Roto Part II

Well, I’m feeling much better now about coughing up $22 for Jorge Posada for my rotisserie team. I also have a second team, an AL-NL league, auto-drafted on Yahoo, 5×5 (traditional 8 categories plus Runs Scored and K), head-to-head, ten franchises, so each one is quite a bit stronger than your regular roto squad. Here’s how mine came out in yesterday morning’s auto-draft:

Continue reading Roto Part II

Poll Taxing

Via Andrew Sullivan, the early results show a strong pro-Bush swing in the battleground states following his initial TV ad campaign. Perhaps most notable is this result:

14. If John Kerry were to win the election in November, do you think your federal income taxes would go up, or not?
Yes, would 58%
No, would not 27%
No opinion 15%

That’s never a good omen for a presidential candidate.

Ellis Down

The potential loss of Mark Ellis for the season (also noted here) is a big blow to the A’s, who had counted on Ellis as the lynchpin of their infield defense, especially while breaking in new shortstop Bobby Crosby (who, as it turned out, broke Ellis instead). With the demise of the A’s high-OBP formula, the team has increasingly relied on pitching and defense, and will now scramble for the latter. Frank Menechino and Esteban German are named as likely stopgaps, although ex-Met Marco Scutaro may also be in the mix.

Daily Clarke, 3/31/04

So the Bush Administration gets thrown in the briar patch yet again by allowing Condi Rice to testify. You gotta admit, Bush sure knows when to fold ’em. I’m actually distressed at the precedent here – refusing to let the National Security Council staff testify is something other administrations have stood for as well (including the 1999 refusal to allow Richard Clarke to testify). Chalk up another one for how little this whole September 11 commission will accomplish besides just scoring political points.
More on the Clarke Affair:

Continue reading Daily Clarke, 3/31/04

The Scarlet R

I actually caught this one on the Daily Show the other night – here’s Bob Novak on Crossfire talking to Rahm Emanuel about Richard Clarke:

NOVAK: Congressman, do you believe, you’re a sophisticated guy, do you believe watching these hearings that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?
EMANUEL: Say that again?
NOVAK: Do you believe that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?
EMANUEL: No, no. Bob, give me a break. No. No.

Is it possible that Clarke is a racist? Well, I don’t know the man. Bob Novak almost certainly does. But while public reports have certainly suggested that Clarke resented working for Rice, I haven’t seen anybody put forth a shred of evidence that would indicate that his problem had anything to do with her race, or for that matter her being a woman. And unless Bob Novak knows something we don’t (in which case he should have shared it, and his failure to do so suggests pretty strongly what the answer is), shame, shame on him for suggesting otherwise.

2004 NL West Established Win Shares Report

At long last, I’ve gotten back around to finishing another Established Win Shares Levels report, this one for the NL West. It’s not looking so hot for getting the other two divisions up before the non-Japanese part of the MLB schedule opens up on April 6, but I’ll do what I can, and hope to have the whole thing wrapped by the first week of the season. If you’re just joining this enterprise in progress, you can start by checking out my prior reports:
*Top 25 Players in Baseball and explanation of EWSL method
*AL West EWSL Report & explanation of team method
*AL East EWSL Report & slight modification to team method
*AL Central EWSL Report
Recall that the projected win totals are probably a bit on the low side, in part because I only list 23 players, and that these aren’t really projections at all, so much as estimates of how much established major league talent is on each roster. On to the Mild, Mild West:

Continue reading 2004 NL West Established Win Shares Report

From the Blogfather

A big milestone today, as we’ve been added to Instapundit’s blogroll, strategically wedged in between Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow and appellate law blogger Howard Bashman. For those of you visiting here for the first time, look around; we’ve been here a while, and there’s plenty to read.
While I’m on the subject of benefactors, a word for a sponsor: you’ll note that I’m currently running a Blogad for TimeWarner Cable’s RoadRunner high-speed internet service. I’ve had RoadRunner since we upgraded to a new computer in the fall of 2000, and with one exception (last summer’s blackout), I’ve had nothing but good to say about the service.

Prayers For Buck

Terrible, terrible news from Instapundit, who passes on word that Stuart Buck has suffered a pair of strokes and is hospitalized. Personally, that’s really scary – Buck’s three years younger than I am, was a few years behind me at Harvard Law, and he’s also a big-firm lawyer with small children at home. He’s also a religious guy and a fine blogger. Say a prayer for him and his family.

Then and Now

I’ve noted this before, but it is sometimes useful to look back:
John Kerry, 2004:

[President Bush] misled the American people in his own State of the Union Address about Saddam’s nuclear program and WMD’s.

John Kerry, October 9, 2002:

Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating agents and is capable of quickly producing weaponizing of a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery on a range of vehicles, such as bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives which would bring them to the United States itself.
In addition, we know they are developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents.
According to the CIA�s report, all U.S. intelligence experts agree that they are seeking nuclear weapons. There is little question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop them.
In the wake of September 11, who among us can say with any certainty to anybody that the weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater, a nuclear weapon?

Who indeed?

Appealing Advice

This Myron Moskovitz column has some good basic advice for lawyers working on an appeal, something I’ve done a lot of recently. And this nugget, from Howard Bashman’s interview with Judge Ruggero J. Aldisert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, should make a particular impression as far as the need for clarity and concision:

When I became a member of the Third Circuit in 1968 each active judge was responsible for deciding 90 appeals a year. The national average was 93. That was “Then.”
But “Now” in the Third Circuit, each active judge was responsible for deciding 381 cases in 2002, 327 in 2001, 330 in 2000; and 381 in 1997. That’s fully briefed cases on the merits. The national average in 2002 was 485 per active judge, up from 429 in 1997. Divide 485 cases by 255 working days a year and you start to get the message I have been preaching for years — to no avail. One-A-Day is a great name for vitamins, but I doubt that it’s equally great in describing the caseload for U.S. Circuit judges.
You must understand that the case you file with us moves along an assembly line of over one case every 4.9 hours. Think about it. That’s the time allotted to your case. In that time, the judge must read the briefs, research the law, perhaps hear argument, conference with colleagues, make a decision, write an opinion or order, examine draft opinions written by other judges, and at the same time study motions in other cases or petitions for rehearing. And, of course, travel to the court, check into the hotel. Answer the phone. One fully briefed case for decision every 4.9 hours.
All of this in the highest court to which a federal litigant has a right to take an appeal. Today there is no quiet library time. The circuit judge is on a treadmill, and your case comes to him or her in the midst of a gallop. No time to taste the morsels you dish up for a leisurely dinner here — a fast-food menu is all that’s available.

(Emphasis added).

Dear Mr. Yard

Q: Mr. Yard – I’m a busy New York lawyer who prefers blogging to yard work on the weekends. Several months ago, I trimmed the hedges in front of my house, and put the clippings in overstuffed bags in two garbage cans. But it was getting dark and I had other stuff to do, so I left the cans (without lids) by the side of the house, where over the proceeding months they accumulated rainwater and melted ice and snow mixed with the branches and leaves. Now I’m ready to transfer the clippings into bags to put out with the trash. Any advice?
A: You are a moron. When you empty out the bags, they will smell like a herd of woolly mammoths took a dump in your driveway. You’ll probably have to burn everything you were wearing, and hosing down the driveway won’t make the stench go away. If you’re fortunate, your neighbors will shun you. If not, your head will be mounted on a post as a warning to the other homeowners.

We Don’t Really Care

More cleaning out the archives of things I’d meant to post . . . Greg Skidmore at Sports Law Blog argues that the steroid scandal and the Kobe Bryant scandal are just the latest examples of things people talk about but that, in the end, fans will ignore when it’s time to pony up for tickets:

[F]ans care much less about what players do on their own time and much more about what they do on the field. Major League Baseball lost its greatest number of fans, not because of any off-the-field scandal, after the strike in 1994, which took players off the field and cancelled the World Series. Fans have often responded to criminal allegations with cheers and not boos. The sports world has recently witnessed this phenomenon in the context of Kobe Bryant, who has been resoundly cheered in many arenas. Ray Lewis was charged with manslaughter, but Ravens fans continue to buy his jersey by the hundreds. Numerous professional athletes have been suspended for drug abuse, sanctioned for domestic battery and charged with driving under the influence. Does this matter? Not so long as the player continues to hit home runs, hit buzzer beaters and rush for 100 yards a game.

I don’t think it’s just sports fans, either; this is equally true of Martha Stewart, who people want to see stay out of prison more because she does good things for them than because they care about her. It’s also why Marv Albert was welcomed back by Knicks fans. Forgiven? Not so much as we just wanted to hear him do the games again.

Straight From The Horse’s . . .

If you haven’t already, you need to check out Smash’s account from last week (here, here and here) of his attendance at an anti-war rally and his interview with one of the speakers. Unbelievable. There’s only so much effort you need to expend on these people, but it’s always enlightening to see what makes them tick. As Lileks put it:

These people are the fringe of the left; yes. They are the Klan with out the sheets. Worse: they don’t have the inbred moonshine-addled mah-pappy-hated-nigras-an-I-hate-’em-too dense-as-a-neutron-star stupidity of your average Kluxer. They didn’t come to this level of stupidity naturally. They had to work at it. I’m sure you’ll find in these pictures people who have cool jobs in San Francisco, people who get grants, write code, run the coffee-frother at a funky bookstore, and have no problem marching alongside someone who spells Israel with swastika instead of an S.

You can see an effective parody of this mindset in Frank J’s Universal Democratic Underground thread, which — if you’ve spent much time at the comment boards of the big left-wing sites — is pretty dead-on accurate.

Scouting KazMat

David Cameron had a mixed review of Kaz Matsui’s batting technique over at Baseball Prospectus (subscription only):

The main obstacle to overcome will be balance at the plate. Matsui, like Ichiro, tends to transfer his weight forward far earlier than most major league hitters. By the time the bat catches up to his body, he’s leaning forward on his front foot, and has eliminated the power that comes from the lower half of the body on contact. His wrists are quick enough to get the bat through the zone and his bat speed still allows him to pull the ball. However, with the weight already leading him toward the mound, he compensates by swinging down on the ball, creating a large number of worm-burning grounders and low line drives.
Occasionally, he keeps his weight back in a more orthodox approach, but adds an uppercut loop to his swing, ostensibly to create more power. Whether this is something the Mets have been working with him on or something he brought from Japan, it does not look natural, and it creates a hole in his swing that can easily be exploited by good breaking balls down in the zone. It is clear that he prefers his hack-and-slash method that improves bat control but robs him of any real power.

Read the whole thing, if you can.

Why One Blog?

Rich Ceccarelli, who runs the Pearly Gates Angels blog and Neo Conservative Daily, a political blog, explains why he (like Mac Thomason and Jason Steffens) runs two blogs:

I know that many bloggers mix baseball and politics (most notably Baseball Crank), but I feel that it is wrong in some way to do so. Most people go to Pearly Gates for Angels news and opinion, and not to be preached at. I want to respect their right not to be bombarded with political opinions that they don’t necessarily share. I know that it really annoys me when I’m looking at a Red Sox blog and I see nothing but left-wing rhetoric and petty name-calling.

I’m very sympathetic to this argument, which is why I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for readers of this site to bypass the non-baseball content. Frankly, I run one blog rather than two partly for my own convenience and partly because – well, sometimes I feel like writing about one topic and sometimes another. Combining my various interests on a single blog ensures that there will be more regular content here.
If you can’t stand my politics, you’re certainly still welcome here – you can read the political stuff and bicker with it, or you can ignore it and skip to the baseball. Either way, I hope you enjoy your stay and come again. Play ball!

Steroids on the Brain

Jody Gerut, at his weblog, argues why baseball’s steroids policy shouldn’t be beefed up:

The point of most contention is that the first time you test positive, your identity is concealed. Personally, I like the idea that if by chance a player tests positive the first time he has a chance to correct it before his identity is made known, and I don’t believe this is clandestine, sneaky, or underhanded in any way. I don’t take steroids, but I do take a number of vitamin and protein supplements in order to make sure I’m getting enough nutrients. If by chance one of these supplements is creating an anabolic effect causing me to test positive, I want to have the chance to show the designated doctors all of my supplements to determine which one is creating the false positive. That way I can either throw it out or if the test itself is flawed they can reassess the test before anything is made public. Consider what happens to me if on the first try I test positive and that information is made available to everyone. Everything that I have worked for in my career is now tainted with this false positive. All the weight training, mental training, visual training, education, preparatory work with defense, offense, my reputation, everything… thousands and thousands of hours of work- gone in an instant. And even if I am later cleared of any wrongdoing and it is decided that I did not violate the spirit of the rules, that accusation would follow me forever, even after I was done playing the game.
Quite frankly, I don’t need that stress.
We could go to Olympic testing standards. 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sounds good, right? It sounded good to me until I heard it like this: 365 days means that every time you go to your uncle’s house, or to a movie, or to a bar, or to church, or if you are sound asleep in your own bed, a knock on your door can come at any time of the day for you to be tested. And if you are not home they will come and find you whereever you are and force you to test. They even go as far as making you register when you leave your hometown and for any reason, be it Thanksgiving at a family member’s house, and weekend in South Beach, or a safari in Africa. They will find you if your number is called. Still sound good to you? No, it didn’t sound good to me either after it was put to me this way.

I think Gerut is probably overstating the privacy intrustions on 365-days-a-year testing, but he does have a point about not releasing the player’s name on a single test result. Read the whole thing.
(Link via Clutch Hits).

More McGriff

Following up on my point the other day on Fred McGriff, the Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA forecast is pretty kind to McGriff, projecting out his weighted median forecast at .265/.472/.346, with a 60th percentile projection of .273/.486/.352. Those aren’t great numbers, but they certainly suggest a guy who deserves a roster spot. Then there’s his baseball-reference profile; consider the OPS+ figures at age 40 for the 10 most similar players at age 39:
Reggie Jackson – 116
Willie McCovey – 97
Willie Stargell – 130
Chili Davis – Retired
Tony Perez – 105
Ernie Banks – 52
Dave Winfield – 137
Harold Baines – 132
Dwight Evans – Retired
Eddie Murray – 87
Two retired guys and two disasters (Banks and Murray), yes, but also one guy who was still a contributor (Reggie) and three who were still smacking the ball (Stargell, Winfield, and Baines). But all this assumes that you’re taking McGriff straight up, when in fact, like a lot of aging players, his value could be maximized by platooning him. The Crime Dog batted .275/.441/.365 last season against RHP, compared to a pitiable .194/.398/.219 against LHP. Over the past three seasons, his splits are .297/.532/.380 against RHP and .240/.431/.304 against LHP. That’s where he could still have value.

Clarke Star Crashing

Some controversies, you can’t blog halfway, and with so many people blogging on the Clarke thing and so much new dirt on the guy every day, it’s been pretty pointless for me to try to keep up even if I hadn’t been swamped at work all week. One thought, on his easily disproven whopper about Condi Rice: there’s no older cliche in the political book than disgruntled insiders claiming people they met with didn’t know what was going on. Hell, they tried that with George Washington.
For what it’s worth, here’s my link-free, bottom-line take on what I think we know thus far about the propriety of blaming Clinton and/or Bush for September 11 (I may or may not go back and dig up the supporting links on this some other day, but it’s all out there):
1. With the benefit of hinsdight, it’s now clear that Clinton’s people screwed up our anti-terror policy, beginning after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, through too much caution about committing to use military force and by a law enforcement-centered approach, despite having regularly considered more aggressive approaches.
2. In so doing, they were largely unchallenged by the GOP and not sufficiently challenged by the conservative press.
3. Had Clinton moved more aggressively, he would have had qualified support from some on the Right and the center-left, but the public appetite for a military response wasn’t there, and would have been difficult for Clinton to generate without a major attack. It would have been a test of even Clinton’s powers of persuasion.
4. Clinton’s people knew well how bad the overall threat was, and warned Bush’s people about the nature of the threat.
5. On the other hand, they didn’t hand over any kind of a strategy or plan to do anything about it other than a continuation of the prior insufficient efforts.
6. Clinton also recognized the Saddam problem — that the ‘containment’ regime’s premises had collapsed and the status quo was ultimately unsustainable — but similarly didn’t hand over any strategy to do anything about Saddam.
7. Bush & Gore both recognized in the 2000 campaign that the status quo with Iraq needed to change, and both would have headed towards a clash with Saddam even without 9/11.
8. Neither Bush nor Gore said much about bin Laden or terrorism in the 2000 campaign. It was not an issue and didn’t even come up at the debates.
9. The Bush Administration, like its predecessor, did nothing of significance on terror or on Iraq for its first 8 months in office.
10. However, the Bush Administration appears to have been developing strategies to deal with both problems (bin Laden and Saddam) by early September 2001, albeit without the urgency we’d want, with hindsight, to have seen from both Bush & Clinton.
11. The Bush Administration also seems to have had some warnings about Al Qaeda using airplanes as a weapon – in fact, I checked and there were widespread press accounts in June 2001 of Al Qaeda reportedly plotting use airplanes as a weapon at the G8 summit in Italy that summer – but never got more specific information, in part because of pre-Patriot Act restrictions on law enforcement’s ability to connect the dots.
Bottom line: yes, in hindsight, both the Bush and Clinton Administrations, with more foresight, could have done more on both counts. Yes, they should have done more. Yes, I hand Clinton the larger share of the blame, at least as far as the failure to develop a long-range offensive strategy is concerned – whereas it appears that Bush was at least thinking in that direction. On the defensive question (i.e., having the homeland on alert), there’s less to fault Clinton and a bit to question about Bush, but I regard the failings as mostly institutional – the problem was the inability to pursue evidentiary leads and get urgent warnings up the ladder, rather than a failure of leadership.
But the blame isn’t, in my view, the important question – as I said, none of it is entirely damning, and it’s bipartisan in nature. The important question is what’s been learned. The Bush Administration, of course, is famously unwilling to throw red meat to its critics by admitting error (witness what happened when they gave an inch on the State of the Union), but its actions have shown a willingness to re-evaluate U.S. military doctrine and law enforcement practice in numerous ways since. The Democrats . . . not so much. I really don’t have confidence that John Kerry, who’s been busy blasting Bush for being too eager to go to war and who’s campaigned against the expanded law enforcement powers of the Patriot Act, has really learned anything.

Patterson Up

Nice little move by the Expos to pick up onetime hot prospect John Patterson in exchange for Randy Choate, a serviceable but replaceable reliever. Still just 26, Patterson has struck out 74 batters in 85.2 major league innings while walking 37. He needs to improve that walk number and get the gopher balls under control; there’s no question that Patterson’s still a project. But he’s still got upside.

Priorities

Tom Maguire’s been all over the Richard Clarke saga – so I don’t have to! In one of his latest installments, he notes a choice vignette from Clarke’s book:

[Bush r]esolved to attack al-Qaida on the evening of Sept. 11. That night, Bush spoke to his staff: “I want you to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters.” When Donald Rumsfeld pointed out the legal problems posed by some proposed attacks, Bush said, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”

The Little Flame, Three Years Later

Yet again I’ve been too busy at work to blog, but I had to mention that today is the three-year anniversary of an event that probably did more than any other to convince me of the impossibility of civilized people treating the Israelis and Palestinians as just two sides of a morally neutral “cycle of violence.” Yes, the Palestinians have their grievances, and yes, children die on both sides. But a society that honors and celebrates a sniper blowing the head off of a ten-month-old girl is simply not ready to walk amongst the community of nations.

Can The Crime Dog Still Bite?

So, Fred McGriff has been cut by the aimless Devil Rays, who decided to go with that young up-and-comer, 36-year-old Tino Martinez. Honestly, I’m baffled by the idea that McGriff can’t get any kind of major league job. He’s always kept himself in good shape, he seems to be well-liked, and he’s apparently healthy again after last season’s knee injury. And his days as a serious masher are hardly ancient history; compare his average season from 1999-2002 to that of Tino or of last year’s Tampa 1B, the man the Yankees picked up to back up Jason Giambi, Travis Lee:

PLAYER AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB AVG SLG OBP OPS HPB GIDP
McGriff 533 155 25 1 30 73 104 77 .291 .512 .379 891 2 14
Martinez 565 150 28 2 25 79 96 55 .266 .456 .334 790 4 14
Lee 468 117 25 7 13 60 66 62 .251 .394 .338 732 2 12

The point here isn’t that this is a particularly relevant comparison, but it was not long ago at all that McGriff was churning out 30-HR, 100-RBI seasons and an OPS close to .900 like clockwork – not impressive for Fred McGriff, but numbers that most mere mortals would be more than happy to see from their first baseman. McGriff had a bad year last season, due to a combination of age, his first-ever serious injury, and Dodger Stadium; even so, he batted .249/.428/.322 (park-adjusted OPS+ of 99), compared to .273/.429/.352 (OPS+ of 106) for Tino and .275/.459/.348 (OPS+ of 111) for Lee. That’s not that much of a difference, particularly compared to Tino. And yes, McGriff is 40 and it’s hard to bounce back at that age. But given how productive he was and how recently he was doing it, don’t you think somebody would give him a chance, at least as a part-timer or a bat off the bench?
David Pinto also speculated a while back that McGriff wouldn’t belong in the Hall of Fame. That, too, is a subject that merits more extensive analysis another day, when you look at how today’s offensive standards have changed. Just on the quick-and-dirty OPS+ metric, McGriff’s career OPS+ of 134 is pretty healthy for a guy who had just over 10,000 plate appearances; that puts him just off the top 100 of all time, and I wonder how many guys with an OPS+ of 130 or higher and 10,000 plate appearances aren’t in the Hall.
But at least on the raw numbers, it’s worth remembering how unprecedented it is for a guy with McGriff’s numbers to be on the outside looking in. There are 24 players who have played 2000 or more career games with a career OBP of .370 or higher and a career slugging average of .500 or higher – 21 Hall of Famers, plus Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, and Fred McGriff. If you drop the bar to .475 career slugging, you get 5 more, 4 Hall of Famers and Norm Cash. That’s pretty good company.

So, It Should Be About Oiiiiiillllll?

The Bush Administration comes under fire for not putting more emphasis in its foreign policy on increasing the supply of oil? Of course, this article is a classic disembodied passive-voice attack, containing only one fairly mild criticism from the Kerry campaign and no named critics. But it’s more than a little ironic to think that Bush would face criticism for not placing a higher priority on oil in our Middle East policy.

It’s The John Kerry Song!

Having a little fun here – it’s time for a John Kerry theme song. This one is to the tune of the classic 70s hit “Rubberband Man” by the Spinners (Click here and scroll down for a sample of the tune). I’ll leave to someone with more musical talent the task of putting this to sounds and images:

The Other Hand Man
Hand me down my chardonnay,
Hand me down my brie,
Hurry now and don’t be late
He�ll be on the slopes by three
You and me were goin’ out
To catch the latest sound
Guranteed to blow your mind
So high you won’t come down
Hey, y’all prepare yourself
For the Other Hand man
You never heard a sound
Like the Other Hand man
You’re bound to lose control
When he starts to say, “on the Other Hand,”
Oh, Lord, this dude is outta sight
Everything he says
Comes out both left and right
Once I went to hear him speak
On a Sunday talk showdown
I was so surprised, I was hypnotized
By how this cat flip-flops around
When I saw this long-faced guy
Stretch a sound bite �till it broke
Hey, I laughed so hard
As he got bogged down
Steerin� clear of yes or no
Hey, y’all prepare yourself
For the Other Hand man
You never heard a sound
Like the Other Hand man
You’re bound to lose control
When he starts to say “on the Other Hand,”
Got that Other Hand
All ready to go
And then he wriggled his way
Around yes or no
(Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo)
Guaranteed to blow your mind
(Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo)
Back and forth flip floppin� all the time
(Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo)
Does he really think we�re stupid, oh, Lord
(Doo doo doo doo doo)
Lord, make him go away
Hey, y’all prepare yourself
For the Other Hand man
You never heard a sound
Like the Other Hand man
You’re bound to lose control
When he starts to say “on the Other Hand,”
Doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo
Other Hand man, Other Hand man
How much of this stuff do he think we can stand
So much nuance, fluff and evasion from one man, Lord
And then he had nerve to wiggle his war vote
To “yes, but,” got it all straight in his head, y’all
Ah, come on, Kerry
Hey, y’all prepare yourself
For the Other Hand man
You never heard a sound
Like the Other Hand man
You’re bound to lose control
When he starts to say “on the Other Hand,”
Other Hand man starts to jam
Flip-floppin� his way across the land
Got answers goin� every way
Everything about him seems out of place
Always wafflin’, always wafflin’
Always waff-waff-wafflin’
Just a Other Hand, Other Hand man
Always wafflin’, always wafflin’
Always waff-waff-wafflin’
Just a Other Hand
Other Hand man
Go �way
Oh, go �way Johnny
Uh-huh

Freak Stat of the Day

Kelly Wunsch’s delivery is nasty in more ways than one: last season, Wunsch allowed just 17 hits in 36 innings – but hit 7 batters with pitches, a ratio that has to be some kind of record. Over the last three seasons, the White Sox middleman has drilled 18 batters compared to just 64 who have gotten a hit off him, almost one hit batsman for every three hits allowed.

Heh Heh, or Huh Huh?

Tim Blair, noting Maureen Dowd’s line about how President Bush “did his “Beavis and Butthead” snigger” at a Dutch reporter, asks the burning question:

Thing is, Beavis and Butthead had entirely distinct and separate sniggers. Performing both simultaneously would rupture a person�s snigger glands. So, which is it, Maureen? Is Bush a high-pitched Beavis man, or does he tend towards the deeper Butthead style?

BASKETBALL: Charity Stripe Trivia

A pair of trivia questions for all you NBA-heads:
1. Only three players in NBA/ABA history have attempted 500 three-pointers and 500 free throws in the same season – and a fourth will join the club with his next free throw attempt. Name ’em.
2. A player has shot 90% or better at the line in 400 or more free throw attempts in one season 17 times in NBA history; the feat has been accomplished by ten different players. Name ’em. Give yourself credit if you get nine; you won’t get the hardest one unless you’re a real early-fifties history buff. There’s also an eleventh who should be added to this list before season’s end.
Answers below:

Continue reading BASKETBALL: Charity Stripe Trivia

BASKETBALL: It’s The Totally Insane Mark Cuban Blog!

Got yer Cuban right here! (Link via Matt Welch). Ooooh, this is gonna be interesting. What’s the over/under on how long it takes Cuban to get fined by the NBA for something he says on his blog? (Never mind the fact that he’s talking here about investments about which he’s making SEC filings – that could get him in a whole lot more trouble than an NBA fine). But it’s always entertaining to see a controversial public figure take his case directly to the public.