New York Senate Shuffle

So, assuming Hillary Clinton is, in fact, leaving the Senate to become Secretary of State (and assuming, see here, here and here, that she can Constitutionally take the job), that sets off the next round of political merry-go-round for New York: who will be appointed by Governor David Paterson to replace her?
Recall the setting. Hillary was re-elected in 2006, defeating Yonkers Mayor John Spencer; her term would be up in 2012, but Gov. Paterson gets to nominate a replacement, who would then face the voters in a special election in 2010. Gov. Paterson was elected Lieutenant Governor in 2006 and took over as Governor earlier this year after Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer is up for re-election in 2010, meaning that all three major statewide offices will be on the ballot in 2010, two of the three filled with incumbents who would be facing the voters for the first time, an unusually fluid situation.

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Troubles For Hugo

Hugo Chavez: not that popular. Of course, Venezuela’s entire economy rests on the price of oil, and like other oil producers, he’s going to be a lot shorter of money in the near future. Chavez, of course, has used the combination of oil money with brutality and chicanery towards the opposition and electoral processes to stay atop Venezuela. With the money that supplies the carrot less plentiful, expect more of the stick.

Searching For Terror

Attorney General Mukasey’s fainting spell at his Federalist Society speech (and his heckling by a member of Washington’s state Supreme Court) have obscured an excellent speech on the Bush Administration’s approach to terrorism and the rule of law. It’s worth pondering in light of recent judicial developments, including from the Second Circuit (the federal appeals court sitting in Manhattan with jurisdiction over New York, Connecticut and Vermont) this morning.

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This Week In Weed

Apparently, marijuana-selling cafes near schools are too much even for the Dutch, and indeed there is broader concern that the cafes are, predictably, bad news:

The Dutch coffee shop policy has come under fresh criticism after the Dutch cities of Bergen op Zoom and Roosendaal, located near the Belgian border, said they will close all their shops within two years to combat drug tourism and crime.

Is this the last hurrah for the land of the Hemp Festival? Perhaps not, as apparently the inevitable result of the continuation of the legal-pot policy is on the way: the government becoming the nation’s monopoly dope dealer:

HOLLAND is pioneering cannabis plantations to supply the drug to coffee shops in a bid to cut out criminal gangs.
Dozens of Dutch mayors voted for the scheme at a “weed summit” to discuss how to enforce their relaxed drug laws.
Cannabis can be legally sold at licensed shops and people can carry up to five grams without prosecution. But cultivation and dealing is outlawed, which has created an illicit two billion Euro …annual trade. The plantations would supply cannabis legally.

Marijuana policy is a slippery thing to get hold of; there’s a libertarian case to be made for letting people waste their lives getting high on a drug whose ill effects are more similar to those of booze and cigarettes than to those of crack or meth or heroin, and of course there’s the fact that enforcement against such a widely-used and easily-grown substance tends by nature to be arbitrary, invasive, cost-ineffective and shot through with hypocrisy. But legalization, as the Dutch have had time to experience, nonetheless presents its own perils. Personally, I tend to think the issue ought to be left to the most local governments possible, and the Dutch experiment reminds us that a local-control regime can lead even the most libertine communities gradually to wake up and smell the potheads.

Billingsley Broken

Chad Billingsley has a fractured fibula from a fall on ice. Hopefully, the prognosis of being ready to go by the spring is on target. The Dodgers have a bunch of talented young pitchers, but as the one who has proven the most so far, Billingsley’s probably the single player – even beyond Russell Martin – most important to the franchise’s future, as a 23-year-old coming off his first 200 IP/200 K season.

Anti-U.S. Protest In Iraq

Peaceful protest. Which says it all, really, about how Iraq has changed since the days of Saddam; the fact that this is Sadr’s people doing what people in democracies do also tells us how far we’ve come in the last 2-3 years.
Next you know, they’ll be taking the subway. Or sending aid to California. Or this:

More here and here (at pp. 4-6). Unfortunately, instead of giving America credit for what our troops (and our allies) have sacrificed to make this all possible, we will now hear four years of this:

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Media Shocked To Discover How Farming Works

In a perfect emblem of (1) how insular the media really is and (2) the national spotlight that will continue to focus on the Governor of Alaska wherever she goes, Sarah Palin did one of those typical silly ceremonies politicians across the country get asked to take part in, and went and pardoned a turkey in advance of Thanksgiving. But while the President has a turkey brought to him, Gov. Palin went to the turkey, handing down the pardon from a barnyard in Wasilla, then giving a news conference to reporters.
Why did this end up in the national news, including a sneering report on MSNBC? Well, the turkey farm went on with its usual business this time of year of slaughtering turkeys for Thanksgiving tables, and cameras caught a farm employee doing just that in the background while Gov. Palin talked to reporters:

The NY Daily News pronounced this a “shocking video” (you can catch the longer video of the whole pardon ceremony from the NY Post, although the Post’s video – via the Anchorage Daily News – has to keep panning away from Gov. Palin to follow the guy slaughtering turkeys).
Folks, this is how farming works: you raise animals, then you kill them and eat them. Here in New York City, we don’t get much exposure to the business end of that process, but people across the country who have farmed or hunted know that it’s part of life, and has been as long as human beings have been eating animals. It’s not a bad thing to have some people in public life who aren’t shocked by where our food comes from.

Freezer Burn

Quin Hillyer tells the inspirational story of Joseph Cao, a Vietnamese immigrant who rose up from his youth in re-education camps after the fall of Saigon and lived to survive the decimation of his community in Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of his house in Hurricane Gustav, and is now the Republican challenger to William Jefferson. Cao has an uphill battle; we’ll see if the voters in that District are willing to give honest government a chance or if they’ll stick with the old loyalty to Jefferson.

Start Me Or Trade Me

Aaron Heilman wants to start in Queens or start somewhere else. Heilman’s failure last season at least takes away the “he’s too valuable in the pen” card – I personally think that (1) he needs a change of scenery so badly the Mets probably have to sell low and get rid of him and (2) the logical destination is St. Louis. Heilman’s 30 years old, reasonably healthy, has a history of some success but has lacked consistency and has lately been failing – that is, to a T, the profile of the kind of pitcher LaRussa and Duncan have made their careers with, from Dave Stewart to Eckersley to Chris Carpenter to Lamarr Hoyt to Isringhausen to Storm Davis to Looper to Lohse to Todd Stottlemyre, etc.

Moose It Or Lose It

While he was still issuing non-denial denials last night, it certainly looks all but official that Mike Mussina is retiring. It’s a shame for the game, and a decision Mussina may regret later on. Mussina can afford to retire, of course – according to Baseball-Reference.com, he’s made $144 million in his career – but even if he hung on 2 or 3 more years, he’d still be 42 or 43 years old and never have to work again, with maybe 40+ years of retirement ahead of him. But you only get a limited number of years to play Major League caliber baseball.
Sure, Mussina’s very unlikely to have another year like 2008. After a a 4.59 ERA in 2004, a 4.41 ERA in 2005, a 5.15 ERA in 2007 and a 5.75 ERA in his first four starts in 2008, Mussina, who turns 40 in December, can be forgiven for thinking that the pendulum will swing back down sooner rather than later, and deciding to go out on top. But still: the man has won 270 games and is coming off a 20-win season when he struck out 150 batters and walked 31. Mussina almost certainly deserves to go to Cooperstown, as discussed below, but from here on in, even another 5 or 10 or 15 wins is going to make his case that much easier, and it’s hardly improbable for him to get to 300 wins; given the exclusivity of that club, it’s hard to imagine a competitive professional athlete never looking back and wondering if he could have done that. Plus, of course, Mussina’s on the Yankees; if he drops back to a 5.00 ERA next year, he’ll still win games. And who wants to retire having pitched 8 seasons with the Yankees and never won a championship?
Buster Olney argues that it’s about the age of his kids:

Mussina’s logic in retiring now is that he really felt like that if he was going to continue playing, it was going to be because he would pursue 300 victories — and with 270 wins, he felt that realistically, he probably would have to pitch three seasons to get those last 30 victories. And he did not want to pitch three more seasons, not at a time when his youngest children are beginning to play youth sports and he can coach them.

Well, OK…I get that if his family’s in Pennsylvania he doesn’t get the same kind of time at home as if they were in New York, and he’d still be 3-4 hours from home even if he signed with the Phillies. But this is a guy who is off for three full months of the offseason, the kids can come to NY for the summer…it’s still not a bad life.
Anyway, assuming Mussina calls it quits, will he make the Hall? I’d assume he will – especially now that the “he never won 20” knock is gone, and probably the writers, ever suckers for a human interest angle, will give him a break on falling short of 300 because he could have if he’d wanted to.
And he should. Let’s look at the career records of pitchers since 1893 with between 250 and 300 wins, ranked by ERA+ (park-adjusted league ERA divided by career ERA; 100 is a league-average pitcher, higher is better; G+ is games over .500). I’ve left off here 5 such pitchers who pitched mostly or entirely before the mound moved back in 1893 (Al Spalding, Bobby Mathews, Tony Mullane, Gus Weyhing, and Jim McCormick), of whom only Spalding’s in the Hall, since there’s no point comparing Mussina to the standards by which those guys are judged:

Pitcher W G+ W% IP ERA+ HoF?
Randy Johnson 295 135 .648 4039.1 137 n/e
Carl Hubbell 253 99 .622 3590.1 130 IN
Bob Gibson 251 77 .591 3884.1 127 IN
Jim Palmer 266 116 .638 3948.0 126 IN
Mike Mussina 270 117 .638 3562.2 123 n/e
Bob Feller 266 104 .621 3827.0 122 IN
Red Faber 254 41 .544 4086.2 119 IN
Bert Blyleven 287 37 .534 4970.0 118 Out
Ted Lyons 260 30 .531 4161.0 118 IN
Fergie Jenkins 284 58 .557 4500.2 115 IN
Eppa Rixey 266 15 .515 4494.2 115 IN
Robin Roberts 286 41 .539 4688.2 113 IN
Tommy John 288 57 .555 4710.1 110 Out
Red Ruffing 273 48 .548 4344.0 109 IN
Jim Kaat 283 46 .544 4530.1 107 Out
Burleigh Grimes 270 58 .560 4180.0 107 IN
Jack Morris 254 68 .577 3824.0 105 Out

Now, there are two guys on this list who still don’t belong here – Randy Johnson will most likely cross the 300-win barrier next season if he’s healthy for even about a third of the season, and Bob Feller would probably have won 300 and had better career averages if he hadn’t missed more than 3 years of his prime to World War II. And of course, career totals aren’t the be-all and end-all (Roberts, in particular, is in the Hall for his dominant prime, not his career totals). That said, two things should jump out at you here: a lot more of these guys are in the Hall than out, and Mussina looks a lot more like the guys who are in with no questions asked than like the guys who are out (243-game winner Juan Marichal comes up as the most similar player to Mussina). He may be superficially similar to Jack Morris, but he’s really much more similar to Jim Palmer – all three had good offenses behind them (Mussina probably had less defensive support than Morris, and definitely less than Palmer), but Mussina’s record is pretty consistent with his ERAs. The worst you can say is that Mussina, in line with modern practice, has thrown a lot fewer innings, but recall as well that he’s thrown an extra 139.2 innings of postseason work. And he’s been fantastically consistent – 17 straight seasons winning in double figures with only one losing season, 9 straight 200-IP seasons, 12 straight with ERA+ better than 100. In today’s American League in particular, that’s more than enough for me.

Keep Counting Until You Win

If you want an illustration of why Republicans are so mistrustful of Democratic efforts to recount and recount and keep counting until they can overturn the Election Day results (and then immediately stop counting) – as Al Gore tried unsuccessfully to do, and as Christine Gregoire succeeded in doing in the Washington Governor’s race four years ago, look no further than Minnesota and Al Franken’s effort to pick off the 59th Democratic Senate seat by invalidating Norm Coleman’s Election Day victory.
I haven’t covered all the twists and turns of this lawyer-intensive effort, but a few to give you the flavor. Franken has been pressing to have all “undervotes” by Obama voters counted as votes for Franken on the theory that they are Democrats who undoubtedly meant to vote for Franken. The Orwellian name “undervote” aside, these are ballots where there’s no vote marked for the race Franken was running in. It was silly to suggest, in 2000, that it was impossible for voters who voted Democrat in other races to have decided they really didn’t want to vote either for Bush or for Gore – certainly plenty of voters found both candidates unsatisfactory, and if some of them accidentally forgot to vote, it was possible they meant to vote for Nader (or Buchanan – hey, if people could vote for both Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008, they can surely vote for any number of odd combinations). But it’s positively ludicrous to make this argument in this race. First of all, we heard all year about Obama’s “historic” appeal and whatnot…now we are supposed to believe that it’s impossible that anybody would vote for Obama and not be equally enamored of Al Franken? Second, even losing the state by 11 points, John McCain won 44% of the vote in Minnesota (1.275 million votes) – more than Franken or Norm Coleman, who each got 42% (1.211 million votes). Obviously, a fair number of people on both sides of other races were not as enthused about the two Senate candidates. One reason was that there was a serious third party challenger in the race – Dean Barkley, who got 15% of the vote. A truly accidental undervote could just as easily have been a Barkley voter. This is why it makes sense to count only actual votes as votes.
Then take a look at an example of a Coleman vote that Franken’s people say is unclear.
Now, after all that recounting, resulting in improbably large but not sufficient gains for Franken, what’s his response? “the Franken campaign said the race starts over today tied ‘zero-zero, with 2.9 million to go.'” In other words, no count matters except a count that gives the race to Franken. Repeat as often as necessary to create an excuse to have the count resolved not by Minnesota voters but by the Democratic majority of the U.S. Senate.
On a humorous note, Erick notes that “Franken said that he was ‘cautiously optimistic’ that he would prevail in the recount,” and contrasts that with this quote from one of Franken’s books:

Cautiously optimistic? That’s not good. That’s an optimist’s way of saying, “We’re screwed.” I’ve instructed my wife that if a doctor ever tells her that he’s “cautiously optimistic” about my test results, she is to pull the plug immediately.

Pull away, Al.

Mauer for MVP

As I have noted previously, this year’s AL MVP race is a mess because so many of the possible candidates got hurt. Carlos Quentin went down for the season from his own foolishness at a key point in the race for a team that went all the way to a 1-game playoff. Evan Longoria, the best player on the league’s best team, missed a month; Ian Kinsler missed more. Curtis Granderson played brilliantly upon his return from injury, but his team was already down for the count when he started his season. A-Rod, the defending MVP, led the league in slugging again but missed 24 games. Milton Bradley was the league’s best hitter, but he was only able to appear in 126 games (and the Rangers were happy to get that much from him).
Nor can you really give it to a pitcher. I’ve explained already why K-Rod is a silly MVP candidate. And Cliff Lee had a great year, but not the kind of super-dominant season necessary to give the MVP to a starting pitcher who threw 223 innings for an also-ran team (I did argue for Pedro as MVP in 1998, 1999 and 2000 – in retrospect, that 1998 column looks kinda silly – so I’m not averse in extreme cases to giving it to a pitcher).
What does that leave? I’m fine with giving the award to a player on a non-competitive team, but not if it’s a guy who doesn’t play a key defensive position and isn’t clearly the best hitter in the league, so sorting through Josh Hamilton (and his gaudy RBI totals), Miguel Cabrera, Grady Sizemore (neither of whom even had a particularly great year by their own standards), Aubrey Huff, and Nick Markakis is pointless. Among the contenders, Justin Morneau likewise was just another good first baseman. You want the award with your bat, you have to seize it.
Probably the best offensive player among the guys who stayed healthy all year and played for a contender was Kevin Youkilis, who batted .312/.390/.569, drove in 115 runs and grounded into only 11 double plays and pitched in as a respectable substitute at 3B in addition to playing first. Youkilis would not be the worst MVP, but fundamentally, it comes down to the two guys who were competitive with him with the bat and contributed more on the defensive side: Joe Mauer and Dustin Pedroia. Let’s look at the offensive tale of the tape:

PLAYER G PA Outs TB TOB Avg OBP Slg LgOPS OPS+ R RBI SB XO
Mauer 146 633 394 242 261 .328 .413 .451 .734 137 98 85 1 22
Pedroia 157 726 474 322 270 .326 .376 .493 .782 122 118 83 20 18

PA=Plate Appearances
TOB=Times on Base
XO=Extra outs (GIDP plus Caught Stealings)
LgOPS=Park-adjusted League OPS, from Baseball-Reference.com
OPS+=OPS/LgOPS

As you can see, you can make a case for either of them with the bat. Mauer has the 37-point edge in on base percentage; Pedroia has the 42-point edge in slugging. Pedroia scored 20 more runs and racked up 80 more total bases on the strength of 93 more plate appearances, but he also used up 80 more outs in those extra 93 plate appearances, so the marginal offensive value to the team was pretty much negative. On the other hand, that also translates to an extra 19 games in the field (Mauer caught 139 games), which is important when comparing two good defensive players at key defensive positions. Pedroia stole 20 bases, something Mauer at age 25 has already stopped doing. But note the LgOPS figure: Fenway was a much more favorable offensive environment this season, so while both players hit better at home than on the road, overall you have to apply a bigger discount to Pedroia’s numbers.
Baseball Prospectus’ VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), which rates hitters compared to a replacement-level player at the same position, rates Pedroia #3 and Mauer #4 in the league, with A-Rod at #1 and Sizemore at #2.
What about “clutch” performance with the bat? I’m not a great believer in clutch ability as a persistent trait, but there’s no question that in determining value in a particular season, it’s fair to look at who actually did come through in big situations. Let’s look how they hit with men in scoring position, men on base and in the late innings of close games:

PLAYER PA-RISP Avg OBP Slg PA-MoB Avg OBP Slg PA-L&C Avg OBP SLG
Mauer 185 .362 .465 .449 312 .353 .441 .456 105 .318 .429 .553
Pedroia 198 .307 .365 .466 320 .310 .367 .453 107 .368 .419 .526

Both fine performances, but advantage: Mauer for his superior batting and OBP figures with men on base, which is how he managed more RBI in fewer opportunities. Pedroia, of course, finished the season withg a flourish, but Mauer, with his team in a death struggle for the division title, batted .365/.414/.490 the last month of the season, a tough time of year for a guy who’s been behind the plate all season.
It’s a close call, but at the end of the day, I have to rate Mauer slightly ahead with the bat, given that most of Pedroia’s offensive advantages simply come from playing in a better hitters’ park and burning a lot of extra outs. And then you turn to the defensive side. That’s more subjective, given the difficulty of getting good defensive stats. The Win Shares system, which tabs Mauer as the AL MVP over Youkilis and Morneau (with Pedroia tied for sixth), rates him second only to Kurt Suzuki for the most valuable defensive player in the league (Suzuki’s the only catcher in the AL to catch more innings than Mauer), with Pedroia seventh. ESPN’s Zone Ratings peg Pedroia as the second-best AL 2B behind Mark Ellis; among the catchers, Mauer’s rated #3 behind Suzuki and Dioner Navarro in catching base thieves. The Fielding Bible +/- ratings rate Pedroia at +15, the fifth best 2B in MLB. Clearly, both guys contributed a good deal with the glove.
It’s hard to get a good comparison, but good catchers who can hit are really hard to come by, and ones who can stay in the lineup for 633 plate appearances are even rarer. And consider that the 25-year-old Mauer also did such a good job with the Twins’ young pitching staff – the overachievement of the Twins’ young arms (between Nick Blackburn, Scott Baker, Kevin Slowey, Glen Perkins and Francisco Liriano, the Twins gave 128 starts to four pitchers who had an average of 20 career starts and 126 innings entering the season) was a big part of how they ended up in the race to the season’s final day despite being buried by most commentators after the Santana trade. Catchers used to win a lot of MVP awards; that’s fallen out of favor (Pudge Rodriguez in 1999 is the only catcher to win the award since Thurman Munson in 1976; Mike Piazza couldn’t even win when he batted .362/.431/.638 and drove in 124 runs playing for a contending team in Dodger Stadium), but Mauer is pretty much the textbook example of how a catcher can make a big difference on several fronts, from getting on base to hitting in the clutch to cutting off the running game and handling the pitchers (he’s the closest thing we’ll likely see in our lifetimes to Mickey Cochrane). He could easily have been MVP two years ago when he became the first AL catcher to win a batting title; between Mauer’s offensive and defensive contributions, I’d say he should win it this year after being the second.
UPDATE: Pedroia wins, Morneau finishes second. The tools of ignorance once again get no respect. The good news? K-Rod finished sixth.
SECOND UPDATE: I suppose Pedroia’s strong second half was just too much to overcome. Pedroia was batting .262/.313/.365 on the morning of June 14, but from June 15 to the end of the season he hit .375/.422/.590 and scored 78 runs in 88 games. That sort of thing tends to leave an impression. I really have no idea what we should expect from Pedroia next year – my guess would be less power overall, but maybe a few more homers.

There’s No Tying In Football

Yes, it’s definitely Andy Reid’s responsibility to make sure his players know that it’s possible to have a tie in an NFL game. I mean, that doesn’t let Donovan McNabb off the hook for the fact that he still doesn’t know the rule:

“I guess we’re aware of it now,” McNabb said. “In college, there are multiple overtimes, and in high school and Pop Warner. I never knew in the professional ranks it would end that way. I hate to see what would happen in the Super Bowl and in the playoffs.”
Uh, they keep playing if it’s tied in the playoffs or Super Bowl. But McNabb apparently didn’t know that, either.

But Reid’s been McNabb’s coach since 1999. And he never covered this? Wow.

My NL MVP

The NL MVP balloting will be announced this afternoon. To my mind, there’s only one candidate: Albert Pujols.
There seems to be a fair amount of sentiment for Ryan Howard, as there was before the Mets’ collapse for Carlos Delgado, and for the same reasons….but Pujols is the best player in the league, he had arguably his best year with the bat, he’s a better defensive player and baserunner than Howard or Delgado or Lance Berkman, he doesn’t play in an offensive haven like Philly or Houston, and his team, with a deeply unimpressive collection of supporting talent, won 86 games, was within 2 games of first place on July 22 and 4 games on August 1, and within 2 games of the wild card lead on August 16 and 3 1/2 on September 9. Pujols led the league in Slugging and OPS, was second in batting and on base percentage, and despite missing two weeks with an injury he managed to lead the league in Total Bases and Times on Base and finish third in homers, fourth in RBI, third in hits, second in walks and fourth in doubles (Chipper Jones was the only really comparable hitter in the league in percentage terms, but Pujols had 641 plate appearances to Jones’ 534). There’s really no serious dispute that if you put Pujols on the Phillies or Mets in place of Howard or Delgado, the team with Pujols would have improved by several games, and the Cardinals would have gone nowhere.
Pujols batted .357/.462/.653 on the season, .335/.443/.613 on the road. Howard batted .251/.339/.543 on the season – a 106 point gap in batting average, a 123 point gap in OBP, and a 110 point gap in slugging. Howard may have had the great September, but Pujols batted .398/.491/.745 in August and .321/.427/.702 in September. With 2 outs and men in scoring position he hit .326/.592/.791. On the whole, Ryan Howard batted .276/.370/.638 with 18 HR and 51 RBI and 38 Runs from August 1 to the end of the season; Pujols, with a lot less help from his teammates, batted .363/.461/.725 with 16 HR, 49 RBI and 35 Runs over the same period.
Howard batted .241/.317/.514 on the road, making him an easier out on the road than Yadier Molina, Cristian Guzman, Brian Schneider, Kazuo Matsui, Aaron Miles, Marco Scutaro, Jeff Keppinger, or Rich Aurilia (Pujols led the majors in OBP on the road), and a less fearsome slugger away from Citizens Bank than Jayson Werth, Xavier Nady, Casey Blake, Cody Ross, or Mike Cameron (Pujols led the majors in Slugging on the road).
Pujols batted .354/.494/.638 with men on base, compared to Howard’s .309/.396/.648 (yes, Howard really did elevate his game with men on base – there is some reason for him being in this discussion). Pujols batted .339/.523/.678 with runners in scoring position, compared to Howard’s .320/.439/.589. The difference? Howard had 47 more plate appearances with men in scoring position (223 to 176) and 29 more with men on base (351 to 322). As with Francisco Rodriguez’ save opportunities, Howard is an MVP candidate almost entirely because of the opportunities his teammates gave him. He may have raised his game in those situations, but even then, as in the stretch run, he couldn’t raise it to Pujols’ level.
Berkman had a better year than Howard, but also doesn’t stack up to Pujols, and unlike Howard’s RBI advantage he did nothing better than Pujols except steal 18 bases. He batted .312/.420/.567, .306/.413/.514 on the road. He had a horrendous September, batting .171/.343/.289.
There are a number of other guys who have good arguments for being on the ballot besides Howard and Berkman – Jones, Delgado, Hanley Ramirez, Tim Lincecum, four other Mets (David Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana), Chase Utley, Ryan Braun, maybe even Manny down at the end of the ballot. But there’s only one choice for #1: Albert Pujols.

The Kiddie Porn Party?

Honestly, I read things like this post at Ace, and it makes me wonder how Republicans ever manage to win elections. Ace notes two stories about aides to Democratic Senators getting arrested for possession of child porn. My reaction to reading the story about the aide to Barbara Boxer this morning was to think that this was something we Republicans could run with. But really, I couldn’t get my head around making this a partisan issue with a straight face. And Ace, who is certainly not above bare-knuckles partisanship, can’t really either:

Personally I don’t think it’s a trend, or indicative of Democratic sexual habits, either. Some people are wired wrong, and it really doesn’t matter what philosophy such people embrace — if they get off on child porn, they’re going to get off on child porn.
But I do happen to know for a fact that had these been Republicans, the media would be greatly interested in the “trend.”

And therein lies our problem. Most of your major conservative bloggers and pundits are going to point to this sort of thing as a media bias story rather than going for the jugular by accusing the Democrats of all being a bunch of perverts. Because that’s exactly how the Left side of the blogosphere plays this sort of game – think of the Mark Foley or Ted Haggard stories in 2006, in Haggard’s case a guy most conservative bloggers had to go Google because we’d never heard of him. All you heard was how these particular screwups were emblematic of something larger. People lingered over this stuff, writing about the stories again and again and again. Foley got replaced in Congress with Tim Mahoney, who turned out to have a horribly messy sex scandal of his own involving payoffs to his mistress. We didn’t get 24/7 media saturation with Mahoney the way we did with Foley, not even the media looking into what the Democratic House leadership knew and when they knew it. Partly that’s because the national media doesn’t want to go there, but maybe, in some sense, because our hearts weren’t really in making it so. And until that changes, we’re still going to have a serious online activism deficit on the Right.

Swish

Excellent move by the Yankees to buy low and pick up Nick Swisher (don’t be fooled by David Pinto’s headline) coming off a terrible year in which he hit .219. Swisher’s only 28, he can play 1B and RF and even play center in a pinch; he was an excellent player in 2006 and 2007, and he had productive stretches in 2008 (in 71 games from June 3 through August 26, he batted .262/.374/.545, averaging 41 HR, 91 walks, 116 Runs and 116 RBI per 162 games). It was really just his batting average that fell off, as his Isolated Power was essentially unchanged from 2007. Swisher will always struggle with his average, but basically he’s a good player hitting .255, but not when hitting .220.
Pinto notes that Swisher particularly struggled on the road, so a change of park alone won’t help him. It’s certainly possible that he’s just washed up young, as sometimes happens to young players with his skill set (the Yankees had a similar failed experiment with Morgan Ensberg, who’s a couple years older, this season), but the odds favor a return to productivity, similar to Johnny Damon after his off-year at age 27. Swisher was probably miscast as a leadoff man, batting .210/.354/.324 in the role (by contrast, he actually hit better when playing center field than 1B, so you can’t blame the strain of a tougher defensive position). My guess is that he’s the kind of player who will particularly benefit from a lower-profile role down in the lineup, even on the bigger stage New York provides.
The Yankees got him fairly cheap (cheap enough that I’m left wondering why Omar Minaya didn’t go after him, given the Mets’ holes in the OF corners). Part of the reason, as usual, was money: Swisher “has three years left on a five-year, $26.75 million contract.” Wilson Betemit has his uses but is pretty much your classic expendable utility infielder at this point, and has been used mostly as a first baseman of late. Jeff Marquez, a 24-year-old starter who posted a 3.65 ERA with just 5.45 K/9 in 2007 at AA and a 4.47 ERA with 4.47 K/9 mostly at AAA this season, would appear to be a marginal prospect at best. 23-year-old Jhonny Nunez has a career minor league ERA of 3.64 and has pitched just 27 innings above A ball, and so can’t really be projected much; I don’t know anything about him but his numbers, but my guess is that a guy his age with good K rates and spotty control will probably get converted to the bullpen. As Pinto discusses, Kanekoa Texeira, the reliever the Yankees got in return, seems a much better prospect than either of them; he “does exactly what a team wants; lots of strikeouts, few walks and a minuscule number of home runs.”

The Budget By The Numbers

Time for some hard numbers to follow on this post discussing “fiscal conservatism” and provide some historical perspective on the GOP’s successes and failures in controlling taxes and spending. Here’s the budget presented as a percentage of GDP since 1947, along with the partisan control of the three elected branches. The fiscal year numbers generaly refer to the year after the budget was passed, as discussed below the fold – thus, for example, Reagan was elected in 1980, took office in 1981, and his first budget was Fiscal Year 1982. Given the ongoing nature of appropriations, 2008 and 2009 are still estimated numbers. I left off the estimates for beyond that, since those will be Obama’s budgets and nobody knows yet for certain what his budgets or the economy will look like, and anyone who makes any sort of fiscal projections that far ahead has no clue what they are doing. In addition to revenues, spending and the deficit I added in the national debt and expenditures on interest to give some perspective on the impact over time on the budget of deficit spending.
I continue to believe that the number that matters most is spending as a percentage of GDP, which peaked over 20% twice under all-Democrat governance (the first time, on the eve of the GOP wave of the 1952 elections), started booming regularly above 20% after the Democrats got their post-Watergate majorities in Congress (Fiscal Year 1975, actually the budget the year of Watergate before those elections when the White House was prostrate, saw spending spike from 18.7% to 21.3% in a single year) and peaked at 23.5% in the second year of the Reagan defense buildup (and while the economy was still in recession), when the GOP held the White House and the Senate, and bottomed out in 2000, Clinton’s second term, when the GOP held both houses of Congress and the economy was riding the dot-com boom. Spending under Bush – driven partly but not wholly by wars and entitlements – crept back up to pre-Gingrich levels, and looks to set new post-1994 highs since Pelosi and Reid took over. One of the lessons of which is the influence of Congress, and specifically the House, on the budget. We’re creeping back towards 21% for the first time since the last time we had unified Democratic governance.
As to taxes, fiscal years 1998-2000 under Clinton were the all-time high watermark for the nation’s tax burden, peaking at 20.9% of GDP and setting the stage for Bush to run on a tax cut platform. Taxes under Bush bottomed out in the first year of the full Bush tax cuts at 16.4%, the lowest share of GDP since 1951, but have been rising since then with economic growth through FY 2007 (unlike spending, taxes are directly linked to the economy, but the distribution of economic activity still impacts tax receipts). Obviously that will abate with the economy’s decline this year.
The deficit, of course, is the number you’re familiar with; it peaked the same year as federal spending (FY 1983), dropped by two thirds from FY 2004 to FY 2007, but is rising rapidly again since the GOP Congress left town. The national debt has never really recovered from its sustained growth from FY 1982-FY1996, but lower interest rates have made the costs of that debt much more tractable (which also means that if rates ever return to late-1970s levels, the federal taxpayer is doomed).
Where do we go from here? On spending, the item most directly under political control, I’ll be very surprised if we’re not above 22% by Obama’s second budget (and that’s assuming that the checks he plans to cut to non-taxpayers are not counted as “spending”). Tax revenues will probably drop in the next year or two, as the chaos in the financial and housing markets have slashed the tax base, and that’s before we get to the impact of rising marginal and investment tax rates.
Anyway, the bottom line here is pretty much what you’d expect: Republicans have had better luck cutting taxes than spending; a GOP Congress and specifically a GOP House is more important to fiscal discipline even than a GOP President (this would be even more dramatic if we looked at the size of the GOP caucus in the House); and unified Democratic governance is a recipe for growth of the federal government across the board.

Continue reading The Budget By The Numbers

Talking Down

So, I have reached the point with our two-and-a-half year old daughter where she actually talks down to me. Coupla examples.
1. She’s sitting on the toilet (having been potty trained earlier than her siblings) and wants me to read her a book, one with the “Wheels on the Bus” song in it. I can’t find it in her room.
Me: “I can’t find the Wheels on the Bus book in here. Do you know where it is? Can I read you another one?”
Her: “It’s the one with the stripes on the side. Now do you understand?”
2. She tells me she wants to play cars, but I can’t make out whether she said wanted to play cards or play cars.
Her: “I want to play cars”
Me: “Cards, or cars?”
Her (leaning her face in and speaking slowly and deliberately): “Say cars.”

“Fiscal Conservatives” Unclear On The Concept

The Washington Post, looking at the GOP rout in the Northeast, sells the hoary old myth that there is a large and coherent “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” faction that got ignored by the national party:

What happened, say some current and former Republican leaders, is that the national party moved away from the issues of fiscal conservatism, small government and lower taxes. As the base of the party shifted to the South and West, social conservatives and evangelicals moved to the forefront, and issues such as abortion, school prayer and gay marriage took primacy on the national party’s agenda — in the process turning off more moderate voters in this part of the country.
“I’m a Northeasterner. I grew up in New York City,” said Christopher Healy, chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party. “The evangelical members of the party have their issues, and their issues are important to them.” But here, he said, “the Northeastern brand of Republican philosophy . . . is based on smaller government and less taxes. We’re not interested in what’s going on in the bedroom.”
Former senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was the epitome of the moderate-to-liberal northeastern Republican — strongly pro-choice on abortion, a supporter of gay marriage and stem cell research, an opponent of the war in Iraq. As a fiscal conservative, Chafee opposed President Bush’s tax cuts.

I’ll leave aside for now the social-issue side of this argument (hey, when did Congress vote on school prayer?), the short answer to which is that smaller government and more federalism is the best way to reassure Northeastern voters that they can support social conservatives nationally without disturbing their own states’ social policies at home, and focus on the problem with the use of the term “fiscal conservative”: it has no fixed meaning.

Continue reading “Fiscal Conservatives” Unclear On The Concept

BUSINESS: Liar’s Poker Folds

I’ve been waiting for Michael Lewis to write the definitive account of the credit crisis. This is an excellent start.
Here’s a few of his vignettes on the housing market madness at the foundation of the crisis, although he has much more on how it worked its way through the financial system:

Continue reading BUSINESS: Liar’s Poker Folds

Holliday On The Road To Fremont

Now, we’re starting to get some real activity in the baseball offseason. The big news is a projected, non-finalized blockbuster deal sending Matt Holliday to the A’s for a package that reportedly includes Greg Smith, Huston Street and Carlos Gonzalez. I’ll try to look at the on-the-field angle once we have a final report of the players involved, but this is an interesting deal from the perspective of analyzing the A’s franchise, since it represents the A’s doing the big-market thing and packaging young players for an established star, represented by Scott Boras, who is going to command a huge salary on the free agent market after the 2009 season (much like when they acquired Johnny Damon, who promptly had a lousy year and then left). It remains to be seen whether Lew Wolff is planning to pull the trigger on a big contract for Holliday now that the A’s are heading for a new stadium and a new city.
On that subject, Fremont Mayor Bob Wasserman ran for re-election as a supporter of finally bringing the A’s to Fremont by 2012 (his opponent was against the plan), and Wasserman’s victory is widely seen as a victory for the new stadium. Wolff sees it that way, and is still hopeful that the park can be ready by 2011:

Despite challenges to building a new baseball stadium, Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff said “we can get it done” in Fremont.
Wolff said Monday at a luncheon of the Associated Press Sports Editors that, “We’re getting close to receiving the first drafts of the environmental impact reports,” according to ESPN.com. “We’ve run into lots of things, which every developer does in California.”
Some Fremont resident concern about traffic and public transportation access to the project, for example, has dogged the project.
Still, Wolff cited last week’s election results in Fremont as a development that broke in his favor. Voters in the city re-elected incumbent Mayor Bob Wasserman, a strong supporter of a plan by the Oakland Athletics to build a $500 million stadium surrounded by 3,150 residential units and enough retail and restaurant space to fill almost nine football fields.

The bad news:

Wolff would change the team’s name to the Athletics at Fremont, and the classic brick ballpark, scheduled for completion in 2012, would be named Cisco Field after the computer networking company.

Ugh. I suppose “at” conveys their transience better than “of” … given the franchise’s history, they may as well just call them the Traveling Athletics and be done with it.

How To Tell The “Culture Wars” Are Not Over

Peter Beinart had an article in the Washington Post the Sunday before Election Day arguing that the culture wars are over; according to Beinart, Sarah Palin was failing to connect with voters because

Palin’s brand is culture war, and in America today culture war no longer sells….Although she seems like a fresh face, Sarah Palin actually represents the end of an era. She may be the last culture warrior on a national ticket for a very long time.

Beinart is wrong – completely wrong. We can tell that the “culture wars” are not over because Democrats and liberals are still fighting them. We know culture warriors won’t disappear from national politics because one of them just won the presidential election. And if Beinart means that conservatives are losing the culture wars, that’s far from a certain bet, and one the Democrats would be ill-advised to take.

Continue reading How To Tell The “Culture Wars” Are Not Over

Score Another One For The Palin Critics

Apparently, according to Newsweek, Gov. Palin refused to appear onstage with a New Hampshire Senator and a New Hampshire Senate candidate because they are pro-choice.

Except that the Senator in question, John Sununu, is pro-life.

And except that the other candidate wasn’t running for the Senate (Newsweek may have missed this, but Sununu was up for re-election, so there were not two Republicans running for the job this year).

And except that she did do public appearances with both men.
And except that she did make public appearances with other pro-choicers.
But you know, other than getting basically every possible fact wrong, Newsweek’s doing OK there.

(H/T).

Not Letting Up

For conservatives and Republicans tempted to follow Fred Barnes and lay low a while, just notice what sites like the Huffington Post are up to these days: the #1 topic over at HuffPo right now, by the frequency of tags used, is “Sarah Palin”:
HuffPoTags.JPG
The Left will not let up its assault on Gov. Palin for any “honeymoon” period. We on the Right will indeed need both patience and perspective, as Barnes suggests, and elected Republicans will surely need to find some common ground with the new Administration. But we’re all adults here; let us not pretend that calls for “unity” are intended to be mutual.

Daley Thoughts

If you’ve read my Integrity Gap series on Barack Obama, or lengthier treatments like David Freddoso’s book, you will be familiar with what was probably the most scandalously under-reported story of 2008, which is President-Elect Obama’s deep and longstanding ties to machine politics in Illinois, most notably to the Daley machine in Chicago. You’ll also recognize two other key themes: Obama’s ties to politically well-connected housing interests ranging from slumlords like Tony Rezko to Beltway powerhouses like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to ACORN, and Obama’s practice of providing official favors to his benefactors.
Last week we saw the first sign of these dynamics playing out in Obama’s first staff hire, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago pol and former “senior adviser and chief fundraiser” for Mayor Daley who made hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting on Freddie Mac’s board during a time when the board was criticized by the SEC for failing to stop the company’s accounting irregularities and shady campaign donations. * *
Now, the second act: Obama reportedly wants Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a/k/a “Public Official A” in the Rezko indictment, to appoint as his replacement in the U.S. Senate Valerie Jarrett, the co-head of Obama’s transition team. Jarrett, of course, is a former Daley aide and Chicago housing developer who gave Michelle Obama her first big job working for Mayor Daley.
Let’s recall Jarrett’s involvement in Grove Parc Plaza, one of the conspicuous failures (at least from the perspective of the tenants, rather than the developers) among the housing projects built by Obama’s friends:

Continue reading Daley Thoughts

Joe Biden Was Right

…for the first time in decades, in fact, on foreign policy: within the first day after the election, Russia and Iran both rattled their sabers to start testing President-Elect Obama. And an Obama foreign policy adviser reacted immediately by backing down in the face of the Russian statement. (It will be good to have Obama start getting his advisers confirmed so we don’t have to keep sifting through his hundreds of foreign policy and economic “advisers” trying to figure out which ones speak for him).
Welcome to the big leagues, Mr. Obama. The rest of us have been given no choice but to depend on you.

Least Valuable of All

A little detour to the days of yore: Looking back in baseball history, no discussion of the least valuable players in any single season can be complete without Joe Gerhardt in 1885.
Baseball in the 1880s had a number of very good 1- or 2-year teams (such as those turned in by NL franchises in Detroit and Providence), but the decade was really dominated by three franchises: in the NL, the Chicago White Stockings (now the Cubs) of 1880-86 and the New York Giants of 1885-89, and in the American Association the St. Louis Browns of 1885-89 (the Browns moved to the NL after the AA folded in 1891, and are now the Cardinals).
The Giants, in fact, got the nickname that stuck with them largely from the 1885 team, which featured six Hall of Famers in their primes:
*Towering, slugging 27-year-old first baseman Roger Connor (at 6’3″ a huge man for the era) was probably the second-best hitter of the decade behind Dan Brouthers – Connor held the career home run record until Babe Ruth, although in those days power was mostly about doubles and triples, which he also produced in bulk – and Connor had his best season, batting .371/.435/.495 compared to a league Avg/OBP/Slg of .241/.284/.322, for an OPS+ of 198 (i.e., nearly twice as good as the league-average hitter).
*25-year-old catcher Buck Ewing, at 5’10” also on the tall side even for a mid-twentieth catcher, batted .304/.330/.471 (OPS+ 155). As Bill James has documented, Ewing’s peers regarded him as the best player in 19th century baseball; his batting stats don’t entirely bear that out, but in his prime he was as good a hitter relative to his leagues as all but a handful of catchers in the game’s history, and that’s before you get to his defense. We don’t have stolen base data before 1886 or caught stealings before the mid-teens, but in 2008 the average team stole 0.57 bases per game in the NL, 0.58 in the AL; in 1886, the NL average was 1.35. So, even adjusting for the open-ended definition of stolen bases in those days, there were a lot of people running. A typical modern catcher averages less than an assist every two games, with around half of those being caught stealings; Ewing, for his career, averaged 1.6 assists per game – a role much more active, between gunning down base thieves and pouncing on bunts, than today’s catchers (Ewing’s career range factor, measuring number of plays made per game, was 11% better than the league, and 8.6% better at third base, where he played part-time in his later years).
*34-year-old center fielder Jim O’Rourke had a year typical of his long career, batting .300/.354/.442 (155) and scoring 119 runs in 112 games. The team’s two other veteran outfielders batted .326/.346/.421 (146) and .293/.317/.362 (118).
*They also had 25-year-old shortstop John Ward, a Hall of Famer more for his pitching and his role as a union organizer and all-around poineer; Ward was the team’s second-weakest hitter at .226/.255/.285 (73).
*The team had two ace starting pitchers, both 300-game winners; against a league ERA of 2.82, 25-year-old Mickey Welch had his best season, going 44-11 with a 1.66 ERA, while 28-year-old Tim Keefe went 31-12 with a 1.58 ERA. The two accounted for 89% of the Giants’ decisions.
Overall, in the shortened seasons common at the time, the Giants cruised to an 85-27 record, for a .759 winning percentage, a 123-win pace in a modern schedule. (Their Pythagorean record was the same, reflecting the league’s second-best offense – by a run and a quarter over #3 – and by far its best pitching/defense team.) But there was one problem:
They finished second.
You see, the White Stockings, behind among others Hall of Famers Cap Anson, King Kelly and John Clarkson – the latter going 53-16 with a 1.85 ERA, the second-highest win total of all time – went 87-25 (.777), a 126-win pace by today’s schedule and good enough to take the pennant by two games. They didn’t have the Giants’ pitching depth and defense, or a hitter as good as Connor, but other than a .209-hitting half-time catcher they had no real holes in their lineup, and so scored a run a game more than the Giants. Despite winning the season series against the White Stockings 10-6, the Giants spent the last two thirds of the season looking up in the standings, and scored just 8 runs in three straight losses to Chicago at the end of September to ice the race.
In the middle of this you had the 30-year-old Gerhardt (himself 6 feet tall), who played every inning of every game at second, and batted a staggeringly anemic .155/.203/.195 (29), considerably worse than the team’s pitchers. Gerhardt scored just 43 runs, compared to 51 for the pitchers and a team average of 85 for the other 7 lineup spots. Amazingly for the day, he had more strikeouts than runs scored. He may not have been that fast, either – in a league where everybody ran constantly, he played everyday in 1886 as well and stole just 8 bases. This is just a breathtakingly disastrous offensive showing for a guy on a great team that was having a great season and coming up short. It’s hard to think of a team this good that had a guy whose OPS was less than a third of the league playing anything like every single game.
Did Gerhardt make up for it with his glove? At a remove of 123 years, based on the numbers alone, it’s hard to say. Manager Jim Mutrie, who won 3 pennants and more than 60% of his career games, must have seen something in him besides the absence of warm bodies on the rosters of the day to justify that awful bat. The Giants were a tremendous defensive team, which speaks well of Gerhardt – while they led the league in strikeouts handily (4.61/game compared to a league average of 3.75), the low ERAs testify more to a great record on balls in play – their defensive efficiency rating (% of balls in play becoming outs) of .701 was almost 30 points higher than that of the #2 team and good even for a 21st century team, let alone a team with guys playing the infield barehanded or wearing gloves that to the modern eye look more like Isotoners; their .929 fielding percentage was likewise 13 points above the nearest competition, and in those days fielding percentages really made a difference, with most fielders making an error one times in ten.
Individually, Gerhardt’s numbers don’t really stand out. His range factors and fielding percentages had been much higher than the league from 1877-1884, but in 1885 he was at .911 fielding percentage compared to .900 for a league-average second baseman, and 5.95 range factor compared to a league average of 5.70 – good but hardly great for a guy playing every inning. On the other hand, his range factors jumped back up in 1887 when he left the Giants, so some illusion created by the team context may be involved even beyond the fact that Keefe and Welch were comparatively high-K pitchers for the day.
Anyway, the evidence suggests that Gerhardt was probably a pretty good fielder, but it’s hard to see at this distance how he could possibly have been good enough to make up for that catastrophic showing with the bat, when a mere .210 hitter would likely have won the Giants the pennant.
Maybe Gehrhardt wasn’t as disastrous on both sides of the ball as the famous John Gochnauer, who in 1903 batted .185/.265/.240 (54) and made 98 errors at shortstop (with fielding percentages and range factors far below the league averages of the day) for an Indians team that somehow finished 77-63, and maybe he wasn’t as epically futile with the bat as Bill Bergen, who compiled a career OPS+ of 21 including three years at the end of his career as a starting catcher batting .139/.163/.156 (1), .161/.180/.177 (6) and .132/.183/.154 (-4). But in the annals of guys who turned in a total flop at the plate when even ordinary incompetence would have been the difference in a pennant race, Gerhardt’s place in history is surely secure.

No Class

The President-Elect wasted no time kicking Republicans when they’re down with his petty, graceless crack today (for which he had to apologize) at the expense of 87-year-old Nancy Reagan, last seen leaving the hospital a few weeks back with a broken pelvis:

Obama was asked at his press conference today if he’d spoken to all the “living” presidents.
“I have spoken to all of them who are living,” he responded. “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any seances.”

As Ben Smith notes, Obama’s left-wing talking points on this one weren’t even accurate. But hey, I guess sneering at the Reagans is “in” again.

Crichton On The Rags

Patterico goes to the archives with a quote from the late and very much lamented Michael Crichton on why we believe the newspapers even though we know better:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

One of my recurring themes on the media is that the preference for liberal politics – big government, social liberalism, political correctness, disdain of conservatives and the religious – is really only the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with the mainstream media. The state of sportswriting, business and legal journalism, pretty much anything that gets covered in the papers and on TV is subject not only to political bias but also to a whole host of other individual and institutional biases and prejudices and axes to grind, laziness, sloppiness, failures of substantive knowledge and logical reasoning…the blogosphere has no shortage of flaws of its own, but the fact that so many bloggers have had careers doing things (the law, the military, business, medicine, etc.) means in general that you get a class of people who have substantive knowledge and exposure to more rigorous disciplines than the typical journalist. Crichton, with his medical background, brought that same advantage to his craft as a novelist, and we were richer for his work (I read a whole bunch of his books; my favorites were The Great Train Robbery and Disclosure).

Rapid Robert

Bob Feller at 90. A nice profile of the last remaining star of the 1930s (Feller broke in in 1936 and went 24-9 in 1939; he and Stan Musial are reallly the only major stars left from the pre-war era). H/T.
Given how short a pitcher’s prime can be (Feller’s last year as a great pitcher was at age 28, although he managed a 22-8 record at age 32 and 13-3 as a sore-armed 35-year-old), Feller probably lost more of his best baseball to the war than any other great player; he missed three full seasons and most of a fourth to the war from age 23-26, after winning 24, 27 and 25 games the prior three years and 26 his first full year back, and retired 34 wins short of 300. Granted, we don’t know if he would have broken down earlier without that break in his years of carrying a major league workload (the man averaged 309 innings and 26 complete games a year from age 19-22), and we don’t know if he would have lasted longer if he hadn’t thrown 371.1 innings and 36 complete games for a team going nowhere his first full year back. When I ran my translated pitching stats project some years ago, Feller was one of four pitchers who really stood out as throwing a lot more innings per year in his prime than his contemporaries, the others being Robin Roberts, Phil Niekro and John Clarkson. He was and is, in any event, one of the all-time greats.

The Honeymooner

It’s rather poignant to watch the media love-fest over Obama’s ‘honymoon’ period – the fawning over Michelle’s pricey fashions, the breathless announcements of how wonderful everything will be as hope soars on clouds of euphoria – and wonder how the Bush presidency would have started if we’d been given a beginning like this, rather than the corrosive and unrelenting assault that consumed his presidency from Election Day 2000 onward. I don’t think there’s a better metaphor than the NY Daily News running front-page headlines about the Obamas bringing a dog to the White House while Bush’s dog Barney bites a Reuters reporter. Victor Davis Hanson: “When I hear a partisan insider like Paul Begala urging at the 11th hour that we now rally around lame-duck Bush in his last few days, I detect a sense of apprehension that no Democrats would wish conservatives to treat Obama as they did Bush for eight years.” H/T. Indeed, they expect that we won’t; they count on it. Ace, unsurprisingly, is having none of the pleas for unilateral unity:

Sorry, folks. No frakkin’ sale. We remember “Jesusland.” And stuff like this. And if you have a few hours, scroll through Malkin’s “Bush Derangement Syndrome” archive. We remember everything – being called racist warmongers, Christianist nutbags, racists, and all the rest of the vitriol you folks threw at us in your “AAAHHH CHIMPY MCBUSHITLER HALLIBURTON IS THE EVILEST” stage of political development.
You spent the last eight years engaged in a disgusting orgy of divisive political hatred and now you want to play nice and pretend we’re all united now? I for one am not going to treat President Obama the way you treated President Bush. That doesn’t mean, though, I’m going to just forgive and forget the fact that you’ve polluted the political landscape with your bile and patchouli-stanking spittle.

I’ve already said my own bit on how the Right should respond. We certainly should not have any illusions that a good deed today will ever be repaid. And we can all enjoy a laugh at the whiplash on the other side. Goldberg: “Alas, that [dissent is patriotic] standard only works for liberals. When conservatives dissent it’s called being ‘divisive.'” Lileks: “I’m off to the Mall to sell razor blades so people can scrape off their ‘Question Authority’ bumper stickers.”

Where His Bread Is Buttered

Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s first and most important staff hire as Chief of Staff: on the wrong side of the credit crisis, but the right side for his own pocketbook. Shocking, I know. The good news about making his first pick a hyper-partisan Chicago pol with a scandalous financial past is that it does away with the whole “new politics” pretense right from the outset. Even the NYT notes that “Democrats are second-guessing one of his first and most important post-election decisions: Why is he asking Representative Rahm Emanuel – “Rahmbo,” one of the capital’s most in-your-face partisan actors – to be his chief of staff?” Obama will be coming for the GOP with the long knives, and Republicans will need to go into that with our eyes open. Washington never changes, after all; only the names change, and so far those aren’t changing much either.
Then there’s Rahm’s plan for compulsory national service. And they said Republicans were the ones plotting to bring back the draft.
On the upside, Emanuel supported the Iraq War:

On Iraq, Emanuel has steered clear of the withdraw-now crowd, preferring to criticize Bush for military failures since the 2003 invasion. “The war never had to turn out this way,” he told me at one of his campaign stops. In January 2005, when asked by Meet the Press’s Tim Russert whether he would have voted to authorize the war-“knowing that there are no weapons of mass destruction”-Emanuel answered yes. (He didn’t take office until after the vote.) “I still believe that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, okay?” he added.

If that signals Obama sobering up on Iraq now that he actually has to govern, all to the good. The nation needs the Democrats to govern responsibly. It’s not like the anti-war faction has anywhere else to go, after all.

When To Hang It Up

Thomas Wayne at Dugout Central looks at where Ken Griffey might land next season. I’m just not sure he brings anything to the table at this point…I mean, would the Mets have use for Griffey to take Endy Chavez’ job, for example? Teams keep around reserve outfielders who can do specific things, not just old guys who might or might not have one last good season in them as a part-timer. He notes that they had Moises Alou this year (lotta good that did), but Alou was coming off hitting .341. I just don’t see the upside to giving him a roster spot at this point. He’ll probably sign somewhere, but the smart move at most is a spring training invite.

Being There

Let us consider five relief pitchers’ MVP candidacies:

Pitcher G IP ERA HR/9 BB/9 K/9 SLG% IR% SV%
A 69 84.0 1.82 0.21 3.54 13.18 .226 20.0 63.1
B 66 67.1 2.67 0.94 4.28 12.16 .314 35.7 90.0
C 69 73.0 1.73 0.74 3.45 12.08 .333 40.0 92.2
D 64 67.1 2.81 0.40 4.54 12.03 .306 41.2 87.0
E 76 68.1 2.24 0.53 4.48 10.14 .316 38.9 89.9

What would you say if I told you that only one of these pitchers even got a single vote for the MVP, even though Pitcher C pitched for a contending team (a second-place team that finished four games out of first place) and the other four all pitched for division winners? Could you guess which one placed in the MVP balloting?
You might guess A, who carried the largest innings workload, was clearly the most effective (most strikeouts, by far the lowest opposing slugging %), and allowed easily the fewest inherited runners to score. Then again, Pitcher A didn’t convert a very large percentage of save opportunities. He did finish fourth in the Cy Young balloting, though.
You might well guess C, who had the best ERA, the best save percentage, the second-most games and innings, and the fewest walks, although his home run rate was the second-highest. Unless you count him out for his team losing the pennant race. He, too, finished fourth in the Cy Young balloting.
What about Pitcher E? He appeared in the most games, and had a better ERA than Pitchers B and D, but he also pitched less than an inning per game, significantly fewer innings than A or C; his save percentage was only the third best on the list; his strikeout rate was easily the lowest without offsetting advantages in the walks or homers column.

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