How much more of a discount could you possibly want?

Albert Pujols was paid a total of $104 million for the first 10 years (and almost certainly the best 10 years) of his Hall of Fame career. It is safe to say the Cardinals got the single-greatest bargain in the history of the sport, relative to the market.

Ryan Howard will be paid $180 million for the first 10 years of his career. Mark Teixeira will be paid $144 million. If Prince Fielder is signed to a contract that pays him $20 million or above for the next five seasons, he will make at least $135 million for his first 10 years. And these are just Pujols' three main contemporaries at 1B. Without checking, I'm confident that at least 20 players have made, or will make, more than Pujols in the first 10 years of their careers, and none of them will offer the same level of production.

Pujols isn't necessarily deserving of sympathy: He made the decision to sign a below-market extension with the Cards, and the team was well within its rights to not renegotiate that contract. But to dismiss the fact that while Pujols was busy being the best player in baseball, the Cards went out and signed a great, but inferior player in Matt Holliday to a higher salary than Pujols' is to purposely prevent yourself from getting the point. The Cardinals knew they were getting a massive bargain in Pujols, and took advantage of it to sign a lesser player for more money, without offering their best player at least a matching salary.

And this is where I get to my (hopefully) succinct point: The Cardinals were playing with at least $35 million in house money, when you compare what they would have had to spend to get 85 percent of his production from another player. You could argue that the figure is probably closer to $100 million, when taking into account how much better Pujols has been than his contemporaries, one of which is going to be paid $80 million more for his first 10 years. The Angels have no credit with which to work, so the $250 million they'll pay for Pujols is based entirely on what they hope he produces for the next 10 years. The Cards, on the other hand, could have offset the inevitable years of overpay in his late 30s and early 40s with the money they already banked from his services while he was drastically underpaid.

The Cardinals had every economic incentive imaginable to ensure they offered Pujols more than any other team. You can argue they made the correct decision to not take on the risk of that 10-year deal, but you cannot argue that Pujols was disloyal for taking the highest bid after 10 years of being underpaid by a very large amount. Loyalty in an employer-employee relationship is always based on money, which is how we measure the esteem with which the subordinate is held. In this case, the employee got a pretty good idea of how his employer felt about not only his future worth, but the worth of his past efforts, and made the entirely rational decision to head elsewhere, where he was wanted more.

Contemplating Paterno, McQueary, and outrage

I feel sorry for Joe Paterno and Mike McQueary. I really do. Both men can be counted amongst the victims of Jerry Sandusky's monstrous crimes, even if they are not the victims we should be most concerned with, or feel the most sympathy for. Both those men were violated in a basic and awful way by Sandusky, and for that they do deserve sympathy.

Joe Paterno and Mike McQueary are awful human beings, and I wish them nothing but misery for the rest of their worthless lives. Those two men are wholly complicit in the continued brutalization of young men by a monster who should be put down with no more dignity than a rabid pitbull.

As we go through life, we can only hope to not be exposed to the depths of the human soul that Paterno and McQueary had so forcefully brought to their immediate attention. I cannot fathom what I would feel if a friend of mine, someone I loved, was revealed to be a monster. I am sure it would cause me to never love, or trust, again, and that in and of itself would render me something less than a whole person. Paterno and McQueary could never be whole again, from the second they discovered what a man they knew, admired, maybe even loved, was doing to at least one young man that day in the bowels of an institution they undoubtedly love as if it were itself human.

But let us not speak of what we would do. I cannot attest to my fitness for navigating this situation, nor can anyone else, except those who have been dealt the blow of actually having faced it. To even consider the hypothetical is to equivocate, to pretend that a choice really exists when it doesn't.

Instead we must speak of what must be done by any human being in that situation: Stop it from ever happening again, no matter the cost. Paterno and McQueary failed a test they didn't deserve to be faced with, and for that failure there is no punishment severe enough on this realm to, upon its execution, grant them absolution. This is not arguable, unless you do not value anything in this world.

You might say, but these men have families, and children of their own, and it is for those reasons they have worth. But those men already betrayed their families and children, and their worthiness as fathers, or spouses, or loved ones is invalidated by their awful crime against the very essence of what makes us human. There is no amount of good they could have done in their lives to outweigh their complicity in child rape. My hope is for both that they die with no other thought than what misery they wrought on Sandusky's victims.

"I am disappointed in the Board's decision," said Paterno in a statement released just moments ago. What incredible proof that this man is unworthy of anything but our most vicious contempt. He just walked out of his house with a smile and his arm around his wife, who herself has abdicated any notion of humanity, as deluded students screamed they loved him, and said he loved them too, before asking as a coda to "pray for the victims." There are no words.

As for those students, the ones on his front lawn, the ones holding gobsmacking silent vigils for the decrepit coward in front of his statue, the ones rioting out on Beaver Street: Our society will not be whole until you leave it, one way or the other. Paterno and McQueary indeed suborned child rape, a crime that defies our ability to express its horrors in words, but did so in a crisis of the soul, and failed their test as humans because they didn't have the moral fortitude to do the only thing a real human being can do. But you, "students," you are animals who mitigate the horrors of child rape with the benefit of reflection, and do a disservice to our species. The stain you have put on us all is one that will not fade for some time, but we can only hope you all begin the healing process for the rest of us by removing yourself from our society, sooner rather than later.

So a cross walks into a federal preserve ...

While living in Pocatello, Idaho, I drove by the county's courthouse on an almost-daily basis. Erected out on the otherwise nondescript lawn was a rather crude monument depicting the Ten Commandments, which is to many courthouses in America what a red light is to a den of iniquity. As a unabashed and often vocal atheist, the memorial was a daily annoyance, though not for the reason many would think. I don't have a problem with signs of faith anymore than I do proclamations of the absence thereof. I am not personally offended or bothered by the concept of spirituality, I just think spirituality itself is silly and dangerous to our world writ large.

The underlying cause of my being annoyed, and the reason I wanted that monument removed, was because I shuddered to think of how totally stupid the lawn in front of the courthouse would look if it featured monuments of faith for the wide variety of religions practiced in the city. I'd just rather we just tell everyone — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — that such displays are best left to the front window of one's house. Or, say, churches.

The response to this argument — and it's almost always the Christians who posit such — is that Christian symbols aren't inherently exclusive. Like the champions of the repulsive Confederate Flag that flew over the South Carolina state house, they'll say it's history that's being protected here, not the particular set of beliefs represented by the symbols. That's the tack pursued by Justice Antonin Scalia in defense of the "White Cross World War I Memorial," a five-foot tall white cross erected in 1934 which sits in the federally owned Mojave National Preserve.

"It's erected as a war memorial! I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of … of … of the resting place of the dead."

The article I've linked to covers its bases in terms of the back-and-forth, and I'm certainly not interested in exploring the various legalistic questions at play in this case. What interests me are two things: 1) The fact that Scalia, a brazenly intelligent man who rarely walks into an intellectual gunfight with a knife, actually believes that non-Christians would ever be buried under a cross (this isn't even the case with large plots of anonymous military burial grounds, where any recognized Jew would have a Star of David substituted for a cross); and, 2) That Scalia actually believes that the universal sign of Christianity ever ceases to be so, even if it's being employed in a non-religious context (in this case, a war memorial).

Of course he doesn't actually believe the second premise implicit in his objection; no human being on earth would ever recognize a white cross as anything but a symbol of Christianity, just like no American would recognize the Confederate Flag as anything but a symbol of slave-owning secessionists who once took arms against fellow citizens and America itself. What he's really arguing here is intent, as clearly those vets who put the cross up in the first place did so with no intention of creating an Establishment Clause skirmish, mainly because America was a much more hegemonic place then than it is today.

It's a sticky situation, as almost every fight surrounding the Establishment Clause is. Tearing down the memorial seems a rather crude exercise, since it was and is a war memorial, and memorials are what little solace we have to offer to our military dead and their families. But the alternative is to open up the memorial space to more demonstrations of faith, as was proposed by a Buddhist on this very site. No one will argue that allowing a Buddhist exhibition would be more consistent with the principles of our pluralistic, multi-faith society, but it would also be a logistical and aesthetic nightmare. One can see a situation in which, come the passing of a decade, the site would look more like a "Faiths of the World" exhibition at your local high school than anything resembling a war memorial.

So we have to ask ourselves, what's worse? Nothing, or everything? Because our constitution does not properly allow for the possibility that a majority's religious beliefs somehow affords those followers more rights for public display than the followers of less popular faiths. To argue otherwise would simply be arguing in favor of de facto establishment, which is a short and token step away from just going ahead and ratifying Christianity as our nation's official religion.

Many Christians, particularly those of a rightward bent, find arguments like mine to be repugnant. They express mock or real outrage at the idea of someone being "offended" by Christian displays on public land (and I'll concede that the verb "offense" and its various conjugations have been abused to a tragic degree). They see any challenge to public displays of Christian symbols as being an "attack" on Christianity, just like they see the use of the term "Happy Holidays" as part of a "war" on Christmas. Yet, they don't see their support of passive exclusion as being an attack on Judaism, just the nature of the world when your tribe is the smaller one, and doesn't boast the commonly recognized name of its deity in a passage of the Declaration of Independence (contrary to a rather disturbing commonly held belief, "God" is not mentioned once in The Constitution, a document that actually holds up the concept of "liberty" as that which bestows any and all blessings).

But professed outrage is a poor substitute for logic, and there is ultimately no logical defense available to those who believe Christian symbols can expect special protection in the public sphere. And, since I know men like Scalia would be even more scandalized by opening up the floodgates and turning the front lawns of every small-town courthouse into a smorgasbord of religious symbology, I think we can all agree that it's just better to have nothing at all.

Mr. Scalia, tear down that cross.

Joyce Carol Oates is a monster

From her recent contribution to the torrent of Ted Kennedy remembrances:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

Is this what it's become? The guilt for Oates and her like over loving Teddy has seemed to overwhelm a rather intelligent woman's last grasp on logic. We're now justifying the kind of callousness and negligence that led to a young woman's unnecessary death — and it's worth noting that she was a wonderful, liberal woman who had dedicated much of her short life to the cause of civil rights — by measuring what that person does with the rest of his undeservedly free life?

And then, this horrifying sentence from someone with much less of a Q rating (and hopefully influence), worse than anything I've heard usual whipping boys O'Reilly, Beck or Limbaugh say recently (though I'm sure they're scrambling now that the stakes have been raised):

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

I don't suppose it's worth mentioning that Kennedy's worth as a politician is in the eyes of the beholder; one shouldn't need to point out to Oates and the HuffPoTroll (HPT from here on out) that there's a significant portion of the American population that wished he was locked up precisely to prevent his "second act." No, even if it were accepted by every person in America that Kennedy's contributions as a politician were positive, it would not aid their arguments in the slightest.

There is something so completely revolting about how easily Oates, HPT and many Kennedy defenders, have sloughed off the death of Mary Jo Kopechne as nothing more than a "nadir" of an otherwise great man's life. Perhaps Oates requires reminding that actual human lives aren't slaves to a narrative arc; Kennedy was no vessel for a fiction writer. He was a real man, who could have had the political career he did without Kopechne's death. And Kopechne was a real woman — do we really need to trot out the "somebody's daughter" bullshit to make this point? — who herself aimed to make a real difference in this country. Who knows? Maybe she could have been an even more influential figure in the civil rights movement than Teddy himself?

Maybe I'm expecting too much from the writers who clearly were trying to set themselves apart from the chatter. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe I'm allowing my harsh summary judgement of Kennedy's political career — he is one of the leading proponents of the government as omnipresent force in my daily life — to cloud my dim view of Oates and HPT's rather cruel-sounding calculus.

But to accept what they've said is to accept that the ends always justify the means. And many of our worst sins as a country and a human race have been perpetrated using that very justification, including many of the sins we continue to commit today. And it also makes me wonder if Oates, and HPT, believe we should start searching our penitentiaries for more men like Kennedy, who simply needed their own "nadir" before doing great things. Because, surely, these lions of equality and liberalism don't believe such redemption is only available to the rich and privileged.

Boy, I don't know if I can really do this

So, I'm about 99 percent sure that, beginning this September, I will begin a Master's program at the University of Phoenix for secondary education. But, before I finalize anything, I'm doing some research on my possible future career, and stumble across this nugget of pure government beauty in the list of requirements for a full secondary education accreditation:

• A passing score on the performance portion of the Arizona Educator Proficiency Assessment. Currently, the assessment has not been developed.

You just can't make that shit up.

Adventures in online content

Far be it from me to accuse someone else of prejudice, but the absence of "Puerto Rican" on the following list of possible answers shrieks of blatant bias.

For shame, ESPN.

Why the draft is only slightly worse than the Bataan Death March

The draft isn't broken. Proof? Here's how the the key part of the top three teams' draft board looked when the festivities kicked off a couple of months ago:

WASHINGTON NATIONALS:
1) Stephen Strasburg

SEATTLE MARINERS:
1) Stephen Strasburg
2) Dustin Ackley

SAN DIEGO PADRES
1) Stephen Strasburg
2) Dustin Ackley
3) Donovan Tate



While you may quibble with whether Tate should have been the target at No. 3 for the Pads, you cannot argue that he was picked there because they thought he was the third-best player on the board, as evidenced by the fact that they set a bonus record for a prep draftee.

That trend continued down the board. While the Pirates took some heat for taking a "signability" guy in Tony Sanchez at No. 4, they did so in part because they were planning to make a splash later on in the draft and international market, both of which they did. Otherwise, what we saw this year was the best talent flowing to teams in inverse order to their finish in the '08 season.

But that's not what the draft is about, despite what some credulous and cretinous writers and fans will bleat. See, the worst teams not only want the best talent, they also want it for free. They're not happy paying Strasburg 1/5th of what he'd get on the open market (conservatively); they don't think he should cost anything at all. Because, clearly, the Nationals deserve a subsidy — paid for entirely in lost opportunity cost by the unlucky, talented amateur — for running a franchise into the ground, despite already receiving a healthy subsidy from the taxpayers of the greater DC area, not to mention the MLB's general fund.

The Nationals have spent or committed $138.85 million in the last five years in completely voluntary contracts (no service time or arbitration constraints), covering 26 total player seasons, for players on the 40-man roster. That works out to $5.34 million per player season. While not all of those seasons have been cashed in, most of them have been, and you can see the results. If the Nationals are cash-poor, it's only because they decided to re-up Dmitri Young for another 2 years at $5 million per when he would have been lucky to get a minor-league deal elsewhere (and Jim Bowden agreed to keep him on the 25-man roster, regardless of performance, to boot!). Outside of that, virtually every player on the 40-man is making the major-league minimum, give or take a few thousand.

The Nationals had the first pick in the draft because they've been a horrendously run organization, mostly in the sense that they spend what money they have terribly. And who, besides the poor bastards still paying for tickets, gets to foot the bill for the team's ineptitude? Stephen Strasburg, who by deign of the draft and the fact he wasn't born in a foreign country, will receive millions less than he would have in an open market for the first four years of his career (plus two more arb years, which will assuredly pay him closer to what he could earn in a free agent deal, but still not as much).

Yes, the young man will still make $15 million over the first four years of his career, which is not a slave wage, nor should it be compared to one. But no one questions what Strasburg would fetch on the open market — a much less proven/polished pitcher in Aroldis Chapman, a better comp for Stras than Daisuke Matsuzaka, is predicted by some to fetch upwards of $30 million — and that's lost money, period. An athlete's career is a fleeting asset in the best of situations, and the attrition rate is higher for pitchers yet. Everyone talks about what Stras will make down the road, and many of the idiots — Jayson Stark, Ryan Zimmerman, Thomas Boswell — are content to say he should wait for his payday happily. But that payday may never come. It's easy to say, when you've got tenure and are getting paid as much as the market will allow, that the kids should wait for the money.

I've read in some comment boards that the reason MLB must restrict draft bonuses is because the attrition rate for prospects is so great, the teams couldn't possibly afford to pay free-market values. But that argument sounds hollow when you consider that Strasburg, the most expensive drafted player in the history of the sport, will make just a little more than half of what the Nationals paid out to Dmitri Young and Austin Kearns for a combined six years. Both of those players turned in below-replacement performances during their time with the Nats; Strasburg is more valuable to the franchise never throwing a pitch, because at least he won't cost the major league team wins.

But I needn't cherry-pick horrible contracts to make an essential point: The draft is wrong, but not because the draftees are modern-day Tom Joads (as one commenter on ShysterBall mockingly said), or because competitive balance is bad. The draft is wrong because it's punishing the best amateur players by making them the only people who lose money for an organization's ineptitude. You can rationalize all you want, but we only have a draft because we're comfortable with the idea that young people deserve to make less only because they're young.