If McClellan performs in 2011...

...like it appears he will, look for Chris Carpenter to be wearing another uniform in 2012.  The Cardinals will look at Chris Carpenter's close to $16 million salary, followed by his age and injury record, and decide that $12 million on a 30 year old Adam Wainwright makes much more sense.  Will Pujols sign?  I kind of doubt it, but only time will tell.  Maybe this season will convince the Cardinals that Pujols is worth 10 years at $20-whatever million dollars he's seeking.  Maybe Pujols's seeming disloyalty and greed will have turned fans to such an extent that he will have to sign elsewhere, to build a fresh fanbase.  I don't pretend to know.

The worthlessness of Amazon User Reviews

Primarily, my beef with Amazon User Reviews is not the fact that they are written by amateurs.  The willful ignorance of an American public that makes Transformers a perennial box-office smash speaks volumes about the passions of the "average American", often shunning a movie specifically because critics gave it high praise.  Is this an example of the people wanting to revolt in some meaningless way (see also: the tea party), or an instance where the critic looks for challenging media while the public wants something comfortable?  Either way, there is obviously an audience for amateur reviewers, who will echo the things that readers want to see. 

My problem with Amazon User Reviews is that the idea of aggregating user reviews to make a score for subjective pieces of media is flawed.  Number one, in the case where a book, or an album, is relatively unknown, the reviews are correspondingly few.  One of the jobs we ask our critics to carry out is to suss out worthwhile entertainment from a large pile, sometimes of unknowns.  When there are only three reviews of an item, are we to think it's an unheralded masterpiece, or that there are three fanatics who are dedicated to its proliferation?  In the case where reviewers are more or less anonymous, how can those three reviewers be held accountable if they have some personal connection to the item's creators, or otherwise stand to benefit in some way from its sales?

The other major problem with the aggregated scores is that there are always going to be more positive reviews (five star--loved it!) for an item than there will be any other score.  Why?  Unless the writer is passionate about the item, it is far harder for him or her to be inspired enough to go through the chore of writing a review that may even get lost in a larger pool of reviews (Avatar's original theatrical version currently has 1,701).  Perhaps my point can be best expressed by the film Burlesque.  On Metacritic, the film Burlesque received a score of 48.  On my favored review site, The A.V. Club, it received a B-.  Fair enough, but on The A.V. Club's site, I can read why they gave it that B-, and decide (as I did), that the reasons they liked it were not going to appeal to me.  But go over to Amazon, and it's gotten 4.5 out of 5 stars.  The number of five-star votes it received is over double the number of votes it got for all other levels combined.  Why?  If you're not passionate about Burlesque, why bother writing about it?  Amazon's star-level reviews can safely be ignored.  It's a place for shopping, not a bastion of discerning tastes.