Is Kerry Toast?

Yes, it’s too early to win a race like this — but it’s not too early to lose.
New polls showing Howard Dean with a commanding lead in New Hampshire have convinced me: John Kerry is toast. He’s losing ground and losing press coverage and trailing badly in native-son territory. Kerry doesn’t excite anybody; he had relied on the aura of a frontrunner, and that’s history now.
This shocks me, since I have suspected for some time that Kerry would win the nomination by virtue of most nearly straddling the middle of his party. I still think that can be done, but not by a guy so obviously trying to do so. Maybe the Dems have learned something from the Gore fiasco.
Lieberman can’t win the nomination, unless he gets a real miracle in support from African-Americans, because he’s become the symbol for party activists of the DINO (Democrat in Name Only) on taxes, war, religion and business regulation. Dean, on the other hand, remains vulnerable because non-Chomskyite Democrats over the age of about 23 realize his stances on taxes and war and possibly his identification with gay marriage and general Vermontism would make him poison in a national election. That creates space in the middle, and Kerry’s implosion and Bob Graham’s dullness and ill health leave that field mostly to Edwards, Gephardt and now perhaps Wesley Clark.
But Edwards, who I predicted to win the nomination back in January, has been a disaster, running in fifth place at 4% (to Dean’s 38%, Kerry’s 17% and Gephardt’s 11%) in New Hampshire and fifth place at 6% (to Dean’s 25% and Gephardt’s 21%) in Iowa, and (in a poll done about a month ago), tied for fourth with 5% (to 13% for Lieberman and 8% apiece for Gephardt and Al Sharpton) in neighboring South Carolina. The only obvious explanation for this is Edwards’ obvious unreadiness to be commander-in-chief, even when compared to someone like Dean, who would be a foreign policy disaster but at least has strong opinions on the subject.

Giles for Perez

I honestly don’t know enough about Oliver Perez — beyond the fact that he’s a young pitcher with high strikeout rates but little or no success thus far at the major league level — to really evaluate the Pirates’ deal of Brian Giles to San Diego, with Perez as the chief consideration in return. But to be fair to the Pirates, remember this:
*The Pirates aren’t any good and won’t be any good for a few more years;
*Giles will be 33 next season, and will never be more marketable.
For all that, I’m suspicious of trading a superstar-level hitter principally for an unproven young pitcher. And you have to conclude this: the deal is a dramatic no-confidence vote in Pittsburgh’s young starting rotation. A team that thought Josh Fogg and Kip Wells and Kris Benson were going to be the anchors of a good rotation would not make this deal. (In Benson’s case, pessimism is clearly warranted by his season-ending shoulder injury).

Oops

Overslept my blogging hour this morning . . . I’ll give you a link – Vodkapundit with a laughable example of U.N. impotence – and a thought – the injury that prevents Mike Sweeney from playing first base (leaving him blocking the DH slot) has a ripple effect in that the acquisition of Rondell White sends hot-hitting Aaron Guiel to the bench instead of the relatively punchless Ken Harvey.

Clark Not Turning Into Superman

Jeff Quinton, the Backcountry Conservative, has a roundup of links to an assortment of attacks on Wesley Clark from the Right, the Left, and sources in between (especially his record in Kosovo, which after all is his sole claim to fame), although I’m not sure I would grant a lot of credence to far-Left sites like zpub.com. I guess this is a sign that people are starting to think seriously about Clark as a presidential candidate riding to rescue the Democrats from Howard Dean.

Abuse

You often hear debates about frivolous or abusive litigation that stay on the level of abstraction or generality, or focus on outrageous verdicts where the plaintiff was the one who did something horrible or complained about something trivial. But an aspect that gets missed is how many truly meritless cases get filed, and how many of those are enabled, aided and abetted along by vague theories of law, liberal pleading and discovery rules, and (in various types of tort cases) hard to disprove allegations of psychological harm or emotional trauma. The collective cost of this stuff, to the economy and the judicial system, is tremendous.
Read this opinion from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (opens as PDF file) — in, what else, a case charging disability discrimination, sexual harrassment and retaliation, plus a few other brainstorms of the Democratic Party in the late 80s and early 90s — to see a particularly lethal cocktail of these elements and how they appear to have been badly abused by a dishonest plaintiff. As you are reading this, reflect on the fact that the federal agency at issue has been stuck defending this case since March of 1998, and on how much lawyering and how many hours of time of not only attorneys but witnesses, doctors, investigators and a federal judge were wasted by this one individual litigant.
Now, you can say that this is an extreme case, and it is, at least in the extent to which the plaintiff’s misbehavior was caught out, documented and sanctioned. But talk to any employment lawyer — whether they represent the government or private business — and you will hear story after story of people who use litigation like this to cover for the fact that they are just unable to bear the adult responsibilities of the working world, or to squeeze some extra dollars out of a company that had layoffs and had to pick somebody to let go.

Some People Tell Me Walkin’ Cruz Ain’t Bad

Just whenever you are ready to think that plate patience and strike zone judgment (the two are not the same thing) can’t be taught, a player with a couple years’ experience becomes a teammate of a guy like Barry Bonds or Rickey Henderson or Edgar Martinez, and a light goes on (or back on). Witness Jose Cruz (still depicted by ESPN in a Blue Jays hat), who after drawing a decent number of walks in 1999-2000 drew just 45 and 51 as an everyday player in 2001 & 2002, respectively. This season: 445 at bats, 83 walks, which helped make Cruz a big part of the Giants’ early success.
Lately, while he’s kept walking, Cruz has stopped hitting, batting .216 and slugging .289 since the All-Star break. In fact, since May 11, he’s batting .243 and slugging just .399. But his season OBP remains a respectable .364.

On The Same Bus

Nice gesture for Mayor Bloomberg to ride the Jerusalem No. 2 bus in solidarity with the victims of the latest suicide bombing, even if it does mean a little foreign policy grandstanding that takes him from his real job.
I have to ask: why does anybody in Israel still ride the bus? I mean, I’m being serious and not critical of the Israelis, who presumably know what they are doing with regard to terrorists; there must be good reasons why, given the fact that suicide bombers have relentlessly targeted buses. I assume part of the problem is a lack of car ownership and the need to navigate narrows streets that aren’t well suited to heavy traffic.
Hey, maybe this is the elusive market for the Segway: you can’t sneak a suicide bomber onto a Segway, after all.
UPDATE: Yeah, I know the Segway is pretty useless for anything beyond a few blocks because it’s so slow. Still, this is the kind of outside-the-box transit solution that may have to be considered to make commuters and tourists in Israel less vulnerable (Low Occupancy Vehicle lanes?)

Wrong Pelosi

This is probably good news for the Democrats, actually — it’s a sign that Nancy Pelosi hasn’t made a big impression on the national scene when the NY Daily News can run headlines about “Pelosi” and they’re talking about somebody completely different. It’s one thing to not have reached the status of being identified by one name, but when somebody else claims your name, you haven’t made it yet with the public.

Status

Sorry it’s been a little quiet around here — crises at work and some distracting errand-running at home have cut into my blogging time. There has been major progress at the site, though, on two fronts: I’ve finished loading my old columns from Projo and the BSG site to the “Baseball Columns” category, and I’ve finally finished classifying all the old (from the Blogspot site) entries into categories and giving them titles.
A more regular posting schedule should return by some time next week. But stay tuned, I won’t be completely quiet in the interim.

Corner Turned?

Has Alfonso Soriano righted the ship? Soriano started this season even hotter than last, and even I — a long-time skeptic of Soriano — was starting to think he was really that good. 28 games into the season, he was batting .378, and even drawing a decent number of walks. But I should have remembered that this is precisely what often happens to guys who have big breakout seasons: a month or so in, they look even better before it all unravels. After May 1, Soriano just coasted on that early hot streak, to the point where Joe Torre benched Soriano for consecutive games in Texas August 6-7 (and for a hitter, what harsher punishment is there than being benched against the Rangers?). Here’s the breakdown:

Dates G/TG AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB-CS AVG SLG OBP
3/31-5/1 28/28 127 48 6 1 10 27 26 11 21 6-1 .378 .677 .428
5/2-8/7 75/80 351 86 14 3 14 54 34 15 72 21-4 .245 .422 .276
8/8-8/23 15/15 67 17 8 1 3 10 8 6 12 2-2 .254 .537 .315

Well, it’s better, anyway. But viewing Soriano as a .300-hitting, top-of-the-order, MVP-candidate type of player may have always been a one-year wonder.

Continue reading Corner Turned?

Fat’s Not Enough

Canadian immigration authorities rejected a Venezuelan woman’s claim for asylum under Canada’s “Gender-Related Persecution guidelines”: she claimed she’d be persecuted in Venezuela because she was overweight. The story suggests that this was a classic example of a bogus claim by someone who had no other leg to stand on:
Ian Clague, the adjudicator, had doubts about her claim, including questions on just how overweight the woman actually is.
“At the hearing, the claimant did not appear to fit the dictionary definition of obese. According to her personal information form, she had gained weight since she had been in Canada. No evidence was presented as to what her weight actually was, if she was medically overweight, or how her weight compared to others, male or female, in Venezuela,” says the decision summary.
Mr. Clague also questioned how damaging being overweight is to life in Venezuela. “She graduated from university.

Much From Musil

One of the bloggers I read far too infrequently is Robert Musil. But I’ve just added him to my blogroll, and if you haven’t been to his site lately, you should check out entries like these:
+Noting an issue that I’ve been concerned about myself, Musil looks in more depth at the weakness of the California economy compared to the nation. Musil’s been one of the best sources for punditry on the recall.
+A hilarious “Guide to the Lesser Husseins
+Thoughts on a Mississippi ruling equating a fetus with a person under state law.
+A fascinating observation on the new ABA rules for lawyers’ ability to blow the whistle on clients engaged in potential financial fraud: while the new SEC rules under Sarbanes-Oxley create a duty to disclose client confidences in certain circumstances when the client is a public company, the new model professional rules simply give the lawyer discretion to do so. Musil notes that this gives lawyers the effective ability to at least implicitly blackmail their clients.

Rethinking a Rethinking

Dr. Manhattan notes something I’d thought about myself: that Tom Tippett’s analysis of balls in play against pitchers (which I noted here) — which concluded that at least some pitchers do have an effect on balls in play, in a revision to Voros McCracken’s groundbreaking theory — is significant because many of the recent advances in fielding statistics have been premised upon the idea that the fielders alone control a team’s overall rate of hits on balls in play.
Of course, still absent (I think) from a lot of the analyses of defensive stats is the other wild card: park effects. Until we make sense of the components of park effects, we can’t really unravel the balance between pitchers and fielders on balls in play.

Harden Times

Reports of Rich Harden’s easy dominance of the American League have been premature; Harden got shelled last night by the Red Sox even after extra rest for a tired arm. With Ted Lilly getting clocked in his last start, Tim Hudson getting drilled with a line drive and now Mark Mulder on the 15-day DL, the A’s starting pitching is more vulnerable than it’s been in some time.

Random Thoughts

*Recently rented The Recruit. You know, Al Pacino is the Aerosmith of acting — he’s given us decades of entertainment with no sign of slowing down, but it’s really only the first few years of his career that you can take seriously.
*I caught some of Meet the Parents again the other night — as Bill Simmons would say, I wish I could buy stock in things like “Meet the Parents will be the highlight of Teri Polo’s film career.”

A Blogoversary

Today is the one year anniversary of my blog! Here’s the inaugural post. In my second post, I noted a long overdue hot streak for Adrian Beltre, which come to think of it he’s having again right now. Traffic remained stalled at about 3 regular readers for the first three weeks until I got linked by Andrew Sullivan, and now seems to hover around 220 visitors a day during the week.
(So, I’ve got a few of these — my first baseball column appeared on the internet on May 5, 2000, and the Movable Type site was launched on April 14, 2003.)

Baseball’s Blair

The Sacramento Bee has fired a reporter who did a story that appeared to be, but wasn’t, filed from the ballpark, with quotes from other sources. Of course, those quotes are mostly useless and writing stories from the telecast isn’t that far from the days when regional reporters would broadcast from ticker reports — but the point is, the guy was giving a false impression that the paper couldn’t tolerate.
At least somebody’s checking these things now.

Baseball Websites

One of my pet peeves is the status of major baseball websites (the news sites, not the commentary/analysis sites). Maybe I just go to the wrong sites — I tend to frequent ESPN’s MLB page, CBSSportsline, and sometimes CNNSI’s baseball page or USAToday’s. A couple of common complaints:
1. Popup ads.
I’m not someone who will boycott sites with popups, but a battery of popups makes it much less likely that I’ll make a site a daily read, or drop by there to pick up a quick piece of information. Even for active players, I much prefer to get stats (other than current-year stats) from Baseball-Reference.com, which loads quickly, searches easily and lacks popups.
2. No Standings on the Front Page
Standings are the lifeblood of Major League Baseball, even moreso than box scores. There’s no reason you shouldn’t see a sidebar on the front page with the divisional and Wild Card standings. (The latter is particularly important, yet also neglected by many newspapers, even though (1) it impacts many more teams’ playoff chances and (2) the wild card race is often both close and complicated, so the average fan may not have the standings straight in his head). CBSSPortsline even makes room for its “power rankings” on the front page, but no standings.
3. Difficulty Searching for Stats
Again, both baseball-reference.com and some of the rotisserie-themed sites beat the major operators here; on ESPN.com, you have to click through several pages to get to where you can pull up an individual player’s stats, whereas BR.com lets you run a name search from the front page. Advantage: Sean Forman.
* * *
Both ESPN and CNNSI have moved in the direction of making the front page look more like a magazine cover, with a big headline and picture. But a webpage should open with the table of contents, not the cover, with lots of links to the information you want. I could go on — maybe some other day I’ll critique the actual stat pages, which each have their pluses and minuses — but the main point here is that baseball websites simply don’t seem to be designed with the people who use them in mind. That’s a shame.

BLOG/ That Old Feeling

Major flashback to September 11 yesterday, as the lights went out and this time I was inside the building, and had to descend 24 floors to ground level (while wondering if another shoe was about to drop) and then repeat my September 11 experience of toting my briefcase through Midtown and Central Park before locating what may have been the last empty cab in the city. I wasn’t taking any chances; the guy balked at leaving Manhattan, so I told him I’d give him $100 (for once, I had some cash on me) to get me to Queens. 2 1/2 hours later, I was home, grilling some burgers before they went bad.
We got power back this morning, but only just got the internet and TV back about 15 minutes ago (#^*!!@ Time Warner). Spent today at home doing some work; as with after September 11, I was calling in to a 1-800 hotline my firm set up to get status updates on when we’d be able to return to work. I would have preferred not to repeat the feeling.
If you want some good blogging on the blackout and its ramifications, check out Jane Galt and Mindles Dreck.
I’m here and then I’m gone, off on vacation. Blogging will resume some time Wednesday or Thursday.

Consider That a Divorce

So the Democrats have fanned out accross the airwaves, telling us that recalling a sitting governor is a terrible idea; commentators on the left (and even skeptics of unbridled democracy on the right, like George Will and Jonah Goldberg) have told us that the sky will fall if the people can up and pull the rug out on an incumbent who only just got re-elected, out of pique over the budget.
I am reminded of Jane Galt’s comment about the French election fiasco of 2002: “They’re completely missing the point, which is that it’s hilarious.” The fact that the recall is an expensive, complicated three-ring circus full of celebrities and celebrity wanna-bes, many of whom know nothing of politics or even decency, and that even the guy who lost to Davis less than a year ago is running again — that’s actually all for the good, for two reasons. First, how much bigger a signal of anger can the public send to a special-interest-captured political class than to mock them by making us listen to Larry Flynt and Gary Coleman and making them run in fear of a bodybuilder with a thick Austrian accent? And second, the farcical nature of the recall is also a useful reminder to voters that nobody really wants to go through this again if it’s not really necessary.
Shouldn’t recalls be saved for the most extreme cases, like corruption? I agree that a recall should be sparingly used (although there have been recall petitions circulated against every California governor in memory). But this is a situation that calls for it: Davis’ record as governor is entirely indefensible, and his popularity (30% approval rating on the day he was re-elected, down to around 23% now) is so narrow that a plurality candidate really wouldn’t have measurably less support anyway. And his integrity, while not about to get him out of office via indictment, is also a serious problem, given his long rap sheet of skirting the ethical limits of obsessive fund-raising.
Is the recall badly designed? Well, yes. There ought to be a runoff. But, like the fact that Bill Simon turned out to be a dreadful candidate, this isn’t really an excuse to make Californians and the nation live with Davis for three more years. The McLaughlin Group’s Tony Blankley gets this right.
The recall is California’s only remaining weapon against Sacramento. It can’t help but produce better government than what the Golden State has now.

As Night Follows Day

Overheard on tonight’s Mets broadcast:
Gary Cohen, 7:55 p.m.: “With a 3-run lead, one out and nobody on base, it looks like Aaron Heilman will pitch to Barry Bonds. It might be the only time we see him pitched to all night.”
Bob Murphy, less than ten seconds later: “There it goes!”

Steyn on Arnold The Amateur

OK, this has been linked to all over the place, but you must read Mark Steyn’s analysis of Arnold’s campaign in California; highlight (emphasis added):
Yes, he’s not a professional politician. And that’s a disadvantage? The professional politicians are the ones who got California into this mess. This is a “throw the bum out” election, so the successful challenger will be the one who looks least like the bum. Gray Davis has been on the public payroll his entire adult life: he represents the full-time political class. Arnold represents the other California: entrepreneurial energy, wit and invention, the California that understands that if Hollywood and Silicon Valley were run by “qualified” people like Davis we’d still be watching flickering silents and you’d need union-approved quill-feathers to send e-mail.
Arnold made his first business investment at 19, using savings from his bodybuilding contests to buy a failed Munich gym. He turned it around. The first really big money he made in America in the early 1970s came when he and a fellow bodybuilder started a bricklaying business. He’s one of a very few actors who was a millionaire before he ever acted. And, if you think it’s no big deal being the world’s highest-paid movie star, you try it – with a guttural German accent so thick you can barely do dialogue and a body frame so large you’re too goofy for playing love scenes. From his gym to his mail-order company to his masonry business to his shopping malls, Schwarzenegger has shown a consistent knack for exploiting the fullest financial value from even his most modest successes. Who would you say best embodies the spirit of California? The guy who has made all his own money? Or the fellows who’ve squandered everybody else’s?

The Enemy is Me

Sports Illustrated’s quote of the week shows that Kerry Collins of the New York Giants knows his strengths and weaknesses: In discussing the mental part of the game, Collins said, “I try to stay out of my own way. Sometimes going inside my head is like going behind enemy lines.”

Smoke and Dust

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein notes that the media is jumping to conclusions about a recent study showing lower than expected birthweights by babies carried by “women who were pregnant and at or around the World Trade Center during or after the terror attack”: he’s right that the correlation between low birth weights and exposure to smoke and dust does not prove causation.
Um, why smoke and dust? I know the article he links to rules out “post-traumatic stress disorder” based on surveys, but isn’t it possible that women who were in or near the towers on September 11 suffered from a greater than normal amount of stress, fear and anxiety?

It’s Not a Rumor

John Fund discusses Arnold Schwarzenegger’s remarkable ability to keep the real truth about his plans to run for governor quiet until the last minute. But here’s something I didn’t know about his consultants: “Several played a pivotal role in Boris Yeltsin’s come-from-behind re-election campaign for Russian president in 1996.”
Go back to 1984. You are leaving the theater after watching “Terminator”, and somebody tells you that in less than 20 years, not only will Arnold be running for governor of California, but he’ll be using campaign consultants with experience in Russian elections.
What a world.

Duffy’s Cliff

The Mets announcers were in high dudgeon the last two nights over the hill in Minute Maid Field — comparing it to a mini golf obstacle — after Timo Perez almost got hurt chasing a fly ball up the hill. Ted Robinson compared it to the old Crosley Field in Cincinnati, which had a slight incline in center. But the better analogy is to Duffy’s Cliff. As MLB’s Red Sox site explains:
What was Duffy’s Cliff?
From 1912 to 1933, there was a 10-foot-high mound that formed an incline in front of the left field wall at Fenway park, extending from the left-field foul pole to the centerfield flag pole. As a result of the mound, a left fielder in Fenway Park had to play the entire territory running uphill. Boston’s first star left fielder, Duffy Lewis, mastered the skill so well that the area became known as Duffy’s Cliff.
In 1934, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey arranged to flatten the ground in left field so that Duffy’s Cliff no longer existed and became part of the lore of Fenway Park.

Out on Cape Cod when I was in college we met an old man who remembered Duffy’s Cliff; he said it was really quite a hill to have to scale on the fly. Must’ve been quite a sight.

More From Michael Kelly

It’s a rare treat to hear more from a writer you thought you’d heard the last of. I just stumbled across this fascinating pre-war interview with the late Michael Kelly in The Atlantic Online. Chills-inducing line: “I don’t think it will be that dangerous for me.” Prediction: “I do think that you will see an honest-to-God picture of people in Iraq and Baghdad cheering America.” Read the whole thing; there’s more on the East Germans’ role in Saddam’s Iraq, the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, and Kelly’s exploits in Gulf 1. A classic story, from his broadside against CNN’s corrupt relationship with Saddam:
[An Australian reporter] and I had gone up to CNN’s suite [in the Al-Rashid hotel] at dawn and knocked on the door. They had locked the door so nobody could get into their suite, because they had the only working phone line and they wanted to protect it, of course. I knocked on the door and slipped them a note asking them if they would, not file our stories for us, but if we could give them a list of phone numbers of wives and others that they would call and tell everybody we were okay. They pushed the note back under the door and said, “Haven’t you ever heard of competition?” So a lot of people who were there have never forgiven them for that.
More choice quotes:

Continue reading More From Michael Kelly