Month: May 2003

WMD or Not WMD?

The conservative/pro-war side of the commentariat and the blogosphere has been disappointingly silent in dealing with the absence of findings of weapons of mass destruction. It’s understandable; the allies haven’t found what we expected them to find, and nobody wants to concede anything yet if we might learn a more favorable truth later.
I feel a long post on this coming on. For now, Kathleen Parker, one of the wisest and most temperate of conservative pundits, has some thoughts on the subject.

No Relation To Wendell

Highway robbery for the Red Sox in getting the talented 24-year-old fireballer Byun-Hyung Kim from Arizona for Shea Hillenbrand, assuming that Kim is healthy, that is (he just got off the DL). Granted, I’m heavily biased towards sidearmers, but Kim has a higher upside, he’s younger than Shea and still reasonably cheap (he makes $3.25 million; Hillenbrand’s a bargain at $407,000), and the Sox already have another guy who plays Hillenbrand’s position; Hillenbrand can’t do anything that Bill Mueller can’t. I think this is an absolute steal. Granted, Hillenbrand’s guts & attitude have made him a better player than he looks on paper, but he’s still a guy who won’t have a great average or power numbers, never walks, doesn’t steal bases and isn’t a great fielder. In the minors he was a mediocre hitter, an awful fielder and often injured. It’s true that pennants have been lost for the want of guys like Hillenbrand, but he’s still basically a much easier commodity to replace than Kim.
I liked Kim as a starter, and it appears the Sox may stick with that even if they could use a closer. Kim has a less than stellar record against the Yankees, but then, Scott Brosius isn’t around to torture him anymore.
Baseball Prospectus lists most-similar players to each guy at same age. Hillenbrand’s #1 is Frank Malzone, but #4 is more intriguing for history-minded Sox fans: Danny Cater. Think he’d be worth dealing for a closer?
Kim’s comps include Bruce Sutter (#2), Tom Hall and Luis Tiant (his most similar, by far, is Scott Williamson).

Joe D.

Great article on Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak — not the 56-game streak, but the professional-record 61-game streak he had in the Pacific Coast League in 1933 (link via Clutch Hits). What’s particularly impressive is that the streak started when Joe D. was basically a nobody, a right fielder batting .250 two months into his first professional season and playing in the best minor league in the country. 70 years ago today was his coming-out – DiMaggio had gone 1-4 on May 28 in the second game of a doubleheader, but May 30 was the turning point:
DiMaggio went 6-for-10 — with a double, triple and home run — in a doubleheader in Seattle. In those days, a series was a week-long affair, and DiMaggio recorded multiple-hit games in four of the Seals’ next five against Seattle.
A star was born.
One thing that almost certainly made the streak easier, especially for a raw rookie, was the PCL’s practice of 7-game serieses, which meant seeing the same starting pitchers twice in a week.

The Man Who Came To Dinner

Lately I’ve been thinking that the one good thing about Hillary! and her presidential ambitions is that it would keep Bill from campaigning for a repeal of the 22d Amendment.
Naturally, I was wrong.
I’m actually not opposed, in principle, to Clinton’s proposal (changing the limits to two consecutive terms rather than two terms per lifetime). But still . . . I mean, please, just go away.

Times-Bashing Roundup

You may have seen some of these:
Andrew Sullivan: “The choice at the Times is between frauds and ideologues.”
From the Ombudsgod: a link to Edward Jay Epstein with a battery of factually-challenged NY Times stories.
David Pinto on how the Times scandals are affecting the sports page.
Lileks:
“Yes, you can take some stringer’s notes and compose a story, but the difference between that an[d] a piece you wrote from your own research is the difference between a Penthouse Forum letter and your recollection of your wedding night.”

Dunn Strikes Out

Joe Sheehan’s all upset about Bob Boone benching Adam Dunn over his strikeouts and low batting average (“every game he starts on the bench is another notch in the argument that Boone should be fired. “). I’d agree with Sheehan that Dunn should, as a general matter, be playing everyday given his .569 slugging average. But consider:
1. It’s May. If Boone is trying to get a message to Dunn, now’s the time to do it.
2. Dunn entered the series in Atlanta in a horrendous 2-for-22 slump.
3. Dunn’s .321 on base percentage is too low for a corner outfielder, something I’m sure Sheehan would recognize if Dunn was hitting .285. Because Dunn’s hitting .222, Sheehan’s quick to defend him on a theory of “Boone’s overempasizing batting average.” Yeah, maybe; but Dunn does need to hit better than .222 if he’s going to get on base enough for the Reds to get anywhere. If a benching for a few days in May gets his attention, that may well be worth it.

Hating Clemens

Bill Simmons was back in the zone Tuesday with some classic Clemens-hating smack talk. Michele at A Small Victory agrees (along with a great picture), and she’s a Yankee fan. David Pinto adds his two cents. Art Martone hands over the soapbox to Lyford for a thorough attempt to rebut Art’s homage to Clemens as the Red Sox’ greatest pitcher (I still agree with Art on that one).
I’d raise an interesting question for Sox fans, though: would you rather have had Clemens’ career with the Sox, followed by his post-Sox career, or Dwight Gooden’s career with the Mets, followed by his post-Mets career? Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that the Mets won a World Series with Gooden (in which Gooden pitched terribly but to which Gooden contributed heavily by his brilliant pitching in the NLCS)?
I’d take Clemens, even with the bellyaching and the betrayal. Gooden was even more disappointing; he gave the Mets some great years in the 80s, but he was in steep decline by the time Clemens hit his peak (1990-92). He was a huge embarrassment with his drug problems. Unlike Clemens, he’ll never make the Hall of Fame. He even threw in a no-hitter, something the Mets have never had, with the Yankees.

Jeter and the Yankee Staff

What ails the Yankees? Many things, at the moment; among others, they remain next to last in Major League Baseball (to the woebegotten Rangers defense) in converting balls in play into outs. But since I’ve raised this issue before, I thought I’d ask again: what is Derek Jeter’s glove worth?
Through 5/27/03:
Yankees with Derek Jeter in and out of the lineup:
OUT: 3.53 ERA, 0.30 URA, 9.02 H/9, 0.55 HR/9, 2.32 BB/9, 7.68 K/9, .305 BIP%
IN: 5.05 ERA, 0.42 URA, 10.21 H/9, 0.84 HR/9, 3.00 BB/9, 6.79 K/9, .317 BIP%
(URA=Unearned Run Average)
Here are the raw totals:
OUT: 23-10, 295.1 IP, 296 H, 18 HR, 76 BB, 252 K, 126 R, 116 ER, 278/912 BIP
IN: 7-12, 171 IP, 194 H, 16 HR, 57 BB, 129 K, 104 R, 96 ER, 178/562 BIP
CONCLUSION: Well, you can’t blame Jeter for the dropoff in strikeouts and the rise in walks and homers by Yankee pitchers. And the sample size is still fairly small; the Yankee offense has dropped off from 5.93 R/G to 5.16 R/G in the same period, and nobody would argue that Jeter is bad for the offense. But with Jeter in the lineup instead of raw, error-prone rookie Erick Almonte, the Yanks have given up a noticeably higher percentage of hits on balls in play (.317 to .305) and allowed 40% more unearned runs. Clearly, Jeter’s return has not been part of the solution.

Judges And Politics

Josh Marshall, who’s been hung up on redistricting in Texas lately, argues:

Many of those who are defending — professionally or otherwise — the DeLay power-grab are arguing that courts simply should not be involved in drawing congressional maps, period. . . . we have an established system and DeLay & Co are changing it . . . the courts-out-of-elections mantle hangs rather heavy on a crew whose president owes his office to a judicial ruling.

Hmmmm. Dr. Marshall’s memory of Florida 2000 is rather selective indeed if he expects us to believe that Al Gore would have won Florida if only the courts hadn’t gotten involved! For those who have forgotten: there was a long established practice in presidential races of respecting the Election Day outcome, even when (as was the case in 1960 but not in 2000) there were credible bases to believe there had been fraud by the winning party. It was the Bush camp that argued all along that the courts shouldn’t be involved in picking presidents, and it was the Gore team that pushed at every turn for a larger role for the court system, including asking the courts to disregard express statutory language enacted by the Florida Legislature and to disregard rulings of the Florida Secretary of State, to whom substantial authority was delegated under the Florida statutes.
In a similar vein, Yale law professor Jack Balkin has been arguing on his blog lately that Democrats are justified in breaking down traditional barriers in another way — by filibustering appellate court nominees on purely ideological grounds — because of their anger over Bush v. Gore. Balkin makes the hypocrisy/inconsistency charge a centerpiece of his argument that

[t]he five conservatives were the least likely, one would think, to extend the Warren Court’s equal protection doctrines in the area of voting rights. Indeed, one member of the majority, Justice Scalia, is on record as opposing novel interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause that undermine traditional state practices. It is hard to imagine that if the parties had been reversed-and Vice-President Gore had been ahead by 537 votes-the five conservatives would have been so eager to review the decisions of a Republican Florida Supreme Court that was trying to ensure that every vote had been counted. The unseemliness of Bush v. Gore stems from the overwhelming suspicion that the members of the five person majority were willing to make things up out of whole cloth-and, equally importantly, contrary to the ways that they usually innovated-in order to ensure a Republican victory . . . The Justices could have avoided the appearance of a conflict of interest by simply remaining out of the fray . . .

(emphasis added). The quotation is from a Virginia Law Review piece by Balkin and Prof. Sanford Levinson.
Of course, “traditional state practices” is precisely what was not at issue in Bush v. Gore; the central and inescapable fact about the case is that it involved the Court’s review of a judicial remedy, one crafted after the election, without any statutory basis, without precedent in history, and without anything but arbitrary standards to guide its implementation. I’ve posted here my reaction to Bush v. Gore written the day after it was decided, and the more I read about the case, the more I stand by my initial gut reaction to the decision; here’s the key excerpt:

“[T]he Court went out of its way to limit this to the facts at hand, and to show how the current system wasn’t so much discriminatory as it was lacking in any rational basis. Far more to the point, as far as consistency with conservative principles is concerned, the Court made clear that its decision does not (at least on its face) apply to the conduct of elections generally (“The question before the Court is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different systems for implementing elections”). Rather, the Court’s decision focuses in on, and arguably applies a higher standard for, judicial proceedings to review elections (“[W]e are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied”) (emphasis added). The net result is to counsel state as well as federal courts to be more circumspect in the future in ordering remedies in election cases where the remedy has not been explicitly set out in advance in a statute. It is this aspect of the decision that essentially constitutionalizes the James Baker Doctrine: you can’t go to court to change the rules after the election.”

In that sense, the Court’s decision is deeply and profoundly conservative, and it is not surprising at all that the conservatives on the Court would have found the Florida court’s approach so troubling, and so hazardous in its gravtitational pull of courts into what Balkin calls the “low politics” of partisan side-taking. By imposing a higher standard of scrutiny on post hoc judicial remedies in election cases, the Court has (admittedly, at some cost to its own short-term credibility with the public) erected a barrier to the use of courts, state or federal, in such adventures in “low politics” in the future.
As to the idea that the Justices could have “remain[ed] out of the fray” — that’s an awfully convenient bit of ledgermain, given that the matter had already been pushed into the court system. This is why I find it particularly laughable that some commentators have invoked the political question doctrine in this context: the doctrine says that some issues are just not suitable for courts to resolve. How can you apply that to say that courts can not review what are judicially crafted remedies in the first place?
What was clear to me at the time — something that should have been familiar to any practicing litigator, though perhaps less so to a law professor — was the extent to which the Court was reacting to the procedural posture of the case and the behavior of the court below.

Continue reading Judges And Politics

Sell High?

Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t, but Robby Alomar’s putting together a decent year; even after a fairly slow week, he’s still sporting a .361 OBP and a slugging average near .400, he’s leading the team in walks and runs scored, and he hasn’t been caught stealing in 5 attempts. Lesson: sell. Alomar’s still got a big name, and with just this year on his contract, a contending team should be willing to take a flyer. Candidates:
Minnesota: Not known for big spending, and they’ve got a young 2B with a good glove in Luis Rivas. Still, Rivas’ .285 OBP leaves much to be desired. Not likely – with that division, why spend the money now? – but the Twins could be more interested come late July, when they’d have to eat only 2 months salary.
Oakland: Similar story, and less likely, but they did spring for Ray Durham last year. Depends how Mark Ellis is faring in July.
Philly: They’re certainly spending, and a rebuilding team doesn’t worry about trading aging veterans at the end of their contracts to divisional rivals. Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, moving Placido Poilanco to a utility role would be an upgrade. Another team that’s likely to wait it out.
Cubs: The Grudz is batting over .300, so no hurry here, either. But with a mediocrity like Grudzielanek at second and Bobby Hill buried in the minors, Alomar would be a good fit for the stretch run.
St. Louis: This one has been rumored, but it only makes sense if Fernando Vina’s really finished. They, too will wait and see, but they may be more interested in Benitez; with Izzy still out, the team leader in saves is Cal Eldred.
Los Angeles: Maybe your best bet; the Dodgers are starved for offense. But Alex Cora, despite his pre-2002 history, has actually hit well last year and this one. Thus, again, they’ll be in no rush.
CONCLUSION: Mets have little choice but to hang on to Alomar and hope he’s still motivated and playing well in July. If he’s hitting above .280 on the 4th of July, there will be plenty of takers.

Um, Yeah.

What Meryl said. Of course, assassinating Arafat isn’t necessarily the most practical option; we could always arrest him, since the U.S. has evidence of Arafat ordering the murder of U.S. diplomats in the early 1970s, when (I could be wrong about this) the U.S. didn’t grant him any special diplomatic status.
The Bush Administration, of course, will do no such thing, and for reasons of the larger picture, that’s probably for the best. But for Israel, not so much.

Alfonse D’Chirac

If you think about it, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder are the Al D’Amato and Gray Davis of Europe. Chirac, like D’Amato, is a machine politician who’s gotten away with being a little bit cheesy and a little bit sleazy by dint of boatloads of chutzpah and a talent for finding opponents who self-destruct in divisive battles with extremists and third-party candidates.
Schroeder, like Davis, is a hack with no redeeming virtues, neither liked nor respected even by his supporters; like Davis, his main skills are demonizing foreign opponents (Bush, Enron) and lying about the budget.
Anyway, Pave France has a hilarious take on Chirac’s latest excellent adventure.
(Link via Samizdata)

A Barn-Burner

Great Mets-Braves game tonight, and proof positive that you don’t always need a good team to have good baseball games. But having an aggressive team, a team that actually cares, helps an awful lot. Of course, almost any game that ends with the tying run thrown out at the plate is, by definition, a good game.
Maybe the Mets should play Burnitz in center more often, given the grand slam tonight. Then again, it was the defensive switch to Shinjo that made the difference at the end of the game. Either way, it’s an embarrassment to Roger Cedeno to see an aging power hitter covering center while Cedeno is stuck in right.

Son of Blair

Reading the New York Observer’s bizarre interview with Jayson Blair and its story on his quest to make money off his own misdeeds brought to mind a few points:
1. I had initially been deeply skeptical of why the U.S. Attorney’s Office would get involved in something like this, where you’d think that Blair had been punished enough by being fired, publicly humiliated, and almost certainly never working in journalism again. Now, I’m not so sure; at a minimum, there’s got to be a way to keep him from laughing all the way to the bank with the proceeds from a book based on his fraud.
2. Consider Blair’s taunt: “I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism . . . They�re all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them.” Maybe Tim Blair’s theory was right: “if I worked for the NY Times, I’d be tempted to destroy its credibility too. Here’s to Jayson, the Evil Blair, bringing them down from the inside!.”
3. An alternative and banal explanation for the federal prosecutors’ interest in the case: Blair freely admits he was using cocaine. Let’s say they drop the anvil of a big grand jury investigation on him over the fraud on the Times, then they start asking: hey, maybe you can tell us who your dealer was. A plausible explanation of the feds’ motives? Maybe.

Solum v. Balkin

If you haven’t been following the ongoing debate between law professors Lawrence Solum and Jack Balkin about the proper method of constitutional adjudication and judging in general, I’d suggest you go and catch up: Solum’s latest salvo, which has links to the earlier posts by both sides (scroll down to Tuesday’s post on “Fear and Loathing in New Haven” if the Blogger links are busted) is an excellent illustration of how serious legal theory and jurisprudential philosophy can be written in a style that is chatty, conversational, accessible, and immensely entertaining. Balkin’s last post argued, in a nutshell, the usual argument of legal academics on the left: that you have to drink their Kool-Aid and abandon hope of following the Constitution as it was written, or you don’t get a lot of the results that we’ve come to take for granted as popular precedents. I had read this and thought, “I know this isn’t right, but I can’t quite put my finger on the precise problem with it.” Solum has the answer.

The Clinton Bitter-Ender

Christopher Hitchens’ review of Sid Blumenthal’s new book is now available online. Fortunately, adherents of the permanent campaign to the contrary, someone still remembers what the battles of that sorry era were all about. Hitchens details the extent to which Blumenthal has given himself over so thoroughly to Clinton that he is unable to even address many of the most inconvenient facts. My favorite passage:
I always thought that it was very clever of Clinton to make a mystery where none existed about when, and even where, he had touched Monica Lewinsky. Since his denial was made partly under oath, and involved a legalistic definition even of certain orifices and appendages, it necessitated a minute inquiry. And this allowed Clinton’s defenders to paint his critics-his critics-as “obsessed with sex.”

The Agenda-Setter

Or, as Glenn Reynolds would put it, oh, that liberal media: Michael Kinsley admits what conservatives have been complaining about for years: the vast influence of the New York Times in setting the agenda for news organizations everywhere, a position of “near-universal dependence” that gives the increasingly left-leaning Times power far beyond its own circulation:
[M]uch or even most American news reporting and commentary on national issues derives – uncredited – from the New York Times. . . Even if you don’t read the Times yourself, you get your news from journalists at other media who do. The Times sets the news agenda that everyone else follows. The Washington Post and maybe one or two other papers also play this role, but even as a writer who appears in the Washington Post — a damned fine newspaper run by superb editors who are graced with every kind of brilliance, charm, and physical beauty – I would have to concede that the Times is more influential. . . it is the imprimatur of the Times or the Post that stamps the story as important before sending it back down to other papers – as well as up to the media gods of television.
In fact, I would go so far as to cite both the Times’ longstanding liberal slant and its influence on the national media agenda as Conservative Truth #2 in my continuing series.

The Base

Instapundit cites an article worrying about Bush’s ability to motivate the conservative base. This is mostly bunk. The article cites conservative worries about the GOP’s tepid efforts to cut spending and the growth of government, but this isn’t nearly as important to the base voters as war, judges and taxes. Concerns about the judiciary are more significant, but I have no doubt that that issue will escalate as we grow closer to 2004, especially if one or more Supreme Court slots open up. And the idea that Bush’s foreign policy is unpopular with the GOP base is just unhinged from reality.

Mike on OPS’

Mike’s Baseball Rants runs the numbers to see what is, historically, the best measure of offense: batting average, on base percentage, OPS, or Rob Neyer’s modified OPS’, which weights OBP more heavily than SLG. Unsurprisingly, for most of baseball history, it’s OPS’ – OPS – OBP – SLG – Avg.
A couple interesting observations:
1. Historically, OPS beats plain old OBP by only a narrow margin.
2. As I noted in my May 2001 column on the Ichiro phenomenon, batting average really was the best measure of offense back in the 1870s, but the changes in the game in the 1880s & 1890s (dropping the number of balls for a walk from 9 to 4, cutting down errors, moving the mound back) brought enough walks and extra base hits into the game to change that.
3. The correlation of any of the stats to team runs scored was lower in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1910s than in later years, and dropped off sharply again in the 1980s & 1990s. Slugging average also had a brief heyday in the 1980s. Why? This is just a guess, but I think that the Earl Weaver-Gene Mauch tug of war had something to do with it: stolen bases and other 1-run strategies were on the rise in the 1960s-70s, but by the 1980s, there were large divergences between teams in the use of such strategies, and that may have undermined the relationship that would exist between traditional base-advancement measures and team scoring (i.e., some teams were losing a lot more baserunners than others).
Or maybe it was just that the Red Sox hit into so damn many double plays.
Either way, I’d be interested to see whether there’s a particular type of team that tended to deviate more from the expected relationship between OPS’ and runs.
(Mike’s post is the one titled “You’re So Money, Baby!”, if you have trouble with the Blogger permalinks. Mike, come over to Movable Type: all the cool kids are doing it! Make you feel good!)

Rocket Fumes

So Roger Clemens wants to go in the Hall of Fame as a Yankee. Thankfully, the Hall took back the decision over what hat is on the plaque after the controversy over Dave Winfield basically auctioning off his hat to the Padres.
Now, if Clemens said “Blue Jays,” you might consider it reasonable. Maybe. But Clemens’ HOF ticket was fully written by the time he came to NY. I mean, seriously:
Clemens’ career in Boston: 192-111 (.634), 3.06 ERA
Clemens’ career in Toronto: 41-13 (.759), 2.33 ERA
Clemens’ career in NY through 2002: 60-27 (.690), 4.01 ERA
Clemens’ best ERA in NY has been 3.51, half a run higher than his career ERA before he arrived in NY. Nobody can seriously think he should enter the Hall in a Yankee hat, and it’s pure spite against his old teams that Clemens would even consider such a thing.

OTHER Sorenstam’s Gamble

I just don’t see the point in the PGA trying to ban women in response to Annika Sorenstam entering a PGA event, or in Vijay Singh refusing to play against her. This isn’t Billie Jean King playing a washed-up has-been and declaring “victory” in “the Battle of the Sexes,” and it isn’t about a woman demanding a right to special treatment. As long as she hits off the same tees as the men, she has every right to play. Phil Mickelson said it best: “I look at the PGA Tour as being the tour for the best players in the world,” not just the best men. Men will always dominate the PGA anyway; where’s the harm in letting the best woman see how far she can go?

Kinney Can

Far from the madding crowd, one of this year’s real success stories is former Minnesota Twins pitching prospect Matt Kinney, having a fine year for the Brewers. With a solid outing last night (8 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 0 BB, 6 K) Kinney is now 3-3 (an accomplishment for the 16-29 Brew Crew) with a 3.43 ERA, and his overall line is more impressive: 57.2 IP, 44 H, 6 HR, 19 BB, 51 K.
The 26-year-old Kinney’s had little prior success at the major league level, although the Baseball Prospectus blamed last summer’s struggles on shoulder tendinitis that sapped his velocity. Hopefully he can handle the increasing pitch counts that are coming his way: 108, 109, 91, 110 and 116 in his last five starts. That’s still a pretty moderate workload, but if he hangs around 115 most nights out, that may start to take a toll on a guy who’s not accustomed to a full season major league workload.

The Poor 44, Part 2: 113-118

This is Part Two of a series on the worst-hitting everyday players of 2002.
108-124: The Weak Spots (Stats listed as Avg/OBP/Slg (OPS))
113 Placido Polanco Age 27
2002 with Cardinals/Phillies: .288/.330/.403 (733 OPS) (604 PA)
2003 with Phillies: .274/.359/.416 (775 OPS) (Projects to 453 PA)
Polanco’s actually playing everyday, but his time has been restricted by injury. You can do worse than Polanco, as we shall be reminded as we descend the list. And nobody’s more aware of this than the Phillies, who for the last several seasons have suffered through Marlon Anderson (695 OPS) at 2B. Last season, Polanco played 131 games at third base; this season, he’s been used exclusively at second, which immediately moves him from “critical lineup hole” to “slightly subpar player.” On top of that, Polanco – always a good hitter for average – has been walking more this season (he’s also been hit by 5 pitches compared to 8 all last year), and as a result has brought his OBP up to a respectable .359.
VERDICT: Polanco’s still better suited to utility duty; he’s still not a guy who will hit for much power, draw a lot of walks or hit .300, but he murders lefthanded pitching (.368 this year, .341 the prior 3 seasons). But the Phillies have intelligently (if expensively) addressed the situation by moving Polanco to second to replace Anderson with David Bell. That, at least, is progress.
114 Paul Lo Duca Age 31
2002 with Dodgers: .281/.330/.402 (731 OPS) (614 PA)
2003 with Dodgers: .295/.364/.411 (775 OPS) (Projects to 589 PA)
Yes, Paul LoDuca; the rookie sensation of two years ago has left those 25-homer days only a memory. LoDuca hit .281 last season as an everyday catcher in Dodger Stadium, and there are some indications that he was playing hurt.
VERDICT: While his overall numbers are disappointing, you wouldn’t consider replacing him, and the Dodgers – short as they are on bats – haven’t. They did bring in a shell of the former Todd Hundley, who’s scarcely played. LoDuca, like Polanco, has helped himself this season by walking more, and if that holds up, he’ll recapture a little more of that 2001 magic.
115 Kevin Young Age 34
2002 with Pirates: .246/.322/.408 (730 OPS) (518 PA)
2003 with Pirates: .217/.254/.367 (621 OPS) (Projects to 232 PA)
116 Jeffrey Hammonds Age 32
2002 with Brewers: .257/.332/.397 (729 OPS) (500 PA)
2003 with Brewers: .158/.220/.289 (509 OPS) (Projects to 151 PA)
Ye wasteful spendthrifts, repent! Young and Hammonds are still working off their horrendous contracts, although “working” for Hammonds is a relative term; he’s back to his usual position on the DL. The Pirates have at least taken Young out of the lineup, albeit to replace him with a younger Kevin Young (Randall Simon).
VERDICT: These guys are done as everyday players. Anyone with half a brain would have seen that they were never worth the many millions these purportedly poverty-stricken teams showered on them. The Brewers may try to play Hammonds when healthy, but John Vander Wal (even at his own advanced age) remains a better option with the bat, and Hammonds lacks the glove to challenge the weak-hitting 26-year-old Alex Sanchez in center field.
117 Adrian Beltre Age “24”
2002 with Dodgers: .257/.303/.426 (729 OPS) (624 PA)
2003 with Dodgers: .190/.237/.345 (582 OPS) (Projects to 549 PA)
My first baseball blog post, last August, argued that Beltre had made The Leap, pointing to his .372/.410/.649 AVG/OBP/SLG line over the prior month. I’ve been at a loss as to what’s happened to him; maybe the abdominal surgery has never quite healed? One likely culprit that’s at least partially responsible: plate discipline.
BB/K Per 600 PA, and OPS:
1998: 39/104–647
1999: 60/103–780
2000: 58/83—835
2001: 33/96—721
2002: 35/91—729
2003: 27/94—582
Hmmmm. Sometimes, it really is that simple. And notice that it’s not the strikeouts, which have been fairly level; it’s the fact that his walks fell off the cliff in 2001 and have not recovered.
VERDICT: You don’t give up on a guy like Beltre quite yet, but the words “Fernando Tatis” are starting to sound familiar. At a minimum, the Dodgers shouldn’t build their pennant race plans around the assumption that he’ll just bounce back.
118 Steve Cox Age 28
2002 with Devil Rays: .254/.330/.396 (727 OPS) (633 PA)
2003: In Japan
Cox is off to Japan, freeing up at bats for . . . well, actually for Travis Lee.
VERDICT: I’d always expected better from Cox, who had good minor league numbers and hit well in 2000 before regressing, particularly in the power categories. Replacing him with the punchless Lee isn’t much, if any, improvement.

One More Observation

Christopher Caldwell, on Jayson Blair and the Times:
The Times has been drifting more and more towards front-page stories on trends and passions and tough-to-capture states of mind. This is what leads to all the talk about “resonating pain” and “acute hurt” and (as the Times puts it elsewhere in its Blair account) “emotionally charged moments.” Some of these stories are backed up with polling numbers, some with a handful of sources speaking in the abstract. And many are excellent. But they do not stand and fall on facts and they are the farthest thing from all the news that’s fit to print. They’re the door through which Jayson Blair’s devious idea of journalism entered the nation’s greatest newspaper.

300 Wins

The Baseball Primer’s Chris Dial argues that the 5-man rotation is innocent of charges of killing off the 300-game winner; in fact, he argues that the 5-man rotation may have helped guys get to 300. After all, as I’ve noted before, Clemens could still be followed by Maddux and Glavine, especially if Glavine can get out of Queens by August.
Dial starts with the obvious: only three 300-game winners started their careers between from 1920 and the mid-1960s. The 300-game winner was thus rare before the mid-60s.
There’s a bunch of factors at work here, and clearly a larger one is the fact that modern pitchers don’t go as deep into games. But Dial says in the comments:
The 300-G winners from the 60s didn’t get 40 starts per season over their careers. Okay, Niekro and his knuckleball would start more often. Seaver *never* started more than 36 games in a season. There would be 3-5 pitchers each season that got more than 36 GS, but not one per team or anything. By 1974, the 5-day rotation was in full use.
I decided to look more closely at the six guys from the 70s who made it to 300. Let’s say you capped all their seasons at 35 starts each – where does that get you? For each pitcher, I prorated Wins/Starts down to 35 starts (ignoring the fact that they sometimes made relief appearances):

Continue reading 300 Wins

Piazza Down

I’d say the injury to Piazza is the straw that broke the camel’s back, but let’s face it: that camel’s been face down in the sand for a very long time now. Let the rebuilding begin! I’d have to say it’s even time to trade Piazza; the good news, in a sense, is that the injury will probably prevent the Mets from dealing Piazza until Steve Phillips has been fired and replaced with somebody with a rebuilding plan beyond “let’s bring in more guys in their late 30s who make $10 million a year.”

Ignoring Incentives

Following up further on my post on Conservative Truth #1 – that the results of government initiatives will inevitably be affected by how the initiative changes individual incentives – I couldn’t have asked for a bettter illustration of how some purportedly mainstream liberals completely ignore this point than this op-ed piece in last Thursday’s New York Times by Yale Economics Professor Robert J. Shiller. Shiller argues that inequalty of wealth is “truly frightening”:
According to the Census Bureau, the bottom 40 percent of American families earned 18 percent of the national income in 1970, but by 1998 they earned only 14 percent � and that figure could fall to 10 percent before too long. On a global scale, too, inequality is a problem. Per capita gross domestic product in India in 2000 was only 7 percent of that of the United States, and for China the figure was 11 percent. Such a difference could increase the possibility of greater inequality within America.
(Note that he identifies America’s wealth relative to other nations as a problem, which becomes more ominous when you examine his proposed solution). The “cure”:

Continue reading Ignoring Incentives

Blair Wrapup

I was debating whether to write more on the Jayson Blair affair. The bottom line: yes, as I’ve already explained, race was a legitimate story here even before Howell Raines admitted it, even though I don’t think it was the only or necessarily even the main reason for the problem. This was clearly something of a perfect storm of blind spots at the Times (affirmative action, the “star” system, Blair’s sucking up to top management, etc.), but two additional features of the modern workplace have attracted perhaps too little notice:
1. The union. Blair belonged to a guild with a collectively-bargained contract:
In April 2002, according to Raines, the Times issued Blair a formal warning saying that further errors “could lead to your separation.” Raines notes that people on the outside have wondered why Blair wasn’t fired at that point. However, says Raines, the Times’ guild contract prohibits summary dismissal for anything short of plagiarism for personnel, like Blair, working in the “intermediate reporter” program.
I’m not totally against unions, which have important uses, but one of their worst features is the tendency to protect the incompetent and the corrupt from being fired.
2. The ADA culture. The Times’ own exhaustive account (now archived – you can’t read it online anymore) points in two directions on this. On the one hand, there’s at least the implication that Blair may have had severe emotional problems and/or a drinking problem (note the passage that says Blair “was unavailable for long stretches” without further elaboration); it is left unexplored to what extent this was known and ignored. Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a company that knows an employee has such problems actually finds itself less able to discipline that employee for fear of legal liability, even when common sense says that the guy’s problems getting the facts straight are probably not coincidental.
But here’s the whopper: when Blair was assigned to the sniper case, under national editor Jim Roberts, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd – the men who run the Times
did not tell Mr. Roberts or his deputies about the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Blair’s reporting. “that discussion did not happen,” Mr. Raines said, adding that he had seen no need for such a discussion because Mr. Blair’s performance had improved, and because “we do not stigmatize people for seeking help.”
You see the problem: it’s not just that Raines didn’t tell Blair’s new boss that he had personal problems, but that he didn’t tell him about Blair’s problems with the truth because it might lead to questions about his personal problems or somehow relate to his “seeking help.” In other words, by seeking psychological help, Blair – just like many of the worst offenders in the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandals (an apt analogy made by many commentators) – was able to build a protective shield around his professional problems.
I could say more; but Lileks has the last word on two other loose ends from the Blair scandal.

GROMs Away!

News coverage of GROM, the Polish Special Forces, is interesting because it suggests that the Poles understand the idea of niche marketing. Look at it this way: leaving aside defending one’s own soil, which everyone has to do and for which everyone in Europe depends to some extent on the United States, the question you have to ask about international influence is this: how does a country exert influence if it has modern skills and technology but doesn’t have the resources to be an independent military power? How do you get bang from a limited military buck?
The answer chosen by Poland is to develop a useful segment of military capability — elite Special Forces — that can be drawn on by the U.S. and/or the broader international community in larger operations, or can exert behind-the-scenes influence on developing situations. Special Forces units are smaller, cheaper and less visible than, say, infantry divisions, so it’s easier to build them without a big public presence, a strain on the budget, or a huge recruiting drive. But modern war has grown very dependent on Special Forces, because of the shift in emphasis to defeating shadowy forces and the need to forestall invaded countries from destroying themselves (e.g., the threat of Iraq firing its own oil wells). And countries like the U.S., with no matter how big their militaries, may thus find it very helpful to be able to call in allied Special Forces units during times of crisis, especially crisis on multiple fronts. That gives the Poles a chip to get in the game, and as we’ve seen, it has made them a bigger player in Iraq’s reconstruction.

Bill James Chat Wrap

Bill James, the master himself, made an appearance over at ESPN.com the other day. Some highlights:
Jake (Mountlake Terrace, WA): Bill, can we gleam anything from the Win Shares system after only 40-odd games, or is it a tool that’s truly accurate after a full 162-game schedule?
Bill James: Nothing. Win Shares are a tool used to analyze a season after it is over. They have no relevance at all to a moving object.
* * *
Jake (Mountlake Terrace, WA): Kansas City Royals: will they merely settle in as a slightly-above .500 team, or will they crash and burn like the 2001 Minnesota Twins? How do you see the young pitchers progressing (or regressing)?
Bill James: I don’t honestly see tham as being any better than they have been. Pena has very significantly re-educated a bunch of the young pitchers, many of whom frankly don’t look anything like they did last year. This is ONE step toward making them good major league pitchers–but it is just one step along a long road.
(Looks like Jake was hogging the chat)
* * *
Jason Rose (Chicago): What players would you say are the most valuable commodities in all of baseball, taking into account everything (talent, age, contract status, expected durability)? I would say 1) A Rod, (2) Vlad Guerrero and (3) Mark Prior.
Bill James: I think I would be Prior ahead of Guerrero, but that’s a REAL good list. I don’t know that there is anybody else who would break up that top three.
* * *
Ted (Charlottesville): When will we get your next book?
Bill James: I don’t know; when did you get the last one? I’ll have a book to a publisher next spring. . .don’t know when it will appear.
* * *
Jordan: There’s been a lot of chatter about moving Piazza to 1B. My feeling is that he’s of more value as a catcher even with all the stolen bases, especially with offense at such a premium for the Mets. What’s your take?
Bill James: I’d move him, and let Mo Vaughn catch. I think he’d throw out about as many runners, and it would be more entertaining to watch.
* * *
Kevin (Harrisburg, PA): Bill, do you think the comparisons of Randy Wolf to Glavine are legit?
Bill James: Yes. If you put Wolf on the Braves, he would win 18-20 games.
Read the whole thing.

Not So Smooth

Aaron Gleeman’s Johan Santana Liberation Watch reads as follows:
Games/Starts: 14/1
ERA: 2.56
Innings: 31.2
Strikeouts: 35
Opponent AVG: .212
Is it rude of me to point out that this omits the inconvenient fact that Santana is walking 4.5 men per 9 innings?
I agree with Aaron’s larger point – heck, I’ve got Santana on both of my rotisserie teams, myself – but he’s not Randy Johnson, not yet at least.

Not Enough Hurt To Go Around

The White Sox have spent the season wallowing in mediocrity in a weak division. Quietly, though, Frank Thomas is back: back to walking a ton, back to the big power numbers, and closing in on .300 (he’s currently at .279/.566/.438). And as I’ve previously noted, D’Angelo Jimenez is having a great year; Esteban Loaiza is 7-1 with a 2.05 ERA; and Damaso Marte is having another fine year out of the bullpen, with 4 saves, a 1.80 ERA and a 17-6 K/BB ratio, and looks likely to wind up wresting the closer’s job from Billy Koch for the balance of the season.
What’s not working? On the pitching side, as usual, the back of the Chicago rotation is a horror show of inexperienced and overmatched starters; Jon Garland and Josh Stewart have been deplorable. But Mark Buerhle, despite a respectable ERA, has also been alarmingly ineffective: Buehrle has allowed an unearned run per 9 innings, and his peripheral stats are ugly – 58.1 IP, 63 hits, 8 HR, 21 BB, just 25 K. Buehrle just isn’t fooling anyone.
On the offensive side: impatience. Behind Thomas and Jimenez, nobody’s averaging a walk per 10 plate appearances. Carlos Lee, who drew 75 walks last year, has regressed to just 7, leaving him with a paltry .295 OBP; Joe Crede’s been twice as impatient and, along with Paul Konerko, hasn’t done anything with the bat.
Up, and down; down, and up. With tonight’s victory, they’re 20-20. The Sox aren’t out of anything, not in mid-May in a weak division. But they’re treading water.

National Disgrace

From a review of Sid Blumenthal’s new book by Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Review of Books, hardly a conservative source, on Blumenthal’s account of Kosovo:
Even after the staff has been shaken up and Clinton is supposedly master in his own house, speechwriters stick a line promising not to use ground troops in Kosovo in his speech to the nation and Sandy Berger, his national security adviser, fails to take it out. Clinton, we are told, is furious because his options have been limited (though it then takes him more than two months to allow other options to be prepared). Berger is “snookered” by the Pentagon when it forces the NATO commander who had been too blunt in his demand for ground troops, General Wesley Clark, into retirement. “I’d like to kill somebody,” Clinton tells Blumenthal.
Um, shouldn’t the President of the United States read his own policy speeches before he gives them? Or was he too busy on other parts of the speech to care about the national defense parts? You know, the boring stuff? (And remember, this is an account by one of Clinton’s friends).
And this:
You never know where the buck will stop. Clinton, it seems, is a prisoner of his own administration, in addition to having to face a baying press and savage opposition. Nowhere is this more the case than in the President’s “intense battle with terrorism, a mostly secret war that was largely screened from the public.” FBI director Louis Freeh, a Clinton appointee, becomes “a prime mover of scandal promotion against the Clinton administration,” to the point that “Freeh’s hostility to the White House dictated his lack of cooperation with the war against bin Laden.” Clinton wants to do more than fire a few cruise missiles at the al-Qaeda leader; he wants to drop special ops troops into the mountains of Afghanistan in a surprise attack. Powell’s successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Henry Shelton, recoils from his commander in chief’s idea, saying such an attack would be too risky.
Clinton could always have fired Freeh, if he really believed this and thought the war on terrorism was as important as the battle for high approval ratings. Obviously, he didn’t.
And who says a president can’t overrule his military commanders? Nobody told George W. Bush that.
(Link via The American Scene)

A Plea For Help

I got the following email last night, and thought I’d pass it along; I don’t know that much about this story, although news reports on the web seem to suggest that this is for real:
[O]n February 22nd, 2003, Carl Riccio, my cousin, a 17 year old junior at Watchung Hills High School in NJ, broke his neck during a high school wrestling match. Carl was an undefeated wrestler and a star baseball player. This tragedy made headline news across the country. These accidents occur only twice a year in the sporting world.
Carl is currently listed as a quadraplegic and the doctor’s have given him a 1% chance of recovering. Luckily, he is at one of the best spinal care facilities in the country now, The Kessler Institute in West Orange, NJ.
It would mean a great deal to him if you could post a get well message to him on his website . . . It should have all his contact information there. . . Even if all you can do is post a message on his website’s message’s board, it would mean a heck of a lot to him. Each night, his parents read all the website’s, messages from around the country to him and his face lights up.

BASEBALL/ Fields of Cash

SO, IT TURNS OUT that Major League Baseball has been berry berry good to members of Congress (about 60/40 to the Democrats), notably Dick Gephardt and James Sensenbrenner (the latter is chairman of a committee that oversees baseball’s antitrust exemption), although frankly the amounts of money involved (at least for the individual members) isn’t that much (you can’t buy a guy like Gephardt for $5,000).