Monday, October 31, 2005

No Dude, I’m Serious…

Theo Epstein (the “boy wonder”, “wiz kid” or simply “guy who gets much tail around Boston”) resigned today after rejecting a 3-year, 1.5 million dollar per year contract from the Boston Red Sox. Epstein had been the Red Sox General Manager (GM) in charge hiring, firing, trading, and drafting players since 2002. The Sox tried to buy out Oakland As GM, Billy Beane, a few years ago for 2.2 million, so the Sox could have gone higher than 1.5 million. Of course, Epstein is far less established and innovative than Billy Beane, and Epstein is unlikely to get a higher offer from another team. Theo Epstein was the youngest GM ever at 28 and the youngest to put together a world series winning team at 30.

Weirdly, Epstein resigned while I was sitting in Applied Regression class thinking about the Epstein contract dispute. Right when I came to the conclusion that I most certainly would accept the Red Sox offer had they purposed it to me, the Prof. called on me to explain why I would make dummy variables from a continuous measure. I answered by repeating what I could remember of the question back in a new word order hoping that might constitute an answer.

Even more bizarrely, Johnny Damon “the Caveman Centerfielder” bought a house across the shore from my uncle in Maine. Next summer we could all blue fish together. More on that to come.

This all may be too much to handle right now. The Damon news is amazingly good, the Epstein news is bad, and both are a little scary. If my brother, dzusa, hasn’t heard either of these news items, I would recommend he take them one at a time, sitting down, with several Budweisers in range.

Both the “Wiz Kid” and “Caveman Centerfielder” rank somewhere between Oil Can and Scooter on the all time nickname list with the “Caveman Centerfielder” above “Wiz Kid” …

1 comment:

Cuddles, the Friendly Bassinet said...

So, if I may be so bold as to rephrase your question, professor, you're inquiring as to my hypothetical motivation for converting a series of dummy variables into a single categorical variable. Yes? Yes. That's extraordinarily interesting. Let me, by way of response, refer you to a recent report that Theo Epstein has quit. Luccino's thinking that cheap young blood (trained in sabermetrics) will do just as well. Old fool.