I present to you The Man Who Staked His Future On Open Source, starring:

Or vice-versa.

(Hey, I know that I haven't found roles for everyone yet, or that the characters listed aren't exact fits … that's what the people in Casting are for!!)

The point is this: both Beane and Gerstner steered the future direction of their respective companies based upon tools that developed in an open source fashion. For Beane and the Oakland Athletics, it was the decision to use sabermetric analysis to field competitive baseball teams for less money; for Gerstner and IBM, it was the decision to build support for Linux — freely available operating system software — into their general corporate strategy.

The question though, is where does Beane go from here? IBM has the ability to change the rules of the market: once upon a time they were a hardware company, then they became a software company, and now with their support of Linux, they are becoming a consulting company — for there is a great deal of money to be made in integrating free (though more secure) server software into the corporate world.

Beane has no such luxury: the object of baseball is and always will be to score more runs than the other team, and thus win more games.

So what happens to Beane when the window of his competitive advantage begins to close? DePodesta, who was set to take over the reins in Oakland when Beane was on his way to Boston, is now the GM of the Dodgers. When Beane balked at the move, Theo Epstein became the youngest GM in baseball by assuming that mantle with the Red Sox. And another Beane protege, J.P. Ricciardi, is now at the helm of the Toronto Blue Jays. Each brings with him the sabermetric bag of tricks to his new job, and in the first two cases at least, arrive to find far more money waiting for them to spend.

Beane will have no choice but to innovate technologically or change jobs, and since he just turned down the Boston post, it seems safe to say that the latter option is out for the foreseeable future. So he must become even more precise with his statistical modeling to stay ahead of DePodesta, Epstein, Ricciardi and the other GMs around Major League Baseball. He must embrace the entire open source core of sabermetrician prosumers, and somehow convert that high identification into proprietary knowledge. The entire culture of baseball, right down to developing grade-school athletes, will begin to revolve around this model and OPS will become the new sign of success.

He might never win his championship, but he will have changed the game forever.

The Sports Guy weighs in on the latest spasm in the sports media-net, the Todd Bertuzzi situation (tks. Seabs):

"I was more worried about myself. Why couldn't I stop watching? Is something wrong with me? This was like slowing down as I passed a car wreck, only this time I kept doubling back to the crash. Do I enjoy seeing hockey players maim each other? My stomach rumbles with disgust, but it's a lot like when I watch those strangely absorbing Autopsy shows on HBO. Most important, am I the only one? Did you flip the channel and say, "I can't watch this again," or did you keep staring at the TV waiting for more too?

Of course, you kept watching. That's why Bertuzzi's punch has lingered almost as long as Julio Franco has. But we're also being played here. Janet Jackson's boob comes flying out on Super Bowl Sunday, causes a national ruckus … hey, guess who has a new CD coming out this spring! It's the formula these days. Leak a sex tape, get your own TV show. Seduce the prez, get your own line of purses. Make up stories for your newspaper, get a massive book deal. Eat cockroaches and cow intestines on TV, get your 15 minutes and a winner's check.

Welcome to Rubberneck Nation. We can't turn away, and both Hollywood and the media know it. Bertuzzi's punch headlined sportscasts and newspapers for a solid week, with every column and TV segment centering around the same exhausted themes: Isn't it despicable? How on earth could the NHL allow their players to do this? Doesn't this make you sick? Oh, and by the way, would you like to see it from another angle? (Absolutely! Hey, show me the one from the right side, when you can see the guy's head bounce! Where did I put my TiVo remote?)"

From "The Russian Nesting Doll of Games" on Wired News:

It was bound to happen. First there was SimCity. Then there was The Sims. And then came a series of highly successful expansion packs like Hot Date, Livin' Large, House Party and others.

Now comes a fan-made plug-in that allows Sims characters to effectively play SimCity inside The Sims. The Sims franchise has gone meta.

For the uninitiated, The Sims is the most successful line of games ever. It started in the late 1980s with SimCity, a game in which players take the role of a powerful mayor who creates and modifies a city to keep citizens happy. About 10 years later, Electronic Arts, the publisher of the series, released The Sims. In this game, the best-selling title of all time, players control the lives of virtual people, called Sims, and determine their daily activities to keep them content.

Now the series has come full circle. The plug-in from Simslice, called Slice City, lets the Sims in the game play a video game in which they create mini cities. So, along with the many things that Sims can be instructed to do — such as going to work, playing guitar, cooking, socializing and dating — they can blow endless hours creating small urban environments.