Former Reds outfielder Shin-soo Choo has signed one of the biggest contracts in MLB history for outfielders and the first ever over $100 million among Asians in Major League Baseball.
A day after passing on a $140-mil. deal with the New York Yankees, Choo signed a 7-year, $130-mil. deal with the Texas Rangers Saturday. That’s the 27th biggest contract in MLB history. Among outfielders it’s behind only those signed by Manny Ramirez ($160 million), Matt Kemp ($160 million), Jacoby Ellsbury ($153 million), Carl Crawford ($142 million) and Alfonso Soriano ($136 million).
After failing to advance to the postseason last year the Rangers are eager to beef up their offense, and Choo is seen as their new leadoff batter. Choo had the fourth-best on-base percentage (OBP) in the majors last season at .423. In the National League it was second only to that of former Reds teammate Joey Votto. Last season Choo slugged 21 home runs, 54 RBIs and 20 steals. His career average OBP is .389 OBP and slugging percentage is .465 with 101 home runs.
Observers had been scratching their heads at Choo’s rejection of the Yankee’s $140-mil. offer made Wednesday. The reason appears to be an earlier handshake deal with the Rangers, according to a source cited by Korean JoongAng Daily.
Rangers General Manager Jon Daniels had met with Choo and agent Scott Boras on December 3 to express the team’s desire to sign Choo and to present Rangers uniforms to Choo and his family. Daniels had opened with an offer of $120 million. Boras was asking for an 8-year $180-mil. deal. Offers also came in from the Mariners on Dec. 7 and the Arizona Diamondbacks on Dec. 8. Choo is said to have favored Arizona’s offer because he and his family have been living in that state. But now he is said to have decided to move.
On Monday the Rangers offered a seven-year deal to which they attached the figure of $130 million on Saturday. Choo was willing to consider less money than offered by the Yankees because he and his wife didn’t want their three kids living in a crowded city like New York, according to the source. Another factor was Choo’s belief that the Rangers are closer to a World Series title than the Yankees.
Choo’s deal trumps those signed by other major Asian major-leaguers, including the $65-mil. deal signed by compatriot Park Chan-ho in 2002 and the $52-mil., 4-year deal signed by Hideki Matsui in 2005. The only other Asian player to come close to Choo’s anticipated salary is Ichiro Suzuki who earned a total of $125.6 mil. during his peak 7 years with the Mariners during the 2006 through 2012 seasons. — Day Nahm Kagy
Asian women are the undisputed princesses of the online dating scene, at least according to data culled recently from users of the Facebook app Are You Interested.
AYI, along with Tinder, is one of the more popular Facebook dating apps. Users can flip through profiles and click “Yes” to show interest or “skip” to move on. People who receive yeses receive notifications of interest and are given a chance to respond.
After sifting through 2.4 million heterosexual encounters using the AYI app, researchers arrived at several conclusions. Perhaps the least surprising is the fact that on average women receive three times the positive interactions as men. The most surprising is the fact that all men initiate more interactions with women outside their own race.
Perhaps as a corollary to the latter (in view of the fact that Whites comprise about 73% of the likely users of the app while Asians comprise only about 7%), Asian women received the highest rate of responses to their messages of interest, ranging from 26.0% from Black Men to 17.6% from White men to 15.8% from Latino men. Asian men were the only ones who responded at a higher rate to women of another race with 19.0% to messages from Latinas.
By contrast Black women received the lowest rate of responses, ranging from 16.4% from Black men, to 10.3% from Asian men, to 9.1% from Latino men and just 8.5% from White men.
White men enjoyed the highest response rates from all women except Black women. Asian women were the most receptive to advances from White men, responding to 7.8% of their messages, higher than the 6.7%% response rate of White women and 5.8% of Latina women. Black women responded most to Black men at 9.3%.
Black men, who had the lowest response rate from all but Black women, nevertheless received the highest rate of response from Asian women at 6.7%, followed by 2.8% from White women and 2.6% from Latinas. Black women accorded the lowest response rate — 5.4% — to White men.
A 2009 research of online heterosexual dating patterns on OKCupid reinforced the preference enjoyed by White men not only from White women but “even more exclusively” from Asians and Latinas. At the same time, that study also suggested that in general the most intensive interactions tend to take place among people of similar backgrounds, of which race was a major component.
UC San Diego professor Kevin Lewis, who conducted the OKCupid study, found that the site’s members are most likely to contact people who share their own racial background, based on the interaction patterns of 126,134 users in the US during a two-and-a-half month period.
That tendency to initiate contact with someone from a shared race is strongest among Asians and Indians and weakest among Whites, Lewis found. But Lewis also noted a phenomenon that he explains with his theory of pre-emptive discrimination — the people who displayed the most marked tendency toward in-group bias were the most likely to change that pattern if they were contacted first by a person of another race.
“Based on a lifetime of experiences in a racist and racially segregated society, people anticipate discrimination on the part of a potential recipient and are largely unwilling to reach out in the first place,” Lewis explained.
“But if a person of another race expresses interest in them first, their assumptions are falsified and they are more willing to take a chance on people of that race in the future.”
He also noted that the mind-opening effect is usually short-lived. People tend to return to their in-group biases within a week or so.
This phenomenon casts some doubt on the significance of the AYI study. While people tend to respond at a higher rate to men of different races who show interest in them, that high response rate would often not translate into the kind of sustained interest needed to form a relationship.
Jeremy Lin scored 31 points off the bench Monday night to lead the Rockets in a tight double-overtime battle against the Toronto Raptors.
Lin showed again that he’s a starter in all but name by finishing the game with 31 points in 46 minutes of play. Though he didn’t enter the game until the seventh minute, Lin played more minutes than all but James Harden and Chandler Parsons. Remarkably, he also managed to get through the entire game without making a single assist as he exploded as the team’s main scoring threat during the game’s final 17 seesaw minutes.
Plagued by turnovers and poor shooting, Lin scored only 5 points in the entire first half. It wasn’t until late in the 3rd quarter that he came to life, scoring 10 points in the final 5 minutes of the quarter and 16 points in the 4th. He ended the game having shot 10 of 17 from the field, 3 of 6 3-pointers and 8 of 9 free throws. He also contributed 5 rebounds and 2 steals while giving up 5 turnovers.
The effort added up to Lin’s 3rd highest scoring game ever, topped only by his two 38-point games, one each for the Knicks and the Rockets. It’s also the most any Rockets player scored off the bench since the 2009-2010 season when Carl Landry scored the same number of points.
“For any player, if you can get the defense at your mercy — if you can hit the shot and drive by them — there is really nothing they can do anymore,” Lin said. “I didn’t really shoot well at all in the first half. We were all in a funk. But then we broke through in the third quarter.
“I think I would say from a pure field-goal-attempt standpoint, this is the most aggressive I have been this year. I think once you get in a zone, you are in that zone, and there is nothing that can faze you at that point.”
“Jeremy was in attack mode going in,” said coach Kevin McHale. “Jeremy is one of the few guys right now shooting with a little bit of confidence, and he made some shots. [W]e talked about it, about him coming off bench. I told him, ‘Hey, you have to just go out there and just play. You’ve worked hard all summer.’
“I think he has more bounce in his legs. He’s got more juice. He’s been playing very, very well for us. He’s just got to go out there and play. He made some big shots for us.”
Showing that kind of effective aggression off the bench may actually diminish Lin’s chances of resuming his starter role as the perception of him as another Hardenesque sixth man seems to be gaining currency in the basketball press.
Madison Nguyen hopes to parlay her initiatives on better schools and safer streets into a bid to become the first Asian American mayor of one of the nation’s top 10 cities.
Nguyen is one of San Jose’s 10 city councilmen and the current vice mayor. That gives her the stature to take on likely rivals in the mayoral race, all of whom are seasoned politicos who have been in the public eye far longer than the 38-year-old Vietnam native.
Nguyen has only been a city councilman since 2005 but hasn’t been coy about her ambitions for higher office. In December of 2012 she became the first serious candidate to file the Candidate’s Intention Statement declaring her entry into the 2014 mayoral race.
Having little support from labor or business, Nguyen will have to rely heavily the area’s Vietnamese American community to fuel her campaign. Her relationship with the community was severely tested in March of 2009 when she faced a a recall campaign launched by the Vietnamese community for her opposition to naming the city’s Vietnamese commercial district “Little Saigon”. She had favored the more formal “Saigon Business District” which was ultimately rejected by the city. She survived the recall 55% to 45% — only about 1,000 votes in a low turnout election.
In December, when candidates are legally allowed to begin fundraising activities, Nguyen will learn how well or poorly her rift with the Viet community has healed.
Nguyen was only four when her family fled Vietnam in 1979 on a tiny fishing boat. They spent months moving among refugee camps in the Philippines until the family was sponsored by a Lutheran church in Scottsdale, Arizona. They managed to live on the $500 monthly stipend paid for her father’s janitorial work. The family moved to Modesto in search of work. Throughout her teen years Nguyen worked alongside the parents as a farm field laborer in the Central Valley.
She managed to attend UC Santa Cruz where she earned a BA in history, then went on to earn a masters from the University of Chicago. She returned to UC Santa Cruz to seek a PhD in in sociology but abandoned those plans in 2001 when she became interested in politics while participating in a voter registration drive in the Vietnamese community.
She ran for a seat on the Franklin-McKinley School District Board of Education and became one of the first two school board officials of Vietnamese descent in the United States. She earned a place in the community’s spotlight after she organized a protest rally against the lack of any official or media outcry about the shooting death of a Vietnamese woman by a San Jose police officer.
In September 2005 a large number of Vietnamese turned out to vote for her and rival Linda Nguyen who were among nine candidates seeking a city council seat that had opened up for the seventh district. Madison Nguyen ultimately won the runoff election against the Linda Nguyen with 62% of the vote.
Nguyen’s trial by fire began in 2008 when when she suggested naming a section of Story Road with a high concentration of Vietnamese businesses “Saigon Business District”. That angered many of the area’s retailers who had been pushing to have the district named Little Saigon, the name commonly used for the larger Vietnamese districts in Westminster and Houston. Egged on by rival Linda Nguyen, many in the Vietnamese community began denouncing Madison Nguyen as a traitor for leading the successful city council initiative to formalize the Saigon Business District name.
In March of 2008 the city council caved into intense pressure and voted to rescind the name “Saigon Business District”. But it didn’t formalize the Little Saigon name. Lingering resentment against Nguyen led to a petition drive for a recall election. The petition garnered 150% of the needed signatures and qualified for the March 3, 2009. After surviving that recall attempt, Nguyen won re-election in 2010. A year later she was nominated vice mayor by Mayor Chuck Reed. The nomination was approved unanimously by the city council.
“I’m going into this campaign, knowing that I will probably not get support form the Chamber of Commerce and South Bay Labor Council,” Nguyen said soon after declaring her candidacy last year. “What I want to do is maintain an independent voice, and not necessarily be influenced by powerful forces in the city.”
To the extent that modern American political campaigns depend heavily on costly TV commercials to promote their candidates, Nguyen’s prospects for winning will depend largely on how successfully she has put the Little Saigon fracas behind her.
Jeremy Lin showed again his knack for sparking late rallies that win close game in Utah Saturday night with a 20-point performance that rekindled memories of Linsanity days and gave the Rockets a 3-0 season start.
The Rockets got off to a slow start and was trailing 16-24 at the end of the 1st quarter and 40-56 at the half. Only a 20-point half by Chandler Parsons kept Houston in the game as the team’s superstars Dwight Howard and James Harden struggled with shots and ball handling.
Halfway through the 4th quarter Utah was leading 83-81 when Lin made a turnaround fadeaway shot to kick off an 9-point scoring burst in a 4-minute stretch that put the Rockets ahead 97-90 and all but out of reach.
Lin also added 4 assists, 3 rebounds and a steal during his 36 minutes of play.
Lin was among the starters on Friday and Saturday nights after Patrick Beverly suffered a rib injury in Wednesday’s season opener.
Technically Jeremy Lin didn’t start in the Rockets’ season opener Wednesday night, but he came off the bench to show that he is likely to remain the team’s go-to point guard.
Lin sat out just the first six minutes of the first quarter before making his presence felt in a surprisingly hard-fought first half of the 96-83 win over the past season’s last-place Charlotte Bobcats. Most of his action took place after he was forced to leave the game to get stitches to close off a bleeding gash on his chin.
In 31 minutes of play Lin shot 5 of 7 from the field, making both 3-point attempts. He also made 4 of 6 free throws to post 16 points and lead the Rockets in shooting efficiency for the night. Most importantly, Lin showed little hesitation about taking shots and exploding into the paint to create offense.
By contrast Beverly — Lin’s putative competition for the starting point-guard spot — injured his ribs early in the game and played only a bit over 10 minutes total, compiling 5 points, 1 assist and 2 turnovers. It’s too early in the season for Lin to put to rest the suggestion that Beverly may be the better starting point guard, but this game suggests Beverly may be more of a decoy starter who retains the burden of ousting Lin from the top spot and not the other way around as many pundits have been suggesting.
“I have known for a while, so it is not really a surprise for me,” Lin said before the game of Coach Kevin McHale’s decision to start Beverly for the season opener. “I need to control what I do when I am out there. I feel like I am beating a dead horse with some of the things I’m saying. Controlling what I can control and playing my brand of basketball when I’m out there and doing what’s best for us, for the team and running the second unit to the best of my ability.”
The Rockets’ win over Charlotte was paved by the 26 rebounds Dwight Howard pulled down, along with the 17 points he put up. James Harden was the game’s high-scorer with 21 points, followed by the Rockets’ 3-point specialist Francisco Garcia.
Last season Lin had to prove that he was more than a four-week wonder. This season he carries the burden of showing that he belongs on the same roster with Harden and Howard — two of the NBA’s biggest stars. This game got him off to a solid start toward accomplishing that task.
Two Asian players became a part of World Series history when Cardinals rookie second-baseman Kolten Wong was picked off at first by Red Sox closer Koji Uehara in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the World Series Sunday night.
The play gave the Sox the final out of the ninth inning for a 4-2 win to tie the series 2-2 in St Louis. It was the first World Series game in history ended by a pickoff play. The teams meet for Game 5 on Monday.
The two Asian players involved in the play are polar opposites in background and career profile. Uehara, 38, is a 15-year veteran of the Japanese and US majors who had just won the MVP award for his efficient closes during the American League Championship Series. During the 2013 season he also set a new MLB record for the most strikeouts per walk at 8.74.
Wong was the Cardinals’ first-round draft pick in 2011 but had spent his first two season with farm teams before being called up on August 16 to become a part of the Sox postseason roster. Wong’s first appearance in the World Series was in Game 3 as a defensive replacement in which he earned a hit in the bottom of the eighth inning. He had been brought into Game 4 as a pinch runner in the ninth inning.
While Uehara is likely in the final few years of his career, Wong’s star is likely to rise for years to come. In 2012, after playing for the Double-A Springfield Cardinals, he was named to appear in the All-Stars Futures game. During the rest of his 2012 season with the AAA Memphis Redbirds Wong batted .303 with 10 HR, 45 RBI, and 20 stolen bases in 107 games, earning him the callup for the playoffs.
Wong was a superstar at Kamehameha Hawaii High in Keaau. He also played football while batting .600 in his senior year to become one of two honored as the 2008 Hawaii Baseball Player of the Year. He was drafted that year by the Minnesota Twins in the 16th round but Wong chose instead to play at the University of Hawaii. He stands 5-9 and weighs 185. His father Kaha Wong had played for two years for the Class-A Reno Silver Sox.
Entrepreneur and mother-of-three Maria Kang has become the latest meal for a mass media ever hungry for an excuse to sweeten pages with cheesecake. Kang’s angle: new moms can look like swimsuit models if they sweat and ease up on the munchies.
These days with websites in ferocious competition to grab readers with ADD it doesn’t take much to go viral. Kang did it just by Facebook posting a picture of herself in hot-pink sports bra and boy briefs next to her brood of three baby boys with the big caption, “What’s your excuse?”. Since the post went up last year, it has garnered a quarter million likes and an abundance of snipes by women accusing her of fat-baiting and showing off.
That was enough of an excuse for the likes of Huffington Post, Yahoo Shine and dozens of other sites to feature Kang as agent provocateur du jour.
Kang, 32, isn’t entirely an accidental virus or an innocent victim of a voracious mass media. She has her own website called mariakang.com which is now having trouble handling the traffic since her post went viral. It keeps throwing up error messages suggesting the server is way too overburdened to send pages.
Kang is very much into self-promotion, and knows its value in her home-based business activities of running two elderly-care facilities, a fitness non-profit and freelance writing. Her commitment to fitness is longstanding and sincere. She said she had actually posted the picture to inspire new moms, not to antagonize the ones who let themselves go postpartum. Her Facebook page even credits herself as “Creators of the Belly Ball.”
Regardless of her original motivation, now that she’s become the poster girl for bikini-fit moms who scorn their more sedentary peers, Kang isn’t above adding fat to the fire. In her recent rejoinder to her critics suggests she writes, “I’m sorry you took an image and resonated with it in such a negative way…
“I won’t even mention how I didn’t give into cravings for ice cream, french fries or chocolate while pregnant or use my growing belly as an excuse to be inactive.
“What I WILL say is this. What you interpret is not MY fault. It’s Yours. The first step in owning your life, your body and your destiny is to OWN the thoughts that come out of your own head.”
It will be interesting to see whether Kang manages to leverage her 15 minutes of fame to become a more permanent mass-media fixture.
Jeremy Lin showed that he can contribute just as effectively off the bench by delivering 14 points in just 23 on-court minutes during the Rockets’ exhibition game against the Pacers in basketball-crazed Manila.
Lin had started in last week’s pre-season game against New Orleans, but took his turn playing off the bench Thursday night under coach Kevin McHale’s pre-announced plan to alternate both starting point guards and power forwards in the pre-season. McHale had Patrick Beverly start as point guard and Terrence Jones as power forward while the usual starters Lin and Donatas Montiejunas played off the bench.
Lin contributed to the Rockets’ 116-96 win over the Indiana Pacers by making all 8 of his free throws and 3 of 6 from the field. He also managed to rack up 6 rebounds and 5 assists with 3 turnovers — impressive stats considering that he played only about two-thirds of his usual minutes as a starter.
James Harden led the Rockets with 21 points while new addition Dwight Howard was held down to 9 points after getting into early foul trouble. He also had four turnovers. Paul George paced Indiana with 17 points.
This was the first time an NBA game had been played in the Philippines which NBA Commissioner David Stern called an ideal host for NBA preseason games because Filipinos are “rabid fans in a wonderful way.”
“The NBA is always trying to find ways to take advantage of opportunities particularly in Southeast Asia, and the Philippines lead the way,” said Stern. “But we’re beginning to see activity around like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore.”
Jeremy Lin’s best chance to shine early this season may come Sunday when the Rockets and Pacers will play each other again in Taiwan, his parents’ homeland. He is expected to be a starter in that game.
Nina Davuluri was contested by two other Asian American women in the final five before being crowned Miss America Sunday night in Atlantic City.
Davuluri made history by becoming the first woman of Indian descent to win the nation’s top beauty pageant. This was also the first time that three Asian American women were among the five finalists. Lee was named first runner up and Yeh, fourth runner up.
“I’m so happy this organization has embraced diversity,” said Davuluri at the press conference following the pageant. “I’m thankful there are children watching at home who can finally relate to a new Miss America.”
Davuluri also made history by becoming the second consecutive New Yorker to win the Miss America crown. She succeeds Mallory Hagan whose term was cut short by several months due to the pageant’s decision to reschedule and move the annual event to Atlantic City from Las Vegas.
Davuluri captivated the judges and the crowd with an energetic Bollywood fusion dance and by her intelligent responses. She plans to apply the $50,000 scholarship winnings toward tuition at the medical school she plans to attend. Her father is a doctor in her hometown of Fayetteville near Syracuse.
First runner-up Crystal Lee of San Francisco is just as brainy and ambitious as Davuluri — and not afraid to show it. Her pageant platform was “Women in STEM’ (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). She has two Stanford degrees, one in biology and a master’s in communication. Even her talent segment was highbrow — classical ballet. Her ambition is to start a tech company.
Among the contestants vying against Crystal Lee, Miss California, was Crystal Lee, Miss Hawaii. The alphabetical introduction of the talent performances of two contestants of Chinese heritage with same a murmur through an audience who thought it was a gaffe. But Hawaii’s Crystal Lee — a graduate of the University of Hawaii — set herself apart with a contemporary dance number.
Fourth runner-up Rebecca Yeh, 20, of Nisswa, Minnesota is a junior at Ohio Northern University where she’s studying to become a clinical pharmacist. She has been earning money as a violin instructor since the age of 13. She also performs regularly as a soloist, as a member of a string trio and a string quartet.
The crowning of Nina Davuluri wasn’t greeted with universal applause. Those who had trouble grasping the concept of a non-white Miss America sniped at her with racist tweets.
“I have to rise above that,” Davuluri said at her press conference. “I always viewed myself as first and foremost American.”
