Synthesis

Synthesis it seems has been around me constantly for many years now, most prominently within my conventional schooling that took place during most of my younger life.  The sources that I have seen and that I have learned the most from are simply my high school teachers.  They have taught me that the best way to use synthesis is to gather a large amount of slightly connected mediums and piece them together to tell the story / get the point that you wish to get across.  An old History teacher that I had did this brilliantly, often combining books, movies, music, photographs, and all sorts of odd other mediums in order to teach us about the times he wanted to convey.  For my paper though, since I do not have the choice of what mediums I will use exactly, I instead will have to use both documents to bolster a single focal point.  I've chosen to write about the place of money within baseball and in order to support that I will have to use Joe Jackson's confession and "The Trading Desk" to display money's place within baseball, not only at both times individually, but also as a whole.  While it may be hard to find evidence in both articles to promote such a topic cohesively, since the documents do cover fairly different ideas, I find that being able to pull together two such sources in a way that they fit together seamlessly to convey a point will ultimately be much stronger than using just a single document as a source or backing the paper with two documents that share an extremely similar topic (since essentially they could probably just be compiled into a single document).

New Document Discussion

The article "The Trading Desk" by Micheal Lewis and the discussion I participated in pertaining to it taught my a lot more about baseball.  In the previous document almost no jargon was used and I didn't have to research anything to understand, at least on a basic level, what was happening in the court transcript.  However, in this document I had to look into how several processes, especially trading, worked within the Major League Baseball system.  While I'm not positive who longdm123 is, their comments about the article were extremely useful to me, helping me to learn about the comparison between baseball and other sports as pertaining to team salary caps, understanding what the importance of a pitcher is within baseball, and through his conversation with Joecathytesta, I learned a lot about baseball and player ages (which I later researched more thoroughly).  I was also rather surprised to find out that baseball team salaries have multiplied by more than one hundred times since the 1919 document was created.  When I first began reading "The Trading Desk", I assumed that since it was supposed to be connected to Joe Jackson's confession, that it was likely to pertain to the topic of cheating in baseball.  As I began to read, this assumption was backed by the entire first paragraph, which describes Mike Magnante and a list of almost ridiculous mistakes he had made during a season.  As I read further though it became evident that the article was less about cheating in baseball and more about the system of trading as adopted by baseball.