The Big R: Chapter 4 (Boston)

I did chapter four which is on boston.

Um My favorite quote from the chapter is that a taxpayer should receive two votes.

I think that is very relevant.

Um so summarize the beginning of the book started off with the FBI uh using

different resources and databases to figure out

what type of killer this killer was.

And they came to the conclusion that it was

a disorganized a social person that was doing the killings

and the evidence they used to kind of come to

this conclusion was the fact that he was killing quickly.

He was leaving the evidence behind.

They kind of turned it as an opportunist killing.

So he like just kind of saw it more as an opportunity. It wasn't really planned out.

Uh he chose his victims at random.

There was no connection to his victims and the murders themselves.

And the only real connection that they could find at all

throughout the killings was the fact that baseball was involved somehow.

Um and then through other uses of the resources and databases,

they found out more like identity factors of the perpetrator.

So they discovered he's not a sex offender.

Thought this was a strange at first that they put it in the book,

but I realized that the reason they're including it

is because if he was a sex offender,

he'd be on a nationalist and he's not

um they concluded he's probably a young man.

The book had talked about how older men like to spend longer time with their victims.

And considering that he's young and he's just,

or considering that he's just killing them and discarding them.

It doesn't seem like it could be an older man.

Um, they also talked about, it's likely a white man.

I don't know how they came to this conclusion,

but I just felt like it was important to include in the summary

and that he had a few too non interpersonal skills,

which makes sense being an a social disorganized

killer and he was most likely unemployed,

which they came to that conclusion because he had to travel

certain places to do the killings and traveling takes time and

therefore he must have had time.

So the second kind of little blip about the book.

I'm kind of doing this in order of which I read the book. So hopefully it makes sense.

Um,

so they talked about like what these murders were and how these murders are

based off the perfect games that are played by players within the MLB.

The murderer would replicate this idea of the perfect

game by going to the city where the perfect

game took place on the date of the perfect

game and committing the murder at that time.

Uh, at first, this was just a, uh, theory.

But then the pattern was confirmed by the third murder that happened in boston

when a northeastern student um died from being beaten with a baseball bat.

The campus was actually located on a former baseball

field where cy young had pitched a perfect game.

Hence as to why the northeastern student got killed.

And a baseball card of jerry josette was found with his body.

We don't know the relevance of that yet. I'm sure that will come up later in the book.

But I felt like it was important to include because that's kind of the killer's M. O.

Is the baseball bat,

the baseball card and the date and the location are like the four biggest

things that we know about the killer at this point in the book.

So three fred's findings and his suggestions and

theories on who the killer could be.

Um, I really liked this suggestion because I,

it made me learn a lot and I don't know all the validity to this.

But I just feel like I learned a lot about baseball in this section of the book,

in the section of the chapter.

So the 1994 baseball strike happened because the umpire union was

trying to force the Major League Baseball Association to negotiate their benefits

And they were forcing them to negotiate by threatening to resign.

So in turn from that a lot of umpires lost their job.

22 umpires actually got forced into early retirement

because of this and the upset stayed,

got compensated for the whole season.

So even the games that they missed while they were striking,

they got compensated for and they got paid for.

Um, this, this kind of irritated and piste off a lot of people and at the last bullet,

there's as many different people within the

industry were affected by this um because it

wasn't just the umpires that were affected even though they were the ones trying to

Negotiate and strike. So a deeper look at how people were affected by this.

The owners of the baseball teams actually

lost around $1 billion dollars in revenue.

Each.

Um about three quarters of that was made up from like

fan revenue and stadium revenue and food and tickets and whatnot.

And about one quarter of that

was made up by advertising revenue.

The players as a whole.

And when I say as a whole, I mean like the team itself, not the players individually,

um each team lost around 350,000 $350 million in salary.

So each player kind of took a hit to their personal salaries and

the organization as a whole took a hit as well because the book,

it talked about how there was a built in strike fund in case this were to happen,

so the players could still get paid.

But that strike fund was only $200 million. So the industry still ended up having to

pay for the other $150 million.

The players were also prevented from making potential new records.

So because there weren't as many games or there

weren't games that important games that were being played,

they were prevented from like, you know,

home run records or pitching records or whatever you can think of.

Um, and then the advertisers, the book didn't really talk about this,

but I thought it was important to point out the

advertisers obviously saved money because they weren't advertising anymore,

but they lost the advertisement,

which is a big part of them themselves getting revenue and affects themselves.

So I think probably the third biggest person that really

lost out on this was the appetizers in the long run.

Alright, so my personal thoughts overall, I really found this book interesting.

Um uh in fairness, I only read the fourth chapter because that's all we had to read.

But I definitely think that this might be a book I picked up during winter break,

there was a lot of different things about baseball in there,

which was interesting because I know like nothing about baseball

and it was kind of cool.

Just a little forensic accounting and government agency

quid pro coz that they had in there.

And like, little tidbits of information that I would never thought of.

Um, I do not know who the killer could be at this point in the novel,

I really liked Campbell's theory about the strike.

But the problem is that most of those people would

have been older at the time the murders were committed

because considering the strike happened at 1994 and I'm

averaging most baseball players around their mid twenties,

that would have to put them at like their mid

to early or their mid to mid to late thirties,

early forties, by the time the murders were being committed,

so it doesn't really fit our M.

O.

Of who the killer is because again,

we think the killer is a young guy because

of the speed in which he's doing these killings.

And then I just have a few review questions. I'm not gonna read them.

You can read them,

There's five of them.

And yeah,

I hope you enjoyed my presentation. Thank you very much.

The Big R: Chapter 4 (Boston)

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated