Holden Your Horses! The Boneyard Gets a Kill!

Score one for the good guys, as the Boneyard ended its roughly year-and-a-half drought with the death of J.D. Salinger. While not a complete surprise, it was nonetheless a great kill for the Boneyard to score points with someone outside their top 3 picks. Salinger, last seen outside the Dakota Hotel in 1980 as pictured above, was not a popular selection among the growing number of Death Pool statheads. These people, known in the death community as sabermorticians, argued that while Salinger looked like a good pick using traditional statistics such as age and lifestyle during youth, there were red flags that should have caused owners to draft elsewhere.

The statheads pointed out that Salinger had an extremely high Castro rating for an American still living in the United States. For the unititiated, a player's Castro rating, named after Fidel Castro, is a calculation of the likelihood that the player may die during the season without the news reaching the Death Pool community (Coincidentally or perhaps not, Fidel Castro is also a member of the 2010 Boneyard team). Typically a high Castro rating is found in players living in dictatorships or Communist countries, where news of the death can be controlled through suppression of the media. A less common reason for a high Castro rating is when the player is an obscure person, usually a controversial selection, such that their death may not even be newsworthy. However, as the recent death of Miep "Asterisk" Gies proved, even the smallest of deaths can be recognized with the help of the Internet.

In Salinger's case, he had been a recluse for many years, so much so that there was concern he may die without anyone realizing it for some time. No photographs have been taken of him in decades. Fortunately this was not the case, as Salinger's death received an appropriate amount of attention, and assassins across the world wept as one.

In any event, the quick kill by the Boneyard serves notice to the rest of the league that last year was a fluke, and they will be a force to reckon with in 2010. Traditionalists will argue that the Boneyard is actually better positioned to win the title than the mighty Tomorrow's History squad, as the History's #1 player is off the board, while the Boneyard still has their top 5 selections alive. However, the sabermorticians prefer the History, arguing that the Boneyard simply drafted poorly, as they did last year, and that GM Jess has a squad of players with poor UZRs (Underworld Zone Rating) and VORPs (Value of Rigor mortis Potential). Who is right? Stay tuned for the first 2010 Power Rankings to find out!