fully prepared to make this move.
We've been pretty set about moving out there this summer for a long time now, but in most of those plans, it was more just an idea or a suggestion, with plenty of room for me to be hesitant or to harbor inhibitions. I guess this trip finally got me fully on board, finally sold Chicago to me.
As we talked about what aspects of a neighborhood were appealing to us, I even started to become more and more willing to live in her hometown of Evanston, rather than somewhere inside the city itself.* I'm going to be 30, with a new baby, so what's the big difference in living in a trendy neighborhood for me? Being in Evanston vs being in Lakeview or Wicker Park or Lincoln Square or wherever is basically just a difference of 15 minutes of commuting time for me to get to work. I'm not going to be going to bars with the same frequency, so moving from having 50 within a mile of my apartment to maybe 10-15 doesn't really matter to me. One of the things I've learned about NYC is that unless you're really getting after it, the bar scene here is really governed by the law of diminishing returns. The real difference between a spectacular bar city like NYC and any other only really manifests itself to someone like me in the variety of options available. You want to play bocce inside? How about sit outside in a 2,000 person (more? I don't know) beer garden? Maybe indulge in a microbrew tasting menu for dirty cheap just down the block? You want to have several different options of places to buy cheap growlers? You want to play pool for free? You want a top-scale cocktail bar? The diviest dive there is? Maybe a place with free pizza, or hot dogs, or popcorn, or cheese? Maybe pitchers for $4 and tons of sports on Sundays? Any kind of rooftop? A shoeless boardwalk bar? A Czech bar, a German biergarten, a Japanese sake house, a Puerto Rican place, a Chinese speakeasy...............this is the greatness of going out in this city, that I can have literally whatever I want. But I just listed a lot of different desires, and I'm not going to want all of them very often, maybe just once a year or less. More often, I'll just want to go to a regular place. Removing this smorgasbord of opportunity will maybe affect my life once every month or two, and that's not even really considering that Chicago isn't exactly limited to just strip-mall bars or Applebees.
Back to my point. I'm happy about our move and I'm mentally ready. I'm also extremely well-equipped for having a baby. Literally, I mean, we now have in our tiny apartment basically everything we might need to care for this baby, and we're still about three months away. There is an infant car seat in my closet where I used to keep sweaters. There is a diaper pail tucked under our table, a changing pad back behind our kitchen storage, a couple sheep's worth of clothes in the bedroom, and much more, even a stroller (currently collapsed). Three months will prove to be about enough for three people to be living in our little place.
* In some ways, this represents only a label, as Evanston is connected on the city's transit line, so it's not like some kind of car suburb. That the city line is drawn where it is as pertains to Evanston-v-Chicago, it's a wholly arbitrary. Rogers Park, the adjacent neighborhood that sits inside the city line, is actually a much less desirable place to live. The real difference in this case of city/"suburb" is that since Evanston is very traditionally liberal, the taxes are higher there, but that in turn successfully leads to better public services. Since we'll at least initially be renting, that tax burden won't really trickle down to us quite as much as it would to an owner.
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