Barra Whiffs Again

The normally sensible Allen Barra bemoans the lack of young superstars in the game compared to 9 years ago. Of course, you don’t have a crop of young talent like that all the time. This isn’t as dumb as Barra’s prior version of this article for Slate, but how you can write about the dearth of young talent in the game and ask “Where Have You Gone, All You Young Joe DiMaggios?” without once mentioning the name Vladimir Guerrero is beyond me. And cut the crap about no potential 300-game winners; between 1912 and 1961 (that’s 50 years, if you’re counting at home), only three pitchers broke in who would win 300 games (Lefty Grove in 1925, Early Wynn in 1939, and Warren Spahn in 1942; the game didn’t debut a 300-game winner for almost 20 years between Spahn and Gaylord Perry in 1962).

Guillen

A’s get Jose Guillen. Although he looked promising when he first came up, due mostly to his reported youth, I’d mostly soured on Guillen before this year, since he’ll swing at anything and he’s been stuck in reverse since he arrived in the league. Interesting that the A’s picked him up after a hot first half he’s unlikely to build on, but he doesn’t have to hit .337 to help, he just has to outhit Terrence Long. Plus, he’s got a cannon of an arm.
David Pinto is more enthused about Guillen and thinks he’s turned the same corner as Brett Boone.

More, More, More

Aside from the merits of the deal, one thing I like about the Red Sox’ acquisition of Scott Williamson is the attitude behind it — the greed and audacity the Sox will need to learn from Steinbrenner if they’re going to keep pace with him over the long haul. Think about it: the Sox had given up a productive everyday player (Shea Hillenbrand) to get the guy who’s now their closer, and both Byun-Hyung Kim and the bullpen as a whole have pitched well since he was installed as the closer. But rather than say, “our bullpen’s pitching well now, we don’t have to worry about it,” the Sox went out and brought in another accomplished high-end reliever. That’s how you stop thinking “Wild Card” and start thinking “spray champagne on Bud Selig.”

Another Take on Niger

See, the basic divide right now is this: the Administration’s defenders say it was perfectly reasonable for the president to rely on British intelligence about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa, although the Administration itself now admits that it shouldn’t have included this item in the State of the Union Address due to the conflicting reports coming from the CIA. The critics say, basically, that if American intelligence doubts that it happened, then we should not rely on intelligence provided by our closest ally; if it’s not blessed by American intelligence, it must be no good, right?
Now, who’s being the arrogant unilateralists?
(Of course, as the left-leaning site The Daily Howler has noted, it appears that the British were talking about the Congo, while our analysis was about Niger; apples and oranges).

Slugging Sox

Through Monday night, the Red Sox — as a team — are slugging .501. No major league team has ever slugged .500 before. The team slugging average record is a prestigious one; the record is currently held by the original “Murderers’ Row,” the 1927 Yankees, who slugged .489.
But of course, raw slugging averages aren’t everything; slugging averages have varied widely over the years, from a low league average of around .300 in the pit of the dead-ball era to a high of almost .450 in the NL of 1930 and the AL of the late 1990s.
So, if you divide a team’s slugging average by the league’s slugging average, you get a relative number — how much above or below the league a team is. Now, let’s see how the 2003 Sox stack up to the all-time leaders; I’ve listed every team that finished 15% or better above the league average:

Continue reading Slugging Sox

Sell!

I was going to write something about the Pentagon’s proposal for a market in predicting terror targets, but as usual I really can’t top Jane Galt’s discussion of the subject; I share her enthusiasm for the concept in the abstract, as well as her reservations about perverse incentives. What amazed me, though, was the sheer political incompetence of announcing this program without the willingness to stick out criticisms that were completely inevitable and predictable; if you didn’t want to take that heat, why make the proposal?

The Traders

Nice column by Buster Olney on the personal dynamics of deadline deals between GMs. The column is a reminder of what a jerk Dan Duquette could be, and why it was bad business for Billy Beane to let Moneyball be written; it’s also, come to think of it, a reminder of why the NY Times was so mismanaged lately as to let Olney leave when he was one of the few sportswriters at the Times who wasn’t a hidebound old codger. My favorite vignette:
Dan Duquette, the former Boston GM, infuriated his peers by not returning phone calls, and sometimes, when he did return calls, Duquette remained silent — a passive-aggressive approach, [Padres GM Kevin] Towers thought. The other GM would feel compelled to fill the uncomfortable silence and surrender more information that Duquette might use. Towers decided to wait out Duquette’s silence one day. Each man was on a speakerphone, and when Duquette stopped talking, so did Towers, for more than 10 minutes.
“Kevin, you there?” Duquette finally asked.
“Yeah, Dan, I’m here,” said Towers, feeling a small sense of accomplishment.

Dixie Chicked?

The lefty side of the blogosphere — and the media — has done a good bit of hyperventilating about the charge that radio congolmerate Clear Channel Communications supposedly ordered a nationwide ban on playing the Dixie Chicks on the radio, depite the company’s denials. Washington Post media critic Tom Shales charged that “Clear Channel stations led a ridiculous national campaign to smear the musical group the Dixie Chicks after one of its members insulted President Bush. The group’s songs were banned on its stations for a time.” Paul Krugman stopped just short of pinning this on Clear Channel, but some left-wing news outlets have pushed the story. The argument goes that the network’s reach shows the evil of media concentration, and Clear Channel has been Exhibit A in the case against FCC deregulation of media ownership.
I hadn’t followed this story all that carefully, but then I stumbled accross an interesting fact. You know what company is the promoter of the Dixie Chicks’ current concert tour?
That’s right: Clear Channel Entertainment.
This isn’t exactly a secret; Clear Channel has touted the success of the Chicks’ tour to the business press, and you can go to the company’s website to buy tickets to their shows.
Moral: maybe you should distrust what you hear on the radio, but don’t believe everything you read, either.

Racial Privacy

Via The Corner, conservative opponents of Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative raise an issue that I aired as early as last September: that, if passed, it would hobble efforts to expose racial preference programs that produce the kind of massive disparities (with preferred groups having many, many times better chances of admission) that were on display in the Michigan cases. Also, Kevin Drum has news that the initiative might get pushed up to this November to be on the ballot with the recall election.
Politically, I suspect that this will greatly hurt the chances of a Republican succeeding Gray Davis, by bringing out larger African-American turnout (Mickey Kaus also thinks those voters will help Davis, but I’m not so sure). But there’s also a flip side: by taking Connerly’s initiative off the March ballot, you (a) improve its chances of passing (March will be Democratic presidential primary time) but possibly (b) depress turnout for the presidential primary (I’m not sure how that cuts, but fewer African-American and Latino voters is probably good news for Howard Dean, whose supporters are decidedly upscale and white).

DIPS Revised

Tom Tippett at Diamond Mind Baseball had an important article last week looking closely at hits on balls in play and concluding that some pitchers, at least, have more control over them than Voros McCracken’s initial studies revealed. This isn’t shocking news; McCracken’s own research and that of others has already backtracked from the extreme position that pitchers have no effect on hits on balls in play, and Tippett’s research still makes clear that — at least in modern baseball — the pitcher is usually not the driving factor in BABIP. (The conclusions are different for guys like Walter Johnson and Pete Alexander, who appear to have had more control over hits on balls in play).
Read the whole article. There’s also been a bustling discussion of this over at the Baseball Primer.

Deja Pedro

With 18 starts down, Pedro Martinez now has the exact number of starts and innings as in his injury-shortened 2001 season. How does his performance stack up?

Year W L ERA G GS CG IP H HR BB K
2001 7 3 2.39 18 18 1 116.2 84 5 25 163
2003 7 2 2.31 18 18 1 116.2 89 6 30 130

That’s eerie.

More on Wiley

I’ve been remiss in not adding a link on my blogroll to Eric McErlain’s Off-Wing Opinion, a site with a similar baseball and political bent to this one. McErlain has a bunch of links (including a link to this site) elaborating on recent controversies about sabermetrics and race, including a half-hearted attempt by Ralph Wiley to deny that his charge of racism against Bill James was a serious thing. What’s scary is that Wiley apparently tosses around these charges so often that he doesn’t think it matters that he made the charge without bothering to look at the facts.

Anyone Can Sue

The Wall Street Journal carries an alarming op-ed by Walter Olson of Overlawyered.com (it actually ran in the print edition on Tuesday) on moves to further expand California Business & Professions Code section 17200, which permits anyone (whether or not they have been injured, suffered any damages, or even been a customer of the business) to sue a business for any “unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice and unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising.” As I’ve noted before, Justices Breyer and O’Connor recently questioned this statute’s constitutionality, at least when applied to lawsuits challenging businesses that seek to defend their reputations in public controversies:

Continue reading Anyone Can Sue

Daily News Confesses To Murder

The story of the shooting of a NY City Councilman by a “political rival” (really just a crackpot who got close to the Councilman styling himself a politician) just keeps getting more complicated. But perhaps the most bizarre twist is this NY Daily News article indicating that one of the triggers for Othniel Askew’s panic over the possible revelation of his criminal record and his private life was . . . a cover story in Monday’s Daily News!

The Origin of Life

MSNBC looks at an underwater vent that “is just the sort of place that might have spawned life on Earth or even other planets.”
But there’s a key question the article leaves unanswered: how? Seriously, I plead ignorance on this one — can any of the scientists in the audience here tell me if science has come up with even a halfway workable description of how non-living materials become life forms?

Still Spinning

Just another day for the front page of the New York Times: an article on the recall in California quotes numerous Democrats griping about democracy “run amok,” the difficulties of dealing with initiatives, and calling the recall supporters “right wing” before it gets to quoting a lone Republican, who is quoted describing himself as a “wacko.” The article also quotes unnamed “experts” (presented without rebuttal) supporting the Lieutenant Governor’s strange theory that he doesn’t need to let the voters pick a replacement for Gray Davis but can just step in himself.
Then there’s the front page article on the shooting at City Hall, which conspicuously omits the fact that the shooter and the victim were both Democrats. (The article also ignores the fact that both men — as well as the hero cop who killed the assailant with five direct hits from 45 feet away — were African-American, although I can’t fault the Times for being color-blind for once).

BASKETBALL: Bad Idea

Now, I don’t follow the NBA half as much as I used to, and I’ve never been a Latrell Sprewell fan, but trading him for Keith Van Horn seems like . . . well, it seems like exactly the same sort of mistake the Mets would make, the same sort the Knicks as well have been making for a decade, always bringing in forwards who are injured, past their prime, unathletic, overpaid, or some combination of the four. Van Horn has missed 20 or more games 3 times in 5 years; his numbers tell you how infrequently he gets physical (he averaged fewer than 3 trips to the line per game the last two years), he’s shot above 45% only once in his career, averaged 1.38 turnovers/asssist for his career (he’s no Larry Bird), and he’s not even a guy who compensates by being a prime time 3-point shooter. Unless I’m missing something, neither is he a guy who does a lot that doesn’t show up in the box scores. And he’s got 3 years and $43 million left on his contract, an extra year and extra $17 million above Sprewell’s deal.

Old Man Bronx River

Jesse Orosco joins Armando Benitez in the Yankee bullpen. Which should help; Orosco’s uses are limited to 1-2 lefty batters and he hasn’t pitched well this season, but his performance in recent years suggests he can still help in a pinch.
The Yankee pitching staff when Orosco was a rookie:
SP Tommy John
SP Ron Guidry
SP Luis Tiant
SP Catfish Hunter
SP Ed Figueroa
SP Jim Beattie
CL Rich Gossage
RP Ron Davis
RP Jim Kaat
RP Ken Clay
RP Don Hood
Also, if you haven’t checked it out, John Sickles of ESPN has a good rundown on the prospects dealt thus far this trade season.

Big Bag of Magnanimity

Sometimes, Bill Clinton’s need to be a part of every story has some good results; Clinton tells Larry King that he feels George W.’s pain over the Niger issue:
“I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying ‘we probably shouldn’t have said that,'” Clinton told CNN’s Larry King in a phone interview Tuesday evening.
“You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. You can’t make as many calls as you have to make without messing up. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now.”

Better Than They Deserved

There are only a few people on this earth whose deaths I would celebrate without any remorse. Uday and Qusay are two.
Off the top of my head, the rest of the list includes:
Saddam
Osama (and, frankly, any of his henchmen)
Mullah Omar
Castro
Kim Jong Il
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Arafat
Lileks: “Yes, I hope they suffered, and yes, I want heads on pikes.”
John from Iberian Notes (who just added us to his blogroll): “In case you haven’t seen it yet, Qusay and Oday look like they’re well on their way to their 72 virgin sheep, goats, and donkeys in hell.”
OK. But just for laughs, let’s check out the reaction from famously anti-American journalist Robert Fisk:

Continue reading Better Than They Deserved

A Soldier’s Return

In a way, it was refreshing to see other news overshadow Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s return to her hometown yesterday (she’s now the most famous thing in West Virginia not named after Robert C. Byrd); she’s a great story, but the media has overdone it at times. Lynch seemed normal — neither overwhelmed by the attention nor unduly taken by it. Good for her; she’s been through a lot. (For a taste of why Americans were so worried about how she’d be treated by Iraq, check out this recent judicial opinion, in PDF form, with some graphic detail of how our POWs were treated in the last Iraq war).

Miller Time

The Weekly Standard has a great interview on Dennis Miller’s journey to conservatism; Miller has too many great lines to excerpt here. A sampling:
I knew [John] Kerry was going to have to run for president because his features are so chiseled, his actual skull could be on Mt. Rushmore. The guy looks like an Easter Island statue in a power tie. Howard Dean can roll up his sleeves in public all he wants, but as long as you can see that heart tattoo with Neville Chamberlain’s name on his right forearm, he’s never going to get off the pad. I hope they send Howard Dean out to do battle with Bush because he’ll get his ass handed to him quicker than someone who just got out of liposuction surgery.
(Link via Jane Galt)

Stark Raving Loony, Part II

With the (forced) retirement of Cynthia McKinney, the title of “worst member of Congress” is up for grabs. I nominate Fortney “Pete” Stark, who cemented his reputation last week by calling Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas a c___sucker, repeatedly calling Congressman Scott McInnis a “fruitcake” and challenging him to a fight, and generally acting in a sufficiently threatening manner that Thomas (probably overreacting to the situation) called the Capitol Police.
(FOX News, by the way, says that McInnis “is married and by all accounts not gay.”).
It turns out that Stark has an incredibly long history of picking up the nastiest slur handy for whomever is in his way:
Stark has a long history of making outrageous remarks. He once called Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson “a whore,” and said former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan is “a disgrace to his race.”
Sullivan, wisely, responded, �I don�t live on Pete Stark�s plantation.�. But wait, there’s more:
+In 2001, Stark “called the Bush budget ‘the embodiment of the anti-Christ,’ saying that it was ‘infamy’ to use the Easter season to release a budget ‘that flies in the face of all Christ’s teachings.'”
+Later that year, he “falsely accused House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of having children who ‘were all born out of wedlock.’,” and The Washington Times recounted more history: “Mr. Stark is something of a legend in the House for making offensive remarks. He has accused Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, Connecticut Republican, of learning about health care from ‘pillow talk’ with her husband, a doctor. In 1991 he blamed ‘Jewish colleagues’ for supporting the Persian Gulf war and called Rep. Stephen Solarz, New York Democrat, as ‘Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.'”
+Earlier this year, Stark argued that any U.S. bombing in or around Baghdad would be “an act of extreme terrorism.”
George Will also had some fun with Stark’s excesses during the Iraq debate:
During the House debate on authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Rep. Pete Stark, a paleo-liberal from northern California, cried, “Rich kids will not pay; their daddies will get them deferments.” He meant draft deferments. It is almost unkind to awaken Stark from his dogmatic slumbers to notify him that there has not been a draft since 1973. And the Beatles have broken up.
Where exactly is Stark’s district? Gee, I’ll give you one guess — “the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay
I know he’s not in the leadership, but there comes a point when even a back-bencher merits some sort of rebuke from his party. This guy’s a disgrace.

California Polling

Bush is losing ground in the polls in California. This underlines two things:
1. As I’ve been saying for some time, Bush has a better shot of reviving in NY (where the war on terror is especially close to home) than in CA. I’ll believe a Republican winning in California when I see it.
2. Bush has nothing to lose from a recall of Gray Davis, and much to gain; if things just fester in California, voters won’t be itching to reward any incumbents.
On a related note, CalPundit (actually doing some California punditry in a break from his all-Niger routine) has a hilarious story of Democrats plotting to force a budget impasse in California for partisan advantage– in front of an open mike.
Just imagine if Newt Gingrich got caught saying some of the stuff in this article.

BASKETBALL/ Presumed Nutso

ESPN’s Kevin Jackson has an important point to remember in the whole Kobe thing: while we should give Kobe Bryant some slack on the grounds that he’s presumed innocent, we should also remember not to rush to judge his accuser, either.
I’m sick of this story already, and it will only get worse. I can only imagine if my son was old enough to follow the NBA; Bryant’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t have minded seeing a poster of on your kid’s wall. And then, not only the fall from grace, but to have to explain the idea of rape to, say, an 8-year-old kid . . . innocent or no, I’d be pissed at Bryant for putting us all in that position.

May on Niger

From the conservative side of the aisle, the absolute best coverage of the African uranium story has been from Clifford May on NRO; you can read his analyses here and here. He asks a very pertinent question:
Early in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney had questions about reports of Saddam buying uranium from Niger. So he asked the Central Intelligence Agency to find out the truth. Consider: Here’s a request from the White House on a vital national-security issue. Does the CIA put their top spies on the case? No. Who do they put on the case? No one. Instead, they apparently decided to give the assignment to a diplomat.
I assume they contacted the State Department. Even so, they didn’t get the Foreign Service’s most talented ambassador, someone with investigative skills and broad experience in nuclear proliferation and related issues. No, the assignment went to a retiree who is far to the left of the Bush administration. Why?
That retiree was Joseph C. Wilson IV, former ambassador to Gabon, and one-time deputy to ambassador April Glaspie in Iraq. (You’ll recall she was the U.S. official who reportedly told Saddam: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.”)
Wilson’s investigation, according to his recent New York Times op-ed, consisted of his spending “eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people.” He added: “It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction [sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq] had ever taken place.”
Wilson’s conclusion was probably correct. It’s likely that no such transaction occurred � which begs the question of whether Saddam attempted to complete such a transaction, as the British believe and as Bush said in his SOTU.
But let’s imagine for just a moment that one of the officials with whom Wilson met had accepted a million-dollar bribe for facilitating the transfer of uranium to Saddam’s agents. What is the likelihood that that information would have been disclosed to Wilson over sips of sweet mint tea? Not huge, I’d wager.
When did the vice president learn that this was the manner in which his orders had been carried out? Is there an explanation for such dereliction of duty by CIA and, possibly, by State as well? Was anyone held accountable?

(emphasis added)

Connecting the Dots

Kevin Drum was at it again on Saturday, knocking Lileks for writing, about Tony Blair, that “[w]e can argue about the shape and direction of Western Civ after we�ve made sure that such a thing will endure.” Drum’s response:
I take terrorism seriously, and I also take seriously the threat of terrorists and unstable states getting hold of weapons of mass destruction. But what can you say about this kind of talk? Do Lileks and the rest of the prowar crowd seriously think that Osama and his ilk have made it doubtful whether western civilization will endure?
To me that just sounds crazy, and I guess maybe that’s at the core of the schism in America today. Lileks and his compatriots think the terrorists have the power to bring western civilization to its knees, whereas I think of them as simply a threat that we will rather quickly and efficiently dispatch. They may be scary, but in terms of actual power they are the merest flea on the back of the United States and the rest of the western democracies.
I wonder what it is that causes such vast gulfs in instinctive reaction between people who probably more or less agree on the actual nature of the threat itself?

Naturally, Drum’s comment boards lit up with various personal attacks on Lileks specifically and conservatives in general. To some extent, of course, Lileks is exaggerating: Western Civilization as a whole is a very good bet to squash its enemies. Me, I’m plenty enough worried about whether my corner of that civilization (New York City) will survive, and from reading Lileks I know that’s his sort of worry as well: not the total destruction of our way of life but a catastrophic attack, or series of attacks, that blow big holes in the nation’s fabric and change forever the way we live.
But the really big gulf right now — and one that’s getting wider — is between those of us, mostly on the Right, who see the states and organizations that declare themselves to be the enemies of our civilization and start with the assumption that they are all part of the same basic problem (particularly when their rhetoric partakes of the same cocktail of pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and old Soviet rhetorical tropes) until proven otherwise, and those (almost exclusively on the Left) who insist on a very high burden of proof before they will see, say, the mullahs in Iran or the regime of Saddam Hussein as being part of the same threat as Al Qaeda.
In the end, that’s what this whole Niger thing is about. In the war on terror, it’s not hard to know who our enemies are: most of them are quite plain in meaning us ill. The hawks in this war have taken a clear position: Never Again will we underestimate our enemies as we did before September 11, and if the cost of that is that we sometimes act too soon, well, that’s the price we pay for the world we live in; if that attitude drives up the cost of being an enemy of the United States, so be it. The goal, after all, is not just to intercede to stop attacks on us the day before they happen, but to stop threats in the bud, before they go too far. While we could use to have better intelligence, we must accept that we will always have to make some decisions about those enemies based on a patchwork of glimpses into their shadowy world.
To the pro-war camp, Saddam’s regime was bad and dangerous in many ways, and in that light, the fact that some intelligence reports indicated that he was looking to buy uranium in one of several African states was not a straight up-or-down item of “evidence” but yet another cause for potential concern. The fact that this particular rumor couldn’t be verified (it still hasn’t been disproved, so much as its bases have been called into question) was no reason to bury our heads in the sand and ignore it; indeed, the very fact that it was possible that Saddam could do such a thing without us being able to conclusively prove it was done is alarming in itself.
We’re not talking about moving against innocent lambs here; if we act on imperfect intelligence, our targets will still be those who hate us and yearn for ways to destroy us. They’d kill me if they could, and you too, and they’ll likely kill more of us before this is all done. The magnitude of the potential threat is just too great to sit around finding excuses to discredit this or that dot, and ignore the looming outline.

Dean, The Blog

Starting here and scrolling down, you can catch some of Howard Dean’s blog entries as guest blogger last week at Prof. Lawrence Lessig’s blog. First of all, a nonpartisan hat’s off to Dean; while most presidential candidates are too busy to do a running blog, it’s a great way to showcase a candidate early in the race if it’s taken seriously, and Dean appears to have tried to be genuinely responsive to feedback.
But then there’s the substance of these posts. Where to begin?
People asked what can be done about media deregulation. I think we need to re-regulate the media that has clearly abused its authority by censoring information that should be made available to the American people.
OK, let’s get this straight . . . Dean wants to use government regulation to punish media outlets for their editorial decisions? So much for Mister Civil Liberties Man. Can you say, “Hugo Chavez” or “Vladimir Putin,” boys and girls?
Someone asked about the Patriot Act-we should repeal those parts that violate our constitution.
Well, it’s good to see that Dean understands that we should repeal things that are unconstitutional, whereas our current president has been known to sign things into law (ahem, McCain-Feingold) that he thinks are unconstitutional, and leave the courts to do the dirty work. But I don’t necessarily agree with Dean’s selections:
I have real problems authorizing the FBI to obtain library and bookstore and video store records simply by claiming the information is �sought for� an investigation against international terrorism. It�s also clearly unconstitutional to detain indivduals and deny them access to a lawyer.
Frankly, the library thing just doesn’t bother me that much. And it isn’t “clearly unconstitutional” to deny counsel to non-citizens or to combatants in a war.
I believe that the only way we are ever going to come to a real solution on any of these issues is if we all stand together against the special interests in Washington. There are now 33 lobbyists for every member of congress. How do we change that? By working together.
Actually, working together is precisely how you attract lobbyists, who love the smell of bipartisanship in the morning. The only known way to get rid of lobbyists is to get the power over their interests out of Washington.
Facts are a better basis for decisions than ideology.
Ah, “competence, not ideology.” Where have we heard that one before?

Minor League Development

Dayn Perry at Baseball Prospectus looks at the minor league pitching careers of good and bad major league pitchers and finds little difference in quality, but that the bad ones spent more time in the minors. In short, a study that raises more questions than it answers. He notes that he excluded late-career returns to the minors, but I can’t shake the feeling that some of the bad ones had good numbers because unlike the good ones, their subpar stuff kept them in the minors after they’d learned how to pitch.

Kielty for Stewart

Like most people, I had the whipsaw effect on the Twins dealing Bobby Kielty for Shannon Stewart: my gut reaction was, “that’s a good deal, Stewart’s a .300 hitting leadoff man in his prime and Kielty’s not really established himself as a regular,” but once I sat down to look at the numbers, it became obvious that the Jays (and Billy Beane disciple J.P. Ricciardi) got the better end of the deal. Kielty’s already a similar hitter, and he’s 3 years younger and a lot cheaper, while Stewart can’t throw and has the kind of offensive skill set (does a little of everything well but nothing outstandingly well) that ages badly.
Aaron Gleeman has a much more detailed (and rueful) analysis. David Pinto also notes that the Jays had played well in Stewart’s recent absence. A few additional thoughts:
*Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system rates the most comparable player to Stewart as Carl Furillo (obviously, PECOTA doesn’t consider outfield assists), and Furillo batted .344 two years later. But the list does include a number of guys (including Derek Bell, Bernard Gilkey, Al Cowens, Harvey Kuenn, and Hoot Evers) who were at or near the end of the productive part of their careers. Kielty’s are more ambiguous and less similar, but do include some guys like Leon Wagner and Bernie Williams who were just entering powerhouse primes.
*Gleeman runs averages, but I thought I’d do Established Performance Levels for the two for 2001-03. For the uninitiated, EPL for, say, hits for 2000-02 would be (((H in 2000) + ((H in 2001)*2) + ((H in 2002)*3))/6. You have to prorate the formula a little when you use the season in progress, though (I just divide by, say, 4.5 if we’re at the absolute halfway mark, or a number similarly adjusted for (Team Games)/162
Here’s Stewart and Kielty for 2001-03:

Player G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB AVG SLG OBP OPS
Stewart 137 568 172 39 5 11 95 54 49 59 12 .303 .449 .366 815
Kielty 103 296 79 16 1 11 49 43 50 69 6 .268 .444 .382 826

As you can see, it’s not completely crazy for a contending team to prefer Stewart, who’s more established and puts the ball in play a lot more. But Kielty’s already a better hitter, and consider the trendline: maybe this is just Ricciardi’s management looking down on steals, but Stewart’s steals vs. his GIDP have dropped from 27-9, to 14-17, to 1-6, which suggests a guy who’s losing a step.
But who beat the Twins in the ALCS last year? The Angels. What do the Angels do well? Put the ball in play. Fighting the last war . . .

Jaw Jaw

Kevin Drum, echoing many of the Bush Administration’s critics, complains that
The unwillingness of the administration to do anything � even talk � with North Korea really does seem to be based more on personal pique than on a sober assessment of what’s best for the United States.
Why has Bush gotten a pass on this from the conservative establishment? Hell, even Clinton did something, while Bush has literally done almost nothing for nine months now, seemingly happy to let the situation fester away until eventually we will be backed into a corner with no options left.
This desperation for some showy display of negotiation is badly mistaken. Really, there’s nothing worse in negotiations than showing up just for the sake of talking. That leads to being afraid to walk away, which leads to bad deals, which is what happened to Clinton.
It’s clear that Bush recognizes that, unlike in Iraq, our freedom of both military action and diplomatic pressure is hampered by a neighboring great power (China). But getting China to do anything requires two preconditions:
1. The situation gets so bad they can’t ignore it.
2. We not be seen as leading the way, so that China not be seen as doing our bidding.
Moreover, any action on our part encourages the North Koreans to think that they are succeeding in inducing panic. In short, for any Bush policy on North Korea — short of a direct military assault — to be effective, we must appear to be doing nothing.
Is that really what Bush is doing? We can’t know. But I would think that critics of the Administration would at least deal with the reality of the situation rather than making the facile assumption that we’re doing nothing simply because we’re not doing the same thing we did with Iraq.

Steyn on Niger

You know Mark Steyn’s got a good one when different excerpts are quoted on every site linking to him. This column on Niger is a good one; this passage cracked me up:
Who knows what really happened in Africa? Maybe the CIA guy in Niamey (assuming they have one) filed a report on uranium in Niger and back at head office the assistant deputy paper-shuffler looked at it upside-down and said, �There�s something here about Saddam getting nigerium from Uranus,� and the deputy assistant paper shuffler said, �Jeez, we need to go into full ass-covering mode.� Either way, you could ask a million folks and never find one whose view on the war was determined by anything to do with Niger, which, insofar as anybody�s ever heard of it, is mostly assumed to be either an abbreviation of Nigeria or a breakaway republic thereof, leaving the rump statelet of Ia to go it alone.

2003 Mid-Year A.L. East DIPS Report

Here’s the fourth in my series of posts analyzing pitching staffs through Defense Independent Pitching Stats; see here for an explanation and my report on the NL East, here for my report on the NL Central and a few more notes on the method, and here for my report on the N.L. West. In short, DIPS is is intended to tell you how a pitcher would perform if an average number of balls in play against him were turned into outs by his defense; I’m using the rougher formula for quick in-season analysis, and as I’ve explained before it appears that the formula is more accurate for A.L. pitchers. Today: the A.L. East. All stats through the All-Star Break:
The Hated Yankees

Pitcher DIPS ERA (Actual ERA, Difference)
Mike Mussina 3.23 (3.26, -0.03)
Roger Clemens 3.54 (3.68, -0.14)
David Wells 4.05 (3.76, +0.29)
Andy Pettitte 3.76 (4.63, -0.87)
Jeff Weaver 3.99 (5.20, -1.21)
Mariano Rivera 2.25 (1.75, -0.50)
Chris Hammond 2.71 (3.20, -0.49)

The top guys’ DIPS ERAs are pretty much in line with actual ERAs. The rest of the numbers tell us one thing we already knew — the Yankee defense isn’t good — and one thing that was less obvious, which is that Pettitte and Weaver have taken the brunt of the lumps resulting from this (which is not surprising, since Clemens and Mussina put fewer balls in play and Wells doesn’t get many ground balls). In fact, Weaver really hasn’t pitched that badly — 110.2 IP, 9 HR (0.73/9IP), 29 BB (2.36 BB/9IP), 62 K (5.04 K/9IP) — so much as he’s been unlucky. Hammond, who’s been touched for 44 hits in 39.1 innings, has pitched better than his ERA.
I had to laugh last night seeing footage of Rivera next to Benitez; Benitez made him look like he was the bat boy or something. Of course, we know who we’d rather face in a tough situation . . .

Continue reading 2003 Mid-Year A.L. East DIPS Report

Overrated

Matt Welch compares the media to the dumb baseball owners who get mocked by the sabermetric crowd. You could extend the analogy and say the NY Times is the Mets in this picture, wasting its prime position in the op-ed market by overpaying for a bunch of untalented or over-the-hill columnists (Dowd, Herbert, The Krug, Safire) and ignoring the vast pool of cheaper or free talent out there (even on the Left). (Or maybe I just like comparing Krugman to Mo Vaughn). Seriously, wouldn’t you rather read 2 columns a week apiece from a selection of good bloggers like Kevin Drum or Megan McArdle and less-nationally-known columnists like Josh Marshall, Mark Steyn or Lileks than 3 a week from Dowd and The Krug? You could easily replace the whole slate, keep the page as a liberal page with 1 or 2 conservatives/libertarians/other non-liberals, and vastly improve the quality (even some of Krugman’s fans think he’s better suited to a weekly magazine piece on economics than 3 hack jobs a week).
But that would be the smart thing to do.