Wright Ending

Good ending to tonight’s game – David Wright has definitely entered the stage of his career where you get to extra innings with an o-fer and you figure the other team just can’t shut him down that many times. The bullpen was another matter, but all is well that ends well.
Random thought: Is it just me, or does that Pirates catching gear make Ronny Paulino look like an overweight C-3PO?
Darryl Strawberry: studio analyst just seems strange to me.

Obama Weak On The Issues

There’s a growing school of thought among Republicans that even despite his massive fundraising machine, pop culture cache and messianic aura, Barack Obama may yet turn out to be a much weaker general election opponent than Hillary Clinton. Hillary is certain to be a competitive candidate, but has enormous built-in negatives; any election involving her is likely to be very closely divided. But Obama, while he seems to have a much higher ceiling, also faces a much more significant risk of getting completely Mondaled. And a new poll from Rasmussen helps explain why – even moreso than Hillary, Obama matches up terribly against McCain on which candidate is more trusted on a host of key issues. Here’s the key findings in tabular form:

Issue McCain Obama
National Security 52 31
Iraq 48 39
Economy 46 39
Taxes 41 38
Corruption/Ethics 33 44

Obama’s inability to crack 40% against McCain on the central issues of the day makes him look less like a transformational political figure and more like the incumbent president’s 34% approval rating. Note that McCain matches up so well against Obama despite “generic ballot” questions showing that the Democrats as a whole are more trusted than Republicans on a number of these issues. (Note also that McCain unsurprisingly beats Hillary handily on the ethics question).
Is Obama actually the easier target? Maybe, maybe not; any one poll is just a snapshot, and it’s a long way to November. But more and more Republicans are eager to find out.

BASEBALL/ They All Look Alike

I guess I am not the only one to notice that Ben Sheets is a dead ringer for Brett Favre:
sheetsfavre.JPG

At one point during lunch, a fan approached Sheets and said “Hey Brett, how are you enjoying retirement?”
“I’m not Brett,” Sheets said, pointing at [Geoff] Jenkins, who was mistaken for Brett Favre early in his career. “He is.”
The confused fan walked away as the players laughed.
“I loved it,” Jenkins said. “And he was dead-set that it was Sheeter. Now that I’m gone, I guess I’ll pass that on to Sheets. I passed the torch.”

Bad Investments

$126 million for a middle reliever.
Zito is a natural lightning rod, but of course it’s not his fault that the Giants have no hitting (an anemic 3.26 R/G, second to worst in the NL) and a crummy defense (.673 defensive efficiency rating is the lowest in the NL and ahead of only the Rangers across MLB). In fact, Zito may end up needing to be traded to stop trying to carry the team.
That said, his core problem seems to be a loss of velocity, and that’s not just psychological. Check out the analysis by veteran pitching guru Paul Nyman at The Hardball Times, introduced somewhat verbosely here, with the second installment here.
UPDATE: By the way, one reason Zito may be getting the blame is how well the Giants’ other top pitchers are doing. Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and the surprising Jonathan Sanchez, between them, are 7-2 with a 3.10 ERA, striking out 10.1 batters/9 and allowing 0.6 HR/9; they’ve been wild (4.8 BB/9, mainly Cain’s doing), but effective. If you look at DER, Lincecum (.630) and Zito (.667) are getting the short end of the stick, with the others above .700. But Zito has historically relied on a combination of good DERs and decent K rates to keep the hits down, and he’s lost both.

Up There Hacking

One of the interesting revelations about watching Johan Santana this season has been watching him hit. Pitchers, even ones who can swing the bat, usually have swings that are not that pretty to watch – they try to meet the ball, or take a butcher-boy approach to whacking it into the ground – but Santana’s swing is relatively compact but with a sharp uppercut, a Mo Vaughn/David Oritz kind of swing, not at all what you expect from a pitcher who spent his whole career in the AL and isn’t built like a burly first baseman.
And Santana’s had decent results – he’s batting .231/.286/.462 with 3 doubles in 13 at bats entering tonight’s action, .250/.283/.386 in 46 career plate appearances, for a career OPS+ of 75, almost the level of a weak-hitting everyday catcher or shortstop.
The other reason this surprised me is that lefthanded power pitchers, in particular, have a fairly grisly track record at the plate. Some examples – bear in mind that you really need to work hard to get an OPS+ below zero; with 100 being the league average hitter, an OPS+ in the 20s is plenty bad (although by 2007, with pitchers falling further and further behind the average hitter, the NL OPS+ for pitchers was -3; in 1956 the Major League average for pitchers was 23) – I’m aware that not all these guys are known as power pitchers, but all of them were when they entered the league:

Pitcher OPS+ Avg OBP SLG
Barry Zito -46 .093 .111 .093
Al Leiter -34 .085 .142 .102
Sandy Koufax -26 .097 .145 .116
Bob Veale -24 .114 .139 .129
Randy Johnson -22 .127 .151 .156
David Wells -22 .129 .148 .140
Jerry Koosman -17 .119 .151 .141
Danny Jackson -15 .126 .148 .164
Lefty Gomez -7 .147 .194 .159
Al Downing -5 .127 .169 .160
Vida Blue -4 .104 .186 .145
Mickey Lolich -2 .110 .215 .121
Sam McDowell -2 .154 .171 .176
Mark Langston -1 .152 .168 .185
Lefty Grove 6 .148 .209 .207
John Matlack 6 .129 .230 .136
Johnny Vander Meer 6 .152 .200 .180
Dave McNally 14 .133 .196 .201
Rube Marquard 17 .179 .207 .202
Carl Hubbell 18 .191 .212 .227
Steve Avery 18 .174 .194 .252
Billy Pierce 19 .184 .232 .203
Rube Waddell 25 .161 .197 .219
Ed Morris 26 .161 .193 .208

I included Waddell and Morris since they hale from an era when pitchers were expected to contribute more with the bat; Morris’ presence shows that you can find this trend all the way back to the very first lefthanded pitcher to have a significant successful career (although his 1880s contemporaries Matt Kilroy and Toad Ramsey were much better hitters, with OPS+ of 72 and 42, respectively).
It’s not all lefthanded power pitchers, of course; there’s Babe Ruth, and there’s also the following list of guys who ranged from dangerous hitters to fairly average hitting pitchers (Sabathia, like Santana, has limited hitting experience, just 39 plate appearances):

Pitcher OPS+ Avg OBP SLG
CC Sabathia 90 .297 .316 .405
Tommy Byrne 77 .238 .286 .378
Dontrelle Willis 68 .234 .280 .359
Warren Spahn 43 .194 .234 .287
Hal Newhouser 36 .201 .267 .234
Steve Carlton 33 .201 .223 .259
Hippo Vaughn 33 .173 .232 .223
Fernando Valenzuela 30 .200 .205 .262
Whitey Ford 28 .173 .256 .200
Sid Fernandez 21 .182 .206 .223

(I remember Sid being a better hitter than that but he batted .080 after turning 30).
Even recognizing that this is more an anecdotal than a systematic study, I don’t have a good single explanation here. Clearly some of these guys were not great athletes, but Koufax, for example, was an excellent basketball player; some of these guys are latter-day AL pitchers, but the pattern precedes them back to the early days and has continued in the NL. I suppose the ability to throw hard as a lefthander probably means most of these guys got identified as pitchers earlier in their baseball-playing youth than your typical stud athlete who plays a lot of SS and CF before settling into a single position; that seems to me the most likely reason.

The Party Of Two Universities

Far be it from me to knock fancy Ivy League law degrees, but you know, with Obama and Hillary the last two choices standing, it appears that the Democrats will pick a candidate from Harvard or Yale for the sixth straight election – Fritz Mondale was the last time they took a candidate educated entirely outside those two universities. Perhaps, if they are concerned about the constant battle to establish that their candidates are normal people rather than captives of a lot of ideas, beliefs, and associations that don’t really exist outside the left-wing academic hothouse, it may be time to fish in wider waters. Consider:
1988 – Dukakis (Harvard Law)
1992 – Clinton (Yale Law) & Gore (Harvard College)
1996 – Clinton (Yale Law) & Gore (Harvard College)
2000 – Gore (Harvard College) & Lieberman (Yale College & Yale Law)
2004 – Kerry (Yale College)
2008 – Obama (Harvard Law) or Hillary (Yale Law) (and both are married to graduates of the same law school)

Getting Frisky

This, from Hillary Clinton, is a reminder why candidates with their backs against the wall are so dangerous – like Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush (in 1992) in the last weeks of their losing campaigns, Hillary has really hit her stride and found her voice as a candidate in a way that was never in evidence as long as she had some plausible case to be a frontrunner – but unlike those candidates, Hillary still has months to go before she can be formally pulled from the stage:

I know his supporters say, well they did like the last debate in Philadelphia, the questions were kind of mean and they were sort of tough, …You know, I’ve got to say, tough questions in a debate is nothing like the tough decisions you’ve got to make in the White House. I think that this state deserves a debate. So here’s what I’m offering. How about this — no moderators just the two of us on a stage for 90 minutes asking each other questions, talking about whatever’s on our minds, just like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and I think, you know, we could even do it on the back of a flatbed truck, doesn’t even have to be in a fancy studio somewhere.

(H/T). Is this a sign of desperation? Sure, these kinds of challenges always are. But then, those of us on the Right never did figure out how to make the Clintons go away, no matter how much hot water they were in. Not only does Obama have to keep taking this, but he has now reached the point where he basically has to hide from debating her again for his own protection, stop doing press conferences, and generally go into a protracted defensive crouch, while McCain is doing blogger calls, touring traditional Democratic strongholds and generally having himself a good time.

Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Indiana Voter ID Law

The Supreme Court this morning, by a 6-3 vote in Crawford v. Marion County Elec. Bd., upheld Indiana’s voter ID law. This is a major defeat for the Democrats’ efforts to prevent states from requiring valid identification to vote. The lawsuit was brought by the Indiana Democratic Party.
The Court took a fractured approach. Justice Stevens, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy, found no showing of an undue burden on various voters who challenged the voter ID law on its face. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito would have upheld the law on the broader ground that it imposed the same requirements equally on all voters. Both opinions give great weight to the state interest in ensuring that only eligible voters cast ballots. Justice Souter, joined by Justices Breyer and Ginsburg, dissented on the grounds that they felt the statute did, in fact, unduly burden some voters. Justice Breyer wrote separately.
Justice Scalia’s separate opinion is redolent of the judicial hangover from Bush v. Gore in its emphasis on the hazards of permitting case-by-case judicial review of neutral rules established by state legislatures before an election takes place. This is a point I’ve been making since the Bush v. Gore decision came down: the most important thing about that case is the fact that the SCOTUS was reviewing a non-statutory judicial remedy crafted by an appellate court after the election had taken place, when all the participants knew – or at least thought they knew – what remedies would benefit which candidates, as opposed to a statute of general applicability enacted before the election, setting out rules and procedures that all participants knew from Day One they would have to comply with.
Extended excerpts from the Stevens and Scalia opinions, and commentary, below the fold. Note that this is the third election-law case this Term (I discussed the first two here and here), and the democratically-enacted statute won in each case.
(UPDATES also below the fold).

Continue reading Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Indiana Voter ID Law

Davey Looks Back

The Daily News talks to Davey Johnson. On Dwight Gooden:

DN: You managed one of the greatest young talents the game has ever seen in Dwight Gooden, who went 24-4 as a 20-year-old. How do you feel when you think about his career, and his life after baseball?
DJ: Unbelievably sad. The biggest shock in my life in baseball was in the spring of 1987, when he came into my office and said, “Skip, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got to go to drug rehab.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Doc was like a son to me. He was the first one to the ballpark every day. He was always happy. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
The thing with Dwight is that he meant no harm, but he couldn’t say no – to his guys from his hometown. He didn’t want to feel bigger or better than anybody else.
DN: He was a good pitcher after that 1985 season, but never the same pitcher.
DJ: Never the same. I blame it on the drugs, and I also blame it on the delivery change they had him make. I don’t even know where the orders came from, but they didn’t come from me or Mel Stottlemyre. They wanted him to shorten his delivery, lower that big high leg kick and not turn as much. Sure, he could be run on, but they could run on (Greg) Maddux, too; did they change his delivery? To this day I regret even going along with it.

Um, yeah. That doesn’t sound like a great idea. Of course, today you would not ask a 20-year-old pitcher to throw 276 innings, either.

DN: If you were starting a team and could choose from all the players you managed or played with/against, who would be your No. 1 pick?
DJ: Henry Aaron. I loved Barry Larkin and Cal (Ripken), but Henry, he could do anything he wanted to do. He was just so powerful. Even at the end of his career, he could do things with such ease. I asked him once, “What do you look for when you go to home plate?” He said, “The breaking ball.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because I know they can’t throw the fastball by me.”
One time late in his career we went into San Francisco. Henry was 40-something years old. Normally he would take off a day game after a night game. This time the Giants’ pitcher, (John) Count Montefusco, said in the paper, “Why am I pitching against the lowly Braves? I want to pitch against a good team.” Henry read it. He went to (manager Eddie) Mathews and said, “I’m playing.” Now Montefusco had a nasty slider. Just wicked. Ralph Garr got on, Mike Lum got on. Henry got up and Montesfusco threw a slider, down and away, his best pitch, And Henry went boom, and hit it out of the ballpark. He got back to the dugout and said, “Maybe that’ll teach this kid a little humility.”

Read the whole thing.

Card In The Hole

The Reds have hired as their general manager Walt Jocketty, the greatly successful former Cardinals GM. We’ll see if Jocketty can recapture his winning formula from St. Louis, which focused on concentrating scarce resources on star-quality prospects and surrounding them largely with reclamation-project veterans (in a sense, not so different from how the Reds were run the past decade, but better), and trading actively while eschewing big free agent signings.

Negative Momentum

The bottom line on last night’s Pennsylvania primary is, on the surface, what it has been for a while: Obama has the lead, but he has serious problems reaching Hillary’s voters, and the voting results seem to support the notion that who wins and loses is determined less by events than by hardened demographic facts; Hillary has arguments about how she’s a better general election candidate, but she’s probably running out of forums in which to press them. I still think there’s no way she can get the superdelegates to give her the nomination; even if were to up and decide en masse that Obama is by far the weaker general election candidate (a point that remains fiercely debatable), he represents three factions of the party (African-American voters, hard-left anti-war activists, and young people with little or no prior voting history) who are most likely to react poorly to the perception that their candidate won at the polls but was sold out in a back room deal. And at that point, the long-term damage to the party from backing Hillary will outweigh considerations of who could win this one.
That said, the Democrats do have to worry that to the extent that momentum is at all discernible in this race, their likely nominee has essentially negative momentum. Obama has faced the voters in seven states in the past 60 days, and here are the popular vote counts:

State Date Obama Clinton Margin
Pennsylvania 4/22 1,042,297 1,258,245 -215,948
Mississippi 3/11 265,502 159,221 +106,281
Wyoming 3/8 5,378 3,311 +2,067
Texas 3/4 1,358,785 1,459,814 -101,029
Ohio 3/4 982,489 1,212,362 -229,873
Rhode Island 3/4 75,316 108,949 -33,633
Vermont 3/4 91,901 59,806 +32,095
Total 3,821,668 4,261,708 -440,040
Overall% 47.3% 52.7%

Obama can probably still run out the clock, but he’s going to end with the worst run-up to the convention since Gerald Ford in 1976. And the real finish line, of course, is in November.

You Can’t Ask Me That!

So the left-blogosphere, mainly the Obama supporters, has erupted in characteristically unbounded fury at the questions asked in Wednesday’s debate – the fact that so many were pointed questions, the fact that they were heavily tilted towards recent controversies around Obama, the fact that the first 45 minutes of the debate covered those controversies before moving on to debate the candidates’ positions on the issues. Obama himself has whined and complained and moaned about the debate and cancelled the next scheduled debate, leaving in doubt whether there will be any further debates even if this race goes on for another six weeks of voting.
I had planned a longer, more link-filled post examining the purpose of presidential debates, but I’m pressed for time, so I’ll hit here the main points in somewhat disjointed form:
*I’d agree, as I said on Thursday, that George Stephanopoulos is too personally tied to the Clintons to get a seat at any debate involving Hillary, and I’d also agree that a couple of his questions were too aggressive. And I’d feel the same way about having him do a GOP debate. One might ask whether the moderators should really include former Democratic staffers (Chris Matthews, Tim Russert – although I do generally like Russert) or the children of Democratic politicians (Cokie Roberts). Fox didn’t have Karl Rove moderating a debate, after all. But the Republicans had to endure Matthews.
*That said, you know, these candidates have debated plenty before; as Obama himself admitted:

“I’ll be honest with you. We’ve now had 21,” Obama said of the debates. “It’s not as if we don’t know how to do these things. I could deliver Senator Clinton’s lines. I’m sure she could deliver mine.”

On health care, where the two have assaulted each other in tedious detail over the microscopic differences in their proposals, that’s true. So, it’s understandable that the debate focused instead on what was new, and the first 45 minutes was all about the stories that had come out since the prior debate, the issues about Obama’s statements, associations, and philosophy. I have said it repeatedly, and I’ll return to this at a later date: ideas don’t run for president, people do.
*Perhaps more to the point, this isn’t like the silly GOP debate questions about evolution or some of the nonsense Matthews asked at the early GOP debates (I wish I had time now to go back over some of those – we forget quite how terrible many of the GOP debates were, even to the point of having questions from planted Democratic operatives giving speeches, see here and here) – basically every question on Wednesday was a hot issue in the news that any observer of this race would have expected to come up and, with the possible exception of the question about Obama’s prior statements about his flag lapel-pin (which he then falsely denied having made), every question was on a topic that one or both of the candidates had raised in attacking each other. It’s hard for reporters to say that something isn’t newsworthy in a 2-candidate race when one of the campaigns is pushing the story; traditionally, if it’s a bogus attack, that’s a prime opportunity for the target of the attack to push back.
*I guess Obama would have preferred these people asking the questions – check in particular the Q&A around 1:50

Soft Up The Middle

I have been thinking of Bill James’ study (in this year’s Goldmine book) confirming the conventional wisdom that good teams tend to be strong up the middle in the context of the Tigers’ early struggles. Edgar Renteria seems to be doing OK, but look elsewhere: at catcher, Pudge Rodriguez is batting .271/.316/.414, and only in the last day or two got his OBP out of the .280s. At second, Placido Polanco – the anchor of the Detroit infield defense – has been injured, and when healthy he hit just .148/.292/.167. In center, star CF and key offensive and defensive contributor Curtis Granderson has been hurt and hasn’t played yet.
That’s not the whole explanation, of course; DH Gary Sheffield is hitting .192/.364/.308, left fielders Jacque Jones and Marcus Thames are hitting .178/.224/.178 and .172/.250/.276, respectively, and starters Justin Verlander, Jeremy Bonderman, Dontrelle Willis and Kenny Rogers have combined to walk 5.77 men per 9 innings while striking out just 4.05. But the weakness up the middle is a key element.
Of course, Sheffield probably isn’t totally done, Thames will hit again, and eventually Polanco and Granderson should be healthy. I still expect them to score buckets of runs. I’d be more concerned about the starters.

Going On The Record

Just for the record, now that the Pennsylvania primary is at last upon us, my prediction: I say it will be Hillary by 8 (RCP’s average has her at 6). She’s getting the late-breaking undecideds, as the more established candidate usually does, but I doubt there are enough of them to push her over the double-digit threshold she really needs to make a major mark.
One thing that goes against the usual conventional wisdom: if turnout is really huge, I expect that to help Hillary, since it probably means that (1) the Rendell machine is going full-out for her and (2) a lot of “Operation Chaos” Republicans have found their way into the primary. (On the other hand, with the primary race on the line, it’s not surprising that Obama is finding ways around his pledge to disdain “walking around money,” which he would in any event need in the fall to compete in PA, NJ, MO, WI and probably MI).
We will know more tomorrow – but I don’t think we’ll really know so much more than we do today.

Kinda Like That “Parallel Public Financing System”

The NY Times on the “Millionaires’ Amendment” case:

On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear a legal challenge to the so-called millionaires’ amendment. It should uphold Congress’s modest effort to help candidates who rely on outside contributions to get their messages out to the voters.

In other words, most candidates for public office – since “candidates who rely on outside contributions to get their messages out to the voters” is almost all of them. Would that the Court, and the Times (and Senators McCain and Obama, for that matter) would devote more energy to freeing such candidates to get their messages to the voters, and let the voters decide.

McCain Dares To Speak The Truth In The Battle of Ideas

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), “the nation’s largest association of Muslim organizations,” joined by one of its increasingly natural allies, the left-wing blog ThinkProgress, is pressing John McCain to stop using the term “radical Islamic extremism” to describe terrorist and terror-sympathizing groups that are undeniably radical and extremist and justify that radical extremism with appeals to a radical and extreme reading of Islam.
Or, at least, a reading that I assume is radical and extreme; one would like to believe that groups like ISNA think so. Naturally, the United States wants and needs to convince the Muslim world that this is the case, and that the terrorists aren’t right when they invoke Islam to justify violence against non-Muslims and even, very regularly, against fellow Muslims. But it’s hard to make that argument if you don’t even acknowledge the fact that the enemy is making such use of an ideology that purports to be grounded in Islamic theology. How would you have gone about combatting the KKK without describing them as a racist group, or international Communism without arguing against Communism? ISNA’s leader apparently wants to shut down precisely that sort of dialogue:

Mr. Fareed, who is ISNA’s secretary-general, said such usages are wrong.
“My own take on this is that we tried and failed to stylize this particular onslaught against the United States as one that has religious connotations and regional connotations,” said Mr. Fareed, a former associate professor of Islamic studies at Wayne State University.
“I think this is just criminality, fair and square. We should just call them criminals. You want to call them terrorist criminals, fine,” he said. “But adding the word ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islamic’ certainly doesn’t help our cause as Americans. It’s counterproductive. It paints an entire community of believers, 1.2 billion in total, in a very negative way. And certainly that’s not something that we want to do.”

The self-proclaimed sophisticates at ThinkProgress echo this line of reasoning:

The term “Islamic extremism” is …sloppy, denigrating Islam as a violent religion while conflating the diverse, multifaceted threats coming from abroad.

The answer here is obvious: we should stop referring to groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah (literally, “the party of Allah”) and Hamas as Islamic when they themselves stop doing so. But as long as they cite chapter and verse of the Qu’ran, it is simply the truth to say that they are who they claim to be. And it’s heartening to hear McCain spokesman Steve Schmidt stick to his guns:

“Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda represent a perverted strain of Islam at odds with the great many peaceful Muslims who practice their great faith peacefully,” Mr. Schmidt said. “But the reality is, the hateful ideology which underpins bin Ladenism is properly described as radical Islamic extremism. Senator McCain refers to it that way because that is what it is.”

Meanwhile, as the Washington Times notes, McCain’s Democratic opponents are not so hot to wield the truth:

Mr. McCain often uses the term “Islamic” to describe terrorist enemies. The two remaining Democrats in the presidential field, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, generally shun such word usage.

Contrast the fire directed at McCain just for speaking the truth with Sen. Obama’s, er, admirers among – you guessed it – radical Islamist extremists. First up, a senior official of Hamas:

We don’t mind – actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance.

Then we have the Iranians:

Iranians are following the American presidential race more avidly than ever before. That’s partly because they’re eager for the exit of President Bush, who branded Iran part of an “Axis of Evil” and implicitly raised the possibility of a military strike against the country over its alleged nuclear weapons program. But the Iranians’ interest is also driven by a sense among many Iranians that the candidacy of Barack Obama offers real hope for repairing the U.S.-Iranian relationship. Commenting on the Iranian preference for a Democrat in the White House, Sergei Barseghian, a columnist for the reformist Etemad Meli newspaper noted that in Farsi, the words Oo ba ma would translate as “He’s with us.” …
it’s Obama’s declared willingness to engage in “aggressive personal diplomacy” with the Iranian leadership that has generated the most interest among senior officials in Tehran, since this would mark a sea-change in Washington’s approach. “Obama is a man of engagement, a man of negotiations,” one Iranian official told TIME.

(More here on Obama’s collection of admirers who are not such big fans of the United States of America). Even weighing the usual caveats here about the difficulty of getting information out of the Iranian regime, as well as the layer of blather TIME pastes over these quotes, it should hardly surprise anyone that Obama is more popular with the enemy when he declines to follow McCain’s lead in calling them by their true name.

Moving On Without Them

This should be the last post from my preseason Established Win Shares (EWSL) division previews, and it’s one I have been meaning to do in past years: a look at the amount of roster turnover. Each year, I identify 23 players who are projected to play roles for their team – 13 non-pitchers and 10 pitchers. That’s not the whole Opening Day roster, but it pretty closely corresponds to the number of people who have something like a steady major league job, given the insecurity of life as a 12th pitcher or last man on the bench.
So, comparing the 2008 23-man rosters to the 2007 ones, how much turnover was there? 173 players were listed last season but not this year, an average of almost six per team. In percentage terms, 173 out of 690 – that’s a 25% attrition rate in a single year even for guys who had made it all the way up the professional pyramid and shimmied up the greasy pole at the top to have one of those scarce jobs playing major league baseball. I’m not making any excuses for anyone when I say that you should remember figures like that the next time you read about ballplayers taking steroids, lying about their ages, corking their bats, scuffing the baseball, concealing injuries, or whatever other edge they think they need to get a big league job and contract and cling to it.
Not all these guys dropped out of the big leagues – some just slid from 10th pitcher to 11th, some are on the DL but could well be major contributors again by midseason, some are youngsters who got sent back for a little more minor league seasoning, some were guys I was just mistaken in thinking last year they’d have jobs. Some, in fact, are already back in a regular job a month later. The under-30 crowd in particular is dominated by injured pitchers. That said, the bulk of this list is guys who fell victim to the dog-eat-dog competition for scarce Major League jobs, most of whom will not return to that perch, and others of whom face an uphill battle in reclaiming those jobs from eager youngsters. In the main, they are a reminder that many more Major League careers end with a whimper than a bang.
The average age of the dropouts? 31.8. Average Win Shares earned show a pattern: 5.8 in 2005, 5.4 in 2006, 2.5 in 2007, with an age-adjusted EWSL of 3.4.
Here’s the full list by age (sorted among age groups by declining EWSL) – each and every name on this list is a story of a guy who, at a minimum, started 2008 with less hope and optimism about his future than he did a year earlier:

Continue reading Moving On Without Them

Heads I Win, Tails The Coin Was Loaded

Sound the alarms!

As consumer, employee and other groups carefully build momentum in Congress for changes in the nation’s arbitration landscape and business groups just as carefully organize their opposition, a new empirical study reports a “disturbing trend” at the state level: state courts vacating many arbitration awards for employees, but not for employers.

See, here’s the thing: if the statistics were the opposite, these same people would be arguing (as they do in with other types of arbitration) that the arbitration panels are biased against them, and they’d cite the reversal rates by the courts as evidence that the arbitrators were less fair than a court would be.
In fact, overall statistics of this nature are famously uninformative because they assume a static universe in which the cases decided by arbitrators or the courts are a representative, evenly divided sample. But there are numerous ways in which data can be biased – just for example:
*If a forum is more favorable to plaintiffs, it may attract more weak or frivolous cases, and thus end up with a higher rate of defense victories – sort of the way outfielders with weak arms get a lot of assists because a lot of people run on them (between 1993 and 2003, Mike Piazza threw out 384 base thieves, Pudge Rodriguez threw out 387 – if you looked just at the total number thrown out, you might draw a very bad conclusion).
*Highly meritorious cases are much more likely to settle, especially in arbitration where plaintiffs are less likely to hold out for massive punitive damages. But the prevalance of nuisance-value settlements means it’s also impossible to use settlement data as a reliable proxy for the merits, especially if you lack the means to assess the value of the settlement.
*Defendants who are repeat players (in employment litigation, that’s pretty much every business) may be more likely to go to court to challenge awards they are dissatisfied with than employees represented by attorneys working on commission.
*Cases can settle at any stage of the process, so these numbers also don’t include cases where a settlement is reached somewhere between the arbitration award and the court decision reviewing it. A defendant who wins in arbitration but faces a likelihood of reversal in court may very well decide to settle the case while the getting is good.
That’s even before you get into the asymmetries here – in most employment cases the employee is the plaintiff, who has the burden of proof, a fact that will impact review of the award. The fact is, there are many points in litigation at which decisions can be made by one or both sides about what avenue to pursue next, and each of those decision-points can skew the sample.

“Get A Life” Seems Somehow Inadequate

getafirstlife.jpgThe WSJ had a piece ($) on Friday on Obama and Hillary groups on Second Life (if you don’t know, don’t ask) … invading each other’s online rallies.
Join something like Second Life? Not my bag, but hey, I’ve wasted way too much time on the internet and other made-up games over the years to throw stones on that one. Join a group of like-minded folks? Well, they do the same on Facebook and MySpace. But thinking you can accomplish something by disrupting somebody else’s make-believe political rally? You may have a problem.

You Are Too Old To Vote Democrat

Left-wing, Soros-funded* interest group “America Coming Together” has produced the following advertisement to helpfully remind you that if you are anywhere near as old as McCain, nyaaah, nyaaah, nyaah you’re not cool enough to hang with the Democrats:

Via Exurban League, who breaks down voter turnout by age and remarks:

[In the ad,] twentysomethings ridicule McCain’s age for 90 seconds. Because American voters love snarky college students insulting their war-hero elders.
Only a few seconds in, I was ready to take my walking-stick and tan the hides of those insolent whippersnappers, by cracky. And I’m only 41. If they’re making punks like me feel old, I can only imagine what retirees throughout the Sun Belt will think.

H/T. Jim Geraghty thinks that “I were on Team McCain, I would make sure that ad runs in central Florida and closed-circuit television of every retirement community in the country,” and suggests that “McCain is so old” could be the new Chuck Norris Facts. Certainly, McCain’s tour harking back to the Great Depression is intended to solidify his bond with older voters, who are much more reliable than people like Obama Girl who make web videos and then don’t bother to show up and vote.
If the Left thinks you are too old, well, it’s never too late to come on over, join the adults, and vote Republican.
* – Why yes, George Soros is 78. I guess he’s not too old for these punks to take his money. That’s what grownups are there for – to pay the bills, right?

You Just Spent That Money

David Brooks sees some of the same problems I saw with Hillary’s and Obama’s answers about taxes at the Philadelphia debate:

Both promised to not raise taxes on those making less than $200,000 or $250,000 a year. They both just emasculated their domestic programs. Returning the rich to their Clinton-era tax rates will yield, at best, $40 billion a year in revenue. It’s impossible to fund a health care plan, let alone anything else, with that kind of money. The consequences are clear: if elected they will have to break their pledge, and thus destroy their credibility, or run a minimalist administration.

Just recall the kind of tax hikes Obama has admitted will be needed just to pay for his health care plan. (And go here, here and here for a reminder of how the Democrats are handling the tax issue at the state level). Ed Morrissey rounds up more as well on the other problem I noted: that the candidates, especially Obama, had already broken these pledges to not raise taxes on voters making under $200,000 a year by the next series of questions, when Obama endorsed (and Hillary refused to rule out) raising the capital gains tax, which of course you don’t need a high income to pay (many retirees pay more in capital gains than income taxes).

Not So Frank

The Blue Jays have unceremoniously cut Frank Thomas, and in the process insult our intelligence:

Thomas was hitless in his past 13 at-bats and had gone 4-for-35 since homering in three straight games April 5-8. Known as a slow starter, he batted .167 with three homers and 11 RBIs for Toronto this season.
Last season, Thomas batted .277, leading the team with 26 home runs and 95 RBIs.
“I don’t know that we have the luxury of waiting two to three months for somebody to kick in because we can’t let this league or this division get away from us,” Ricciardi said.
Thomas’ deal included a $10-million option for 2009 that would have kicked in automatically if he made 376 plate appearances this season. On Saturday, Thomas said the Blue Jays had benched him to prevent him from reaching that mark.
“It’s pretty obvious,” Thomas said. “Sixty at bats isn’t enough to make that decision. I’m angry, I know I can help this team. My career isn’t going to end like this.”
Thomas did not shake hands with his teammates following Toronto’s 3-2 victory over Detroit Saturday and left the clubhouse without speaking to reporters.
Ricciardi said Thomas was more calm when they met Sunday, adding that the contract was not part of their discussion.
“That never came up,” Ricciardi said. “I told Frank our decision is based on performance and his decision is based on not being able to be in the lineup.”

There are many things that could be said for this decision – that John Gibbons needed to assert his authority over the team in the face of Thomas’ griping about playing time, that the Jays aren’t going to win anything this year and need to build for the future, that the move cuts expenses for the future…but two things that can’t be said are that this is strictly about 2008 performance and that it’s not at all about money.
The latter is obvious; as to the former, the main point here is to create playing time for Shannon Stewart in left field, thus forcing Matt Stairs into the DH role (note that Stairs is 40 and Stewart 34; this will make much more rebuilding sense once that PT goes to Adam Lind). And Stewart is batting .235/.341/.294, not much better than Thomas’ .167/.306/.333.
In fact, the Big Hurt, even having a bad year through the 19th of April, still has 3 homers and 11 walks in 16 games/60 at bats. A 4-for-35 slump is way too early to give up on a guy who batted .277/.377/.480 and drove in 95 runs last season. In 2006, Thomas was batting .178/.300/.373 on May 20, and hit .302/.408/.603 the rest of the way.
Given that Thomas can’t really play 1B, the market for his services is pretty narrow, but I’d be surprised if someone doesn’t snap him up (Seattle, maybe? Minnesota? Baltimore? Tampa, if Jonny Gomes can go back to the outfield?).

One To Watch

Looking for a player who may be inching towards a big leap forward? It remains very early, but one guy to watch may be Wandy Rodriguez with the Astros. The 29-year-old Rodriguez is an unlikely prospect to become a really outstanding pitcher; he’s not young and his first two years in the league he was horrible. But he did significantly improve his K/BB numbers last season, from 6.50 K/9 and 4.18 BB/9 in 2006 (also 1.13 HR) to 7.78 K/9 and 3.05 BB/9 (also 1.08 HR) in 2007. In three starts this season, Rodriguez has dialed it up a notch further, to 8.84 K/9, 0.93 BB/9, but 1.40 HR/9. The walk numbers are unsustainable, but if Rodriguez can make another stride forward in the K/BB department while keeping the homers from running away from him, he could be a legitimately solid #3 starter (not that the Astros have a #2). (One caution – Rodriguez pitched well in the first half last season, too – there may be durability issues as well.)

One Justice, One Vote

If you want to understand precisely why Barack Obama’s sneering condescension towards the beliefs and culture of ordinary voters – and willingness to treat them as irrational prejudices – is a concern in presidential politics, you really need look no further than what happens when such attitudes are brought to the Supreme Court, whose Justices Senator Obama wants to pick. Check out the conclusion of Justice Scalia’s brief but masterful concurring opinion yesterday Baze v. Rees, taking Justice Stevens to task for his separate opinion urging that the death penalty be held unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment (a position the Court had taken once before, only to be reversed by Justices then including Stevens himself), despite the many state and federal legislatures that have repeatedly endorsed it, the many juries that have imposed it, the studies supporting its effects, and the fact that the Constitution itself makes explicit references to the death penalty:

As Justice Stevens explains, “‘objective evidence, though of great importance, [does] not wholly determine the controversy, for the Constitution contemplates that in the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment.'” …. “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty” is unconstitutional.
Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of Justice Stevens’ experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence. The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress – who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment – is dismissed as “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.” Ante, at 8. The experience of social scientists whose studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. Ante, at 10, n. 13. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most thinly veiled condemnation, as stemming from a “thirst for vengeance.” Ante, at 11. It is Justice Stevens’ experience that reigns over all.

(Bold added; italics in original). Read the whole thing; as I said, it’s pretty short, as Justice Thomas’ separate concurrence (there were seven separate opinions) does the heavy historical lifting.
Now, take note here; it’s not Justice Scalia in this debate who wants to take the issue of the death penalty away from the people of Kentucky and make it a matter to be determined by presidential appointees; it’s Justice Stevens. I think a lot of Americans wish that we had presidential politics free of hot-button cultural issues, but it’s not conservatives who are the main obstacle to doing that. Yet if you listened to Senator Obama last night, he would still have you believe that there’s something wrong with voters who care about the rights and democratic privileges that people like Senator Obama want to bring under federal control:

[P]eople are going through very difficult times right now. And we are seeing it all across the country. And that was true even before the current economic hardships …And so the point I was making was that when people feel like Washington’s not listening to them, when they’re promised year after year, decade after decade, that their economic situation is going to change and it doesn’t, then, politically, they end up focusing on those things that are constant like religion.
They end up feeling this is a place where I can find some refuge. This is something I can count on. They end up being much more concerned about votes around things like guns, where traditions have been passed on from generation to generation. And those are incredibly important to them. And, yes, what is also true is that wedge issues, hot-button issues, end up taking prominence in our politics.
And part of the problem is that when those issues are exploited, we never get to solve the issues that people really have to get some relief on, whether it’s health care or education or jobs.

In other words, you’re only supposed to vote about what Obama says you should vote about – even when Washington is busy meddling in other areas of life. On the “wedge issues,” people who agree with Obama should just be given a free hand. (It’s also rather rich for Obama to suggest that guns should not be a political issue given his own record of voting to restrict gun ownership – I guess he cast those votes because he was too bitter to stick to economic issues, eh?).
Cases like Baze vividly illustrate that, for the foreseeable future, the Presidential power to appoint federal judges will have an outsized impact on the resolution of “hot-button” or “wedge” issues. I understand full well why, given the unpopularity of “rule by judicial fiat” for liberal ends, Senator Obama doesn’t want voters to consider those aspects of the president’s powers in voting for who the president should be. But I very much doubt that most voters are such ignorant rubes that they don’t realize that a President Obama would be quite happy to use his powers to advance his own values, not theirs.

The Biggest Loser

On Sunday, Tom Glavine passed a milestone I was watching for a year ago, becoming just the second pitcher to lose 200 games among pitchers who broke in after 1973, the first being his longtime teammate Greg Maddux, who is one win away from 350. Barring a Roger Clemens return to rack up 16 more losses, the only active pitcher approaching 200 is Jamie Moyer, who needs 22 more – a feat he can accomplish if he stays in the rotation through the end of 2009 (as he’s 45 now and straining to crack 80 on the radar gun, that may be a stretch). After that is Steve Trachsel, who’s 37 and needs 44 more losses; about the only other active pitcher who is anywhere in the neihborhood is Livan Hernandez, whose age is indeterminate but who needs 72 more losses, about 6 years’ work for him.
The 200-game loser is likely to remain rarer than the 300-game winner – as with Maddux, Glavine, Clemens and possibly Randy Johnson, the path to 300 wins will mainly be trod in the future by guys who win more than 60% of their decisions, given how hard it is to get that many decisions these days.

Lies About Money and Nonsense About The Economy

The Democratic Presidential Race Summarized In 31 Seconds
The latest Hillary Clinton ad pretty much summarizes the Democratic race in a nutshell. On the one hand, the ad throws a great punch at one of Barack Obama’s more egregiously disingenuous attempts to pass himself off as Mr. New Politics, pointing out that his advertised claim not to take money from oil companies is bogus on two levels – nobody takes money from the companies themselves, since it’s illegal, but Obama has received plenty of donations from oil company executives and employees:

Just when you are ready to (gag) cheer on Hillary, though, we get a rapid descent into utter nonsense, as she claims that “She’ll make oil companies pay to create the new jobs … America needs.”
hillaryoil.JPG
So how, exactly, is Hillary supposed to make oil companies create new jobs in the United States?

Continue reading Lies About Money and Nonsense About The Economy

Still on the Shelf

There are three bad things that can happen in April, in order of importance:
1. Injuries.
2. Having somebody else start walking off with the division.
3. Getting buried early in the standings.
And #3 has to be really serious (i.e., what is happening in Detroit, the only team in baseball that’s more than 4 games out of first place) before it’s worth panicking. I’m not happy with the Mets’ performance and W-L record thus far, but they are only 1.5 games back, percentage points behind the Phillies and a half game ahead of Atlanta, so no need to flip out yet. The worst that can be said is they are squandering opportunities.
But the injuries to Pedro and El Duque are problematic, and it now looks like Pedro’s down for a while:

General manager Omar Minaya told the New York Post for Tuesday’s editions that the team doesn’t expect the injured Martinez to return to the mound for the Mets until the middle of May or possibly June.
“We’re definitely going to be more conservative with him,” Minaya told the Post. “With hamstrings, you just never know. We’ve got to be careful.”
Martinez suffered a left hamstring strain in his first start of the season. It was diagnosed as a mild hamstring strain and at the time, he was expected to miss four to six weeks.
Minaya told the Post that the Mets’ doctors have ruled out Martinez’s return before the six-week mark of his recovery.

Granted, assuming Pedro comes back recovered, there’s no reason the hamstring injury needs to be chronic, and his arm may be fresher in September/October for cutting him some slack now. But a long stretch with only three reliable starters plus reliance on Pelfrey and Nelson Figueroa is a good way to keep squandering.

Five Years On

I count blogoversaries from three different points – the debut of my column on the old BSG site in May 2000 and the start of my Blogspot blog in August 2002 are the first two – but as of yesterday I reached the five year mark of this site in its current form. It’s always an adventure, balancing the baseball/sports/pop culture and the political/war/law sides of the site, on top of all my other family and work commitments (and blog commitments, as I’ve assumed an ever larger role over at RedState, where I am currently one of the site’s Directors), but it’s almost always been fun. Thanks to everyone who stops by.

De-Privatization

Leaving aside a pun he had probably spent years waiting to use, David Freddoso has an excellent piece on the complete collapse of opposition to a big-ticket new ship for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ocean-floor-mapping project. NOAA, of course, takes up close to 60% of the budget of the Commerce Department, whose budget I looked at in greater detail here. Freddoso’s point is that ocean-mapping is a classic example of a function that should be left to the private sector or, at a minimum, contracted out to private companies rather than performed by more-expensive government employees:

At the beginning of the Bush presidency, the administration enthusiastically embraced and fought for competitive sourcing. Bush’s first budget director, Mitch Daniels, issued a revised version of a Reagan-era OMB Circular to that end. “To ensure that the American people receive maximum value for their tax dollars,” it reads, “commercial activities should be subject to the forces of competition.”
The 63-page document, which exempts the military in time of war or mobilization, urges federal agencies to outsource jobs that are not “inherently governmental” and lays down guidelines for doing so. In the past, this practice has created significant savings – there is no reason, for example, to pay lawn crews and janitorial staffs government-union salaries and pensions, when a private company could do the work for less.

And Freddoso warns that in the next Presidential Administration, we could see major increases in government employment as the Democrats roll back the progress that has been made on behalf of hard-working taxpayers:

Competitive sourcing is rarely discussed anymore, except when congressional Democrats, at the urging of public-sector unions, attempt to erode gains already made. Both of the remaining Democratic presidential candidates want the government to perform more non-governmental tasks. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D., N.Y.) told an enthusiastic crowd of unionists in Nevada last February that she would eliminate half a million private contractors. She promised $8 to $10 billion in savings, failing to account for the far-greater offsetting costs that government would incur.

Use of private contractors isn’t necessarily the perfect solution, if the government can’t get competitive bids, but even so it is cheaper than adding long-term employees to the government’s various obligations. The better solution will generally be to get more tasks out of government entirely. But instead of debating between those two alternatives, the Democrats just want to expand the number of workers dependent on salaries and benefits drawn from taxpayer money. And the GOP, sadly, isn’t expending much energy to stop them.

Obama Economic Logic

Barack Obama on the interconnectedness of the American economy:

Mr. Obama said America needs a president who understands the “fundamental truth that’s been at the heart of America’s economic success: that each American does better when all Americans do better; that the well-being of American business and the American people are aligned.”

His policy proposal? He wants some Americans to do less well. Which will cause all Americans to do…well, you figure it out.
By the way, speaking of audacity, I just love Obama’s euphemism for breaking his pledge to use public financing for his campaign:

“We have created a parallel public financing system where the American people decide if they want to support a campaign they can get on the Internet and finance it, and they will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful.”

Republicans absolutely must use this language. School choice? A parallel public education system where the American people decide if they want to support a school they can finance it. Private retirement accounts? A parallel public retirement system where the American people decide if they want to support their retirement they can finance it.

Twisting the Knife

Well, if Senator Obama wants to get away from his remarks about small-town Americans at a fundraiser on Billionaires’ Row, his opponents aren’t going to make it easy for him. First up, John McCain, who calls Obama’s refusal to disavow his statements “defining” because it suggests that Obama really thinks that people’s values on fundamental issues are shaped by economics – and we know that if there’s one thing that’s a constant in McCain’s value system, it’s that there are things more important than money:H/T. Meanwhile, The NRCC is eager to use Rube-gate as an opening to prove Erick Erickson’s point by hammering vulnerable House Dems who may not be thrilled to align themselves with Obama:

It helps in dispelling the myth that somehow Barack Obama is good for Democrats down ballot. In the districts that many target Democrats won in 2006, they did so with the help of the kind of rural, church-going, gun-toting voters that Obama appears to disdain.

Then there’s Hillary, who wants us to know that Harry and Louise are, er, still bitter over this:

H/T.
And a thought: you know who might find that this is a good time to speak up for small central Pennsylvania towns? Lynn Swann, that’s who.

“You Are What You Read”

Ace had a fine point a few weeks back about media bias and the ways mainstream media figures respond to criticisms from the Right and the Left:

They don’t even bother responding to us on the right, even in a clear-cut and provable systemic and deliberate case of a bias such as this. They don’t even bother defending themselves. They just ignore us. Because they’re not even reading us and even if they did, what we think just doesn’t matter.
When various leftist bloggers attack MSM figures, the response is usually fairly immediate. Joe Klein spent weeks defending himself from lefty attacks; Paul Krugman just posted a blog entry defending himself against the charge he had dared to deny the divinity of Barack Obama.
But they don’t even bother acknowledging the most obviously-verifiable criticisms of the right. Not even an acknowledgment.
Politically, you are what you read, and culturally, you are whose opinions you give a crap about.
By their very reading habits and exquisite concern for the opinions of leftwing bloggers, they give the game away. I could spend three weeks attacking Joe Klein; I’d never get a response. Because not only is he not reading me, he also doesn’t even know anyone who may be reading me and might forward my criticisms to him.