Shakedowns

So, Republicans are, or have been, critical of Obama for his "shakedown" of BP that produced the $20 billion escrow fund. (They stopped being after Joe Barton made a po-otohp (bad photo-op) about the subject.) To me, the fact that they are critical in this manner is an instance of their letting their guard down and exposing a dirty little secret of their philosophy. Here's the logic:

A Proposal

So, here's my proposal for how to mix up the structure of Major League Baseball. It's partly based by some musings about Interleague Play, and I think I have a pretty good solution for that conundrum.

First, the teams:

National League:

Eastern Division:

New York Mets
Philadelphia Phillies
Pittsburgh Pirates
Washington Nationals

Southern Division:

Atlanta Braves
Florida Marlins
Houston Astros
St. Louis Cardinals

Central Division:

Cincinnati Reds
Chicago Cubs
Milwaukee Brewers
Colorado Rockies

Western Division:

Arizona Diamondbacks
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Fransisco Giants
San Diego Padres

American League:

Eastern Division:

Boston Red Sox
New York Yankees
Toronto Blue Jays
Baltimore Orioles

Southern Division:

Texas Rangers
Tampa Bay? Rays



Central Division:

Chicago White Sox
Cleveland Indians
Detroit Tigers
Minnesota Twins

Western Division:

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
Oakland Athletics
Seattle Mariners
Kansas City Royals

The motivating factor in my coming up with this plan was the observation that baseball used to have a power-of-two number of teams, back before expansion when there were only eight teams in each league, and that it would be nice to have a power of two again: this requires adding two more. To me, this feels like "completing" expansion. New Orleans was the only real American city that I could think of that lacked a major league team, and it struck me that Puerto Rico could perfectly easily have a team; there's plenty of baseball there already. And, given sixteen teams in each league, the only way to really cash in on the power of two is to have four divisions: each division winner goes to the playoffs, no wild card required. I also think the Rays might be available for moving away from Tampa Bay, which has never looked like it could sustain a major-league team.

So that's the teams. Now for the schedule. My idea is to have 18 games against each in-division team, which is 54 games. Then 7 games against each team in the league but out of the division, which provides another 84 games, a total of 138. That leaves 24 games for Interleague Play, and here's my vision for that section of the schedule: one three-game series against each team in one's own division but in the opposite league, and one three-game series against each team in one other division from the opposite league. And the teams in each division would all face the same other division from the other league.

The benefits of this system are as follows: the rivalries of interleague play, most notably the Mets and Yankees, would be preserved, BUT the schedule would still be competitively balanced. Each team in each division would play the same exact schedule as the other teams in that division, other than not playing against themselves. And while teams from different divisions would have radically different schedules, they also wouldn't be playing for the same playoff spots. And each team would play 23 of the 31 other teams in baseball each year, and all 31 other teams every three years. I think this is the only reasonable way to maintain a competitively balanced schedule while also accommodating the desire to play teams, any teams, in the other league.

Feminism and Females

There's an article in the New York Times today about the rise of the pro-life women, and lamenting the fact that the traditional reluctance of such women to enter politics allows the left to portray pro-choisism as being critical to feminism. There are, actually, a lot of more minor logical errors in the piece that I would mention were I to debate its author, Ramesh Ponnuru, but I won't bother with them here. The main premise is that because women are just as likely to be pro-life as men are, in other words about 50% odds, pro-lifeness must be at least a plausibly feminist position. To illustrate why this logic does not hold (not necessarily showing per se that he's wrong substantively in this case, though I think he is), I saw a stat in Harper's Index recently that suggested that two-thirds of Egyptian women, women, were in favor of allowing wife-beating under certain circumstances. Would anyone like to defend the claim that wife-beating is a feminist policy? Keep in mind that feminism is "the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men." I don't think that getting women beaten up counts as feminist. I don't think that allowing men to beat women up counts as feminist. And the fact that a supermajority of Egyptian women are in favor of it doesn't change that. The point is, I guess, that policies are policies, and wikiality doesn't really work. If 90% of Americans believed that exploding a nuclear bomb in the middle of Manhattan on a busy weekday would kill no one, they would be wrong.

This has something to do, I think, with my response to a little throw-away line from Maureen Dowd's column about Obama's relationship with the press. She comments that he, like most/all Democrats, expects the press to be on his side. I don't think that's because the press has a liberal bias, or because Democrats expect the press to have a liberal bias. It's because Democrats expect the press to have a bias in favor of the facts, in favor of reality, and Democrats also tend to believe that reality and the facts are on their side, in a way that I don't think Republicans really do as much. It wasn't a Democratic President whose aide said the thing about the reality-based community. I think this is a similar thing, about wanting issues to be evaluated on their merits and not on the basis of what the two parties have to say about them (or something like that).

Intrade and the 2010 Senate Races

According to Intrade.com, at the present the 2010 Senate races break down as follows:

2 safe Democratic races (OR, VT)
6 likely Democratic races (HI, WI, MD, NY1, NY2, CT)
2 leans Democratic races (WA, CA)
8 leans Republican races (NV, CO, MO, IL, KY, OH, PA, NH)
8 likely Republican races (AZ, UT, SD, OK, IA, AR, NC, DE)
9 safe Republican races (AK, ID, ND, KS, LA, IN, AL, GA, SC)
1 leans Independent race (FL)

Definitions: "Safe" means the percentage given for the leading party is more than 90% of total percentages. "likely" means that value is less than 90% but at least 66.6%, while "leaning" means leading but less than 2-to-1 in favor. I assume that unlisted percentages are filled in to make the total add up to 100 or exceed it by as little as possible, and that if the total is not 100% I just scale it so that it is (for instance, 92% vs. 15% is "likely," while 85% vs. 6% is "safe").

A few thoughts: UT, SD, and OK are not likely Republican, they're safe Republican, and Intrade is toying with me putting them under 90%. I still think Republicans are reaching in WA and CA, and I think most of the "likely Democratic" races are realistically out of play. As for the big group of important races, the "leans Republican" crowd, that's a huge pile of races Republicans are only narrowly favored in, and I think in at least some of them (NV, OH, I'd like to think PA) it's wrong to favor the Republicans at this point. Overall, Intrade gives 8 Republican pick-ups and 1 Independent pick-up, and zero actual Democratic pickups (though Crist will caucus with the Democrats). I think that North Dakota, Arkansas, Indiana, and Delaware are going Republican, and Florida is going to Crist. That leaves us with 53 Democrats and 3 Independents caucusing Democratic, if nothing else changed. I think Harry Reid will hang on, I'm skeptical of Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, Mark Kirk's been having a rough couple of weeks and may be a criminal. All in all, I'd say somewhere in the mid-to-upper 50's is very much within range, and I think the big take-home from that Intrade landscape is that there are a lot of seats where Republicans are favored, but just barely. If the Democrats can win four or five or six of them, we're in good shape.

Baseball Stats

So, for the past little while I've been working on a project of trying to compile all-time teams for each of the 30 currently extant Major League baseball franchises, in other words to pick the best 25-man roster out of their historical players. And, of course, only allowing the team to count players as they appeared with that team, so the Mets don't get Willie Mays in all his glory. At first I did this just subjectively: I looked over the most prominent players in team history and tried to pick the ones who looked best. Then I got objective, and devised a stat that I thought did a pretty good job of picking people who were good for a team for a good long while, with a relatively good mix. Then I noticed that there are lots of stats for how-good-people-are compiled by people other than me, and I'd try using one of those. So, here are some results: