So long Santana

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About 7 years ago, there was a “Free Johan Santana” movement in Minnesota that wanted the Twins to move the young left-handed phenom into the starting rotation. After Santana spent the majority of four years in the bullpen and another half-season at Triple-A, the Twins finally gave him a permanent spot in the rotation to begin the 2004 season. He immediately became the best pitcher in baseball, winning the AL Cy Young by going 20-6 while leading the league with a 2.61 ERA and 265 strikeouts.

In four seasons as a full-time starter Santana went 70-32, winning two ERA titles and three strikeout crowns while capturing a pair of Cy Young awards and deserving a third. It was an amazing metamorphosis. At 21 years old Santana was a little-known Rule 5 pick who showed some promise, at 23 years old he was an ace-in-waiting who dominated from the bullpen or rotation, and at 25 years old he was the best pitcher in baseball. Three years later he’d be the best pitcher in baseball and all of us in MN were pretty damn happy.

This week Johan was traded to the Mets for 4 prospects. While getting 4 unknowns for the best pitcher in baseball seems like a travesty, you can’t really think about it like that. Johan was going to be lost to free agency next year, so the Twins really were trading one season of the best pitcher in baseball for 4 prospects, which really isn’t that bad. The Twins have had great success in getting prospects and turning them into great players – in fact, that’s how we got Johan – so i’m not going to say all is lost

In a perfect world, we’d sign Johan and he’d be the best pitcher in baseball for another 10 years and he’d enter the Hall of Fame witha Twins cap on his head. The world just doesn’t work that way unfortunately, especially when you’re a small market team. So, all i can do is thank Johan for brightening my day every 5 games and wish him well.

I’m just happy he didn’t go to a Boston team, with Moss, Ortiz, and Garnett they’ve done enough.

Now THIS is a Company

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The United States Beer Drinking Team!

What is it? From the website:

The U.S. Beer Drinking Team™ ( USBDT ® ) is the first team dedicated to the millions of passionate beer drinkers in the United States. The USBDT’s goal is to promote the “sister and brotherhood of beer” while promoting responsible drinking.

This is a cool company and what’s even better is that it’s actually profitable. The founder was just on Oprah – apparently women are the biggest customers. Women seem to buy a lot of U.S. Beer Drinking Team T-shirts for their guys. They are available in 16,000 convenience stores as well as the Targets and big stores.

They even have an official netcasting station. Apparently the business started as a joke – definitely not a laughing matter anymore 🙂

Patriots Perfect? Don't Talk to Me About iIT.

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I am pretty sick of hearing about the Patriots, their quest to perfection and all that.  I am forever destined to curse the entire Boston area for stealing all of the good Minnesotans.  First is was David Ortiz and Doug Mientkiewicz going to the Red Sox, then it was Moroney going to the Pats and Kevin Garnett going to the Celtics.  The final straw was seeing Randy Moss catching passes as a Patriot. It just drives me nuts.  It’s as if Minnesota is the JV team to New Englands Varsity squad.  It just hurts so much

I did like Klosterman’s recent article about the meaning of perfection and how Brady and the Pats relate.  Check it out here.

Go Giants

The short head is human, middle fat is social and long tail is algorithmic

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This was a quote i found on Chris Anderson’s  – the author of The Long Tail – and it refers to how search will be done in the future.  The short popular stuff will be pre-loaded results by humans, the medium will be populated by friends and the obscure long tail is found by algorithms.  The quote from the blog post is:

“The short head will be human, the fat middle social and the long tail algorithmic” Still, that single sentence is worth another book. I won’t write it, but I’ll bet someone else does.

It is an interesting way to think about it.  Of course, it is all ad-supported and it does make a good case for Mahalo.

Downtown Owl

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There’s a new novel by Chuck Klosterman who as many of you know is one of my favorite writers.  While his past 4 books were all non-fiction, this new book, called Downtown Owl, is a fiction novel that takes place in 1983 North Dakota.

I think it’s a pretty good book and it definitely captured my attention. My big issue with the book is that it’s all description and details. There is very little interaction or plot.  It’s a 300 page summary of a time and people in North Dakota with some interesting anecdotes.  It’s funny, witty and well-written but it’s not necessarily a story.

That said, it’s very Klosterman-ish and has some great elements.  As usual he explores deeply the frivolous. There are entire chapters about a theoretical fight  between a hulking giant of a boy named Grendal and a smaller, wrong-side of the tracks type kid name Cubby who loves to fight.  With a typical Klostermanish metaphor, the scenario is more than just a “who would win” but a nice little metaphor for what you believe in the world.  Do traits like physical appearance or genes win out in our world or will characteristics like desire and passion?  Peolpe will lean different ways and that debate is by far the best part of the book.

One thing i really like is how he sets up the small town feel.   One character in high school relates Owl to the book 1984 – the Orwell book his class was assigned saying:

“Everyone knew everything. So how was ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ a dystopia? It seemed ordinary. What was so unusual about everyone knowing all the same things?”

“People always say that nothing changes in a small town, but — whenever they say that — they usually mean that nothing changes figuratively. The truth is that nothing changes literally: It’s always all the same people, doing all the same things.”

Discussing the differnce between literal thoughts and figurative is something Chuck loves to do.  He’s typically done it with popular culture but in Downtown Owl he does it with a 1980’s North Dakota town.  And it makes for a pretty fun read

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Music lessons from Seth

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Speaking of music (my last post was), a good blog post from Seth Godin about music lessons. To read it all, go here. The main points were:

0. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now.
Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.

1. Past performance is no guarantee of future success
Every single industry changes and, eventually, fades. Just because you made money doing something a certain way yesterday, there’s no reason to believe you’ll succeed at it tomorrow.

The music business had a spectacular run alongside the baby boomers. Starting with the Beatles and Dylan, they just kept minting money. The co-incidence of expanding purchasing power of teens along with the birth of rock, the invention of the transistor and changing social mores meant a long, long growth curve.

As a result, the music business built huge systems. They created top-heavy organizations, dedicated superstores, a loss-leader touring industry, extraordinarily high profit margins, MTV and more. It was a well-greased system, but the key question: why did it deserve to last forever?

It didn’t. Yours doesn’t either. Continue reading “Music lessons from Seth” →

What are the top albums of 2007?

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Do you know what the top 10 albums of 2007 were?  Seven years ago the top 10 included ‘N Sync, Eminem, Britney Spears, Creed, Nelly, Backstreet Boys, and Destiny’s Child.  These are all mainstream pop stars that everyone’s heard of and everyone knew that everyone was listening to this stuff.  Last year’s top albums were:

  1. “Noel”/Josh Groban: 3,699,000
  2. “Soundtrack”/ High School Musical 2: 2,957,000
  3. “Long Road Out of Eden”/Eagles: 2,608,000
  4. “As I Am”/Alicia Keys: 2,543,000
  5. “Daughtry”/Daughtry: 2,497,000
  6. “Soundtrack”/Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley: 2,489,000
  7. “Minutes To Midnight”/Linkin Park: 2,099,000
  8. “Dutchess”/Fergie: 2,064,000
  9. “Taylor Swift”/Taylor Swift: 1,951,000
  10. “Graduation”/Kanye West: 1,892,000

In this list there are kids albums (#2 and #6), an album that went straight to Wal-Mart (Eagles), a country album (#9) and an American Idol (#5).  The top album in 2000 sold ~10 million copies.  The top album here had 3.5.  It really is all niches nowadays.  Nobody is going to kill it the way that GNR and the boy bands did.

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