Taylor Swift. No. Seriously.

Okay, sorry for having been away for a while. Had to stay up very late listening to novice policy debate. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to do that, I suggest you run away as fast as possible. Still very busy IRL, so this will be a shorter entry. Not 3000 words or whatever.

So, anyway, I’m going to spend a bit of time on “Love Story”, by Taylor Swift. Why “Love Story”? Because my neighbors yesterday were blaring it for several hours right next to their home-created hockey rink and I have not been able to get the song out of my head since then. As a result, I have not only learned all of the lyrics to the song, but have had ample time to attempt to understand the myriad references in the “US Billboard Top 40 Mainstream number-one single” of February 28, 2009. Don’t get me wrong; I actually like the song, I’m just going to mock it also. I don’t like having songs stuck in my head.

So it’s apparently somewhat about Romeo and Juliet. Apart from the “they don’t kill themselves at the end” and the “tragedy” parts, I think Taylor (yeah, I first typed “Ms. Swift” and then realized how wrong that felt, so it’s Taylor) nails it. The first few stanzas are a pretty clear indicator of the first few scenes of the play, particularly the party/ball where Romeo and Juliet, you know, first fall in love or whatever. There’s some clever references within those verses themselves (“So I sneak out to the garden to see you / We keep quiet ’cause we’re dead if they knew”), which, of course, allude to the famous “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo” scenes (as one can tell, my Romeo and Juliet is a little weak on the edges. What can I say? Hamlet‘s my favorite Shakespeare play).

There’s also a clever little reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in the next line: “‘Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter”, which I really appreciate; not only does it utterly capture Hester Prynne’s isolation, but it also captures the primary root cause of that isolation, which was her love. I’m not sure that the narrator is necessarily a woman constrained by Puritan society, but the use of the reference really adds to the depth of the narrator’s feelings (in my opinion).

Interestingly, for a pop song (yes, I know it’s technically country, but let’s get real here; Taylor Swift is as much pop as she is country), the change in tempo and vocal usage is accompanied by a change in mood in the song: “I got tired of waiting / Wondering if you were ever coming around / My faith in you is fading”. That’s the Romeo and Juliet we’re used to, as it’s darker and far less bright, and the next line (“When I met you on the outskirts of town”) is, I imagine, a reference to what Romeo and Juliet were intending to do when they left the town. Or something of the sort.

Could the song then function as an idyllic version of Romeo and Juliet, a Utopian hope for them to live happily ever after? Whenever one (correction: one with a heart) reads the story for the first time, one wants them together, to live away from the strife in their lives. Wouldn’t it be nice to see “He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring / And said, marry me Juliet / You’ll never have to be alone / I love you and that’s all I really know /I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress”. The dad thing is especially unrealistic. It’s almost as if Taylor wanted to preserve the love and beauty of Romeo and Juliet while glossing over the rest of it.

Maybe I’m just reading too much into it (y’think?!?). Maybe the chorus (“It’s a love story baby just say yes”) is really the intention of the song. Maybe we just need to pretend like we’re watching the play when we listen to the lyrics. Or maybe people just don’t listen to the lyrics of Taylor Swift songs.

What does Taylor say?

This is a song I wrote when I was dating a guy who wasn’t exactly the popular choice. His situation was a little complicated, but I didn’t care. I started this song with the line “This love is difficult, but it’s real.” When I wrote the ending to this song, I felt like it was the ending every girl wants to go with her love story. It’s the ending that I want. You want a guy who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, what anyone says. He just says, “Marry me, Juliet, I love you, and that’s all I really know.” It’s sort of told in a character kind of thing, where it’s Romeo and Juliet, and it’s not me saying that I’m getting married or anything…but I think it’s fun to write about it.

More thoughts after the jump.

ESPN’s problems and Finals thoughts

I’m very upset at ESPN.

Look, normally I’m a huge fan of ESPN. The idea of a channel (or five) for sports, 24/7 really appeals to the side of me that is convinced that there is nothing else in life besides sports (that’s the majority side of me, for anyone who knows anything about me). I’m also a huge fan of having multiple channels, so that multiple myriad sporting events can be on each channel at once. I’ll be totally honest; it’s addicting. I’m one of those people who watches Sportscenter. For hours. For the same news over and over again. (quick guess: how much life do I possess? person who comes closest IN THE COMMENTS [hint hint] gets a surprise!).

I also like tennis (that’s a surprising one, no?). I do not possess the willpower, nor the time, however, to stay up until 2:00 am to watch the Australian Open women’s (or men’s) finals, no matter how good they are (sidebar: the only time I’ve canceled everything to stay up and watch sports in the middle of the night was the last World Cup. I was in India and for about the first month of my trip, I was still on American time). The idea of showing the games on tape delay (something that ESPN2 has apparently grown very fond of, as I’ve seen everything from Djokovic-Tsonga and Murray-Nadal to Dulko-Ivanovic on tape delay at between 10:00 and 2:00), while, on the surface somewhat prehistoric (you know, those times before texting and iPhones) appealed to me.

Seemed to appeal to the executives at ESPN2 as well, since they advertised that they would show the Henin-Williams final in prime time, as well as an “encore presentation” of the men’s final at 10 am Eastern time. So, even though it was a Saturday night, I canceled all my plans and settled down on the couch at 9:00 pm to see Justine the Comeback Kid and the Defending Champion duke it out in a match that I already knew Serena Williams had won in three sets. Basically, I expected to see three sets.

I saw two.

They played two. Seriously. They played around half of the first set, the second half of the second set, and the third set. For all the advertising, for all the talk about putting the game in prime time, it seemed that the two-hour time slot rampaged past my desire to see what ended up being a great women’s final. Sure, the sections shown were most likely the most “action-packed” (although having entertaining events with Dick Enberg commentating tennis is inordinately painful), but for actual fans, for thinking fans, it isn’t about the part where Justine won fifteen points in a row to close out the second set. It’s about her lead-up, how she managed to figure out Serena Williams’ defenses, about WHY she could do it earlier.

Now I understand the overwhelming compulsion to effusively show thunderous action that is the highlights of the day’s Winter X Games, and I understand that, no doubt, there were throngs of people gathered at 11:00 pm to see snowboard halfpipes or whatever (if you like Winter X Games, I apologize; I hate it when people ridicule my sports too), but for us tennis fans, it’s a utter, complete, total insult to cut off 1/3 of a match. Come on, ESPN2. Come on.

You know what makes it worse? The game itself was not much longer than the necessary space in the time slot (it was 2:07 hours for a 2:00 hour time slot) and the fact that ESPN2 was scheduling tapings all evening means that the time slot could have been expanded to accommodate the length of the women’s match; after all, it’s a tape delay. And you know what’s worse than that? The actual play that they showed ended at 10:44, meaning that there was another quarter of an hour where they could have shown the game (they showed the trophy presentation and speeches instead).

If they removed all the pre-match discussions, the analysis between sets, and a bit of the unnecessary advertising, they could have most likely fit the match in their schedule. If they had pushed everything back at most a half-hour (something they could have no doubt done), they could have fit the match right in. But they didn’t. This upsets me.

This morning, I watched the entirety of the men’s match on tape delay and, with the exception of the third set, Henin-Williams was a significantly better match (the quality of the tennis might have been not very different, but the skill level/skill at which the opponents were playing was significantly different and better in the women’s match). The men’s match was the once that received the better coverage and, well, I could see all of. I’m not saying gender has something to do with it, I’m just saying…*

* – (of course, it’s just as likely because Federer is an icon of the sport, but still! Justine’s a great story and this is America; surely people are Serena Williams fans? Right? Right?)

Bah. It doesn’t really matter. I know some people have been expecting rants from me, so I’m glad to oblige with this little mini-rant. To be honest, I’m much more at home talking about the finals.

Analysis after the “jump”, broken into little sections about various thoughts of mine.

Predicting service games

Hi! You probably know me from a variety of names, but if you do or you don’t, I’m “Arjun” (at least in this form), and this is a place for me to throw various rantings, research pieces, and other miscellaneous items. If you aren’t interested in analyzing things, well I’ll probably have ranty-pieces as well.

I’m a huge sports fan, so a lot of this will be about sports and baseball especially (because baseball is quantifiable and very prone to statistical thinking). I’ve published lots of stuff in varied places all over the internet, but at least here I can put what I want. There really won’t be a rhyme or reason to what’s exactly on here, but that’s on purpose; that’s how I think. Hey, for all I know, there might just be short stories or something here too!

Please comment! I have the little hit-tracker on the side to satisfy my curiosity/overwhelming need for ego-stroking, but if you comment, that makes me feel even better! And that’s what you want…right?

I have a list of sites on the sidebar; mostly baseball stats websites for now, but I’ll probably add more later. Give them a check if you’re interested based on the description: I promise only to link to the very best.

I’ll have a “jump” in all of my articles, just because I think it’s really cool-looking.

Without further rambling, the article! Tennis! Yay!

Anyway, I’ve been watching a fair bit of the Australian Open (by “a fair bit”, I mean “far far too much”) and generally am one of the sorts to enjoy tennis. By implication, this means that I’m also the type to be curious as to what exactly makes tennis players click – how do they do what they do? Specifically, in a recent match between Roger Federer and Nikolay Davydenko (the numbers one and six in the world, respectively. No idea how they met in the quarterfinals; if someone understands the Australian Open seeding, please tell me), it seemed that the primary difference between the players was that whenever Federer got into trouble in his service games, he had an ace (or two, or three, or even just a big serve) to throw out to even out the game, while Davydenko had an unfortunate habit of double-faulting in said situations.

Naturally, a lot of this is just from my eyes (which are, of course, simultaneously the most reliable and unreliable sources of information in the world), but this got me thinking: how well do aces and double faults predict a player holding serve? Naturally, players who have better serves will have more aces and will hold their serve more often (here in America, the player who is immediately associated with this kind of thinking is Andy Roddick), but to what extent is that true? I wanted to investigate further and, since “having a life” is beyond me, I decided to do just that.

So I used a sample size of sixty-three male players. More specifically, I looked at their success over the last year. There are several problems with this dataset: first, I used the totally-arbitrary cut-off of fifteen games played. I have no idea if this cut-off is too small or too high, while second, I used the data from the whole year, so I’m combining surfaces – never a good idea!  Oh well, at least it’s a fun exercise. Third, I’m not accounting for player ability. Federer and Rafael Nadal are weighed the same as Lukas Lacko.

All statistics courtesy tennisinsight.com.

Actual data after the “jump”.

Jack Morris vs the 1980s

One of the major claims made by Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame supporters is that he was the best pitcher of the eighties since he won so  many games. I wanted to see just how many games he “deserved” to win and just how many he won by virtue of being on very good offensive teams.

MORRIS = Jack Morris
STIEB = Dave Stieb
SABERHAGEN = Bret Saberhagen
MARTINEZ = Dennis Martinez
FLANAGAN = Mike Flanagan

From this, I think I get that Stieb and Saberhagen were far superior to Morris.
Martinez is Morris’ most similar player (B-Ref similarity scores). I get that he was a better pitcher.
Flanagan, a player no one has ever heard of, provides a very comparable case to Jack Morris in terms of his pitching profile.

In much of this period, there were better pitchers (Roger Clemens in the later half, Bert Blyleven throughout, etc).
This little table is only to illustrate:
a) Jack Morris’ win total is extremely inflated
b) Jack Morris was not the best pitcher of the 1980s