Mad Men Character Death Pool Odds
Last night I concluded a 6-week odyssey to watch all seasons and thorougly catch up with the acclaimed AMC series. This show is near and dear to my heart. I have a brother who is 13 years older than I who went to work as a paper boy and newsstand clerk at Ahmann’s newstand back in the early 1960′s. For whatever reason, he began collecting MAD magazines, and I believe he had every issue from mid-1960 through 1968 or ’69 or so. He also had a healthy collection of the paperback book reprints of MAD’s greatest hits. When he moved on to college, marriage, career, etc, he left all of that behind in our house, and our mother decided to pitch it all.
My 12-year-old self rescued that collection, and became enamored with the juvenile humor of MAD during those classic years. What connects that to Mad Men the TV series is that the 1960′s were MAD Magazine at its high point, where the source of parody was 70% aimed at consumer culture and advertising. MAD’s offices were indeed on Madison Avenue in New York City then, and thus they took great glee in skewering the Ad Man Culture they were awash in.
I should also point out that I grew up at the tail end of the era we see in Mad Men. I well remember parties where as a kid I was either sent away to a babysitter or confined to my bedroom or the finished basement. I well remember dinner parties and kids playing outside after dark (how the heck else do you play hide and seek?) Mad Men brings me instant nostalgia, either for those experiences, or the virtual experiences I inherited by reading a decade’s worth of old MAD Magazines. I do love the show so much.
And so, without further ado, I give you the Popnarcotic Mad Men Character Death Pool Odds, to be updated with the passage of time. These odds are strictly for reference. Please kids, no wagering.
(Assumes death by the end of Season 6, sometime in 2013/14, show currently expected to go at least 7 seasons, with broad hints that 7 may be the final one.)
(To be dead, the death needn’t happen on camera, but only needs to be referenced in the show itself by characters.)
Midge: 1-3
Bert Cooper: Even
Herman “Duck” Phillips: 5-2
Dr. Greg Harris: 4-1
Carla: 6-1
Grandma Pauline: 7-1
Dawn Chambers: 8-1
Freddie Rumsen: 9-1
Glen Bishop: 10-1
Thomas Vogel (Pete’s Father-in-law): 12-1
Bobby Draper: 15-1
Rebecca Pryce: 18-1
Roger Sterling: 20-1
The Field (Any character with 5 or more separate episode appearances in the show’s run whose death is acknowledged by characters on the show): 25-1
Michael Ginsberg: 30-1
Henry Francis: 30-1
Trudy Campbell: 30-1
Betty Draper: 35-1
Stan Rizzo: 35-1
Pete Campbell: 40-1
Harry Crane: 40-1
Megan Draper: 40-1
Lane Pryce: 50-1
Joan Harris: 50-1
Sally Draper: 50-1
Don Draper: 200-1
Peggy Olson: 500-1
What Might Really Be Wrong With Albert.
I’ve noted with some interest in the last few days that some west coast MLB scribes are asking “What’s wrong with Albert Pujols?” because #5 doesn’t have any home runs yet this season (49 AB). I think the question they should be asking is this: why isn’t Albert Pujols walking anymore?
Last season Albert walked 61 times in 651 plate appearances, which is a rate of walking once every 10.67 times at bat. That’s the least he’s walked in his career.
His rate in years previous to 2011:
2010: walked every 6.8 times
2009: walked every 6 times
2008: every 6.16 times
2007: every 6.86
2006: every 6.89
2005: every 7.12
etc.
What’s obvious is this: up until 2011, Albert Pujols was a phenomenally selective hitter. His lack of strikeouts and high walk rate suggest the obvious: a Hall of Fame-like ability to judge the strike zone and mash pitches within it. Perhaps only fellows like Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial possessed that kind of ability among hitters of the post-war era.
A quick visit to FanGraphs reinforces this. Those fine folks track how often a guy swings at pitches outside the strike zone. That’s abbreviated as O-Swing%, but is frequently referred to as “chase rate”–the rate at which a guy chases pitches out of the zone.
For a sizable portion of his career, Albert Pujols had a ridiculously low chase rate below 20%. In fact, from 2002 through the 2009 season, Albert’s average chase rate covering all those seasons was below 20%. That’s phenomenal.
In 2007 his O-Swing was 18.3%. In 2008 it jumped to 21.6%. In 2009 it went up again to 22.9%. No biggie. Those are still ridiculously low chase rates.
They show something of a trend, though, don’t they?
In 2010 Albert’s o-swing% really jumped: 27.5%. That’s almost mortal.
In 2011: 31.8%. That’s…well, that’s about what a lot of other great ballplayers put up–guys who don’t have 10-year, $250m contracts.
So far in 2012, and again the sample size is small: 44.7% chase rate.
Where are we going with this?
For that part of the deal, we want to look back at some of the things that Albert and his hitting coaches have written or said in public about his swing, back a few years ago. For starters, there’s this fascinating story from 2006. Apparently in 1921, some researchers at Columbia University in New York decided to try to measure the hand-eye coordination (and how that affected things like decisions to swing) for a fellow named Babe Ruth. GQ Magazine persuaded Albert to undgergo the same set of tests at Washington University in St. Louis. Result: Pujols, like Ruth, possessed an almost supernatural hand-eye coordination. Like Ruth, he had an amazing ability for his brain to make effective use of information given by his eyes and act upon it in fractions of a second. Additionally, you’d frequently hear his manager, hitting coach, and peers talk about how Albert seemed able to wait a fraction of a second longer than any other hitter in the game, with a swing so lightning quick that he was able to see a pitch as a strike with more assuredness, and then able to act on that information and mash the ball.
All of which leads me to believe that Albert’s swing when he was a younger man with better eyes and faster reflexes was a miracle of hand-eye coordination unlike anything we’ve ever seen…unless you’re old enough to have seen Ted Williams hit. What I guess we’re starting to see is that Albert has to “cheat” a little on his swing, and has to start it earlier than he used to, and the result is that he swings at more pitches out of the zone than ever before. Albert is still Albert. Even swinging at pitches outside the zone, he’s still going to make contact with far more of them than anyone else out there…but less often is that contact going to be him squaring up a pitch.
I think the guy will hit .300-ish for the Angels, and I think he’ll untrack the power and sock 30-35 HR for them. But I also am not sure I expect him to be able to do that 4 years from now, much less 6 or 10.
Father Time.
If there’s a baseball autobiography I want to read that hasn’t been written yet, that one would belong without a doubt to Jamie Moyer of the Phillies. I just want to read him talking about all the stuff he’s seen and the weird, astonishing career path he’s taken, winding his way through 4 decades of baseball.
Jamie is 49 years old. He originally came up to the majors in 1986 as a member of the Chicago Cubs. Ronald Reagan was president. Harry Caray was calling games on WGN. Iran Contra was a few months away from being discovered.
His first game in the bigs, he went up against Steve Carlton. Carlton was a teammate of Lou Brock and Kenny Boyer. He pitched to Mike Schmidt that day. In that era, Moyer faced Andre Dawson and Tim Raines. He faced current broadcaster Orel Hershiser when they both were young pitchers. Angels manager Mike Scoscia had claimed the Dodgers starting catching job as a 27-year-old when Jamie Moyer faced him in 1986.
Jamie’s Cub teammates that year included Dennis Eckersley; Eck was a starter then. When Moyer first arrived in the big leagues, Eckersley–now a Hall of Famer–had zero career MLB saves. Eckersley retired with 390 saves…Eckersley recorded all 390 saves during Moyer’s career, and since Eckersley’s retirement, Jamie Moyer has won 154 games.
When Moyer pitched for the Cubs, they made a September call-up of a kid 3 years younger than Jamie Moyer. That kid’s name was Greg Maddux. Greg Maddux won 355 major league games, all during Moyer’s career. Maddux retired 2 years ago.
When Jamie Moyer joined the Cubs, Ryne Sandberg–one of the top five second basemen of all time–was 26 years old. He is in the Hall Of Fame now. Rick Sutcliffe, now an ESPN commentator, was a teammate. Another Cub rookie called up the same year as Jamie Moyer was Rafael Palmiero.
Jamie has had a fascinating career. He had a few decent years in his 20′s with the Cubs…and then he and Palmiero were traded to Texas. Moyer got hit pretty hard as a Ranger and never was as good as he was as a Cub, and the Rangers ended up releasing him outright after the 1990 season. No blame to the Rangers at all–Moyer himself would likely tell you he stunk up the joint.
George Herbert Walker Bush was president when this happened.
Moyer then signed on with the Cardinals and spent a season shuttling back and forth from the big club to their AAA team, all the while pitching mostly out of the bullpen. At the end of the year, the Cardinals released Moyer outright, and with reason: Moyer didn’t pitch very well at all.
Jamie signed a deal with the Cubs for the ’92 season, but couldn’t recapture the magic of his early career with them. When he didn’t make the team out of spring training that year, they cut him. Moyer signed on as a minor leaguer in the Detroit system, but at the end of that year in AAA ball, the Tigers declined to offer Jamie a contract for ’93.
Bill Clinton was president by then.
Moyer signed a deal with the Orioles, made the team, and had his best season since 1988. He worked three seasons with the Orioles, but by the end of the 1995 season–yep, 17 years ago–Baltimore decided the 33-year-old Moyer was in the twilight of his career and declined to offer him a new contract. Moyer got a minor league deal with the Red Sox for ’96, made the team in spring training, and spent the first half of the season pitching mainly as a reliever. That year–powered by Randy Johnson and a young Ken Griffey Jr, the Mariners were in the hunt for the playoffs and decided to send utility outfielder Darren Bragg to Boston for Moyer. The Mariners put Moyer in the rotation, and Jamie got 11 starts going 6-2 with Seattle and posted a 3.31 ERA.
Something had clicked on for Moyer bigtime. For the next 9 years he was a mainstay of the Mariner rotation, winning 20 games twice. In 2005 the Mariners–in full rebuilding mode–traded Jamie to the Phillies. By now George W. Bush was president. The Mariners and Phillies both probably figured the 43-year-old Moyer was in the twilight of his career.
Moyer went 5-2 after joining Philadelphia, and then won 14, 16, and 12 games respectively for them in the next 3 seasons. Moyer also finally got himself a World Series ring when the Phils won the title in 2008.
In 2009 Moyer started off fine, but then leveled off and eventually started getting hit hard–harder than he’d been hit in years, maybe decades. A lot of folks, myself included, wondered if maybe 46-year-old Jamie Moyer might finally be arriving at the end of the road. 2010 went better for him for a while; at one point he was 9-6 with two complete games, including a 2-hit shutout. In July of that year it was apparent though–something was wrong with Moyer’s 47-year-old left arm. After pitching the first inning of a game against St. Louis, Moyer came out of the game. A few days later a diagnosis confirmed: Jamie needed major elbow reconstructive surgery. It seemed as if his career was over. For young men in their teens and twenties, that surgery can take over a year to recover from, with no guarantees of ever being able to make it back.
And so here we are in the Spring of 2012, a time when even an old man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of baseball love. Jamie Moyer is in the spring training camp of the Colorado Rockies in Arizona, trying to make that ballclub as a non-roster invitee. The Rockies became a team 18 years ago; Moyer was already a 7-year veteran of the major leagues. Jamie will be 50 in November. If he sticks with the Rockies, he’ll have a chance to break one of the oddest of baseball records. In 1932, a 49-year old Cincinnati pitcher named Jack Quinn won a ballgame. Moyer is already older than Quinn was when he won that game, so if Moyer can make the Rox, and wins at least one game this year, he’ll be the oldest player in major league history to have done so.
Last night in the warm desert air of a Cactus League game facing the San Francisco Giants, Jamie Moyer pitched 4 innings, giving up no hits or walks and striking out 4 with a fastball that never registered faster than 78 mph on a radar gun.
On behalf of forty-something old guys everywhere, Jamie Moyer, we’re rooting for you.
I’ll Just Put These Here…
(In case you were unaware, legendary German band Kraftwerk is playing all 8 of their studio albums at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art as 8 separate shows. Unfortunately, tickets are limited to 2 tickets per person, and only to see one particular album/show. This has cause much angst, and for once “angst” is the perfect word to use to describe here in a Kraftwerk post.)
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Happy Kontiki Valentine’s Day!
Tomorrow finally sees the release to general public the deluxe reissue of Cotton Mather’s Kontiki album. Which, if you have read anything here, you probably know, and you know that I think you should buy it if you don’t already have a copy.
If you’re on the fence, hard as that is for me to fathom, you can hear the whole album–bonus disc and all–by hitting this link:
Cotton Mather’s Deluxe Reissue of Kontiki
The first 14 songs are the original album. Songs 15 and thereafter are the bonus disc. Some of those bonus tracks–like “Pine Box Builder” and “Baby Freeze Queen” would end up on the third and final (?) Cotton Mather record, The Big Picture, which due to being on Rainbow Quartz worldwide remains in print and available. If you want a highlight from the bonus stuff, give the “electric” version of “Spin My Wheels” a shot. Really, really good.
Lily Dreams On
I’ll take a flyer and say that 99% of the folks on the planet have never heard of the band Cotton Mather. They were from Austin, Texas, and were active in the 1990′s.
That said, if you’re visiting this blog, there’s a much better chance that you have. If you’re a friend of mine personally, there’s an even better chance that I’ve forced you to listen to Cotton Mather and forced you to listen to me pontificate on their greatness. So…here comes some more of that.
Last year Cotton Mather frontman (and current leader of the band Future Clouds And Radar, another fave here) Robert Harrison launched a Kickstarter.com campaign to try to reissue Cotton Mather’s second–and perhaps most-heralded album, a gem of a thing called Kontiki. Harrison’s aims were modest. He needed $20,000 to hit the goal that would allow him to repackage and re-release a remastered version of the album with a bonus disc of outtakes and some extensive liner notes.
Word got out. Within about a week or so Harrison had his $20,000. In a few more weeks he had way more than that. The reissue happened. For those of us lucky sods who got in on the Kickstarter thing, we got our copies of Kontiki some time after this past Thanksgiving. For everyone else, the album comes out next week. Check it:
You want to own this for the music, obviously. But let’s say you’re one of the roughly 500 people or so that I burned a copy of the original Kontiki for over the last 15 years, and you still have that crumbling CD-R, or you ripped it to a hard drive long ago. You still want this, if only for the outtakes disc but especially for the liner notes. The liner notes have all sorts of background on the band, the recording, and where it fit with the times, written by journalists, musicians, and producer Brad Jones. Robert Harrison then comes along to do a track-by-track breakdown of each song. And that, finally, is what this post is about.
If I’ve never run across you or been able to blather in your ear about Cotton Mather, there’s still a chance you heard them if you’re a fan of the excellent but short-lived TV show Veronica Mars. At the center of the show is the mystery of the death of Veronica’s best friend, a girl named Lilly in the show, and in the final episode of season 1 the series used the Cotton Mather song “Lily Dreams On” in it’s entirety. (Turns out show creater Rob Thomas is a huge Cotton Mather fan, and he had Paul Rudd lip synching to another Cotton Mather tune from Kontiki on season 3.)
So. For the agnostic, the one song folks might know from Cotton Mather is “Lily Dreams On”. Here’s that track. (Forgive the poor dude who put that up for the misspelling of the band’s name.)
The song opens with this line:
“Lily I hope you picture me in your dreams”
Later in the first verse you get this evocative doozy:
“‘Close your eyes, baby I’ll dry mine’”
Echoes through the phone”
I’d always thought that song was a lovelorn song about a girl. It sort of is.
And sort of, it isn’t.
The song is about Robert Harrison’s mother. In the liner notes, Harrison mentions that “Lily” was his mom’s childhood name. Further, he states that “This song was far too personal for me to ever sing live.”
And so now go back and revisit those song lyrics. Why does the singer want Lily to picture him in her dreams? Not because she’s a long lost lover, but because he wants the affirmation from someone he seems to have lost (I’m guessing here, obviously. If Mrs. Harrison is alive and well and I’ve missed the mark, then mea culpa. For my own meaning, though, I need that to be the narrative.) Hitting even more like a ton of bricks is that second couplet.
I’d always thought that it was Harrison trying to reassure and assuage the sadness of a girl on the other end of the phone. Knowing now who “Lily” likely is, though, it seems like the conversation echoing through the phone is coming the opposite direction. The person saying “Close your eyes baby, I’ll dry mine” may well be a mother delivering exceptionally bad news to a son and trying to still somehow make things seem OK. And so now you listen to the song, and the chorus, and the whole thing takes on an entirely different meaning. There’s more poignancy and sense of loss (and perhaps hope?) here than I’d ever imagined.
It is that universal theme then, that strikes me now so deeply. My own mother is probably nearing the end of her days. She has been doing OK, but not well. She has been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease for over a decade now and is in the latest stages, unable to talk, recognize anyone at all, or do much of anything besides eat, sleep, and, for lack of a better word, exist. That’s a far cry from the lady who once read to her six-year-old son the entire Lord Of The Rings trilogy a chapter at a time at bedtime, or the lady who constantly encouraged my creative efforts–lame as they were, or the lady who never seemed to not be singing at all hours of the day around the house. No, when I see her now, she’s in a very nice nursing home and she’ll smile and sort of nod…and sometimes she makes what sounds like words but which aren’t, really. She seems to like to have her hands held. She likes to be hugged. That’s pretty much all you get.
Before her disease completely claimed her brain but after I knew her diagnosis, Mom would talk to me about some of the vivid dreams she would have. Not nightmares, just dreams of her life and past. I have always wondered if somehow in her ravaged mind, that maybe there isn’t a sort of coherent state that she still has access to in her dreams, even now. I hope, I suppose. I hope that my own Lily still pictures me in her dreams. I hope that far from this, she dreams on.
Differentiating The Douchebag From The Martyr.
This little .jpg has shown up about three times on my facebook feed over the last two days. Have a look.
(Click me to embiggen).
That fellow on the far left, the one we’re supposed to feel sorrow and outrage for is a guy named Kim Dotcom, nee Kim Schmitz. Let’s first clear some air: Mr. Schmitz has not been sentenced to 50 years in prison. He was only arrested last week, and has not yet even been extradited to the United States from New Zealand, where he was placed in custody by police there. So there’s that. But there’s more here.
Kim Dotcom did not get arrested for “sharing” anything. Kim Dotcom was arrested for being the man behind the popular file upload/download site Megaupload, because Megaupload–according to the Feds–knowingly engaged in internet-based IP piracy and conspiracy of same.
Let’s understand what’s going on here. Megaupload is/was one of many sites that are known as “cyberlockers”. Others include Rapidshare, Filesonic, Mediafire, etc. These sites all have similar models for what they do and how they make money. They offer a service by which users can upload files. When the file is uploaded, the site generates a unique URL address which the user can then share with others who may then download the file. When users go to these sites, they’re typically assaulted with a variety of ads, popups, and perhaps even adware/malware downloaded to their own computers. Users who wish to download a file are normally given a choice involving a slow download, or a faster one available with a monthly membership, typically in the $10/30 days model. There are legitimate uses for such sites, but they are also a haven for uploaded copyrighted music, movie, and game files as well.
To understand what happened here, it’s also necessary to understand how these cyberlocker sites save money and space in bandwidth and storage. If you’re uploading a file, you may not be the only person who’s done that with that particular file, and in the exact same format. It would be inefficient for these sites to store all these exact same files as different files on their servers, and the uploading of these files likely clogs their bandwidth, so what they do is “hash” their files. Let’s say that you’ve uploaded a public-domain movie to a cyberlocker. That cyberlocker sees this, and simply gives you a unique URL for the movie file that you can share, but doesn’t have you actually upload anything. They know they’ve already got a copy in the same format and don’t want to waste the space on redudancy. Where this comes into play on Megaupload is that folks were uploading movies, music, and games that were under copyright. When Megaupload hashed the files, it would simply generate unique URL addresses for users to share, all of which pointed to the same file on their servers. So…if a thousand pirates uploaded a Radiohead album in the same format, (which happens; you, Mr. Pirate, are not the unique snowflake your parents tell you that you are), Megaupload would generate a thousand different, unique URL’s, but they’d all point to the same file.
Now we get to the problems. Youtube (which isn’t a cyberlocker, but which I included to prevent jackholes from commenting “What about Youtube!”)and various cyberlocker sites that aren’t in trouble have been diligent about removing content when a copyright holder complains about it. For right now, that’s enough to satisfy US laws; if you are a musician and see your copyrighted music being shared and want to stop that from happening, you file a complaint and the offending site removes the file. What Megaupload would do (and you can see this coming, can’t you?) was to remove the offending URL that had been complained about, but KEEP the actual file on their servers, with potentially thousands of other URL’s out there still pointing to it and making it a valid link. In seized emails and chatlogs, Kim Dotcom of Megaupload and various others in the company actually discuss this practice as a matter of policy and allegedly admit to fostering piracy through their site.
And so that’s bad.
But there’s more.
I understand that there are a lot of folks out there in the “Information just wants to be free!” camp. I get that, even if I disagree with it. Let’s be clear here, however. Kim Schmitz/Dotcom did not “share” anything. Mr. Dotcom made a ridiculously posh living off of it. By visiting Megaupload, he got money off of clickthrough’s from advertisers. He got money off of subscribers who paid him $10/month. He “shared” files in the same way that McDonald’s “shares” food: you give them money, they give you the goods.
How much money did this “file sharer” make off the copyrighted works of others?
Here’s his house. You tell me.
(If you’re struggling with this, Kim Dotcom’s net worth is estimated at $200 million USD)
There are legitimate and useful cyberlocker services out there, and this is not a condemnation of them as a blanket by any means. Even more than that, many of these sites are smart enough to put their server farms in European countries with more forgiving “fair use” laws than those in North America (Megaupload had a huge server farm in Ashburn, VA and also in Canada). What this is is a condemnation of one person and one site whose willful and gleeful scofflaw activity emboldens politicians to send legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA on through.
