Thoughts About Primaries...

Last night, CNN hosted the final debate to take place before the Florida Republican Primary, which is on Tuesday 1/31.  The debate featured the four remaining candidates: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum - a pool that has been significantly narrowed over the previous three contests in the primary process.  By all accounts Romney, the once and future frontrunner, stood his ground against Newt Gingrich, who is generally considered the better debater.  Each candidate's performance in the debate says a lot about their chances of winning the Republican nomination for President, and about their chances of challenging incumbent Barack Obama.  But rather than picking apart their responses to questions about the hot-button issues or analyzing their speech patterns and facial expressions for insight into such crucial intangibles as confidence and leadership qualities, let's take a look at how they all got here.

Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are the only two holdover candidates from the 2008 Republican primaries.  Last election cycle, Romney had some epic clashes with eventual nominee John McCain during the debates, and eventually dropped out of the race in early February.  The former Massachusetts Governor can be recognized by his decidedly Mormon family (an endless stream of smiling, healthy-looking offspring, all dressed in white) and his eerily Manchurian Candidate-esque appearance and mannerisms.  Ron Paul resembles your friend's hip grandpa: he's the oldest candidate on the ballot (even a year older than McCain, although he doesn't look it), he wears a lot of sweaters, and he's never shy about rambling on about his crazy ideas.  The former gynecologist's politics lean more towards Libertarian than Republican, but the GOP has been kind to him during his 20+ years serving in the House of Representatives for Texas, so he remains on the party's ticket.

In his first ever presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich was surging after his double digit victory in last weekend's South Carolina primary, but after last night's debate, pundits are quick to announce that his momentum is waning.  Gingrich served as speaker of the House during the Clinton administration, and is quick to take a bunch of credit for the period of peacetime and economic expansion that Clinton presided over during that time, the longest in the country's history.  Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is still hanging in this race, refusing to throw in the towel mostly based on his win in Iowa.  He won by just 34 votes over Romney, and the contest would have instantly been headed to recount-town were it anything but a non-binding caucus.

The most talked-about candidate who didn't even make it to the primaries has to be Herman Cain, he of the questionable sexual history and policy plans taken straight out of a videogame.  Michele Bachmann took her haunting stare out of the race after Iowa, and Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman followed suit after New Hampshire (despite the latter candidate garnering a strong 3rd place finish with 17% of the vote).  Huntsman - who was a member of a band called The Wizards while growing up in Palo Alto, CA - endorsed fellow Mormon Mitt Romney, while Texas Governor Perry endorsed Gingrich, setting the stage for their all-out battle in South Carolina.

Pundits claimed that South Carolina primary voters pride themselves on voting for the eventual nominee.  With Romney looking like the clear favorite leaving New Hampshire, it's interesting that they didn't jump on the bandwagon and effectively wrap this thing up before Florida.  The fact that they picked Gingrich says a lot about the importance of debates and drives home the point that a poor or effective performance can make or break an election - as if Nixon didn't teach us that lesson effectively enough back in 1960.  But with Romney leading in delegates and in the polls, coupled with his triumph at last night's debates, puts him in a pretty darn good position going forward.  That is, unless the Ron Paul Revolution spreads across the nation (as we all know is inevitable, even if it takes a different name).  If you live in Florida, make sure to vote this coming Tuesday.  And if you hail from anywhere else, just clap your hands if you believe...

Thoughts About Football...

Let's Try to Understand some of the Football that happened Last Weekend

I have, in my hands, a copy of the Sports Illustrated 2011 NFL Preview. It's got Atlanta Linebacker Curtis Lofton on the cover, because Peter King had picked the Falcons to win the Super Bowl. As it happens, they were eliminated one week ago by the New York Giants in the Wild Card round, who (after yesterday's win against the defending champion Green Bay Packers) are now slated to go up against the San Francisco 49ers - with a trip to the Super Bowl in the balance.

In the NFL Preview, each team has a 2-page spread - a pattern I hope to see the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview return to in the future. There's an article about each team, a profile on the coach, a "Spotlight" on a particular player, and of course the Projected Lineup. Some might say it's useless to look at pre-season rankings this late in the year, since various changes throughout the year will cause most of them to be out-of-date or inaccurate. But they are useful to see how the teams and the players got to where they are now (the playoffs) from where they were then (potential teams, only existing within the pages of a magazine).

I have the pages marked for 4 teams: the Baltimore Ravens, the New England Patriots, and the aforementioned Giants and Niners. These 4 teams will all play next week, and 2 of those 4 will go to the Super Bowl, or so I'm led to believe. This is a pretty important cultural event, the Super Bowl, if for no other reason than the commercials. And Sports Illustrated is a magazine whose predictions are fun to make a story out of. So let's take a look at the men who SI's writers think were likely to factor into the teams that could play in the big game.


New England Patriots
Projected Finish: 1st in AFC EAST
Actual Finish: Same
Spotlight on: Chad Ochocinco, one of the team's three starting Wide Recievers. Now he sat out most of last game, after compiling just 276 yards the whole season. The top-performing player on Tom Brady's offense last week was TE Rob Gronkowski with 145 yards - SI describes him as "highly skilled". The article mostly features the new defense surrounding powerhouse NT Vince Wilfork (who incidentally had 1.5 sacks in their trouncing of the Denver Broncos).

Baltimore Ravens
Projected Finish: 2nd in AFC NORTH
Actual Finish: T-1st in AFC NORTH
Spotlight on: Anquan Boldin. The team's top Wide Receiver was expected to gel better with QB Joe Flacco (pictured (in the magazine, as well as above)) after spending a year playing together. Well, he earned 887 yards this year... after 839 the year before. Not sure if it's working out how they planned, but he's still the team's #1 WR - he had a team-high 79 yards in last week's win over the Houston Texans. I have no idea what stats to use to judge Quarterbacks, but pro-football-reference has him at an 80.9 Passer Rating, a drop from 93.6 the previous year...

New York Giants
Projected Finish: 3rd in NFC EAST
Actual Finish: 1st in NFC EAST
Spotlight on: Jonathan Goff, the would-have-been-4th year Linebacker, had he not missed the whole season with a knee injury.
WR Hackeem Nicks gets the picture in the article. He's supposed to "hold together New York's untested receiving corps" - all signs point to success, as he trailed rookie Victor Cruz in total yards, but still hit the 1,000 mark himself. However it has been Nicks's turn to shine in the playoffs, combining for 280 yards and 4 touchdowns in the Giants' two postseason games.

San Francisco 49ers
Projected Finish: 4th in NFC WEST
Actual Finish: 1st in NFC WEST
Spotlight on: Aldon Smith, a Linebacker who in 2011 somehow ended up with 14.0 sacks in just 16 games... The clear focus of the article was on Jim Harbaugh, their new Coach, recently departed from Stanford (and the brother of Ravens coach, John Harbaugh. There's a chance for the brothers to meet in the Superbowl, if things turn out right.

I'll certainly be pulling for that eventuality as I watch the games next week. Maybe at that point I will also know enough about the teams in question to actually make some meaningful observations about the Big Game.

Top Players: AL & NL 2011

While the analysis of Box Office numbers is fun and insightful and economically significant, let's not forget the original focus of this blog: Baseball statistics. Using my patented Baseball Database, I have calculated the Top Players in each position in each league, which I now present in lineup form.

Some pretty impressive players all around. A good mix of young players and veterans, expected performers and breakout stars. Let's break them down further, not by position or by team, but by how they were expected to do from a fantasy standpoint. Granted, my system is going to be a little incongruous, cuz I'm using mlb.com's rankings and a form of calculating fantasy points (swp) that has been outdated for many years. But I believe that in combining the two, I'll arrive at a sort of Hegelian synthesis of fantasy evaluation methods.


Four (4) of our players ranked within the Top 10 according to MLB: 1B Miguel Cabrera (who anchored my fantasy team btw), SS Troy Tulowitzki, LF Ryan Braun (who won this year's NL MVP, prior to a positive PED test), and 1B Joey Votto. By contrast, there were four (4) total batters who ranked out of the top 100: CF Curtis Granderson (who surpassed all expectations by destroying his career-highs in HR, RBIs, runs and walks), C Miguel Montero (high-ranked catchers are very hard to come by, since catchers as a position don't produce a lot of points), SS Asdrubal Cabrera (a legitimate breakout All-Star season), and LF Alex Gordon. Gordon, a former 3B prospect [see also Ryan Braun] who everyone had just about given up on, was by far the lowest-ranked starter among all others on the team (458).


The highest-ranked pitcher was Roy Halladay (16). The two hurlers who accomplished the near-superhuman feat of breaking 3,000 points were ranked 32 (Kershaw) and 50 (Verlander). One starting pitcher from each league had surprising and unexpected seasons: Ian Kennedy (232) and James Shields (240). Non-Closer Relief Pitchers rarely contribute enough points to warrant a roster spot (unless your league measures Holds, in which case you'll need a couple of the best). Craig Kimbrel was this year's Rookie of the Year, so it's understandable why he was ranked 213 - just 9 slots higher than teammate Jonny Venters, who had a shot to win the closer role right up until opening day. Valverde, who performed significantly worse than Kimbrel in terms of both stats and ability to control his emotions, ranked 117.



This is all part of an ongoing process to use these numbers to hone in on different players' fantasy value, but updates on that project will have to wait, as there is a whole real world out there to see and experience.

New Year, New Lists!

Well, we're back from a glorious 2011 Holiday Season, one that wrapped up the last year before the coming consciousness shift of 2012. With the baseball season over, action shifts to offseason trades, new contracts for free agents, and exchange of arbitration figures. Very little is happening in my Batman world since beating Arkham City - I'm going to remain spoiler-free and skip the 6-minute preview of Dark Knight Rises, and I hardly think the New Years Eve marathon of the 1960s Adam West TV series should garner much coverage on the blagosphere. To occupy this dark cold time of the year, I have been engaging in the creation of two sortable databases that cover the two new subjects of this blog.

The first is a comprehensive look at the 2011 baseball season, with a wealth of information for each qualifying player, including position, swp (for each team in the case of a trade or other mid-season acquisition), birthday, hometown, draft position, and school history. The other is a list of the biggest movies that came out in 2011, listed by release date, distributor, North American opening weekend gross (so we can compare movies from the beginning of the year to later releases), and production company (pending).

As is the case with most database work, there is a lot of number crunching that has to go into play before any interesting or publishable findings can come out, but here are some preliminary findings about how the major distributors did at the box office this year, in terms of opening weekend ticket sales:


1. Warmer Bros. Pictures
$623.7 million

The leader in market share for 2010 continued its dominance last year, grossing the most opening weekend ticket sales out of all the major distributors. Of course, it never hurts when your slate includes the biggest release in movie history (let alone of 2011): Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 ($169.2m). The company also boasted the film with the 6th highest opening weekend sales: comedy sequel The Hangover Part II ($85.9m). (The next biggest comedy on their slate was Horrible Bosses, which missed the $30m mark by less than $2m.) Green Lantern, a movie inspired by a property from Time Warner-owned DC Entertainment (formerly DC Comics), grossed $53.2m in its opening weekend, a figure sure to be dwarfed by next year's fellow DC behemoth The Dark Knight Rises. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was good for $39.6m - who knows how many sequels that franchise will churn out. It's no wonder the film unit accounts for about 40% of parent company Time Warner's bottom line.

2. Paramount Pictures
$535.8 million

With 16 notable releases in 2011, the film distribution arm of media conglomerate Viacom (see also MTV Networks, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and the BET family) took home the silver medal. Its top-opening film - Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon - made $97.9m in its debut weekend, good for the third-highest opening of the year. A pair of Marvel Comics movies - Thor and Captain America, both foreshadowing next year's ensemble epic The Avengers - were basically locked up in a tie for second: $65.7m and $65.1m respectively. Next on their list is another three-quel, this one in the horror genre rather than an effects-driven event film (Paranormal Activity 3: $52.6m). Three animated movies featuring high profile celeb voices (Kung Fu Panda 2, Rango, and Puss in Boots) each grossed over $30m in their opening frames. Rounding out their $30m+ releases is Super 8, Paramount's second collaboration with director J.J. Abrams in the last three years.

3. Universal Pictures
$330.7 million

The studio's biggest tentpole, Fast Five, had just the 5th highest-grossing opening of the year (just edging out Hangover II with $86.2m). The only other movies on its slate that broke the $30m mark were animated Easter comedy Hop ($37.5m) and disappointing period/sci-fi actioner Cowboys & Aliens ($36.4). Bridesmaids, like Horrible Bosses before it, also missed out on the $30m milestone, but what it lacked in B.O. it made up for in breakout performances. If we consider Focus Features (also owned by Universal's parent company NBCUniversal, which is itself owned by Comcast and GE), the grand total goes up by about $36m (the imprint's biggest release of 2011 was Hanna with a mere $12.4m)... but it's not enough to move it up in the rankings, and I consciously didn't want to get too much into the corporate game on this post.

4. 20th Century Fox
$301.2 million

News Corp's film unit didn't make any real big splashes, with their two biggest releases (X-Men: First Class and Rise of the Planet of the Apes) languishing in the mid $50m range. Rio once again proved the lucrativity of animated features with $39.2m in its opening weekend. Specialty division Fox Searchlight contributed barely $3m to the till, but it's hoping to bank big in awards season with Oscar contender The Descendants and pretentious-favorite The Tree of Life.

5. Columbia Pictures
$282.5 million

Here's where the corporate ownership game really comes into play: if we combine Columbia's take with the other banners that operate under Sony Pictures Entertainment (TriStar Pictures, Screen Gems, and Sony Pictures Classics) the total goes up to $382.9m, and the conglomerate as a whole rockets up to third place on the year. Combined or not, the company's biggest grosses were Battle: Los Angeles and The Smurfs (tied with $35.6m) followed closely by old TV show remake The Green Hornet and comedy Bad Teacher. A pair of Adam Sandler comedies round out the slate (Just Go With It and Jack and Jill).

6. Walt Disney Pictures

$205 million

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides ($90.2m) and Cars 2 ($66.1) led the way for the Mouse House, while throwback The Muppets missed the $30m mark by less than $1m. A corporate note: if we add the $107.5 million grossed by Disney-owned Touchstone (led by Real Steel, Gnomeo & Juliet, and The Help) the Disney machine eclipses the News Corp machine.

7. Summit Entertainment
$178.5 million

Summit made basically all its income from The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 ($138.1m). Its next highest release, Source Code, garnished just over 1/10th of the haul made by the vampire/werewolf tween drama. The final corporate note of this post: if this week's deal that will see Lions Gate buy Summit for $400m had occurred last year, the combined moviemaker would have grossed $244.1m between them.