Albert Pujol's Terrible Start - Should Fans be Worried?

Albert Pujols is off to a terrible start in his Angels career.  As of this writing he's hitting:

.224 BA, .280 OBP, .316 SLG, .596 OPS, 0 HRs

Yup, that's a big zero home runs for the man who's currently 37th all time in home runs.  It's significantly worse than his April 2011 slump where he hit:

.245 BA, .305 OBP, .453 SLG, .758 OPS, 7 HRs

The question is, should Angel's fans be concerned?  It's interesting that there are instances of Hall of Fame caliber players having ridiculous slumps in their careers.

One that comes to mind is Frank Thomas. From 1991 to 1997, Frank Thomas averaged:

.330 BA, .452 OBP, .604 SLG, 1.056 OPS

Then in 1998-1999, Frank Thomas was just not himself.  In 1998 he hit:

.265 BA, .381 OBP, .480 SLG, .861 OPS

and 1999 wasn't that much better.  Then all of a sudden he was back to form in 2000:

.328 BA, .436 OBP, .625 SLG, 1.061 OPS

Injuries and age slowed down Thomas' production the rest of the way, but at the age of 38 he was still able to produce a .926 OPS with 39 home runs in Oakland.  He even put up 26 home runs and a .857 OPS when he was 39 years old in Toronto.

Another player I remember having a year long slump was Mark McGwire.  From 1987 to 1990 he averaged:

.255 BA, .358 OBP, .515 SLG, .873 OPS, 38 HRs

then in 1991 he had a terrible year:

.201 BA, .330 OBP, .383 SLG, .714 OPS, 22 HRs

I remember Mark McGwire sat out the last game of the year, for fear his batting average would dip below .200.  Then he rebounded and was pretty normal again in 1992:

.268 BA, .385 OBP, .585 SLG, .970 OPS

while he had injuries, we know the story of the rest of Mark McGwire's career, culminating with leading the majors in home runs 3 years in a row from 1997-1999.

The last (and most recent) example I could think of was David Ortiz in 2009.  Through the month of May, David Ortiz had this horrific line:

.185 BA, .284 OBP, .287 SLG, .570 OPS, 1 HR

since then, David Ortiz has continued to be the solid DH slugger he always has been.  He finished 2009 with a .794 OPS, had a .899 OPS in 2010, and a .953 OPS in 2011.

The short story of these examples is that great hitters typically do not disappear and fail to hit in the future.  They may have to grind through some injuries as they age and perhaps adjust as they age, but crazy slumps do occur.  Perhaps Pujols is dealing with the pressure of $250M contract or he's having difficulty handling the new Los Angeles media.  Long term though, he should be fine.

Update (5/14/12):

I forgot about the case of one of my favorite players in baseball, El Grande Donkey Adam Dunn. From 2004 to 2010 Dunn averaged:

.253 BA, .381 OBP, .533 SLG, .914 OPS, 40 HRs

He's not Albert Pujols, but those are great slugging numbers for any power hitter to put up.  Then in 2011 he had a line that was embarrassing.

.159 BA, .292 OBP, .277 SLG, .569 OPS, 11 HRs

Adam Dunn is not Albert Pujols, but how does a player go from about a .900 OPS to sub-.600 OPS for a year and getting benched?  Stress over a big contract?  Trouble adjusting to a new league?  Who knows.  What we do know is he's recovering quite nicely in 2012.  Through the time of this writing Dunn is hitting:

.248 BA, .390 OBP, .607 SLG, .997 OPS, 11 HRs

So he appears to be pretty much back to normal.

Update (6/10/12):

I noticed something funny w/ Albert Pujols of late.  On 5/15/12, the Anaheim Angel's hitting coach was fired.

Through 5/15/12 Albert Pujols hit:

.212 BA, .248 OBP, .288 SLG, .536 OPS, 1 HRs

from 5/15 to 6/9, Albert Pujols hit:

.322 BA, .394 OBP, .678 SLG, 1.072 OPS, 8 HRs

coincidence

Mass Effect 3 Ending - Did Bioware drop the ball?

There's been a lot written about fan outrage on the ending of Mass Effect 3. While I had heard about the bad ending prior to playing the game, I didn't find the ending to be that much of an issue. Perhaps my expectations had been lowered, or the more likely case is that I was not as invested into the Mass Effect universe as others. I was curious as to what the fan outrage was over and if the outrage was warranted and started reading up on the topic. As far as I can tell from reading random articles online, there seem to be four main issues with the ending. SPOILERS BELOW.

1. The ending story.

When Shepard discovers the meaning behind the Reapers, the story conclusion is a tad disappointing, however I wouldn't consider it repulsive. I had heard that one review said the ending was very similar to "it was all just a dream". It's certainly not that bad. I recall the ending to one game (I think Grandia 3) where the end boss said his goal was to "destroy love". Now that's an awful ending.

Perhaps the ending could have been tweaked to be similar to the Matrix Reloaded. Shepard could have been told the true nature of the Reapers and chosen to let the Reapers continue their destruction, perhaps in exchange for saving his and his crew's life. That certainly would have made the ending story choice more interesting.

I'm not going to rag on Bioware too much for the story ending. With the end of the Mass Effect trilogy, no ending would please all of the fans. The ending to the story was average and acceptable in my eyes.

2. The ending battle.

I think fans have a legitimate gripe here. After playing the game for 20-30 hours, and taking on various side missions to gain "war assets" for the final battle, the end battle appears to be unchanged based on your decisions. During a final battle in which you are protecting some missiles, you could have had some help from Geth, Quarian, mercenaries, Salarian, etc. forces based on your decisions in the game. Perhaps Grunt, Samara, etc. could have come to help as well. However, none of that happened. It was all just on you.

As a comparison, lets look at another Bioware game, Dragon Age: Origins. In the game, you are similarly trying to ally races/people to battle the Darkspawn. Based on your decisions in the game, you can have extra/different allies help you in the final battle (elves, golems, mages, etc.). It makes your decision making in the game more meaningful.

Given Bioware's history of having the game's story affect the end battle, I would say Bioware did drop the ball here. It is certainly not what people expected of a Bioware game.

3. The ending cinematic.

This is where I think fans are the most irate. Regardless of your decision making at the end, the end cinematic is largely unchanged. There are minor differences, such as the Reapers leaving earth or being destroyed, but 80-90% of the cinematic is identical regardless of your choices.

I wouldn't say Bioware dropped the ball here. In previous games by Bioware (that I can recall), the ending cinematic hasn't been gloriously different either. Even other contemporary games, such as Fallout 3, have had only minor differences in the cinematic ending too. It's hard for me to say that it was something expected by fans.

This isn't to say Bioware couldn't/shouldn't have done better. For example, they could have added an extra 30-60 second cinematic at the very end to show how your decisions affected the world. If you didn't cured the Genophage, perhaps a look 100 years in the future show the Krogan have started a new war with the Salarians. Or perhaps if the Geth and Quarians didn't make peace, a new organic vs. synthetic war occurs.

4. Ending plot holes

Well, I think Bioware definitely messed up here. Especially with the ending crash of the Normandy on another planet. How does your crew end up back on the Normandy after your battle on Earth? Especially given some members of your crew were blasted in the final fight.

So overall, do I think Bioware blow the ending? I wouldn't say they did. Fan expectations were through the roof for this game. I imagine some amount of disappointment was bound to occur. However, Bioware could had a number of embarrassing goofs and definitely should have done better.

I would say the disappointment was similar to the disappointment for Dragon Age 2. A quote from RPG site [1] said, "the discussion about Dragon Age II doesn't need to be "is it good?" - It is - but needs to be "is this what fans wanted from a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins?"

The same can probably be said about Mass Effect 3. The game is really good, that's not in question. But is the ending what fans were expecting? The answer seems to be an emphatic no.

[1] - http://pc.rpgsite.net/reviews/267-dragon-age-ii-review, through Wikipedia

Update 4/11/12:

Ok, I've now learned about the "Indoctrination Theory" for the ending of Mass Effect 3. The theory is really interesting. If it's true, it's actually brilliant, but mean. After giving people a massive game of "choices" and "decisions", you end the game saying, "Aha, you actually did not control your decisions. This is a video game."

Mike Trout & Bryce Harper, the next Andruw Jones & Vladimir Guerrero?

Baseball America's top 100 prospects for 2012 had Bryce Harper and Mike Trout listed as the #1 and #3 prospects in baseball respectively. In 2011, they were listed as the #1 and #2 prospects. The baseball world is carefully watching their progress and comparisons between the two will likely be shared for much of their careers.

I couldn't help but think of the last time there were two highly touted outfield prospects at the top of the charts. Andruw Jones and Vladimir Guerrero were listed #1 and #9 respectively on Baseball America's top 100 prospects in 1996. In 1997 they were #1 and #2. They were similarly compared to as they reached the majors and began to mature. If I recall correctly, Andruw Jones was considered the more well rounded prospect of the two while Vladimir Guerrero was the better hitter. It's not so dissimilar from the comparisons of Mike Trout and Bryce Harper (Harper being the better hitter with Trout being the more rounded player).

Now that they are both approaching the ends of their careers, it's interesting that Jones and Guerrero pretty much met all of the expectations people had of them.

Andruw Jones was an incredible center fielder during his prime, amassing 10 gold gloves. As of this writing, he has 420 career home runs, 1255 RBIs, and a career OPS of .827. He had a quick decline when he entered his 30s, which put him in more of a backup role and may limit his HOF chances, but that's about it.

Vladimir Guerrero did end up the better hitter of the two. As of this writing, he has 449 home runs, 1496 RBIs, a .318 BA, and a .931 OPS. He won an MVP in 2004 and finished in the top ten of MVP voting an additional 5 times. Wow!

Hopefully there will be similar careers for Mike Trout and Bryce Harper.

Update (10/4/12):

Wow, I don't think anyone thought Mike Trout and Bryce Harper's careers would start off like this.

Bryce Harper, at 19, finished the year with 22 home runs, a .270/.340/.477 split, and a 5.0 WAR.  For a 19 year old, that's amazing.  As a comparison, Ken Griffey Jr. had 16 home runs, a .264/.329/.420 split, and a 2.9 WAR in his age 19 rookie year.

Mike Trout was a completely other story.  He's in a dead heat with Miguel Cabrera for the AL MVP in his rookie year.  He finished his rookie year with 30 home runs, a .326/.399/.564 split, and a 10.7 WAR.  Some feel he might be the best player in baseball already.

Apple's Dividend - Why All the Excitement?

So earlier this morning Apple announced a dividend. I don't understand the fuss.

A) It's simply what mature/big companies do. Perhaps Apple's culture and customers had a tough time accepting this? Perhaps it's part of what Tim Cook wants to do as CEO at Apple? Make Apple a bit more mature?

B) The dividend is very average. At $2.65 a quarter, that gives us a yield of 1.7%. It's good, but nothing stunning. By my calculations Walmart is at 2.4%. Microsoft is at 1.9%. GE is at 2.9%. It's higher than Cisco & Oracle, which started issuing dividends not so long ago (both were around 1 percent).

A Young Amy Poehler on Conan O'Brien

A came upon these videos of a young Amy Poehler performing as Andy Richter's little sister on Conan O'brien. I couldn't stop laughing, Poehler is great in these.

Infiniband - You Gotta Have Pretty Good Game

A long time ago I saw a t-shirt from an Infiniband company that said the following

"Infinband - Fast, Cheap, Easy"

my thought process when first reading this was:

• Fast - Yup, it's fast.  Definitely faster than ethernet.
• Cheap - Yeah, way cheaper than ethernet.
• Easy - Ummm, no, you gotta have pretty good game ... and a wingman would help.

Now, I'm sure there are some market analysts at Cisco, Intel, IDC, etc. that did some fancy market analysis to figure out why Infiniband did not grow at the rates people predicted.  My guess has always been that it was because Infiniband isn't easy.  It's just way too different than ethernet, leading many institutions to not bother with it because it wasn't worth the hassle of learning, retraining, coming up to speed, etc.

I sometimes like to think of the issue with an Infiniband expert trying to explain Infiniband to a knowledgeable ethernet user. 

Ethernet Guy: So I installed all the hardware, loaded the drivers, but nothing is working.
Infiniband Expert:  Did you run the subnet manager? The subnet manager sets up and routes the fabric.
Ethernet Guy: Is that an option on the switch?
Infiniband Expert: Maybe, it's a piece of software that may run on the switch or a server. 
Ethernet Guy: Where is it on my fabric?
Infiniband Guy: On your network, it's a daemon running on a server.
Ethernet Guy: Ugh, but server configuration is handled by a different group.

or

Ethernet Guy: What are GUIDs in Infiniband?
Infiniband Expert: The GUIDs in Infiniband are like MAC addresses.  They are NIC specific identifiers.
Ethernet Guy: Ok, then what's a LID.
Infinitude Expert: A LID is sort of like an IP address.  It's the software based identifier for a port.
Ethernet Guy: So why does my Infiniband NIC have a LID and an IP address?
Infiniband Expert: You get the IP address from IP over IB.  It's a separate driver.
Ethernet Guy: So I need to load 2 drivers for one NIC?
Infiniband Expert: Yup
Ethernet Guy: So how do I see the LID for my NIC.
Infiniband Expert: You can use one of many tools, like ibstat.
Ethernet Guy: Why isn't it in ifconfig?

I could go on and on, but the point is it's so different that the learning curve is quite steep.  There's new ways to debug problems, new ways to route, new advanced configuration, new tools to learn, etc.  For the majority of institutions, the performance gain of Infiniband must be immensely superior to justify the cost for retraining, transition, inefficiency, maintenance, etc.

How many institutions found Infiniband to be "immensely superior" for their needs?  It seems to be not many.  I can imagine this conversation happening in many companies:

Manager: Hey, Engineer can you take a look at this Infiniband thing.   The sales people say it's super fast for the price.
Engineer: Sure thing, I'll play with it.
<1 week later>
Manager: So how is Infiniband?
Engineer: I can't figure any of this out.

and that's the end of Infiniband at that company.

Intel acquires Qlogic's Infiniband Assets - End of Infiniband?

So today, it was announced that Intel had acquired Qlogic's Infiniband assets for $125M.  My immediate reaction was, "uh oh, is the age of Infiniband in HPC over?"

Why would this be the end of Infiniband?  Here's my analysis and thinking on the topic.

In 2005 there were five early players in the Infiniband market worth mentioning: Topspin, Voltaire, Mellanox, Pathscale, and Silverstorm.

• Topspin was acquired by Cisco in 2005 for $250M. Cisco shut down their Infiniband R&D in 2009.
• Silverstorm and Pathscale were acquired by Qlogic in 2006 for $60M and $109M respectively (total $169M). Pathscale's compilers were sold for undisclosed amounts (or atleast I can't find the number online). Given they are undisclosed numbers, its unlikely the numbers were big.  So Qlogic likely couldn't sell their Infiniband assets for even the price they paid for them.
• Mellanox acquired Voltaire in 2010 for $218M.

So that takes us to the beginning of 2011. What was once 5 major players (or 4 if you count the merged Silverstorm/Pathscale as 1) became 2. The growth of Infiniband as a data center solution to replace Ethernet did not appear to be happening.  Naturally, consolidation occurred.

So no worries yet for Infiniband, there were still 2 major players left.  Well lets look at the financials.

• Mellanox has been profitable for awhile.  Last year (2010) they profited $13M on $154M in sales.  Analysts say that Mellanox had huge sales this year at $258M.  Going off old income statements, $50-$60M of that is from Voltaire, so that's some decent growth.  Of course, a non-trivial portion of this profit is not from Infiniband, but from Mellanox's Ethernet sales.  How much?  Unfortunately I can't find breakdowns.
• I couldn't find breakdowns in revenue/profit for Qlogic, but given the sale of their Infiniband divisions was for $125M, it indicates it wasn't much (Qlogic had a market cap of $1.6B starting today).
• As far as I can tell from data sheets, Voltaire never had a single profitable year.

I'm not some fancy financial analyst, but what I derive from this is that the total profitability of Infiniband is somewhere on the order of $25-$50 million globally. It's enough for there to be businesses out there and enough for there to be a market, but it's not a lot.

So the big question is, why did Intel buy Qlogic's Infiniband assets?

1. Were they interested in the ~$5M profit that Qlogic's Infiniband assets could net them?  I doubt it.  (I derived the ballpark $5M because this article puts Mellanox as owning about 85% of the Infiniband market.)
2. Perhaps Intel thinks they can do some bundling to increase the profitability of Infiniband.  Hypothetically, put them on Intel motherboards.  It's certainly possible.  But how much gain can they really get for a market that appears to not be interested in Infiniband?  Turn the $5M into $20-$30M in a few years?  It seems hardly worth it for an Intel.
3. Intel thinks they can turn Infiniband around as a data center/HPC solution and make it far more popular.  If this were 2005, I would be willing to believe it.  I think the lack of wider adoption of Infiniband is a bit cemented.  Newer/better Ethernet solutions are now catching up too, so it's not the same market as 2005.
4. Support Infiniband as a community service.  With Mellanox having 85% of the market, there was a decent chance Qlogic's Infiniband could eventually sink.  Without a competitor and decent prices, the HPC community could buy less Intel chips.  There is a good argument for this, although I think the odds of this are low.  Intel could completely ignore the HPC community and they would still buy tons of their chips.  Perhaps less overall, but is it enough of a difference for Intel to do a $125M community service for them?
5. This is an aqhire move, designed to give Intel the talent necessary to make the HPC networking product they really want to make.  While it could be based on Infiniband, it's unlikely to be standard Infiniband or standardized as Infiniband. There are very few companies/groups out there that know how to make HPC networking equipment, and the Infiniband group at Qlogic is one of them.  They could have bought Cray, but they'd be buying a lot of software assets they probably weren't interested in

My gut tells me its #5 above.  As an additional argument for this point, in 2011  Intel hired away a ton of HPC talent including Chief Architect of Blue Gene from IBM.  Did they hire a whole bunch of these elite HPC executives and architects to help push commodity Intel chips and hardware like they have in the past?  I doubt it.

So how is this the end for Infiniband?  Well, if my guess above occurs, you'll only have Mellanox as the player in the Infiniband market.  While I have respect for Mellanox, I have a hard time believing they are going to care about standardizing their hardware or pushing changes to standards groups if they are the only ones manufacturing it.  Eventually, Infiniband would become synonymous with whatever Mellanox produces, and Infiniband itself will be gone.

Update (4/26/12):

Heh, from #5 above:

They could have bought Cray, but they'd be buying a lot of software assets they probably weren't interested in 

and what do ya know, Intel bought Cray's interconnect assets earlier this week.

With that acquisition, that's a lot of networking HPC expertise to be buying up and absorbing.  Perhaps this enhances my argument that Intel is gathering forces to create a new HPC interconnect technology?

One colleague suggested that Intel might be trying to have a "portfolio" of different products.  It's certainly possible that they are, but it doesn't seem like something they would want to do.  Having a portfolio of products is more up the alley of an HP or an IBM.  It'll be interesting to see what Intel does, but the full manifestation of this will probably not be seen for years.