Following Tracks

One of the nice things about reaching a certain level of visibility as a blogger is that people you’ve never heard of link to you, and so just by checking your referrer logs you can stumble on interesting blogs. (I lost track of who was linking to me once I joined the massive, impersonal “Blogs for Bush” blogroll during the election).
The Frinklin and Fred Show seems to have a rather unique sense of humor, as you can see from these recent entries on eating popcorn with chopsticks and scented pencils. (Frinklin also links to an ecstatic, spoiler-filled review of the new Star Wars flick by director Kevin “Silent Bob” Smith).
Then, on a similar theme to the Star Wars fest, Matt Barr at New World Man (a Rush homage, I presume) says of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie:

I can’t tell you how good it was. . . I had too much invested in it. I read the books when I was beginning my teen years, and they supplanted the Wrinkle In Time series as my favorite books.
If you collected X-Men comics when you were young, like I did, to the point where the numbers 94 and 137 mean something to you, you remember that when you saw the X-Men movies you couldn’t really get a sense of how good or bad they were because they were, in their way, so faithful to what you were familiar with. Same with Hitchhiker’s Guide. There’s some new stuff, but they bent over backwards not to stray too far from the book. The sheer delight of watching something so “yours” from your youth come alive in a theater, right down to the bowl of petunias thinking “oh, no, not again” as it falls to the surface of Magrathea, is thrilling.
Put it this way. If you’re my age, you remember how you felt when the score began and the words STAR WARS appeared on the screen at the beginning of Episode I. (That it was all downhill from there is immaterial.) Same deal.

I’d always heard about the Hitchhiker’s Guide book, but never got around to reading it. Any opinions on whether (leaving aside the issue of persuading my wife to watch it) I should wait and read the book before seeing the movie?
UPDATE: I should add that, like Vodkapundit and Michele, I am getting very excited for the final Star Wars installment very much in spite of my better judgment, although I’m worried it may be a bit much to take the kids to despite the fact that they’re dying to see it. Phantom Menace had its entertaining portions – particularly the scenes with Liam Neeson and the Darth Maul fight sequences – but it’s hard to rewatch, due mainly to Jar Jar and those fish-face aliens with the Charlie Chan accents, as well as the unforgivable decision to turn The Force into a biological phenomenon. Attack of the Clones was better, and has been subjected to a lot of unfair criticism (although it too could have done without the fish-face guys), but it also had many disappointments, notably a display of Lucas’ leaden touch with romance. Both films are better re-watched in spurts rather than trying to sit through the whole thing.
This one, though, really needs to have been done right. And I’m getting my hopes up that it has been.

5×20

Continuing on the Tom Glavine kick, comments here got me thinking about Glavine as a Hall of Fame candidate, and specifically about the fact that he has won 20 games in a season five times. How much of a lock is a 5-time 20-game winner for Cooperstown?
Not certain. But aside from winning 300 games, there are few achievements more likely to send a pitcher to the Hall of Fame than a large number of 20-win seasons. With the aid of Aaron Haspel’s search engine, I put together a list of all the pitchers who have won 20 a significant number of times.
Among pitchers who pitched primarily before 1900, winning 20 five times was no guarantee of immortality; 10 of the 22 pitchers to do it are in the Hall. All but one of those (Al Spalding, who’s in for a variety of reasons) did it at least 7 times, and there are guys on the outside looking in with as many as 8 20-win seasons. A good example of why can be seen with Jim McCormick, an 8-time 20-game winner who went 20-40 in 60 starts in 1879 and 26-30 two years later. (For what it’s worth, Cy Young holds the record for 20-win seasons with 15).
Among pitchers who pitched mainly since 1900, there are 39 pitchers with three 20-win seasons; 6 are in the Hall, 30 are not, and three are ineligible (Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling are still active and Ed Cicotte is banned).
Among 4-time 20-game winners, 10 are in and 13 are out; the post-war pitchers in the latter group are Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally, Johnny Sain, Dave Stewart, Luis Tiant and Wilbur Wood.
Among 5-time 20-game winners, 8 and in, 3 are out and Glavine’s still pitching. Among those with 6 or more, 16 are in, 3 are out and Roger Clemens is still pitching. In short, only 6 pitchers have won 20 five or more times in the last century or so without making the Hall.
So, how do you not make the Hall with 5 or 6 20-win seasons? Well, three of the six are not all that modern; Pirates teammates Deacon Phillippe and Jesse Tannehill, both 6-time 20-game winners (like their teammate, 4-time 20 game winner Sam Leever) both had their last 20-win season in 1905, and neither won 200 games. 5-timer George Mullin was 21-21 in 1905 and 20-20 for a pennant winning team in 1907, and even his 29-8 season in 1909 had more to do with Ty Cobb hitting .377; Mullin’s ERAs were barely better than the league for his career. 5-timer Hippo Vaughn was a great pitcher in the late teens, but had a very short career and won just 178 games. 5-timer Carl Mays is probably the most similar to Glavine of this group, with a 207-126 career record and a 2.35 ERA in four World Series, but Glavine never killed a man with a pitch. 6-timer Wes Ferrell, the most recent of the bunch (his last 20-win season was in 1936), retired with 193 career wins and a 4.02 ERA. Ferrell was a tremendous pitcher in his prime and a much better hitter than his brother, who’s in the Hall as a catcher, but the era and parks he pitched in did his numbers no favors, and he was finished as an effective pitcher at 29 (his ERA in just under 500 innings after age 28 was 5.41). (How good a hitter was Ferrell? In 612 at bats from 1931-35, he batted .294/.493/.361 with 29 home runs, 101 runs scored and 123 RBI).
So, if Glavine’s 5 20-win seasons alone don’t make him a lock for Cooeprstown, they get him so far that little else is needed.

Health and Freedom

I agree completely with the Radley Balko post on pharmacists and abortion quoted in the third item of Jon Henke’s post here. I also agree with Henke, in his second item, that “pro-choice” feminists are being hypocritical (what else is new?) in opposing freedom of women to choose whether to have silicone breast implants. I’m no fan of implants, but given the shoddy plaintiff-lawyer science used to attack them, the choice should really belong to the women who want them.

D’Oh Canada

Austin Bay (link via Instapundit) thinks Canada is a failed state that could collapse and splinter . . . I understand why Bay thinks Quebec could and probably should secede from Canada, and while it may or may not be true that the current scandals engulfing the ruling Liberal Party could provide an impetus for Quebec’s separatists to gain power and demand secession, I don’t really follow the logic of why this would result in Anglophone Canada crumbling into bits as a result. It’s certainly true that the Canadian West is politically a poor fit with Ontario, but no moreso – and for many of the same reasons – than America’s red and blue states are at odds. Thus, even if we do finally see Quebec go its own way, there’s no reason why the rest of Canada shouldn’t remain intact.

Tom Glavine, Double Agent

Picking up on a thought here:

P ERA H/9 HR/9 BB/9 K/9
A 3.41 8.53 0.65 3.08 5.52
B 3.56 8.90 0.71 3.09 4.60

Now, if you signed Pitcher A as a free agent and got the numbers in row B out of him, you’d feel like you got your money’s worth, wouldn’t you? Well, except for one little problem:

P ERA H/9 HR/9 BB/9 K/9
C 2.86 8.69 0.89 2.94 5.60
D 9.37 14.15 3.05 4.57 2.83

If you take out his performance against the Mets and Braves, A is Tom Glavine’s pitching record as a Brave, and B is his record as a Met; astonishingly similar, actually. But C is Glavine’s record against the Mets, and D is his record against his former teammates in Atlanta. Glavine went 16-7 career against the Mets, a .696 winning percentage compared to .620 against all other teams. With the Mets, he’s gone 1-7 against Atlanta, .125 compared to .455 against all other teams.

Missing Trachs

I noted last month that the Mets would find Steve Trachsel hard to replace, given how well he’d pitched from June 2001 (when he returned from a brief trip to Norfolk) through the end of 2004, a period of more than three and a half years. Well, David Pinto’s Day by Day Database gives us a chance to revisit Trachsel’s numbers and compare him to others for that period. See if you can guess, before you click the link, which of the following pitchers is Trachsel, and which are Leiter, Glavine, Clemens, Mussina, Maddux and Mulder:

P GS IP ERA
A 114 699 3.46
B 125 778 3.53
C 124 765 3.54
D 115 736.1 3.62
E 111 770.2 3.62
F 116 715.1 3.66
G 113 742.2 3.73

Of course, some of those guys pitched in the AL, and Trachsel himself, much like Leiter and Glavine, may find it hard to return to that level. But it’s still an impressive run.
Speaking of returns from injury, one of the hot issues right now is what to do with Mike Cameron, specifically whether the Mets are likely to be able at some point to get good value if they trade him. I was thinking that one of the teams that could actually use Cameron is the Hated Yankees, who (1) with the Sierra injury are down to at most 9 guys on the roster you could write into the starting lineup on consecutive days with a straight face and (2) could desperately use a defensive upgrade from Bernie in center field. But aside from the difficulties in doing a Mets-Yankees deal, there’s another problem that points to a bigger issue with the Yanks: for all their money, aside from the core players they won’t part with, they’ve got nothing left worth trading for. That’s one reason for Yankee fans to worry: while the current roster is still the strongest in the game, I have trouble seeing how they can make a significant deal in season this year. They’re thin on prospects, they won’t and shouldn’t part with their surplus in middle relief, and you can’t sign free agents in July. That will mostly leave them picking over guys whose teams will dump them for a song just to get rid of their contracts. For once, George may have to dance with the roster that brung him.

Filibuster Buster

Dale Franks argues in favor of a Dick Morris proposal to force the Democrats filibustering judges into an old-fashioned full-time round the clock Jimmy Stewart/Strom Thurmond-style shut-down-all-other-Senate-business filibuster. It’s a good idea both now and in the future, and in many ways preferable to formally abolishing the filibuster entirely. There will be times when it’s worthwhile to do a real filibuster; the Abe Fortas nomination in 1968 was an example, where the nomination was delayed only a week on grounds that more time was needed to air serious ethics charges that ultimately caused Fortas (a sitting associate justice nominated for Chief Justice) to resign entirely from the bench. But the need to do real filibusters would end the practice of multiple indefinite filibusters on strictly partisan or ideological lines.
I don’t agree that the first shot at this should be one of the less nationally significant judges, though; the Republicans might as well lead with their strongest cases.
Meanwhile, Orrin Judd thinks it’s a death knell for the Democrats’ filibuster efforts when Al Gore gets involved.

Taylor Trouble

David Adesnik points to this WaPo op-ed arguing that the U.S. should press Nigeria to turn over former Liberian leader Charles Taylor to the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. While I’m a skeptic about international courts generally, the only issue here seems to be whether we should adhere to a prior agreement that removed Taylor from power, and at least this piece suggests strong evidence that Taylor hasn’t held up his end of the bargain. He should be reminded that deals we make with dictators are easily voided if they don’t comply.

The Least Dangerous Branch?

The newly permalink-enhanced Sultan of Snark, Mickey Kaus, touches on a crucial point in explaining why he believes filibusters are more, not less, appropriate for judges rather than legislation:

In the post-Warren era, judges don’t just have tenure, they have almost uncheckable anti-democratic power. The constitution has been durably politicized in a way the Framers didn’t anticipate. Practically every legislative issue can be–and is–phrased in constitutional terms (e.g., as a case of “rights”). Activist Democratic judges would start by supervising the fine points of democratically-passed abortion laws, trimester-by-trimester, and take off from there. Activist Republicans would overturn laws approved by the elected Congress when they don’t sufficiently affect interstate commerce. The only hope, given these dueling tribes of activists, is that in the Senate’s confirmation deliberations each faction will cancel out the extremes of the other, Bork-style, resulting in either the confirmation of a) a principled non-activist or b) a mushy middle-of-the-road consensus candidate. The filibuster can force such a compromise.

(Emphasis added). Much of the problem with the filibuster debate has been the “pox on both houses” tendency of commentators to treat liberal and conservative judges as if they were two sides of the same coin. They are not. As a practical political matter, I understand well that if you eliminate the filibuster for Republican judicial nominees (which I’ve advocated doing on a more limited scale), you can’t well get it back for Democratic ones, although when Republicans hold a Senate majority during a Democrat’s turn in the White House you always retain the option of voting judges down. But in discussing the merits of the two sides’ competing visions of the Constitution*, Republicans need to make it clearer that conservative judges should be given an easier path to confirmation than liberal judges, and for precisely the reason Mickey identifies.
Because the fact is, conservative judges are pro-democracy in ways that liberal judges are not. The core ideology of people like Justice Scalia is the idea that judges need to rest their rulings on a foundation of democratic legitimacy – to draw their power solely from the express consent of the governed – rather than from some higher law never expressly enacted by the people in any form. By and large, this means not striking down legislative enactments if one can’t find clear evidence that the people previously spoke to the issue in the Constitution itself.
Specifically, liberal judicial decisions have tended to take issues away from the democratically elected branches: on abortion, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, etc., it’s liberals who argue that the Constitution removes choices from federal and state governments, even when it is clear that the people, in ratifying the constitutional provision in question, never consented to such expressions of judicial power. The list of such decisions is too long to recount here, but includes the especially undemocratic movement towards deriving authority from international law (in which the consent of the governed is irrelevant, and accountability impossible).
Counter-examples of conservative “activism,” by contrast, generally tend at most to reallocate powers among the various branches of government rather than rule them out of the democratic sphere entirely. When the Supreme Court tells Congress that something like the Violence Against Women Act exceeds the commerce power, it leaves the people’s representatives in the states with plenary authority to legislate in that area. When the Court limits the ability to sue states in federal court under the 11th Amendment – probably the most controversial area of Rehnquist Court “activism” – it leaves the people’s representatives in the states with the ability to accomplish the same ends in state court, or through alternative state-law remedies, if that is what they want. By contrast, the Dormant Commerce Clause cases, which restrict state power, generally leave Congress with the ability to enact nationwide economic policy. If the Court had struck down the Independent Counsel statute, as Justice Scalia proposed, there would still be special prosecutors (as there are again today). And, of course, if the Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade, many states would go ahead and repeal their old statutes banning abortion.
Where there have been a few legitimate counter-examples of conservative judges pushing to limit the scope of democratic governance in the way commonly done by judicial liberals, they have been in the heartland of express constitutional provisions: protecting freedom of political speech during elections (the campaign finance reform cases), preventing government from making preferential distinctions on the basis of race (the affirmative action cases), recognizing an individual right to bear arms or requiring just compensation for government takings of property. There are fair arguments over the original meaning of such provisions, but judicial conservatives can hardly be accused of making up the Fourteenth Amendment’s concern with race discrimination.
(Of course, at this point, some liberal readers will no doubt complain about Bush v. Gore, which is often cited as an example of activism. Bush v. Gore was a unique case, of course, and I won’t revisit all the arguments I made about it here, here, here and here. But recall that (1) the Supreme Court in that case did nothing to limit the authority of the Florida Legislature or Florida’s executive branch; the decision was strictly limited to striking down a judicial remedy derived after the fact without a basis in statute; (2) the Court actually sided with the people’s elected representatives in Florida, specifically the Secretary of State, who was given statutory responsibility over the matter; and (3) the Court’s conservatives wanted to resolve the case on the basis of an express Constitutional command, in Article II, that left the final say to the Florida Legislature. You have to work awfully hard to distort this into a decision taking power from the elected and accountable representatives of the people).
In short, when confirming judges, the first question should always be this: is this person, on the bench, likely to remove power from its legitimate source, the consent of the governed? Of course, there will be hard questions about how to read what the Constitition and statutes are meant to say. But the clear track record shows that judicial conservatives of the Scalia/Thomas type can be trusted to err on the side of democracy; judicial liberals can not, and should therefore be regarded as the greater danger to democratic self-government. And O’Connor/Kennedy-style “mushy middle-of-the-road consensus candidates,” as Kaus puts it, are as likely as not to join the liberals, in addition to joining in some “activist” conservative-leaning decisions, thus making everyone unhappy. The fact that the appointment and confirmation process is the only way short of impeachment (which I, as a practicing lawyer, oppose for all the reasons identified by Ted Olson) to ensure that the bench is filled with people who respect the need to draw power from the consent of the governed is precisely why filibustering conservative judges is particularly misguided and illegitimate.
UPDATE: To clarify a point noted in the comments: my point here is, there may well be an argument for filibustering liberal judges on grounds that they are likely to exercise “uncheckable anti-democratic power,” but that argument just doesn’t fly for conservative judges.

Continue reading The Least Dangerous Branch?

High Risk

OK, I’m just listening on the radio here, but Mike Piazza – who just entered the game as a pinch hitter in the 9th inning – just ran the risk of getting thrown out going first to third on a single with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. On Raul Mondesi’s arm, no less. Gulp.
UPDATE: So, Cliff Floyd pops out to lose the game. Grrr.

Lumber Company

After last night’s action, the Mets are second in the league in runs scored, 6th in OBP but tied for the lead in HR. While it’s still early to judge any individual player, through 20 games, Mets non-pitchers have 631 at bats – about a full season’s worth for a regular player. What have they done with those at bats?

AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB CS AVG SLG OBP HPB GDP SF
631 177 31 1 24 98 90 65 127 13 5 .281 .447 .350 5 17 4

That’s a portrait of a player with a solid base of offensive skill, maybe could improve the K/BB rate and cut down a bit on the DPs. But not bad at all for an entire team.

Crooked Nails?

Trouble for Lenny Dykstra:

Lenny Dykstra’s longtime friend and business partner has accused the former Philadelphia Phillies center fielder of using steroids and gambling illegally during his baseball career in a civil lawsuit, according to a newspaper report.
Lindsay Jones, Dykstra’s former partner in a lucrative car wash business, alleges the ballplayer advised him to bet thousands of dollars with a bookmaker on selected Phillies games in 1993, Dykstra’s best year in the majors, the Los Angeles Times reported in Sunday editions.
Jones, who is seeking to regain interest in the car wash business, said in a sworn statement that the baseball wagers were a form of payment to him, made “on the basis that Lenny would cover all losses, and I would use the winnings to live on.”

[snip]

The suit also includes a sworn statement from a Florida bodybuilder and convicted drug dealer who said Dykstra paid him $20,000 plus “special perks” during their eight-year association to “bulk up” the once-slight ballplayer.

[snip]

The bodybuilder, Jeff Scott, told the Times in an interview that he injected Dykstra with steroids “more times than I can count,” and that Dykstra stepped up his steroid use in spring training of 1993 because it was a contract year.

While the sources here are of dubious credibility, I have little doubt that Dykstra used steroids; the guy bulked up way too quickly from being skinny in his Mets days, and returned way too quickly to his original size as soon as his playing career ended.
As to the gambling, while gambling in general seems in character for Dykstra, I’d like to believe he wasn’t stupid enough, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Pete Rose debacle, to bet on baseball, even indirectly (it would be a more interesting rules question if a player advised a friend to bet on games but took no financial stake in the bets). Presumably, there will be some effort to investigate this. For now, he’s saying it ain’t so.

Phil: The Monster Who Sometimes Likes to Eat a Cookie

Jonah Goldberg has an amusing column on Cookie Monster. Who else but Goldberg would invoke Marcus Aurelius and Hannibal Lecter in defense of a muppet? I particularly liked this point:

The whole point of the Cookie Monster character was to have a character who was silly because he ate so much. If Cookie Monster were a Greek god, he’d be the god of gluttony. Wouldn’t it have been more honest and simply better to implore kids not to be too much like the Cookie Monster rather than make the Cookie Monster like everyone else? We all understand we shouldn’t be like Oscar the Grouch.
Who says that making Cookie Monster into moderate eater will improve kids’ behavior anyway? Indeed, for years, Cookie Monster has devoured not only cookies, but things which merely look like cookies, including plates, Frisbees, and the moon. If Cookie Monster is so influential, why haven’t I heard more about kids going to the hospital after trying to eat plates?

Frankly, it doesn’t take a very bright 4-year-old to grasp that Cookie Monster’s behavior is not acceptable. But it’s funny.

That Big Meanie John Bolton

You would have to labor long and hard to come up with a crueler parody of the modern Democratic party than the opposition of Democrats to a male appointee to a serious national security position on the grounds that he is too hard on his subordinates or is a “bully”. (See here for a typical example of this rhetoric). Yet, somehow, that is where they have found themselves with John Bolton. Andrew Jackson must be rolling over in his grave.
Look, most people have worked for difficult or abusive bosses at some point in their careers; nobody likes them, and they can in many cases be counterproductive. But most of us also understand that the more serious the task and the higher the pressure, the more leeway you give a guy who gets results, and when you are talking about national security, the balance ought to tip decidedly towards getting the job done. This PTA-focus-grouped attack is all too reminiscent of the cringe-inducing line Dick Gephardt used over and over again during the 2004 primaries about how Bush “would get a mark on his report card: doesn’t play well with others.” Um, Dick, we’re not talking about kicking over a tower of blocks here.
And Democrats wonder why they lost men by 11 points in the last election. From the election results you can infer that women didn’t buy this either, of course, but I suspect that this sort of thing – placing politeness above effectiveness – has a particularly strong fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect on men.
(Of course, it’s not like Bolton groped the woman who’s complaining about him, or drove her off a bridge; that would be just plum dandy. For that matter, these same self-appointed anti-meanie brigades were strangely silent when Kerry and Dean were the Democratic front-runners. But John Kerry would never act badly towards subordinates, and Howard Dean would never yell at anyone).
For a twofer, Democrats have somehow allowed themselves to be publicly maneuvered, against what must be their better judgment, into the posture of defenders of the corrupt, hypocritical, anti-American, anti-Semitic United Nations. Win-win!

Muncha Buncha

If you noticed his recent appearance on “Law & Order: Trial by Jury,”
Richard Belzer has now played the same character, Detective John Munch, on six different series, granting that half of those are of the Law & Order franchise – he’s also been a regular character on L&0-SVU and Homicide, as well as appearing on the original L&O, The Beat, and The X-Files, the last being perhaps the most improbable because it was on another network.

The White Sox Channel the Dodgers

As Chicago enjoys its major-league-leading record, I think back to Los Angeles. But not the Dodgers crew that, until its current three-game skid, had the most wins — I have in mind the 2003 vintage. That team had a notoriously awful offense, ranking last in many batting categories. It was also involved in a considerable number of one-run games, as it employed a “small ball” strategy to manufacture runs. The dominant pitching staff ended up keeping the club in contention.
The White Sox, while perhaps not at the same level of offensive futility, is nonetheless pretty unimpressive themselves. They have the AL’s lowest on-base percentage at .300. Despite their 20 homeruns (good enough for 4th in the league), their slugging percentage of .408 and OPS of .707 put them at 10th. Meanwhile, the pitching staff has been awesome. Its top-ranked 3.18 ERA is 0.34 better than the next competitor. It also boasts the second lowest opponent OPS at .650.
With this kind of formula, I question whether the White Sox can remain atop the majors for much longer. I know that, with the Dodgers, it certainly wasn’t enough to be a real force.
Update: By the way, nine of Chicago’s first fifteen wins are by one run.

Grand Mientkiewicz

Minky goes deep with the bases loaded in the second off Al Leiter, his first career grand slam. I love a 3-run lead with Pedro on the mound.
UPDATE: Make that 6-1 in the second. Leiter just doesn’t have it tonight.
7-1, and Cliff Floyd has stolen two bases in one inning. Don’t see that every day.
LAST UPDATE: Well, that was satisfying. The radio guys were discussing the fact that we saw little of Pedro’s fastball tonight and whether that was because he was pitching on regular (4 days) rest for the first time this season. Hardly mattered, but we’ll see how that goes later in the year.

RELIGION: New Pope

Breaking. No name yet.
UPDATE (which I’m correcting on the fly): It’s Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, 78 years old, reportedly now Pope Benedict XVI, one of the few cardinals appointed before the papacy of John Paul II. Ratzinger is considered, in common parlance, a “conservative” on matters of Church doctrine. He’s the 265th pope, and – I believe – the first German. [Correction: first in a very, very long time; this article on papal names says the first German pope was in 996]
MORE: Sam Ser in the Jerusalem Post on Ratzinger’s time in the Hitler Youth (membership was compulsory – the Nazis, you will recall, were big fans of compulsion – but Ratzinger was exempted from activities due to his religious studies) and his years in Nazi Germany (he lived under Nazi rule from age 6 to 18, and only becoming a priest saved him from induction into the SS). All of which may make the timing of this unfortunate.

Chain of Causation

If I wasn’t busy enough, this morning brought a decision from the Supreme Court in a major private securities litigation case, the first significant such decision from the Court since 1995, requiring pleading and proof that a stock declined in value as a result of alleged misrepresentations before suit can be filed. I’d been closely watching the Court’s site waiting for this one to write it ip and circulate (see, the blogging skill set has its professional benefits). And now, another institution sends up closely watched signals . . .

Pigs Fly . . .

And Aaron Heilman throws a 1-hit shutout, among the things happening while I’ve been too tied up with work and other stuff to blog (as the papers noted, there have now been 23 complete game 1-hitters in Mets history, but still zero no-hitters; what are the odds of that?). Certainly is shaping up like a classic Mets season – improbable wins, improbable losses, low-scoring games with late comebacks, lots and lots of strikeouts.
Matsui’s been disappointing thus far, but I just don’t get the boos and calls for him to be replaced with Cairo. Maybe Matsui’s back really is worse than we think, but if not, he’s still got more upside than Cairo, who played to 100% of his upside last year and still was only just OK.
I’ll be in and out of blog this week, hopefully back to blogging regularly after April 22.
UPDATE: I see where Kerry Ligtenberg, who I’d been stumping for as a possible addition to the Mets pen, has signed a minor league deal with the D-Backs.

Out West, A Study in Contrasts

Prior to the start of today’s games, the five NL West teams occupied the top six spots in on-base percentage. The Giants and the Diamondbacks were practically tied for number one, with .367 and .366. The Dodgers’ .359 were right behind them. At numbers five and six, the Rockies and the Padres had .349 and .348.
By contrast, three of the four AL West teams ranked in the bottom sixth: the Mariners’ .307 put them at 25th, the Angels’ .301 at 26th, and the A’s .289 at 28th. Texas had a respectable .338, which was good enough for 11th.
I doubt that these rankings will hold for much longer, but they’re interesting to note in the first 10+ games of the season.

Quick Links 4/13/05

I’ve still got little or no time to read, let alone write (I’ve got a big brief to the Second Circuit due April 22, and between that and other stuff it will be crazy until then). But a few quick links collected in recent weeks, before they get totally out of date:
*Go check out Vodkapundit for color photos of World War I.
*Ann Althouse has some important background on CNN prosecutor Nancy Grace.
*This Instapundit post is a good place to start on the scandals brewing in Canada. Captain Ed has been all over this.
*The Soviets once had a false alert that could have launched a full-out nuclear war (via Studes).
*Speaking of Studes, his previous column had a funny excerpt from the Daily Show on Barry Bonds.
*Until he died, I didn’t know that Barney Martin, who played Morty Seinfeld, had “served as a navigator in the Air Force during World War II before starting a 20-year career as a New York City police detective.”
*I like Byung-Hyun Kim and all, but the guys has a 6.30 career ERA at Coors Field, mostly compiled in his Arizona heyday. In other words, even if he gets his act back together, don’t expect this to end well.
*I begin to suspect Derek Zumsteg has too much time on his hands when he has time to come up with 26 different reasons to suspect Mariner Moose is not actually a moose at all, and many of them aren’t even funny, they’re just things like “Antlers are not wide, large, or heavy enough.”
*The fact that Seymour Hersh says something does not make it even slightly more likely that it is true. (via Instapundit)
*More bad guys bite the dust

Power Surge

Orioles speed merchant Brian Roberts has hit four home runs already this season, one shy of his career high. I should have seen this coming. Roberts smacked 50 doubles last season, and even considering that a number of those were “leg” doubles, guys in their twenties who hit that many doubles tend to hit more home runs in following seasons (Roberts is 27). Roberts also cut his groundball/flyball ratio last season to 1.09 from 1.37 the prior year, although he’s as unlikely to stick to his current pace of 0.36 G/F as he is to slug .931 for a full season. But 15-20 homers, maybe a little more than that, might not be such a big surprise.

Break on Through

Today’s Mets game was as classic as a 6-1 victory in the first week of the season could possibly be. You really had to see it, Pedro and John Smoltz bringing their best stuff – Pedro hitting the mid-90s with his fastball on the way to a complete game 2-hitter (and keeping the pitch counts low enough that you didn’t even worry about him going out for the 9th inning), Smoltz tying his career high with 15 strikeouts through the first 7 innings, to the point where the Mets announcers were discussing whether Smoltz had a chance to strike out 20. For a long while there, it looked like the 1-0 lead the Braves had staked Smoltz to would be all he needed, until Carlos Beltran nailed a line drive home run to right field. That got Smoltz out, and I just had that feeling that Cliff Floyd was going to go deep against the next pitcher, as he did, followed by a double for Minky and a homer for Wright, and all of a sudden all the frustration of the 0-5 start was washed away.
Oh, there was frustration. Perhaps the most vivid demonstration was Saturday night, when the ever-combustible Aaron Heilman gave up a second inning grand slam to Brian Jordan, and the cameras cut to Willie Randolph with what looked like a perfect addition to the Bill Simmons pantheon of faces – the Willie Randolph “Why Did I Ever Take This Job” Face, which was topped only when they panned down the dugout to Pedro and he had the exact same expression on his face.
For the record, Pedro has now struck out 21 and walked 3 while allowing 5 hits in 15 innings. You can say “small sample size” all you like, but it’s been a damn long time since the Mets had anyone who could do that even in a 2-start sample. Hey, as long as Pedro continues to improve on his career ERA and K/9 . . .
Wright is really starting to remind me of Robin Ventura. The comparison he usually draws is to Scott Rolen, but Ventura was at least 90% of the player Rolen is, and Wright could do much worse.
I continue to fear the Mets’ non-Pedro pitchers, other than my inexplicable faith in Victor Zambrano, who (1) managed a 35-27 career record in Tampa Bay, giving him almost half of the .500-or-better seasons in Devil Rays history, and (2) has whiffed 20 batters in 19 innings with a 3.79 ERA as a Met. But I’m really feeling good about the everyday lineup. Floyd has looked rejuvenated, to the point of throwing out two guys at home on Saturday night. Beltran, as he showed last October and again today, has icewater in his veins. And if the high/next highest comps on Wright are Rolen and Ventura, the matches for Jose Reyes are Barry Larkin and Rafael Furcal. Reyes is just one exciting baserunner, as he showed in legging a routine groundball single past second into right center into a double today.
Need the pitching to come through. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to settle for sending a championship team out to play only once every five days.

BASEBALL/ Lawyer for Bonds Trainer Pleads Guilty

Defense attorney J. Tony Serra pled guilty on Tuesday to misdemeanor federal income tax evasion charges for failing to pay more than $40,000 in taxes. Serra has been involved in the BALCO steroids case:

As famous for his rumpled suits and love of marijuana as he is for delivering blistering cross-examinations, Serra has railed against what he sees as government overreaching in criminal prosecutions. He’s now defending Greg Anderson, a personal trainer for San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds. Anderson is accused of distributing steroids along with three others at the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative in U.S. v. Conte, 04-0044.

Conflict of Interest

Well, look at who’s confusing his roles of public prosecutor and campaigner:

Eliot Spitzer was accused on Wednesday of blurring his role as New York attorney-general with his political ambitions to run for state governor after his campaign office paid Google to link a search for “AIG” to a website promoting his gubernatorial bid.
AIG, the world’s largest insurer, is at the centre of investigation by Mr Spitzer and others regulators into alleged improper accounting.
The linked website on Google www.spitzer2006.com collects campaign contributions and posts messages to supporters. It is headlined Spitzer for NY Governor, with the message: “Good Guys Can Finish First. Sign up Now and Join The Fight!”

The thing about Spitzer is, of course, that he’s never yet been put to proving one of his high-profile cases in court; he generally targets heavily regulated public companies, and such companies generally can’t survive a court battle with the government. But it makes for good press.

New Toy

Still having fun with some of the new toys at David Pinto’s site – can it really be true that Ichiro is batting .509 on the road since the All-Star Break last season?
UPDATE: Here’s another: visiting players of the 1980s with the best slugging percentages at Shea.
Same for the 1990s (no surprise to see Chipper and Brian Jordan near the top of that list).
Same for 2000-04.
You can run the same search for your favorite team (here’s the all-time list for Coors Field, which is less dramatic than I’d expected).
Or, one last eye-opener: the feared 1975-79 Red Sox offense, on the road.
I should add the disclaimer here: The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.

Downer

Well, the Mets sure know how to take the enthusiasm out of you. Nothing like getting swept by a mediocre team to start the season on the wrong foot. All in all, even with yesterday’s shutdown by Aaron Harang, I’m still very optimistic about this team’s offense and defense, and despite the early 3-run homer on Opening Day you can’t help but be impressed by Pedro’s first outing. But the pitching staff is a disaster. I’ve never really trusted Tom Glavine, who’s now 3-7 with a 6.22 ERA since the beginning of last August. Ishii and the bullpen have been as bad as advertised, Trachsel’s down for half the season or more, Benson’s hurt already . . . not a good sign.

The Preachy Monster

Another sign that we’ll never again see children’s entertainment that actually places entertaining children first: Cookie Monster is shilling for moderation in eating cookies. Wile E. Coyote wouldn’t even get on the air today. “Sesame Street” has always been both educational and moralistic, and that’s a good thing. But Jim Henson understood that a little plain old childish mischief is what made the show work well enough to keep kids coming back for more letters and numbers.

Hazing

Willie Randolph laced into Victor Diaz with a profanity-laden stream of insults today… well, actually he didn’t, but he’s batting him eighth, behind career .215 hitter Ramon Castro, which amounts to the same thing. This, after Randolph batted David Wright 8th during the spring. This has no logical basis – you bat your weakest hitter 8th in the NL, not a blossoming slugger like Wright or even a guy like Diaz who’s only playing, in an outfield corner, because of his bat.
Unless Randolph somehow got the idea that starting at the bottom of the order is a necessary learning experience for a young hitter. Where would he get that idea? Well, in Randolph’s major league debut with the Pirates in 1975, he batted leadoff. He was still hitting leadoff two weeks later and batting .115. For the season, Randolph batted .130 in the leadoff spot, but .250 elswhere. He finally started hitting in a doubleheader where he batted 8th and went 3-for-6. In 1976, as an everyday player with the Yankees, Randolph spent 103 games in the 8 hole, and only in 1977 did he begin to bat leadoff regularly.
So, perhaps Randolph is generalizing from his own experience.

Screw Up

Turns out that the memo pushing the legislation to save Terri Schaivo’s life on, among others, raw partisan political grounds was after all created by a GOP staffer working for Mel Martinez, who apparently – I assume without reading the thing, unless he’s a complete idiot – handed it to arch-liberal Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, who in a rare display of aisle-crossing was supporting the bill but obviously was not doing so for purposes of putting heat on other Democrats. Instapundit has the links. (UPDATE: Patrick Hynes has a more direct apology).
I like this quote, from hyper-partisan New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg:

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), a member of the Rules and Administration Committee, wrote to the panel’s leaders last week to ask for an investigation into the “document, its source, and how it came to be distributed.”
“Those who would attempt to influence debate in the United States Senate should not hide behind anonymous pieces of paper,” he said.

And this one:

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in an interview Friday that he considered it “ludicrous” to suggest that his party created the document and said Republicans were using such talk to divert responsibility.
“I guess the best defense is a good offense — that’s their theory,” he said.

And this one:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said he believed that the memo originated with the GOP because it is “totally consistent” with how the Republicans have operated for the past four years. “They just shouldn’t lose their memos,” he said.

And now that that’s settled, I hope Lautenberg, Reid and Biden can all get to a substantive discussion of these memos circulated among Senate Democrats.

Dump the DH

Michele noted the dubious anniversary yesterday of the introduction of the DH. I had long tolerated the DH rule – and, more controversially the hybrid DH/no DH AL/NL setup – maybe just because it’s what I grew up with. But I’ve recently come to the conclusion that, like Astroturf in outdoor parks, it’s time for the DH to go. I have two major reasons for this.
Eliminating the DH would have two overdue beneficial effects. First, it would reduce the number and stress of pitches thrown by starting pitchers (it’s easier to get past Al Leiter in the lineup than David Ortiz), improving the ability of pitchers to go deep in games and to stay healthy. Seeing more of the best starters and less of marginal middle relievers is good.
Second, the DH is an extra everyday player. The more everyday players, the more opportunities for some teams to spend more money and thus gain advantages solely through their financial position. This is especially true of DHs, who tend to be well-paid veterans rather than cheap rookies. (Of course, the fact that dumping the DH would reduce payrolls by eliminating well-paid jobs is precisely why the union would never let it happen).
In other words, eliminating the DH would mean better pitching and less economic inequality. It’s time for the DH to go.

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

Nothing quite says “Yankee fans” quite like booing Mariano Rivera for blowing the third game of the season.
Who’s Rivera’s daddy now? Though I must say, Simmons is awful cocky here for a guy whose team is 1-2 and who wrote that Keith “Foulke’s gritty October performance vaulted him past Rivera as the premier money reliever in baseball” just a day or so before Foulke got tagged for a walk-off homer by Derek Jeter.
Of course, it’s a long season. But any Yankee fan tempted to boo Rivera should contemplate how all those banners got there the past 9 years.

You Can’t Handle The Truth

This is just appalling:

At Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, Connecticut, [principal Gail] Karwoski’s teachers grade papers by giving examples of better answers for those students who make mistakes. But that approach meant the kids often found their work covered in red, the color that teachers long have used to grade work.
Parents objected. Red writing, they said, was “stressful.” The principal said teachers were just giving constructive advice and the color of ink used to convey that message should not matter. But some parents could not let it go.
So the school put red on the blacklist.

Read the whole thing . . . what on earth is wrong with these people? Criticism, constructive and otherwise, is one of the harsh realities of the world. Do they really think kids who are sheltered from this fact will prosper later in life? Heck, in high school – granted, I went to an all-boys Catholic high school – we had a history teacher, best teacher I ever had, who wrote the high and low grades on the board and handed back tests in descending order, meaning that some poor schlub got the indignity of being fingered as the guy who got a 22 on a test.

Omens of Spring

With real games being played, we’re just a day or two from completely forgetting spring performances. And mostly just as well, despite the fact that some managers still determine jobs based on spring stats.
But there could, nonetheless, be good news there for some sluggers:

Could David Ortiz be in for even a bigger year than the monster season he had in 2004? It wouldn’t come as a shock to number-cruncher John Dewan. The Stats Inc. researcher says you normally can’t put any stock in spring training numbers, but there is a possible exception.
“A hitter that has a tremendous spring training does correlate to a better-than-normal season,” Dewan writes. “In precise statistical terms, a hitter with a positive difference between their spring training slugging percentage and their lifetime slugging percentage of .200 or more alerts us to a step forward in the coming season.
Dewan looked at hitters with 100 or more career regular-season at-bats and 36 or more 2005 spring training at-bats through last Monday. The top 30 hitters who met his criteria included Ortiz, who ranked 19th on his list with a 269-point difference.
Fantasy leaguers take note: Andruw Jones of the Braves ranked first, with a .682 difference between spring slugging percentage (1.175) and career (.493). Former Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra ranked 10th, with a 331-point spread.

I didn’t see the original Dewan article – was it on ESPN? Personally, I expect a step back for Ortiz, but I am very bullish on Andruw Jones this year, just as many people are despairing that he will ever have the year.
Erik Siegrist over at Baseball Prospectus (subscription-only) has a more detailed list of spring’s winners and losers.

Heilman’s Chance

Looks increasingly like Aaron Heilman may end up taking Kris Benson’s slot in the rotation for the next few weeks (although for Saturday he’s unavailable), as the Mets’ hopes for ever putting the “on paper” 2005 Mets on the field grow dimmer. In December 2003, I looked at the prospects for guys who get pounded as badly as Heilman as rookies. Me, I’d still give Jae Seo the shot.

RELIGION: Not Looking Very Hard

I’m still digging out from the combination of work and Opening Day, but this one is a classic, from Powerline on Saturday: the NY Times ran a web obit of Pope John Paul II that included carefully pre-arranged criticisms of the Pope – including from an “eminent Swiss theologian, who was barred by from teaching in Catholic schools because of his liberal views” – but still included a space marked “need some quote from supporter.”
Typical Times. How hard, really, is it to find not only a supporter of the pope but one of equal prominence to an “eminent theologian”? The National Review certainly didn’t have trouble locating supporters of this pope.

Did You Know . . .

That Pedro’s career ERA at Shea Stadium is 1.17?
(The bad news: that’s just against the Mets).
All that and more at David Pinto’s new Retrosheet-powered pitcher database, which stretches back to 1974. Mets fans will particularly enjoy this excerpt, the 50-start stretch wherein Dwight Gooden went 37-5 with a 1.38 ERA, struck out 8.24 batters per start, and tossed shutouts in almost a quarter of his starts. I can remember talk that Gooden was “babied” at the time, but looking back it’s unbelievable the workload he carried for such a young pitcher: over a year and a half he completed half his starts and averaged more than 8 innings a start.

Lightenberg For A Song

With today’s bullpen implosion, perhaps the first of many (although I wouldn’t have expected Looper to be the culprit), I thought it might be worthwhile to wrap up a post I’d started and not finished this morning . . . I was very disappointed to see the Blue Jays release Kerry Ligtenberg last week. We hear a lot of talk among analysts about how important it is to get decent relief pitchers for a song these days. Well, the Jays are eating Ligtenberg’s $2.5 million contract; anybody else can have him for the league minimum. A team like the Mets, desperate to shore up their bullpen, ought to jump on Ligtenberg with both feet.
Entering last season, Ligtenberg was one of baseball’s more reliable relievers, with a 3.06 career ERA since 1997 and four straight years of 52 or more appearances since missing 1999 to injury. Let’s look at Ligtenberg’s core performance numbers last season, compared to his career:

Year HR/9 UIBB/9 K/9 GB/FB
Thru 2003 0.99 2.95 8.37 0.81
2004 0.98 2.95 8.02 0.81

UIBB/9 is unintentional walks/9 IP. As you can easily see, Ligtenberg was basically the same pitcher as ever last season, notching a slightly lower strikeout rate but otherwise doing all the same old things. So why did he get the boot? Well, you know where this is going: balls in play. It wasn’t that the balls in play against him were hit particularly hard; according to the Hardball Times, Ligtenberg’s LD% – the percent of balls in play that were line drives – was .152 compared to an AL average of .177. His Fielding Independent Pitching ERA was 4.39, and his DIPS ERA was 3.77.
So how did Ligtenberg end up with a 6.38 ERA and a pink slip? Four things:
*A rough calculation indicates that the batting average on balls in play against Ligtenberg shot up from .284 to .386 (I’d use the more sophisticated comparisons done by Jay Jaffe and the Hardball Times guys, but I needed to be able to compare to the 1997-2003 edition of Ligtenberg). That could easily be bad luck and bad defense at work, and it goes a long way to explaining why his H/9 jumped from 7.40 to 11.95.
*The percentage of balls in play against Ligtenberg going for doubles rose from 5.3% to 8.5%. That can also be partly explained by the Blue Jays’ outfield defense, although it’s possible that some of it is also Ligtenberg getting hit harder. Still, you don’t expect to see a guy getting smacked for a lot more doubles if he’s surrendering the same old number of fly balls and home runs and has a good record allowing line drives.
*The number of GIDP against Ligtenberg dropped from 1 per 43 at bats to 1 per 189 at bats. This may well be attributable to the defense, in combination with a slightly elevated number of stolen bases.
*His rate of intentional walks doubled, from 0.61/9 IP to 1.15/9 IP. As I’ve noted before, intentional walks tend to be an occupational hazard of middle relief work, and Ligtenberg got stuck with an awful lot of them last season. The intentional passes were solely responsible for the rise in his walk rate, and it’s not his fault.
Anyway, even if you accept that Ligtenberg was somewhat responsible for his poor performance last season, there was a reason:

Health-wise, Ligtenberg says there’s no lingering effects from the inflammation in his left hip that pretty much crippled his season last year when he was 1-6 with a 6.38 ERA.
“The hip feels good,” he said. “The first 10 days I wasn’t feeling real good and we made an adjustment. The last three weeks my hip has been good, it hasn’t been an issue.”

Of course, he’s going to say that. And maybe he’ll have another rotten year this year, or have injury troubles, if someone gives him a shot. But I wouldn’t be even mildly surprised if he threw 60 appearances with an ERA around 3.00. Wouldn’t you rather see him do that for the Mets than for the Braves?

Pumped, But Not Up

We’ve all had a good laugh, and deservedly so, at the expense of Alex Sanchez, the first player to (apparently) get caught using steroids. Apparently it was easier for the Tampa Bay speed merchant to take steroids than take a pitch. As my older brother put it, “We can only guess how many of Sanchez’s two home runs might have been the result of steroids… ” Ex-teammate Brandon Inge:

He’s the farthest guy from testing positive that I ever thought would happen . . . You’d think a red flag would go up in someone’s mind. I can’t believe it. When I heard his name, I thought it was a joke. You don’t need steroids to bunt like he does. Actually, I’d think he’d be taking the opposite of steroids.

That said, the idea of a speedy guy taking steroids isn’t that far-fetched; if you think about it for a few minutes, the name “Ben Johnson” may come to mind.
Of course, there’s still Inge’s other point:

I didn’t think anyone would test positive. Everyone had enough notice, I mean they’ve been talking about it since midseason of last year.

Yes, Sanchez is apparently an idiot.