haircut time
So I'm sitting here coding and I rub the back of my head. I've noticed that my hair is getting a bit long. For those that know me, well I apologize, but for those that don't, I pretty much get a haircut every 10-11 days. It's a thing with me. In fact, I saw Will in Italy a couple of years ago, and he had gone over 6 months without a haircut and even looking at his hair bothered me. I have issues. But that's not what this post is about. I got to thinking about the worst haircut in the Major Leagues. Not just long hair, but just some hairstyles that could never have been in style in any age, or culture or degree of insanity. I've decided to list some of the worst hair in the Bigs. You're making millions boys, get a haircut.
Once upon a time, I used to play high school baseball. The only player that I know of, who got into the Majors, is Manny Ramirez. Back then, he had a normal looking haircut. Now, he looks like this.
I think he actually tied streamers into his hair now, so when he runs around the bases, he looks like the streamers on the handle bars of my old Schwinn bicycle.
Next up is Vladimir Guerrero. Now his hair isn't so bad, but looking at it makes me want to "jump jump". Seriously, he looks like a beefed up version of Kriss Kross. Seriously, he's been growing those dreads for 3-4 years now, it's time to give it up.
Any topic of bad hair would have to include a mullet. Any any mention of mullets in baseball would have to start off with the Big Unit himself.
I think this late night post has run it's course. 7 more days til my next hair cut.
Mitchell reports announces…. the 2003 yankees?
So the Mitchell report has named the players who have bought and used steroids. The names that surprise me are:
- Jorge Posada
- Jason Giambi
- Alfonso Soriano
- Aaron Boone
- Derek Jeter
- Hideki Matsui
- Bernie Williams
- Raul Mondesi
- Roger Clemens
- Andy Pettite
Oh wait, my mistake, those are the members of the 2003 New York Yankees. 5 members of their starting lineup and rotation were named.
Here are the names of current or former Yankees
- Aaron Boone
- Jose Canseco
- Roger Clemens
- Johnny Damon
- Wilson Delgado
- Kyle Farnsworth
- Jason Grimsley
- Felix Heredia
- Darren Holmes
- Matt Lawton
- Raul Mondesi
- Andy Pettite
- Gary Sheffield
By my count, that's 13 Yankees. To extend the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry to the arena of controlled substances, let's count the Red Sox.
- Manny Alexander
- Dante Bichette
- Roger Clemens
- Wil Cordero
- Jose Canseco
- Paxton Crawford
- Johnny Damon
- Carl Everett
- Rich "El Guapo" Garces
- Eric Gagne
- Nomar Garciaparra
- Jeremy Giambi
- Trot Nixon
- Jose Offerman
- Julian Tavarez
- Mo Vaughn
- Jason Varitek
That's 17 current or former Red Sox. I guess we should include Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite twice for the Yankees since they each had 2 tours of duty with them, but then again, Mo Vaughn and Rich Garces each weighed twice the normal human so I think it evens out in the end.
An interesting chart would be to see which team had the highest percentage of named steroids abusers on their roster at one time.
It’s been a while…
It's been a while since I last posted but things have been getting more and more hectic with benchcoach. So we've reached a number of milestones, but as we stand looking back at the hill we climbed, we turn around and there's a mountain still waiting.
In any case, a quick update, we've launched an internal release of our site. It's not quite polished enough for us to release it yet, but we're working furiously to try and get there. We're also working on our business plan which has been an eye opening experience. Even if you're not planning on pitching your idea to an investor, the process of writing out a business plan, and trying to anticipate investors' questions and concerns, has proved invaluable. A lot of things we glossed over in our giddiness can no longer be ignored and other strategies need to be flushed out to a greater extent.
As a technologist, I tend to think of the technological side first and feel that the rest would take care of itself. Well that was the first douse of cold water on this cold December afternoon. These things don't take care of themselves and need to be addressed. Even if you don't plan on taking care of the issue, someone will have to. Here's an example using some made up figures.
Say that you estimate the market to be 50 million users. You figure if you can get 500,000 paying users, that would mean you get paid big time. You think, "that's only 1% of the market... no worries, our technology will be good enough to capture 1% of the paying market". Well it looks easy to go from 50M to 500K. Now try looking at it from the other perspective. How do I go from 0 users to 500K? That's when I crawled into bed with my Baseball Prospectus book and cried myself to sleep. Fortunately, I'm much cheerier in the morning and the thought of going from 0-500K increases my resolve to work harder and plan better, and take the marketing aspect more seriously.
So off I go now to try and develop a marketing strategy for our business plan.
