Baseball Crank

Click Here For Baseball-Only Content	About Me
Disclaimers & Terms of Use	Syndicate This Site
@baseballcrank on Twitter

February 8, 2010

POLITICS: After Murtha

The important practical question following the death today of Congressman John Murtha is what happens to the House seat he held on behalf of the people of Pennsylvania's 12th District. The good news, so far as I can tell from early reports, is that Ed Rendell won't get to appoint an interim replacement, but rather the voters will have to choose one in a special election. As the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza reports:

According to state law, the governor has ten days once the vacancy is officially declared to decide on the date for the special election, which can come no sooner than 60 days following that proclamation.
That likely means the special election will be held on May 18, which is the date already set for federal primaries around the state. (Special elections costs the state huge sums of money and it's likely that Gov. Ed Rendell will choose to go with an already established election day to save some cash.)

This is yet another critical election; recall that Obamacare passed the House with a 3-vote margin of victory, and any effort to run it back through the House with the watered-down Senate langauge on abortion will cost at least two of those votes (Bart Stupak and Joseph Cao), while now two others (Robert Wexler and Murtha) have left the House since the vote was cast. Mike Memoli at RCP notes the continuing flux with special elections already coming up to replace Wexler and the yet-to-resign Neil Abercrombie in Hawaii:

Democrats have won every [House] special election in this Congress, including one pick-up from the GOP in New York 23. Another is set in the Florida 19th on April 13, with yet another seat opening soon when Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) steps down to run for governor.

In other words, there will be a couple more opportunities for voters to affect the composition of a House already narrowly divided on President Obama's signature issue, and for now, at least, there are no longer the votes to pass anything unless and until Nancy Pelosi turns some "no" votes into "yes" votes without losing more of the original "yes" votes.

PA-12 has trended Republican in recent years - Cillizza notes that it was the only district carried by John Kerry in 2004 to flip to McCain in 2008 - although it's hard to tell how much of that is due to Murtha-specific issues and to the hangover from Obama's ham-handed comments during the Pennsylvania primaries. My best advice to the PA GOP is to study carefully the mess made in NY-23 (the behind-closed-doors selection of a thin-skinned and too-liberal member of the dysfunctional, corrupt and discredited state legislature) before a candidate is chosen for this special election.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 3:59 PM | Politics 2010 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 4, 2010

POLITICS: Chicago

If you thought Alexi Giannoulias, running in the shadow of Rod Blagojevich and Roland Burris, wasn't enough corruption and scandal for the Illinois Democrats in one election cycle, you were right. Meet the winner of the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor:

What Chicago election is complete without elements of domestic violence, prostitution and tax evasion?
A Chicago pawnbroker who financed his campaign with nearly $2 million of his own wealth, Scott Lee Cohen Tuesday won the Democratic Party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor. But with new details of Cohen's sordid past emerging today, Democratic primary voters will soon be wishing they had given his five rivals a second look.

Cohen allegedly held a knife to his then-girlfriend's in October 2005. Charges were later dropped after the woman, once convicted of prostitution, failed to appear in court to testify against Cohen.

A police report of obtained by the Chicago Sun Times said the woman had scar[r]ing and defensive wounds on her hands "from trying to defend herself against the arrestee swinging the knife at her." Additionally, Cohen "pushed [the] complainant's head against [a] wall, causing a bump on the back of her head."

Read the whole tawdry thing.

UPDATES: Pat Quinn, still carrying the baggage of his running mate in the last election, thinks his current running mate should and will have to drop out.

Ace notes the first Rasmussen poll showing Kirk leading Giannoulias by 6 points and has a chuckle and a caution about the whole situation:

It's a one-time gift by Democrats that they've nominated these guys with absolutely no regard to how they would fare in the general. They assumed that, as usual, the general would be a cakewalk, and so they could nominate whatever corrupt/crazy/socialist idiot they liked in the primary.
Conservatives have been having a heated argument about just this -- how far can we go? It seems the Democratic Party hasn't had this argument at all in blue states.

They're going to pay for that.

Alas, they will not be this stupid for too much longer.

And Moe Lane notes that the GOP candidate in Illinois' 11th Congressional District has the opposite record from Cohen as far as people attacking women with knives.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 11:31 AM | Politics 2010 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

February 3, 2010

POLITICS: After Obamacare: What Do Conservatives And Republicans Want on Health Care?

Democrats trying to defend their flailing healthcare bills have tried, repeatedly, a two-pronged attack on the mostly united Republican opposition to the various plans floated by the Senate and House Democrats and the Obama White House. One is to suggest that Republicans are criticizing the proposed Democratic solutions without having any of their own - implying that there really is no other choice but to pass a Democratic bill and that Republican opposition is irresponsible. The other and related contention is to argue that Republicans have a responsibility to cooperate in bipartisan fashion on the bills currently under consideration, rather than seek those bills' defeat.

These arguments are useful as political spin, but they are wrong. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the GOP has opposed the healthcare bills with much the same strategy employed by the Democrats against George W. Bush's effort to reform Social Security - which almost certainly resulted in the destruction of any chance in the foreseeable future to fix Social Security's fiscal problems or even prevent them from getting worse - as well as by forces both Right and Left against the Bush-McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration bill.

For the uninitiated, here's a sampling of what conservatives and Republicans do think about health care. I can't speak for everybody, but I think I can explain in general what the majority of the Right thinks and wants on this isue, and why it precludes most if not all elected Republicans from supporting any comprehensive healthcare bill built along the lines of those floated over the past year:

1. The System Is Not That Bad: The fundamental disconnect starts at the beginning: by and large, most people on the Right think the United States has a great healthcare system, the best in the world. Pretty much nobody thinks the system is perfect: there are lots of skewed financial incentives, lawsuits are too expensive and prevalent, costs are excessive in some parts of the system, and there are, in fact, too many people who don't get care they need. The system is messy in much the same way that democracy and free markets are messy, and similarly in need of constant tweaking. But the general feeling among conservatives and Republicans is that while you might make fundamental changes in the structure of the system if you were starting it from scratch, when you're dealing with the system as it is, the best thing to do is work around the margins rather than launch a massive federal takeover of the whole shebang that rewrites every aspect of the system from Washington with no possible way to anticipate how all those changes will play out.

That very premise is the basis of the deep divisions over this issue, and helps explain why the further the process has advanced, the more public opinion has favored the opposition, despite the generalized initial public sentiment that "reforms" should be implemented. If the voters are leery of drastic, comprehensive systemic "reform" now that they have had time to see what it looks like, they will naturally prefer doing nothing at all. Maybe the opportunity won't come this way again soon to do a fundamental overhaul of the system, but there's always a next year to do smaller, more incremental bills that work around the margins. That's precisely why the GOP has suffered no political damage for not having its own comprehensive plan - GOP solutions like permitting insurance to be sold across state lines are piecemeal and can be enacted as such without having to get all the moving parts into the same bill.

This is the diametric opposite of President Obama's position. As the President put it in last week's State of the Union Address:

There's a reason why many doctors, nurses, and health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo. But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. (Applause.) Let me know. Let me know. (Applause.) I'm eager to see it.

There you have it - he's only willing to consider an alternative proposal if, in his view, it reduces premiums and reduces the deficit and covers all the uninsured and "strengthens" Medicare, and clamps down on "abuses" by insurance companies - even a proposal guaranteed to do any one of those things is unacceptable.

That's a recipe for giving Republicans no choice but to simply say "no." But it doesn't mean the GOP, if it took control of Congress, would be unwilling or unable to present the Obama White House with bills that could address particular problems with the system.

2. What Matters Is Health Care, Not Health Insurance: The core concept behind comprehensive reform is that the federal government has a responsibility to eliminate with one fell swoop the estimate tens of millions of people (nobody knows the real number) who lack insurance. This is one reason why the Democratic plans all include a mandate that compels citizens to purchase insurance, and why they also include a battery of other interlocking provisions designed to control the allocation of risks, the imposition of costs, and the terms on which insurance can be offered or coverage denied. Despite all of that, it remains questionable whether the uninsured would truly be eliminated under any bill on the table - to pick two examples, illegal aliens may be hesitant to claim coverage (and could be barred from coverage, depdning how one reads the bills), and if the less onerous penalties for refusing to buy insurance are selected (the Senate bill won't criminalize refusing to participate in the mandate; the House would), some young, healthy people will just pay the fine and opt out of the system.

Is it worth disrupting the health insurance arrangements of the insured majority to extend coverage to the uninsured minority, and perhaps not even all of the uninsured minority? To answer that, you need to remember that what matters isn't insurance, it's care - the sole purpose of health insurance is to secure access to health care.

And people without insurance in this country still get health care, often from sources like clinics and emergency rooms. Not all the care they may want or in some cases need, nor the best or most cost-effective care. And of course, not everyone with insurance receives perfect care either. Many of the distinctions between the insured and the uninsured are differences of degree. Moreover, many of those who lack private sector insurance are covered under Medicaid or Medicare.

Conservatives don't argue that this is an optimal situation - but we do argue that in light of these realities, it's entirely acceptable to focus on solutions that improve access to both insurance and care, rather than guaranteeing insurance. If you can reduce genuinely unnecessary barriers to competition and low-cost insurance, if you can provide better ways for people to shield assets from taxation to spend on healthcare - these are goals that can reduce the number of people who lack insurance, without necessarily having to come up with a single magic bullet that claims to eliminate the lack of insurance overnight.

3. Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom: A fundamental objection to Obamacare in its various forms is that by enacting a vast new federal regulatory and entitlement structure, it freezes the entire industry in amber in ways that will choke off the possibility for future revisions. The political trauma of the efforts to enact this legialstion only underscores the extent to which politicians will be unwilling to revisit comprehensive changes in the future. If it passes and doesn't work out perfectly - and how many government programs do? - neither the states, nor the private sector, nor in all likelihood future Congresses will be able to fix it. Like Medicare, it will simply run on autopilot forever more.

This was one of the objections Scott Brown raised in the Massachusetts Senate race: Massachusetts has its own statewide system of "Romneycare," which had many similarities to the federal program. But the Massachusetts Legislature today remains free to alter or repeal or defund Romneycare, much the way that Tennessee's Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen has done with TennCare, the system originally modeled after Hillary Clinton's health care plan, when it grew too expensive for his state.

The states are, in Brandeis' term, the laboratories of democracy for at least two reasons. One, multiple states can try differing approaches, and learn from each others' experiences - whereas once the federal government acts, innovation is at an end. Two, states do not have the federal government's budgetary processes - many have balanced budget amendments or other constraints on deficit spending, they have to compete with rival states to keep taxes reasonable, some have line-item vetos, zero-based budgeting or other tools Washington lacks for revisiting budgetary decisions annually, and the partisan/ideological temperature is lower in many statehouses. When forced to make genuine choices among competing budgetary priorities, states can't just choose "all of the above."

The diversity of state and private-sector approaches is also evident in the debate over rationing of care and whether this will lead to government "death panels." It is true that rationing in one sense or another - that is, decisions to forego some care on cost/benefit grounds - will occur in any remotely fiscally responsible healthcare system. It is arguable, even, that not enough rationing is done today. Ideally, rationing should be done by the consumer, as happens in any field where consumers, rather than insurance intermediaries, make purchasing decisions; as Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, the GOP's go-to guy on health care these days, explains:

Rationing happens today! The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?
... what I'm saying is that rather than having government ration care to manage decline, let's take those market signals that work in every sector of the economy to reduce cost and improve competition. I got Lasik in 2000. That's a cash surgery. It cost me $2,000 an eye. Since then, it's been revolutionized three times and now costs $800 an eye. This sector isn't immune from free-market principles.

What's particularly menacing about putting rationing power in the monpolistic hands of the vast, impersonal and bureaucratic federal government is, again, that it eliminates the possibility of competition or outside supervision putting any counterweight on the desire to control costs. It's possible, of course, that the federal government will respond to concerns about rationing by being profligate, but that presents the opposite problem of hemhorraging money. Either way, the system becomes much less fluid when a single actor with the coercive power of the state behind it is calling the shots.

Even where the GOP has more ambitious proposals for reform, they are not based on top-down diktats from Washington; Ryan argues for a broader, less incremental approach than many in the party, but his proposals would operate by gradual, voluntary reform of existing structures through the market, rather than an avalanche of new regulation driven from a single office in the capital:

We set up state-based exchanges. You don't have to participate in the exchange if you don't want to. You don't have to sell it in the exchange if you don't want to. I don't want a closed system that will gravitate towards more government control. I want it to be decentralized that has regulatory competition and market competition. You can be in or out of the exchange, which keeps everybody honest.

Note the emphasis on avoiding individual or employer mandates, thus avoiding the most freedom-encroaching aspects of Obamacare while also eliding the major Constitutional objections to compelling people to buy a private company's products, as well as the essentially corrupt nature of tethering individuals to a government-compelled relationship with large insurers.

4. This Is Still America: The final really core disagreement is that many Republicans and nearly all conservatives object on principle to making health care a fundamental entitlement guaranteed by the national government. Experience the world over shows that health care is one of the most critical tipping points in altering the relationship between the citizen and the government in cradle-to-grave social-welfare states on the European model (when people call Obama a "socialist," this - along with de facto direct government control of major industries - is what they are thinking of). Having health care systems run at the state level is bad enough, but having them uniformly dependent upon Washington for funding and regulatory favor simply takes too many of the most important things in life and puts them in a single pair of hands. That's not the American Way, and if that sets us apart from other nations, it should.

When all is said and done, when 2010 has - as it seems increasingly likely - come and gone without the passage of a sweeping comprehensive federalization of health care, Republicans in due course will offer, and will need to offer, constructive solutions of their own that can marshal support across the GOP and, hopefully, in some cases across party lines. But what will be clear is that those solutions will not be just mirror images of the Democrats' vision. They will instead reflect these core distinctions: incrementalism over one-bill-to-rule-them-all; a focus on increasing access and decreasing cost rather than making sweeping guarantees; avoidance of coercive government mandates; and diffusion of power among consumers, states and businesses rather than concentration in Washington.

After Obamacare, we can stop pretending that a handful of experts in Washington know better than the rest of the country. After Obamacare, we can return to debating solutions more in line with traditional American values and American ways of solving problems by the trials and errors of a free people. After Obamacare, the goals will be more modest, but more realistic. After Obamacare, health care reform will still be possible - but only if President Obama abandons his utopian schemes and looks at the kind of solutions that Americans have long regarded as common ground.

« Close It

Posted by Baseball Crank at 6:28 PM | Politics 2010 | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

POLITICS: Gloves Off

Truly, we live in a golden age of political advertising unseen since Ralph Nader told his parrot he wanted to dress up in costume and get jiggy with a panda.

First up is an NRSC ad that concisely sets forth why Republicans everywhere rejoiced at yesterday's Illinois Senate primary win for Obama crony Alexi Giannoulias and his, er, baggage train:

Posted by Baseball Crank at 6:15 PM | Politics 2010 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 2, 2010

BASEBALL: Speed of Lightning

Jose Reyes seems ready to go, thanks to people not employed by the Mets:

Panariello and his partner, Adam Elberg, work independently of the Mets, recommended by Reyes' agent Peter Greenberg. They have a good relationship with the Mets' medical people, including trainer Ray Ramirez, but the rehab and training is their deal, and this amazing indoor facility has all the bases covered.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 5:53 PM | Baseball 2010 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

SCIENCE/POLITICS: Surrender on Autism

The Lancet, a once-respectable scientific journal, has conceded and retracted a now-discredited 1998 study claiming to show a link between vaccines and autism. Of course, the genie loosed by that piece of junk science can't be so easily put back in its bottle, but score another one for science and a defeat for its left-wing enemies.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 5:48 PM | Politics 2010 • | Science | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

February 1, 2010

BASEBALL: The Minaya Era in a Nutshell

The reasons why Omar Minaya needs to be fired - and probably Jeff Wilpon too - are legion, but this interview with JJ Putz captures perfectly the essence of a dysfunctional organization more interested in futile news cycle-to-news cycle CYA efforts with the press than with doing the work needed to create a winning ballclub and hold accountable the people who fail to get their jobs done:

"When the trade went down last year, I never really had a physical with the Mets," said Putz. "I had the bone spur (in the right elbow). It was discovered the previous year in Seattle, and it never got checked out by any other doctors until I got to spring training, and the spring training physical is kind of a formality. It was bugging me all through April, and in May I got an injection. It just got to the point where I couldn't pitch. I couldn't throw strikes, my velocity was way down."

+++

[T]he Mets told Putz not to talk about being hurt with the media.
"I knew that I wasn't right. I wasn't healthy. The toughest part was having to face the media and tell them that you feel fine, even though you know there's something wrong and they don't want you telling them that you're banged up."

Ugh. So, don't bother checking out the guy's arm when you're making a multimillion dollar business decision, then order him to cover up what you were too dumb or lazy to check - knowing full well it will come out soon enough anyway.

Inexcusable.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 1:49 PM | Baseball 2010 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

January 29, 2010

POLITICS/HISTORY/POP CULTURE: The Dead

Benjamin Kerstein has an excellent and serious essay at TNL looking at the recently deceased Howard Zinn, the historian of choice for people who didn't like U.S. history and wanted a new one. As he and others have noted, in the final analysis Zinn wasn't even a good Marxist, given his fatalism and view of the conspiracy of the elite as an essentially static and permanent phenomenon.

As to the other and even older writer who died this week, JD Salinger (he was 91; Zinn was 87), I have nothing to say about him personally, but his name and obituaries bring back bad memories. I hated Catcher in the Rye when it was assigned to me in high school; it struck me at the time as the kind of thing adults think teenagers would like to read, but neither its turgid prose nor its whining narrator offered much in the way of entertainment or even a good topic to write a five-paragraph essay about. I suppose the book's durable success suggests that somebody actually liked it as a teen, or at least saw value in claiming to, but not me.

Literature was never my thing - I always preferred history - but I did have a few assignments I liked. The easy one was when my sophmore English teacher gave us a list of possible book report topics, and being a Red Sox fan he included Peter Gammons' book Beyond the Sixth Game. But that's cheating. I loved Julius Ceasar, and enjoyed The Crucible, Macbeth, Hamlet, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Animal Farm (we did that one in seventh grade). Besides Catcher in the Rye, I hated Steinbeck (we read tons of Steinbeck, even his dreary take on King Arthur), A Separate Peace (did that one twice), The Old Man and the Sea, Dubliners, and pretty much anything else that had no likeable characters, no action, no humor and no political intrigue. I managed to avoid taking any English classes in college (thank you, AP exam), but got assigned a bunch of Orwell in my British Empire class, and loved all of it - my Orwell Reader is dog-eared, and I still mean sometime soon to go back and read Down and Out in Paris and London in its entirety (I'd read only a lengthy excerpt focusing on Orwell's time in a Paris restaurant).

Posted by Baseball Crank at 11:11 AM | Politics 2010 | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

January 27, 2010

POP CULTURE: Oedipus, Go Home

ST Karnick notes one of the things that makes "24" and its characters more compelling than so many other TV shows, even in its 8th season : the shows characters may have suffered onscreen or recent offscreen traumas they have to grapple with, but few of them, at least on the good-guys side of the ledger, are driven by some canned backstory about their relationship with their parents (Kim Bauer is obviously an exception, but we've been given ample evidence of the sources of strains between Kim and Jack, including Kim's tendency to get kidnapped by Jack's enemies and her boyfriends' tendency to lose limbs).

Posted by Baseball Crank at 3:52 PM | Pop Culture | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

POLITICS: Untapped

Caleb Howe has some fun at the expense of MSNBC's David Shuster - which is admittedly like hunting cows - over Shuster's haste to make partisan hay over the arrest of James O'Keefe at the offices of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, contrasted with Shuster's muted, caution-filled response to Nidal Hasan's mass shooting at Fort Hood.

If you've been fortunate enough to miss the O'Keefe story, he's one of the college-age right-wing gonzo-journalist types who busted ACORN with a string of undercover videos in which he dressed up as a cartoonish pimp and got various ACORN employees to counsel him on things such as how to safely employ underage hookers who were in the country illegally. Anyway, O'Keefe and three accomplices were busted yesterday by federal authorities at one of Senator Landrieu's district offices in Louisiana - two of the others were posing as telephone repairmen and O'Keefe was apparently videotaping them with his cell phone. Left-wingers like Shuster, desperately starved for some good news, went nuts on the story (the media reacted far, far faster to this than they did to the original ACORN story - a response that may be the privilege of advocates on one side or the other, but speaks quite ill of anybody pretending to be an objective mainstream news agency), blaring that this was a conspiracy to plant illegal wiretaps on Senator Landrieu's phones.

If so, that was wrong, illegal and colossally stupid on the part of O'Keefe and his henchmen, ad the potential charges under federal wiretapping statutes are steep, whereas the returns on tapping the main phone line at a Senator's local district office are likely to be slim pickings indeed. The Louisiana Democratic Party was calling this "Louisiana's Watergate," as if Watergate would even have made a list of the top 50 scandals ever to hit the Louisiana Democratic Party, but then the LDP has never been short on chutzpah; liberals were likewise quick to forget their own side's ugly history in this area, ranging from Congressman James McDermott being successfully sued for distributing an illegally intercepted cell phone conversation by GOP leadership, to Sarah Palin's emails being hacked by the son of a prominent Tennessee Democrat, to John Kerry's campaign manager in his first Congressional race (his brother, who still gets jobs from the Democrats) being busted for breaking into an opponent's headquarters.

But unlike the Fort Hood shooting or, say, the recent arrest of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter on yet another charge of soliciting underage sex, in this case waiting to see what the facts are may actually provide something of a different story. Maybe O'Keefe really is a knucklehead, but Patterico looks more carefully at the arrest affidavit and notes the absence of any allegation that O'Keefe or his accomplices had any bugs or other listening devices on them when they were arrested (although there was a reference to an unspecified listening device in one of their cars several blocks away) - that hasn't stopped major media from headlining the claim that they were caught planting bugs, but then O'Keefe (unlike Hasan) is not the kind of figure who gets "alleged" put in front of charges of his misdeeds. And Patterico at least suggests a possible alternative explanation: that O'Keefe's group may have been trying to get to the bottom of media reports that Sen. Landrieu's phone lines have been too jammed to receive calls from constituents opposed to the health care bill.

Anyway, wait and see. The odds are that O'Keefe's brief career is over and he's headed to jail - which does not a whit to change what he exposed about ACORN, but nonetheless would get him out of the business of running future exposes - but even so, we may yet find out that not all is as initially reported.

UPDATE: Fox News says that O'Keefe's story is that this didn't involve wiretapping, but - prudently, if I'm his lawyer - he's not offering much else in the way of detail.

SECOND UPDATE: Good Lt. at the Jawa Report elaborates on Patterico's theory and how it may fit with the affidavit. MSNBC has a similar take from law enforcement sources that makes it sound like they were definitely vandalizing the phones:

[T]he men, led by conservative videomaker James O'Keefe, wanted to see how her local office staff would respond if the phones were inoperative. They were apparently motivated, the official says, by criticism that when Sen. Landrieu became a big player in the health care debate, people in Louisiana were having a hard time getting through on the phones to register their views.
That is, the official says, what led the four men to pull this stunt -- to see how the local staffers would react if the phones went out. Would the staff just laugh it off, or would they express great concern that local folks couldn't get through?

Posted by Baseball Crank at 2:28 PM | Politics 2010 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

BASEBALL: Nothing Doing

For the most part, the recent signings of Joel Pineiro with the Angels and Jon Garland with the Padres is good news for the Mets, as both were rumored to be on Omar Minaya's radar, and neither seems a reliable option. Pineiro, 31, is coming off a good year under Dave Duncan's tutelage in St. Louis, but 0.5 HR/9 and 1.1 BB/9 are the kinds of microscopic rates that are hard to sustain every year - the fact is, Pineiro has a 4.97 ERA over the past five seasons for a reason, and 4.9 K/9 in that period is a big part of that.

Garland is more useful, since he's tremendously durable - he's started 32 or 33 games 8 years in a row, during which time he's averaged 205 innings per year - but he, too, hasn't cracked 5 K/9 since 2003. With Pelfrey already in the rotation, adding another very low-K pitcher would probably put more strain on the Mets defense than it already faces.

The failure to sign Ben Sheets, snapped up by Billy Beane and the A's, is more depressing. Sheets' injury record is pretty grim - he averaged 21 starts and 135 IP from 2005-2007, and after a solid comeback in 2008 he missed all of last season. And Sheets' K rate has also tailed off with the years, to around 7 per 9 innings. But when healthy, Sheets is a legitimate #2 starter, and would represent a genuine upgrade.

Still, avoiding the dumb moves is progress, at this point.

UPDATE: I should add that I have very mixed feelings about John Smoltz. On the one hand, Smoltz pitched far better than his 6.35 ERA would suggest - 2.1 BB/9 and 8.4 K/9 are both good figures, and 1.3 HR/9 is high but not bad enough to preclude a guy with a 4-to-1 K/BB ratio from being successful; he cut his HR rate more than in half after moving from Boston to St. Louis. On the other hand, all good things come to an end, and a 43-year-old pitcher who has started just 21 games in the past two seasons can't be penciled in to just keep putting up those kinds of numbers week in and week out.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 12:35 PM | Baseball 2010 | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)