$51m

That's a shitload of money just to have the right to negotiate with a player, but 1) it ain't my money, and 2) as far as I've understood, it doesn't impact Red Sox payroll. (Joy of Sox has some good quotes, via SoSH, on the deal).

Of course, this is just the overture. The Red Sox now have 30 days to work out a deal with Matsuzaka's agent Scott Boras, which will be no easy task, although Theo has a pretty good relationship with Boras, which should help things along.

I started to get worried about the Red Sox becoming a carbon copy of the Yankees with this kind of deal, but it occurred to me that once you reach a certain level of spending it all becomes irrelevant. The Red Sox are already in Monopoly-money territory when it comes to payroll, so what really matters is getting quality goods in return for your dollar. This is a deal that is going to cost the Red Sox a tidy sum, but by all accounts Matsuzaka has good stuff, and could well be worth whatever the final price is.

I have to say that I'm pretty upbeat about this potential deal. Matsuzaka could be a top-of-the-rotation guy for the Sox for the next few seasons, and that is the kind of opportunity you should never get away from you. Of course, a deal may get struck, only for Matsuzaka to bomb completely, but at least we won't be sat around in 2009 saying: "I told you we shoulda signed that Matsu-whatsisname when we had the chance."

And, last but certanly not least, we're getting excited about baseball. In mid-November. The Hot Stove is burning warm enough to keep us cosy right through to March.

Fields And Dreams

We're barely into November and the baseball itch is starting already. If you feel the need to scratch it a little, Surviving Grady has the answer.

The Internet: best thing ever

If you remember, it was the location that had left me intrigued. Well, the mystery has been solved. Mystery Blog Reader is no longer just a stat in SiteMeter: she's a fellow Brit - not quite living in my home town, but not a million miles away either - who is a fan of the game of baseball, generally, and of the Boston Red Sox, specifically (chalk up another member of Red Sox Nation: International Chapter).

Jo - for that is the MBR's name - had this to say about how she came to the Sox:

I am a devoted Red Sox fan and became a card-carrying, if marooned, supporter during the 2003 post-season. I happened to be watching archived clips of various games, just to catch any baseball that I could, and downloaded highlights of a Red Sox game. A few minutes into the clip I spotted the likes of Millar and Damon scampering about the Fenway turf like rabid lunatics. They were just big kids; albeit with long hair and goatee beards. And as I watched them I ‘got’ it – the Red Sox thing, you know? I became a nutter. It certainly seemed to me that these guys were playing (as that oft-quoted line in Field of Dreams goes): ‘…for food money…’ for ‘…the thrill of the grass…’ I saw that they wanted success too, of course, I saw that these were professional sportsmen, but that at the same time I was thinking: ‘they look like guys that I could have a beer with.’ And I hope I can get lucky enough to meet a few of them some day (even if by then we are all ghosts) and split a few suds. But I knew in my bones that they were the team for me. I was hooked, then and there. The game of baseball for me is bigger than any one team but I think I love baseball twice as much because I’m a Red Sox fan.

I love the line: "I 'got' it." For those of us not born into a Red Sox context, there is always a moment like that, a realisation that this is our team. It isn't always possible to back it up with a lot of detailed reasons why - it just is. But the beauty of that is that there's no hesitation or second-guessing later on, it's a "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health" deal. And, as Jo says, we end up loving the game of baseball all the more for it.

Apple of my i (Part 3)

I'm thinking of flagging my posts with an NBC (Non-Baseball Content) sticker right now, in case people start getting tired of coming here for random musings on the Red Sox, only to find yet another slice of my life outside baseball...

One of the other doors that the iPod and iTunes open up is one that nicely balances the money that seems to disappear every month into the iTunes store: podcasts. Free entertainment on just about every subject under the sun, downloadable on to your iPod for endless hours of enjoyment on the way to work? Yes, please, I'd like to sign up for that right now.

Since getting the iPod, I've become addicted to several podcasts, mainly news / current affairs / entertainment podcasts from both sides of the Atlantic. I don't listen to French radio very much, mainly because it redefines the meaning of the word 'crap' on an almost hourly basis. But there is another reason, which also goes a long way towards explaining why I read very little in French, and that is the effort it takes. Even if you're completely bilingual and understand every word you hear or read, there's a certain effort needed - probably unconscious, but there nonetheless - to follow. I can read a book or listen to the radio in French, but unlike when I'm reading in English, I can't 'coast' and switch off a small part of the brain that's not needed for the book or the news programme to worry about what we're having for dinner or whether I've paid the gas bill - it needs full concentration.

Podcasts are therefore pennies from heaven - entertainment and information in my comfortable, no-effort-needed mother tongue that I can take with me anywhere I go. No radio signal needed, just sufficient battery power.

I listen to a lot of different podcasts, but a particular favourite is NPR's Driveway Moments. Unlike the genre podcasts which make up the rest of my listening, the subject matter is varied and unpredictable. Sometimes I listen and just go: "Oh, interesting...", but from time to time NPR unearths a real gem, and I find myself doing exactly what the title of the show says - listening to the end of the excerpt, even when I've already arrived at work or got back home.

One of my all-time favourites from the series is this one - once the programme introduction was over and those spooky, electronic voices kicked in I had one of those all-too-rare "Holy crap! What is that?" moments. I was transfixed - it reached out and grabbed my attention in the car one night, so much so that I had to stop listening until I got home, because I was so fascinated by the whole thing that I wasn't concentrating on the road in front of me. The show hasn't turned into a full-blown obsession, but, given a little time, it's just the kind of thing that could.

And coming full circle back to our starting point, it's not just the content available for the iPod which grabs my attention. Sometimes it's the machine itself and the mysteries - real or imagined - that have sprung up around it.

I've wondered myself about the randomness of the Random feature on the iPod - how come on some mornings I get two tracks from the soundtrack to Tucker within the space of ten minutes, and then nothing more from it for three weeks? The article is a reassuring indication not only that I'm not the only one wondering this, but also that I'm not the only one having trouble getting to grips with the answer:

Steven D Levitt, the self-described "rogue economist" who co-wrote the bestselling Freakonomics, also fell into the trap. Writing on his blog, he professed constant surprise at how often his iPod shuffle "plays two, three or even four songs by the same artist, even though I have songs by dozens of different artists on it". But as a statistics maven, Levitt understood that the bottom line is that "the human mind does badly with randomness."

It's all about clusters, apparently, and they're perfectly normal. But that didn't stop me from reading the maths trick used as an example and thinking: "That can't be right!."

Gather 40 people in a room and have everyone write down the day he or she was born. What are the odds that two people will have the same birthday? Nearly 100%.

I took the time to look into the figures - they're right. With a class of 40, the chances are around 90%, and by the time you get to 47 people, the probability is 95%. Completely bizarre, and completely true. So thanks to my iPod I can now not only carry around two weeks' worth of music in my pocket but I can also impress people at dinner parties with my elementary grasp of randomness and probability. Seriously, what more could you possibly want from a digital music player?*

* A hypothetical question, but if you really want an answer, you can apparently take your pick: FM radio, Bluetooth, better battery life, widescreen... Which just goes to prove the old adage that you really can't please all the people all the time.

Message In A Bottle

Over dinner last week with a fellow blogger, the conversation came around, naturally enough, to blog stuff, notably stats and comments. I have nowhere near the traffic nor the exposure that Petite has, so I still have the luxury of being able to look at who comes to this website - not so much in terms of numbers (although it is always satisfying to know that people are reading this stuff) but in terms of geography.

When I began this blog back in 2003, I did so because I spent a lot of time writing about baseball in a very private medium (e-mail) and it semed to make sense to throw some of the stuff out there into cyberspace to see if it might find a wider audience. At the same time, the subject matter gave me a kind of built-in inferiority complex: the English guy trying his hand at writing about the quintessential American game. However, sowly but surely people started coming here, reading the posts and even leaving comments, and every comment I got from American baseball fans was a kind of validation for me - people who know about baseball thinking that my random musings are worth reading.

But beyond the validation inherent in the comments, there are also social and geographical aspects. The comments people have left or the e-mails they have sent have allowed me to meet - figuratively and in some cases literally - people from all over the world that I would otherwise have never had any contact with, and it's always interesting to see who comes here, how they got here and where they're from. The US, Canada, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the UK - this little corner of the interweb is a regular United Nations. But despite the global reach of the Baseball Desert, I have to admit to being intrigued over the past few weeks by one very local visitor - local in this case being a couple of miles from my home town - who has been stopping by the blog regularly and reading it, lots of it.

So, if the Mystery Blog Reader from Rochdale who uses Zen as their ISP is reading this, would you please make yourself known, either in the comments or via e-mail? I'm curious to know how somebody from just down the road arrives at the Baseball Desert, and whether they like what they see.

Apple of my i (Part 2)

It's not just the player, either - it's all that surrounds it, beginning with iTunes. I've used other software to organise my digital music before, but none seems to be as efficient as iTunes. Like the iPod, it does exactly what you want it to do - organises the music, lets you make your own playlists - and adds in some bells and whistles (displaying album art as if you were browsing your CD collection, smart playlists) which are actually quite funky.

Above and beyond the organisation of my own music, I've come to discover what's behind the other doors that iTunes opens. Unfortunately, one of the doors it opens - with apologies to Nancy, who wanted me to help her in her quest for a Christmas present - is the one that leads to the pathway of pure evil known as the iTunes store. My favourite iPod evangelist Sheila said it well:

It is like crack.

Seriously.

I feel like I am not responsible enough to deal with iTunes. I feel like I need to have some outside authority limit what I am able to do on iTunes. Like: Oops, Sheila has overstayed her welcome ... she is now cut off until next month. I feel like one of those mindless drones pouring their welfare checks into the slot machines. 10 minutes go by and I could spend 200 bucks. 99 cents a song?? That's NOTHING!! Click, click, click, click ... 50 songs later ...

It's too easy, it really is, especially for someone who listens to a genre that you can't find in your local record store (please step forward, Paris's foremost British hillbilly, redneck, Red Sox fan ;-)). How many times have I heard something on an Internet radio station, only to find myself looking it up in the iTunes store and downloading it onto my iPod before I've even had time to think about it? I'll tell you how many times: too many.

The upside is that the iTunes is a perfect complement to the iPod feature that everyone raves about: the shuffle feature. Just as the shuffle feature on the player drags up songs you haven't listened to for ages - in fact, songs you'd sometimes forgotten you even had - so the iTunes store allows you to purchase other long-forgotten songs within a matter of seconds. (Not everything is available in the store, but there's enough stuff there to make it interesting). Outside of regular purchases, I tend to use the store in binge-drinking fashion - I'll suddenly get a nostalgic craving for a particular song (Enola Gay, by OMD), which will have a natural association (in my head, at least) with another (The Smiths' What Difference Does It Make?) and another (Going Underground by The Jam) and before you know it, I've got a thirty-song 'Memories of the 80's' playlist downloaded onto the iPod.

As it says on wine bottles here in France: à consommer avec modération.