The Moneyball Concept

I stumbled across Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, while driving around town and listening to talk radio. One of the hosts, whom I've listened to for several years, mentioned that this book changed the way he thought about baseball (before you stop reading, baseball is just the setting here). I thought it was a little interesting, just because I knew this was probably the first book this guy had read in years (he later admitted this), so I thought it would be interesting to check out.

I couldn't put it down.

Here's the premise: A man named Bill James, who was a night watchman at a factory and an avid baseball fan, decided that the statistics that are most often associated with baseball players are a very flawed means of judging performance. He writes and self-publishes (60 copies or so) an amateur analysis back in '77 or so. He does legwork and determines that there are some obscure statistics that are much better predictors of success in the major leagues, and a small, underground craze begins--This question generates discussion among top minds in statistics and economics across the nation--adding academic theory to the raw concepts.

The funny thing is that no major league team picked up on the relevance of this statistcal analysis...until 20 years later, when Billy Beane, General Manager for the Oakland A's, hires a Harvard economist (it's really funny in the book, because there is not one scene where this guy isn't typing into his computer, which they personify: "His computer told them to take such-and-such a player". Using this data, Billy Beane finds players who are undervalued in the market and scoops them up at bargain prices, where they proceed to completely kick the ass of the Texas Rangers (my team), winning the division and going to the playoffs with a substantially lower total player salary.

The moral of this story could be: Nerds rule.

This story struck home with me, because it was completely analagous to the situation in which Gar and I found ourselves at the trucking company ten years ago...before the Moneyball concept was implemented in the major leagues.

We went to a small, family-owned trucking business, and, by applying concepts in productivity and logical business processes, without an MBA among us, I must add, we increased the production of a ragtag company which had never made a profit.

We also encountered some of the same obstacles--old-timers in a good ol' boy industry who were resistant to change--our ideas were flatly rejected quite often, which left us shaking our heads. We would have to prove our ideas with very little error, our assumptions would be questioned, and, in the end, if some old man with forty years of experience decided he wasn't going to do it, it wouldn't get done.

It was an exciting time for us--it felt like riding the crest of a wave on a surfboard, feeling the momentum of the company moving forward as we made huge changes. Gar had been my roommate in college and was my most trusted friend, but at the company he sort of went underground. He dressed in workclothes sometimes and went down on the loading docks to help the guys drive forklifts and load trucks, taking on that responsibility for months in order to get a real picture of what was happening behind the scenes. Sometimes, he would have to leave his dock responsiblities to build a new server, network our office, or help me crunch numbers for a new contract.

I wonder if the authors and implementers of the Moneyball concept realize how stubborn and entrenched businesses can get. The feeling that I get from the book is that the managers in baseball often feel confined to almost superstitious beliefs in trusting meaningless statistics and disproven rules of thumb because they fear ridicule and public scrutiny. The tone that is conveyed is that baseball is composed of "insiders" and "outsiders", and that never the twain shall agree--having a computer pretty much automatically makes you an outsider.

But this is the way that Gar and I felt when we pointed to a printout as evidence that a change needed to be made, only to be met with solemn head-shaking. Reading Moneyball gave me an analogy to point to--we knew we were right but because we didn't have a Harvard pedigree there was more of a burden on us to prove ourselves. Even after 4 years of increasing profits and proving our track record, our voice was given weight, but not enough to overrule the insistence of insiders and their voodoo supersititions of business, which they chanted like a mantra at times while Gar and I incredulously tried to explain.

About a year ago, I wrote a story called The Potato Factor, about the owner of our company who saw our statistical projections and tried to get in on the act by implementing his own, nonsensical, timewasting, and inefficient record-keeping procedure--it was laughable--we felt like we were in our own world, and that nobody would believe it if we told them the story.

Maybe that's why Moneyball made me feel so excited--I connected with the struggle to apply statistical analysis in a subjective world. Suddenly, I felt like there were people in the world who felt my pain, and who also used the same techniques as I did to generate success. In fact, I was applying these concepts before Billy Beane used them to generate a winning team--It fed my ego and made me feel a lot smarter. But why should it? Nothing changed about our success or methods except for the fact that they were given Ivy League credentials and more sophisticated language and several zeros were added to the number of dollars.

There are some lessons to be learned there.

Our Love's in Jeopardy, Baby...

Has anyone heard of the Greg Kihn Band? Okay, that song really sucks. Best parody: "I have a Japanese Baby" and "I Lost on Jeopardy, Baby"

Fran records the game show Jeopardy every day. It's amazing how high a score you can envision for yourself if you calculate your score this way: Give yourself points for everything you know, or remember as soon as the contestant says the answer. Don't subtract for wrong answers. So she scores very well every day and she's ready to go on the show (seriously, and not just so I don't get killed in my sleep, she does know a lot about many things, including royalty, which I am terrible at: I don't know a James from a George, and if there were at least eight Henry's, why does Henry VIII seem to be, disproportionally, the answer to everything?)

So she told me some vague story about testing to be on the show, and how important it would be for me to be present. I promptly forgot.

I got held up at work one recent night, and then my late evening turned even later, and then turned into entertaining a colleage who was in town to help me on a project. I couldn't get out of it even though I tried--I was his ride back to the hotel and I got roped into going out for dinner. I came home to glares and was informed that Fran had to take the Jeopardy test online with an attention-seeking 2-year-old running around the house wrecking things to get a reaction from her mommy. Whoops.

Yes--there is a God!

Ding Dong Wedding Cake...

Reminds me of a very dumb joke:

Q: What does a dyslexic agnostic insomniac do?

A: Stays up all night wondering if there really is a dog...

What's the deal with THAT?

When I took Ryan camping a few weeks ago, I was pretty sheepish when I bought bear spray for protection. I even was a pretty good sport when the know-it-all dude at Sportsman's Warehouse wanted to give me a lecture on the n-dimensional decision tree which should be thoroughly analyzed before bustin' a cap of bear spray.

All I had to say was "Well, they're only black bears" (aka Ursus americanus), not known to be very aggressive toward humans--more likely to run away than the more aggressive grizzly bear (Ursus horibilis, as in they can make your day horrible).

While we were camping, the only other campers we ran into reported that they saw a black bear last year in the area. That made me feel a little less foolish about packing "heat". The campers reported that suddenly came into a clearing and saw the bear, which turned and ran away into the woods.

A couple of weeks ago, a black bear attacked a family in Tennessee and actually killed a child. Last week, a bear attacked and severely injured a man in Washington. It is so rare--there have only been about 50 deaths attributed to black bear attacks in the last 100 years.

Somehow, I preferred life when my fears were irrational.

Glory Days

Something about driving around in the neighborhood where you grew up makes you feel like a spy. You see the house of your old best friend and it may shock the current occupants that you know the floor plan and how it always mysteriously smelled like pickles.

You may even catch a glimpse of an aging ex-neighbor and realize that they couldn't possibly recognize you from thirty years ago--it would be so funny to stop and call them by name and watch the wheels spin. But not intriguing enough to actually do it.

The playground where you used to play basketball. The field where you meticulously played golf for a whole blazing Texas summer. There's an interstate running through the gap where the soccer field once was--I remember fishing icy cans of Shasta out of a cooler at the end of a game.

When I moved back to my old hometown, I ended up on the far north end--it didn't hit me until recently that down the street the site of the grocery superstore has a special significance--the entrance is erected directly on top of left field of the old baseball diamond where my crowning sports achievement took place. It accidentally happened while I was so frustrated that I gave up on playing well and tried with all my might to blast the head off one of the opposing players.

---

I'm not sure why I ever wanted to get into sports. I was always strong but very small and very slow. I must have set a record in soccer for playing eight complete seasons without ever scoring a goal. I was one of the best defensemen there ever was, and we even won division titles, but I didn't even get close to putting one in the net for our team. In football, I remember getting leveled, having the wind totally knocked out of me, and deciding that I didn't want anything to do with that kind of hitting ever again.

I had some raw tools for baseball, but never any finesse at all. I could throw the ball with almost destructive power--I could throw the ball so hard it would zip into the receiver's glove with a loud, attention-getting smack--definitely ahead of my time for my age. The coach rewarded this talent by parking me in the middle of the anthills of the dreaded and boring outfield because I was the only one who could heave the ball in to the other players if it was well-hit by our opponents.

In 1980, I was 10 years old, and Texas was experiencing the worst heatwave in recorded history--50 days over 100 degrees, and there I was standing as the dirt around me baked quietly, ripping open in wide, prehistoric cracks. Even though our games were regulation competitions, the fields were in tremendous disrepair--the outfield was composed of a conglomerate of dirt mounds held together by the scorched brown carcasses of dead weeds, which were woven together to make the ball careen across the lumpy ground unpredictably whenever it was hit over the heads (or through the legs) of the infielders.

In my baseball career, I was always on the same team. The coach's son, Chris, always pitched, and he always sucked. And we always lost. Chris would get unnerved any time he started to get into trouble, and our team would get shelled like we were under attack by anti-aircraft mortars. It made things interesting from the standpoint of an outfielder, but it wasn't very fun to lose every game in the hottest summer ever. Occastionally, Chris would have a meltdown, pitch a whiney baby fit, march off the field and even quit the team. But the next week he'd be back on the mound, serving up meatballs for the other team to shove down our throats. When you're the coach's kid, you don't get sent out to the weedpatch.

It was during one of these complete drummings that I completely lost interest in baseball. We were playing the Pirates and they were extremely well-coached. They also were cocky and kept spitting nasty comments at me and my teammates and were smirking as they beat us 12-2. The sun was beating down on my head and I just started thinking about other cool things I could do, like taping baseball cards to my bike tires and making it sound like a motorcycle. I was marooned out in left field and was studying a fire ant mound when I heard the crack of a bat--I looked up and saw Chris' pitch getting rocketed back at our team--specifically right at me with quite a bit of speed as it bounced over the third baseman's head and headed down the line into the outfield territory that I was supposed to protect.

Time just seemed to tick off slowly like the hands of a stopwatch suddenly submerged in gelatin. I could see that the runner on second base fully intended to round third base and head for home. He was a short little guy and I remember seeing the old, beat-up batting helmet wobbling on top of his head as though it were 10 sizes too large for him. Sometimes, especially when your team is good and you're shelling the other team's outfield, lots of runners get on base and when you're up to bat you just have to put on the batting helmet that's sitting there in the dugout whether it fits or not.

This is not what was going through my mind at the time. At the time I was reconciling the fact that I was really mad that our coach's son was ruining all my fun by getting us killed every game, that the same coach kept pointing me out to the ridiculous outback also known as our outfield, and that it was so damn hot outside. That smug bobble-headed midget rounding third was just the topper. I took it personally that he didn't have sufficient respect for my throwing arm, and I couldn't wait to teach him a lesson. I had made a perfect play on the ball--it must have bounced off one of the larger, flatter weeds--and I had a second to think before throwing the ball in. I was supposed to throw it to the cutoff man at second base. The runner would score.

Hitting the cutoff man was for the other players who cared. The ones who didn't have a cannon for an arm. We were losing by ten points and the game was all but technically over.

I clearly remember thinking, even though I was at least forty yards away, that there was no doubt that I was going to peg this guy in the back of the head with every ounce of my strength. I took two quick steps, cocking my arm back and burning it straight at him with very little arc and putting everything I had into it, swinging my arm across my whole body with a huge follow-through.

I couldn't wait for that ball to clank off his head and leave his brains sloshing and ringing inside like the clapper on the Liberty Bell--that goofy-looking bobblety-headed freak.

But instead, a miracle happened. The ball sailed about 6 inches high, sailing over bobble-head's left shoulder and straight into the glove of J.P. Magginola, our catcher and the best player on our entire team. Even though there is no way J.P. could see it coming, he somehow caught the ball and stood in the base path in front of the completely astonished runner--it was a second before the runner got to the plate, and there was no where for him to turn.

He had no where to go.

His coach had no idea of what to say to him. Or time to say anything.

J.P. even looked a little surprised.

The kid gingerly ran right into J.P., who tagged him out. He stood there in a cloud of dust, shocked. The helmet went spinning off behind home plate somewhere.

The parents in the bleachers behind our bench, perhaps for the first time all season, erupted in a jumping, screaming celebration honoring the best play our team had ever made. J.P. was the hero. He turned and waved to his parents, who beamed with pride. The cheering lasted over a full minute, then died down.

Although I was happy to have been part of it, it seemed a little unfair. I was just a kid, and maybe I wasn't a very good sport, but I wanted a little of the credit for that killer play. I had languished in right field the whole damn summer, and I had been running after fly balls from Chris' sorry pitching as they fell in the cracks and the ant piles and weed patches. I couldn't wait for the season to be over, but in the meantime I wanted someone to know that it was me who had thrown that ball.

I mean, J.P. Magginola didn't manufacture that ball himself behind home plate, did he? He didn't pluck it out of thin air--well, maybe he did, but I'm the one who planted it in thin air in just the right place while trying to kill that Darth Vader-looking punk who tried to take an extra base on me.

A couple of minutes later, before Chris served up another meatball, the coach, as an afterthought, hollered out into our weedpatch outfield "Who threw that?"

"I did" I said weakly.

"Good throw, Mike" someone said courteously. And that was it.

My moment in the sun.

Some Adjectives

Bummed
Tired
Uninspired
embarrassed
Buried
Suffocated
unimportant
ineffective
foolish
melancholy
unproductive
hodgepodge
short-sighted
dysfunctional
wrecked
undercaffeinated
allergic
neglectful
uneloquent
Petty

The Travelocity Gnome

Kaitlyn calls him "Little Santa"....

No Reason for Fear...Right?

This is Kaitlyn earlier today, fleeing for her life from the Easter bunny...I'm not so sure I wouldn't run from that, too...


Four Years ago...you couldn't make this up, could you?

 

Flight

Something about reading Hemingway makes me peevish.

I picked up A Farewell to Arms again--haven't read it in about five years, and it's been a year since I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I have been so amazed at how fantastic the writing is. It makes me want to sit down and write for an entire day. The simplicity of the style just draws me in and makes me overconfident.

It also gives me the urge to binge drink and eat hunks of meat and cheese.

I read that in 1954 he won the Nobel prize for Literature and in 1961 he committed suicide, and I just can't get that straight in my head--I can't get it to make sense. I mean, this writing is so gifted and powerful that it is inspiring and motivating, even with its nihilist undertones. the dialog is sometimes wooden and the female characters are underdeveloped and flat.

On to my secret.

Have you ever heard of the term "personal myth"? It's often used in describing teenagers and how they feel magically protected from harm. Well, I wonder if I don't harbor a secret personal myth--that all this crap that I've lived through must pay off in the end in some extraordinary way. Like, if I find myself forty years from now sitting on a duct-taped barcalounger eating a tuna fish sandwich on a TV tray and bitching about how hot it is outside, that life won't have been worthwhile. Like I'm biding my time until my story matures and circumstances explode into some exciting story with huge significance to mankind.

Part of my personal myth is that I share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway, and I somehow feel that this is significant. There, it's out. Fran says that's just way too much pressure to put on myself--it actually probably demotivates me...

But I just can't sit and write all day like I wish I could. I've got my story sketched out and waiting for me to flesh out.

Last week I was driving through downtown Dallas. Clouds came overhead and everything was grey (I always spell this word with an "e" because I nearly got expelled from 8th grade over this alternative spelling--the teacher counted it wrong and I threw an increasingly violent hissy fit, calling one girl a "bitch" and then getting sent to the principal's office). I noticed a building with gothic architecture and threw open my notebook on the passenger's seat, scribbling the name of the building so I could look it up later.

Then I resolved to get my camera, clear off the flash card, and take half of a day to walk through the city, photographing interesting buildings, fountains, and structures. There is a beautiful sculpture of a cattle drive, adjacent to the oldest cemetery in town, with twenty or thrity cattle and several cowboys on horseback cascading down a hillside, representing the cattle drives of over 100 years ago so prominent in this region of the country. Courthouses, skyscrapers, quirky buildings---I got excited about the project and then got tired of the idea before I hit the next red light. I knew I would never do it.

Without wanting to raise alarm, I kind of see what happened to Hemingway--his personal myth was unatttainable. He had to put down the tuna sandwich, get off the barcalounger, and do something about it.

The secret seems to be contentment, being real, enjoying life, having good relationships. Either that or really kicking some ass in life and doing something significant--one or the other.

In My Quest to Remain Anonymous...

Whenever I evaluate my personality, I know that I have the capability of getting up front and leading a group. I have been a leader in several different organizations, can manage projects, and do very well when I am organizing events. The only drawback is that I don't really enjoy it. At all. Something about the randomness of life, how things tend to go wrong, and loathing the task of standing up and getting kicked, well, you get the idea, when things go wrong that are completely beyond my control. Years of being in charge have taken away the power trip of being the #1 guy, so I just want to be a quiet soldier in the framework of the world, working hard, doing a diligent job, and keeping my head low.

But there is some vacuous force in the world that keeps sucking me out to front stage center.

I know I've said it here before, but I don't want to be one of "those parents". *Thinks back to memory of Dad screaming on the sidelines during a soccer game*.

Flash forward twenty-something years and here I am: screaming on the sidelines during a baseball game.

What's worse: I got stuck on the slippery slope of parental involvement, leading from volunteering to help out at practice whenever I'm available to...wearing a very silly kid-sized baseball cap and standing on the field during the game, helping kids figure out where to run when the ball gets hit. How did this happen? Can't I just sit down and enjoy the game like any other parent without getting a guilt trip that I'm not "part of the solution" (Yo--60's flashback).

I distinctly remember this conversation:

Baseball team coach: "Hey, Mike, we could really use your help at practices whenever you are available."

Me (surprised, maybe a little flattered): "Oh, well, sure...I'll help whenever I can but sometimes I work some late nights and can't make it."

Coach: "Oh, that's no problem...we'll just need all the help we can get."

Then...a few weeks later, the phone rings.

Coach: "Hey, I really appreciate the way you've been helping."

Me: "Sure, Lance--it's fun."

Coach: "We went ahead and ordered you a hat and uniform."

Me: "Really? Well, that's a little surprising!"

Coach: "Well, you've been helping out, so this will help the boys know you are an official coach."

Me: "Oh." Thinking: AM I an official coach? Don't know if I really want to be...

Coach: "You want to be a coach, don't you?"

Me: "Well, I don't know..."

I know I sound wishy-washy, but I felt like I was put on the spot. I always tell Ryan to stick to his commitments, so I didn't want to get suckered into a commitment without thinking it through--in fact, I know I'm going to miss some games and practices and I damn sure don't want to shirk an implied committment which I didn't even make.

Coach, clearly irritated: "Well do you or don't you?"

Me (now feeling like a jerk that is asking this guy to volunteer his time to coach my son but not willing to join him. Also, feeling like I'm about to get me and/or my son ostracised from the team by coming across like a flake, but resenting being put in this position. What am I, some kind of spineless idiot getting talked into this? Don't you just want to sit on the bleachers like the other parents. Why can't you be like the other parents: FREAK!)

"Well, Lance, do I have to say 'yes or no' this minute?"

Coach (pausing): "No. Just let me know when you decide."

So nothing else was said. At the game, I was asked to go and "coach third base", which means that I dictate to these 7-year-olds whether they should keep running or stop at the base. Pretty easy to determine, right? I mean, my whole function is to just watch the play and give them some instructions.

Oh, I am so naive!

I promise that I have no delusions of grandeur, but this duty seems to have weight that I never saw before. I will do my best to avoid boring baseball jargon to spare those of you who could care less (and who have probably stopped reading by this point anyway--trust me, this explanation is needed to demonstrate how much of a self-conscious freak I am).

It turns out that there is a rule for these boys that they need to stop running when the ball is "under control" by a member of the infield. It also turns out that this is a very subjective concept--how do you determine if a 7-year-old is in "control" of the ball? Where on the field does the "infield" start and end? There is also split-second timing as to whether or not the player should keep going or stop. There are a variety of styles of coaching the boys: from a very aggressive style to a very conservative style.

At this age, there isn't a referee on the field, so the coaches and parents are on the Honor System to officiate the game and interpret the rules, which makes things a little squirmy at times.

During the first game, I was extremely conservative. If there was any question, I would just have the player stop running and stay on his base.

The next thing that happened was unbelievable: I started getting heckled by the parents of our players! Just a couple of them, but they started telling me "You should have told him to run, Mike!" I took this very personally (I know, I'm stupid to do that). I kept going over it in my mind, replaying the situation and thinking that maybe I could have kept the kid running.

It's only 7-year-old kiddie baseball, for God's sake! What am I doing worrying about this?!

Another funny thing that happened: There is a somewhat complex rule that we never brought up to the kids--if the ball gets caught in the air, they have to return to their original base immediately. Well, this situation happened, and of course the kid had no clue and I didn't have time to sit down with him and deliver a dissertation on the concept. He ended up getting out, which I suppose spoiled his dad's expectation of a major league career for his son--he was clearly irritated that it was all my fault for poorly instructing his boy during the game. The dad sidled up to me after the game and stood there, waiting for me to apologize--seriously.

Keep in mind: I'm just trying to keep my head low and get through this life without having to claim responsibility for everything that happens around me.

On to last night: Our coach has now decided and informed me that we are going to adopt a philosophy of more aggressive base-running. Now, our team previously protested when another team's coach was using this philosophy, so this promised to make life interesting. But, to his credit, our coach told the other team's coach before the game that we were going to play with this interpretation of the rules, and they agreed to it.

So, of course, here's Mike: stuck in this position of making base-running decisions for the boys and getting stuck out on the field (and last night I was right in front of the bleachers for the opposing team) to live with the consequences of the plays, especially when it goes in our favor and against the other team. We beat them 12-1, so they were quite disgruntled. By the end of the game, parents and coaches were making comments and complaints under their breath, which made me feel uneasy. Hey, I'm just trying to get through life being the good guy!

It's so funny how being conflict-averse got me into this crazy set of circumstances where I'm in such a controversial and conflict-filled position. Will I ever learn?

A Breakdown

It's possible that we ruined Helen, but I suspect that she was already going down that path when she came to us.

Maybe it isn't fair, but I would wonder when a well-dressed woman came in to our filthy trucking terminal looking for a job--I noticed a few potential candidates looking around and trying not to brush their clothes against any exposed surfaces where grease and dirt would accumulate--this would be right before they walked out the door and never came back. The dirt was so bad that I had a set of shoes for work which I would kick off outside the door when I got home to save our carpet from premature aging--my wife thought it was due to some sort of Asian influence. But when the woman accepted the job after seeing the dirt and the truckers coming in and out and knowing what she was getting herself into, it made me wonder why they chose to come here.

For Helen, I chalked it up to simple economics--she lived nearby and she drove the worst car I've ever seen--an enormous, gas-guzzling, buick from the '80's--I think it was originally silver. And it always seemed to be breaking down.

I have to admit that at first Helen seemed more competent than most--nothing seemed to shock her in our strange little company where half of what happened seemed unbelievable: one of the managers was running a theft ring right under our noses--it outraged everyone in the office, but Helen never made a comment. She just kept working quietly in a poorly lit corner of the office area, matching up paperwork and gathering data for government tax reports and billing. She was quick and efficient and tidy.

She never complained about working conditions like everyone, including myself, tended to do--she worked the night shift and the office always felt too dark--especially the small corner desk where Helen would often work. The electricity in the building was weird, so the company on the other side of the wall would turn out their lights when they went home and half of our office would go dark. Maybe it was more irritating that it was just half our office, but that was the way it was. One time I mentioned it to our neighbors that they were turning out our lights every night, and the guy just smugly smiled at me and said nothing, so I let it go rather than giving him the satisfaction that he was getting to me.

And it turned out that Helen was very bright. It was difficult to gauge in our employees as they came and went: our job assignments weren't permanent. Due to some mental instability in the owner of the company which is another story in itself, we would often find ourselves retooling our business procedures to place more emphasis on billing accuracy, speed, data collection, or trying to calculate the efficiency and accuracy of our drivers. This caused us to change our billing procedures multiple times and causing people's duties to be shuffled around randomly.

Whenever these changes occurred, there was usually a chorus of complaints, but none from Helen--she chugged along with her duties for a little over a year, and, despite managing her and giving her directions, I can't remember a single conversation with her about anything personal.

She was a Mexican girl, originally from Chicago, and her accent told me that she could speak some Spanish but used mostly English. Her hair was sort of thin and wispy, jet black, straight, and long to the middle of her back. Her clothes were conservative--she was about thirty but dressed more like she was about forty. She had no family in town, and maybe she made some friends to go out with after work--one of the other girls, it seems like.

After about ten months or so, Helen's work level declined dramatically. I was counting on her doing an important report that she had done several times before, and she blew the deadline with no explanation. In fact, when I went to help her out with the project, it was in complete disarray, and Helen seemed very defensive and upset that I was intervening. I didn't want to embarrass her, so I asked her to work on it for a couple of days and we would get back together. When we met again, she was again almost violently defensive about not getting her work done, and the project seemed to be in the same state of disorder. Since it was a critical government document, I took it over and reassigned Helen to another project.

She seemed to never recover from that.

Over the next couple of weeks, Helen grew bitter and sarcastic. I liked her and thought maybe she was just embarrassed about needing help on the project, so I gave her some space and let her increasing number of snide comments go by me without taking too much notice. Amazingly, her production completely ceased to move forward. Eventually, I had to bring her into my office and gently talk to her about getting over the problem with the report and moving on--she looked, completely confused, as though she had no idea what I was talking about. But no change in her production--I couldn't figure out what she was doing with her time--she certainly seemed busy shuffling papers at her desk whenever I would see her.

So I gave her a couple of days off to collect herself. It still didn't work. It had been about two months since she failed at her project, and Helen had grown unbearably sarcastic and angry, and she had completely stopped doing anything productive at work. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong, acknowledge any problems, or make any resolutions to change. Her behavior was odd to say the least.

Eventually, I had to let Helen go. It was pretty sad, and not something we often did at our little company. There was a lot going on at the time: the company was involved in another lawsuit, we were renegotiating contracts with customers, and we were working with the bank to get increased financing. Getting rid of Helen and posting an ad in the paper were just line items in my list of things to do for the day. And I never saw her again.

About a month later, Helen's sister called from Chicago--she didn't know that Helen had been fired, and she thought we might be wondering what happened to her. I guess we had no way of knowing that Helen had gone missing without a trace for over two weeks. She had apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and left her apartment without paying rent, heading for Chicago. Her car broke down on the highway on her way out of Texas, and she had to hitchhike the rest of the way. She arrived, disheveled and incoherent in Chicago, where they put her in a mental hospital.

When things like this happen, it's pretty normal to replay the events in your mind to see if you could have done something differently to prevent it. There were a lot of people at that company who I took a personal interest in, got to know, or gave extra help to beyond what they deserve. Maybe I even tried doing this in Helen's case--I don't know if I could have done anything to help her out--my assessment of her poor work, and my decision to fire her certainly added to her stress.

Would I have lent her a hand if she called, stranded, from the road? I don't know--I would like to think I would. Don't get me wrong--I'm not naive enough, or so self-centered as to think that my actions were the main cause or held the ability to prevent her breakdown.

But little things seem to count, and I sometimes wonder if I could have (should have) seen all this coming if I had looked a little harder.

Opening Day--Standing Room Only

Monday, April 3rd
Texas Rangers vs. Boston Red Sox (My 2 favorite teams)
1:05 PM Start time (took 1/2 day off from work)
Standing Room Only
Attendance: 52,000
Jumbo Hot Dog with mustard and relish
Humongous Glass of Lemondade on Ice

I was there! 

Do yourself a Favor...

If you ever go to San Antonio, go to this restaurant. Especially if you like shrimp--get the Mexican Shrimp Coctail.

If you like beef, get the beef fajitas.

Get flour tortillas, and a big margarita in a thick glass (Fran and I split a Strawberry margarita--if you're a guy, you can get away with that only if you are not wearing pink at all).

Spring the extra $10 and ask the mariachi's to play "one of the old songs" (not La Bamba or Guantanameda or (hell no) La Cucarcha or something stupid like that).

I've found myself thinking up excuses to go there before just so I could enjoy a meal there...

You know I wouldn't steer you wrong, especially when it comes to food, right?
http://www.lamargarita.com/

Fantasy Dinner Party

Ugh. I always thought that was the cheesiest question: Who would the guests be at your fantasy dinner party?

Answer #1: Einstein, Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin

Really? With these egos in the room, nobody would get a word in edgewise--dinner would consist of 4 distinct conversations going simultaneously (i'll spare you my imagined dialog).

Other popular guests exist--Jesus, Paul, Peter--other religious figures come to mind. For racial balance, MLK, Malcolm X...Hot chicks are always welcome of course :). Deceased relatives make the list, too. Quirky people like to throw in a name or two that nobody knows who the hell it is. Some people are willing to waste their whole fantasy dinner party on quirky choices just to make themselves appear to be fabulously eccentric.

We got together for a "supper club" meeting of a group of our friends--there are about 40 couples that sign up and get randomly assigned to have a dinner together--like a social mixer-upper to break up the cliques.

Fran called me to tell me who our group was when she got the email--she was laughing.

We were having it at the home of a really nice couple--they just completed building their home pretty far away on the other side of the lake--maybe an hour's drive away, but maybe even more on a Friday evening. He is an elementary school principal and his wife has a degree in interior design. Their house is decorated in a French Cottage fashion--expertly done and breathtakingly beautiful and tidy. The kind of thing that makes you a little disappointed to come home after--like: why didn't I think of doing that/painting that THAT color/decorating with THAT?

Other attendees include my doctor (as in "turn your head and cough"), his wife who has an extremely strong personality. Another woman, a cancer survivor with one leg and an equally strong personality, would be attending without her husband (the kind of person who proceeds to tell you how to raise your kids when she has absolutely no experience with kids at all).

Lastly: a tie-in from a previous blog entry. A couple friend of ours had a tragedy occur--their babysitter dropped their child down the stairs and the child died. The fourth guest: the babysitter.

This was essentially the dinner list from hell. I was hoping to take a valium and drink 3 shots of tequila before going in.

Another idea: this would make a great cage-match.

Dinner went surprisingly well. Thankfully, the babysitter did not show up--that would have been unbearablly awkward. Cancer survivor talked over the doctor about how to diagnose certain illnesses--he kindly let her make a fool out of herself.

One funny thing: I was born one year plus one day after Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. Cancer survivor was born one year and one day before me: on that very day--she was shocked that I knew the significance of her birthday.

Blah blah blah--at one point we sat around and talked about mowing the yard. It made me reconsider those cheesy questions: You have to burn one of your attendees and get someone to shake up the room a little.

Kaitlyn decided to take matters into her own hands--she was the youngest of the mobile children at the party, and she felt she was being left out--so she walked around clobbering the other kids. It's called the Terrible Twos, and it can be embarassing for the parents. Cancer survivor started lecturing on what we can do to stop it, drawing blank looks.

We made our way to the car--I put Kaitlyn into her car seat, we loaded up the food containers (Fran made banana pudding and homemade chocolate brownies). I went around to the garage to get Ryan and I was called:

"MIKE!"

I knew exactly what was up--it had to be a snake. And I wasn't disappointed.

The weather was very warm for the first time, and there were woods all around us and a lake across the street. We were in the middle of snake central.

Someone had actually, earlier in the evening, asked our hostess about wildlife that they have seen (I make a point of trying not to ask to hide my paranoia). She had responded that they had killed two snakes a year ago, but since then had only seen opossums, raccoons, and a deer.

But when I came around the corner from the garage, I saw the look on Fran's face and she called out seriously "It's a snake--and it has a big head!" (good indication that it is venomous).

I called out to her "Well, then, get back and close the door!" Her mama-bear instinct had kicked in and she was "guarding" the car because Kaitlyn was inside buckled into her car seat.

She did as I said and I walked over to where the snake was--minutes before I had been exactly where it was now lying, loading the car. It was a copperhead--thin, about the diameter of my index finger, and poisonous--about 2 feet long and pretty aggressive--it got to the grass and turned around and came back toward me, stopping short. The homeowner came up from behind me with a long-handled shovel and snapped it's head off with a couple of blows.

We took the snake into the garage and showed the body to boys--Ryan was fascinated. We warned them to steer clear of this type of snake, and how they can be dangerous.

In the meantime, I heard the doctor call out "Here's another one!" He had taken a flashlight and searched around his car before bringing his girls out to leave--this snake, also a copperhead, was over 3 feet long and very thick-bodied--it was nestled up against a tree beside the car and stretched out into the adjacent woods...it was considerably more threatening--it's size coupled with the snake raising it's head aggressively when the owner approached with his shovel-guillotine before delivering a fatal blow.

Our poor hostess seemed a little embarrassed that the country charm came with the risk of death as we escaped to our cars, twitching nervously at every dark patch on the grass, calling our children to us for safety.

Leave it to my presence to turn a dinner party into a snake-o-rama.

Maybe we should have invited that Crocodile Hunter guy "Beee-utie, Mate! In't she Gorh-jus? What a whoppa!"