Ike Davis and First Base

Last year Ike Davis posted a .264/.351/.440 slash line, good enough to be a little bit above league average as a hitter. This year he's at .345/.424/.595, which is a wee bit better, and which he's almost certain not to keep up all year, but let's say he turns out to be a little bit better than his rookie campaign. Maybe he ends up having an overall batting average around .275 or .280 instead of the .265 region, raising OBP to around .365 or .370, and gets his slugging percentage up around .500. That's a pretty good hitter; in fact, it's a very good hitter. But it is not, we are told, good for a first baseman. I have two problems with that assumption. One relates to Ike Davis himself, and the other relates to the idea of defensive positions having certain levels of offensive prowess required of them.

As for Ike, here's what I'd say. The idea that first base should be a plus-plus-plus offensive position is that it is the least demanding and/or least important position on the field defensively. All you have to do to be a competent first baseman is stand there and catch the ball. Therefore, it's a perfectly natural place to put big, hulking sluggers who couldn't very well be a shortstop or a center fielder. All true enough. But it's also true that, at first base just as at any other position, better defense is better. Having a first baseman who moves well, has decent range, is really really sure-handed on the catching side of things, and will make lots of smart aggressive plays and make them well really does improve your team. And Ike Davis looks to be a pretty fine defensive first baseman. Keith Hernandez hit a career-high eighteen home runs for the Mets in 1987. He was a first baseman, and he never hit twenty home runs. Sure, he had a .384 OBP and averaged thirty doubles a year, but he still wasn't a slugger in the mold of Albert Pujols or Mark Teixeira or Adrian Gonzalez or Prince Fielder. Or Ike Davis, for that matter, who's got more power than Keith though probably less hitting-for-average skills. But he won eleven Gold Gloves, and that made a difference for his teams. First base needs to be a strong offensive position because we assume it will be a weak defensive one, but a strong defensive first baseman has that much less need to be Albert Pujols at the plate (and note, Ike isn't a bad hitter).

More to the point, though. You have a team consisting of nine players, eight of whom aren't pitchers (I'm assuming no DH, because that ruins things). Those eight position players need to play the eight positions, and you'd like for them to play those eight positions well. They also each need to bat, in some order, and you'd like both for them to each bat well and for them to form a nice cohesive lineup. Fundamentally those are different things. Now, since first base is a much easier position than shortstop we expect more people to be able to play first than short and therefore to find more sluggers at first; perhaps there's also an idea that spending more effort becoming an offensive player means you should be playing a position that requires less effort. But from the team's perspective, it doesn't matter. You want your lineup to produce X hits, and Y home runs and Z doubles and score ABC runs. It doesn't matter if your shortstop hits 15 home runs and your first baseman 25 or it your shortstop doesn't hit any and your first baseman hits 40. (Well, it might matter in that there might be a difference between having two players 40/0 and two players 25/15, but which positions they play doesn't matter.) One thing the New York Mets have on their current lineup is a shortstop who can easily hit fifteen home runs, while also providing at least that many triples. That's way the hell above-average power for a shortstop. And to a certain extent it takes some pressure off the positions that are "supposed" to produce sluggers to do so. (It's one of the things Jose Reyes brings to the table that doesn't get mentioned very often.) So Ike Davis is a good defensive first baseman and he's also a good power hitter (how good, exactly, remains to be seen). He's also, for the time being, dirt-cheap. That's a good player to have on your team, especially if it is a team with a power-hitting shortstop and a power-hitting third baseman. That other people who play first base, many of them not as well, are even better hitters does not really change that.

Statute of Limitations

Donald Trump is currently arguing that Barack Obama would never have gotten where he is today without affirmative action. He was a lousy student at Occidental, Trump says, and then he got into Harvard. How could that be, asks Trump? Now, set aside for a moment the fact that that would be an argument in favor of affirmative action. But anyway, the current leader in polls to oppose the incumbent President in his re-election bid is arguing more or less that his opponent is unqualified to become President, because he only got his elite education because of affirmative action.

There's something wrong with this argument. It should've been made four years ago. Back then, it was a distinctly open question whether or not Mr. Barack H. Obama was qualified to be President. You could argue that two years in the Senate wasn't enough to prepare him, or that we had no evidence of his executive judgment. Or that he had somehow managed to present himself as intelligent etc. to the voters of Chicago and then won an election against, uh, Alan Keyes, and so we had no particular reason to think there's anything remarkable about him. On the other side, people could've argued that his policy ideas were good, or his speeches revealed an intelligent thinker, or whatever. But that was four years ago.

Today, I think it's pretty obvious what makes Barack Obama qualified to be President: he won a Presidential election. Hell, he got the highest percentage of the population to vote for him of anyone who wasn't already President in history. And then he's spent four years actually being President. So it is no longer a matter of qualifications. It is a matter of performance. Setting aside for the moment the question of the quality of the Republican nominee, the basic question facing people in 2012 is "do you want Barack Obama to continue being U.S. President?" For obvious reasons, the kinds of arguments you make in answering that question should be almost entirely based on his record as U.S. President. It's not an insubstantial record. He's done lots of stuff. He's handled foreign policy crises, he's cut legislative deals, he's made judicial appointments. He's done the things Presidents do. So if you want to argue he'd be a bad President, argue that he's been a bad President. And I'll argue that he's been a good President (and also that you are Donald Trump, so it really doesn't matter what kind of a President Obama is...)

Bayesian statistical thinking basically follows a principle where you start with a certain a priori assumption about the state of affairs, and then as you accumulate more data your idea of what the universe is like becomes less and less based on the a priori assumptions and more and more based on the data. Trump is making arguments about what our a priori assumptions about Obama's competence should have been, back when they were important. But there's so massively much data about Obama's competence to be President by this point that it scarcely matters at all what those assumptions were. They've been swamped, overridden by the things we know about Obama as President. So okay, Mr. Trump, maybe Barack Obama was an affirmative-action baby. But that just means we should expect him to be a lousy President; if he is actually a good President, it's certainly not a reason to vote against him regardless.

Unless you're just being racist for racism's sake, which, of course, you are, but that's sort of beside the point.

"It's not a peripheral issue for them."

That's what former Congressman Patrick Murphy said about Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the talk he just gave while accepting the Brown Democrats' JFK Jr. Award. He talked about how his local newspaper editorialized against his focus on repealing DADT, arguing that it was a "peripheral issue," and about how he had seen people he described as having been better leaders than him kicked out of the military just because they had "a boyfriend or a girlfriend back home." And for those people, it wasn't a peripheral issue, it was their life. This is one really important thing about civil rights issues: for the people they affect, they tend to be life-destroyers. And for me, a life-destroyer is a pretty big deal. One person whose life you ruin is one person too many; it's incredibly hard to find that balance on the other side of the ledger. Ending someone's career because of who they happen to fall in love with just plain inflicts more suffering on that person than taking an extra three percent of a rich person's income in taxes ever could. It's not a peripheral issue for them.

Side note: he also referred to Osama bin Laden as having "murdered" thousands of Americans. I think that's a really interesting way to talk about it, given that the Administration around 9/11 made the very conscious decision not to talk about it as an act of crime but rather as an act of war. Just sayin'.

Government Jobs

This is kind of random, but I just read a little write-up about a poll YouGov did in Britain about a variety of issues relating to poverty. One subject they asked about was unemployment benefits, and here's the line I found interesting:

80% agree with the idea that people who have been out of work for 12 months should be required to do community work in return for their benefits.

So, these people should be given the opportunity to do a form of work in the public interest determined by the government, and in return receive money from the government? To me, see, that sounds a whole lot like the government giving these people jobs. Maybe jobs with a fairly explicit agreement that the workers in question are hoping to get other jobs soon, but you have the basic wages-for-labor exchange going on here. I'm curious if 80% of Britons would agree that the government should offer jobs to people who've been out of work for a year, if you put it that way. Come to think of it, I wonder how these questions would play in this country.

Who Darvish?

Wow. Apparently this guy named Yu Darvish, a Persian-Japanese pitcher of age twenty-four, is one of the best pitchers in the world. As in, four consecutive seasons with an ERA under 2. Admittedly that's in the Japanese leagues which are not quite the Major Leagues, but a) I've always thought that it was hitting stats that are inflated in Japan, and b) Sandy Koufax never ran up four consecutive years of sub-2.00 ERA, so one way or another I think this guy's pretty good. And there's some thought that the Mets might be in the conversation to sign him, at least if they aren't going to become a shriveled husk of a team. Boy would that be awesome. Santana/Darvish/Dickey/Mejia/Niese-or-Pelfrey looks pretty good to me for a 2012 rotation. I still think their top priority if they're going to reinvest some of the 70 million coming off the books this year should be resigning Reyes, but I might also be willing to say that their second priority ought to be trying to get Darvish. That would just be amazing.

The Mets' Problem

I'm just perusing the advanced batting and pitching statistics for the Mets and a few things are jumping out at me at what they, as a team, are doing wrong. First, here's what the hitters are doing wrong. They're striking out too much, 21.3% of the time compared to a league average of 19%. They're not hitting enough line drives, 16% of balls in play compared to 18% for the league, and their fly balls are weak, with just 4.8% going for home runs compared to 7% as the league average (though you can chalk that up to CitiField in part, at least). They're not making productive outs, succeeding at that category just 28% of the time, well below league-average 35%, and they're not getting runners home from third with less than two outs. This is egregious: league average is 53%, and they're managing just 38%.

As for the pitchers, they're walking too many people (10.7% against 8.6% average) and they're giving up too many home runs, 9.4% of fly balls versus 7% on average. They're allowing opposing baserunners to run wild, allowing an 86% steal success rate compared to 75% average. Honestly, that's all I see from these advanced stats.

But the biggest thing that jumps out at me is that the Mets hitters have just a .286 batting average on balls in play, while the pitchers are sporting a nasty .338 BAbip. League average is .300. I have a feeling that if on both sides of the ball the Mets were doing average at this, it'd seem like a whole different season. Here's hoping the people who say that all BAbip numbers trend toward the mean rather aggressively as the season wears along are correct.

Atheistic Ethics and Discrete Categorization

Matt Yglesias has a really interesting post about the way that thinking about hell influences secular views of morality. The traditional view of hell in the Christian tradition was that a) it was a really awful place to wind up, and b) being sent there was the act of a just and moral god. One consequence of this view, he writes, is that the standards for being good enough to not go to hell had to be low enough that most people could meet them. Otherwise you've got a just and moral god sending 99% of humanity to the fiery pits where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, which doesn't seem very just and moral. The standard for how wicked you need to be before our supposedly benevolent god is willing to condemn you to an eternity of fiery torture should be reasonably high. But for we atheists, Yglesias argues, "there’s no reason to think of good and bad, right and wrong as a question of getting over some hurdle of minimum standard of conduct." Well, that's kind of true. But there's another feature of hell-less morality that changes the dynamic: you don't need to label people.

In the traditional Christian judgment story, some people die and go to heaven, some people die and go to hell. Maybe, if you're Catholic and haven't been around for the last few years, some of them go to purgatory. But in any event, there are at most three distinct outcomes for what happens when you die, and these are the categories of goodness. There are the Good People, who go to heaven, and the Bad People, who go to hell, and possibly also the In-Between People, who go to purgatory for some time at least. You need to draw lines. But when we take the judgment out of the equation, we don't need to draw any lines. A given act is somewhat good or somewhat bad or very good or very bad. Someone who does a lot of very good acts and very few bad acts is very good indeed. Someone who does a few fewer very good acts, maybe trading some of them in for mildly good acts and maybe the occasionally slightly bad act, is somewhat less good. Someone who does a whole lot of very bad acts and very few good acts, conversely, would be quite bad indeed. And the thing is, because we don't have to judge people (except vis-a-vis the question of sending some of them to secular prisons), we can say just that. If you have a person who does 23% Very Good Things, 56% Somewhat Good Things, 16% Somewhat Bad Things, and 5% Very Bad Things, well, okay, you've just described them. Is this a "good" person? Well, that both depends on how you define goodness and doesn't really matter. It's all a matter of semantics; nothing is riding on how we define the word "good" except what word we use to describe this person. Very good is better than somewhat good, which is better than bad. There's just no need to involve what Richard Dawkins calls the tyranny of the discontinuous mind. Morality is a continuum running from Hitler to MLK, or thereabouts, and we atheists get to just admit it.

The Debt Ceiling

Is not an issue. We think it is, because we need to have a Congressional vote raising the debt ceiling every once in a while. But we're the only nation in the world that uses such a device. It's quite simple in other countries: you pass laws raising X in revenues and authorizing Y in outlaws, and if Y > X then your government issues debt equal to Y - X. America, for some silly reason, has this debt ceiling idea. But that's not the question, no other civilized country considers it a question, and there's no reason to consider it a question. It's a non-issue, or at least it should be.

This is in response to a poll that included "raising the debt ceiling" as a potential solution to the deficit problem. That's just irresponsible pollstering.

Batting Average on Balls in Play

There's this mythology that batting average on balls in play is a matter of pure luck. The pitcher, so the thinking goes, determines whether an at-bat results in a walk, a strikeout, a home run, or a ball put in play; the first three have deterministic outcomes, and in the last case it's just a roll of the dice. Moreover, according to the hardest-core statistical minimalists, there aren't fundamental differences among pitchers in their BAbip levels. There aren't low-BAbip pitchers, there aren't high-BAbip pitchers, because BAbip is not a pitching skill. Your skills are striking people out and preventing home runs or walks. That's it.

On his career, Nolan Ryan's BAbip was .266, distinctly below the league average over that period. Never mind that he's enough below league average over a long enough career that I think it's almost certainly a statistically significant difference. The standard deviation of his BAbip across the couple dozen season he pitched was .021, or right around 8% of the number itself. Now consider that his career strikeouts per plate appearances number was just a little less than 25% (!) and the standard deviation of his K/PA number across various seasons was .036, which is 14.5% of the number itself. In other words, Nolan Ryan's propensity to strike people out varied a lot more than his propensity for giving up hits on balls in play. To me that suggests that BAbip isn't as mysterious and uncontrollable as people sometimes maintain. To me it says that there was something about Nolan Ryan's stuff that made it hard to put in play well. In fact, when I originally encountered the idea that BAbip is not a pitcher's skill it was in an article that seemed to rather explicitly negate itself, by noting that knuckleballers, of course, have naturally low BAbip numbers.

Okay. If a knuckleball can induce poor contact, why is it theoretically impossible that a normal pitcher could know how to induce poor contact? Likewise, given that home runs are just balls put in play but a little further than usual, why shouldn't a pitcher who can keep home runs from happening theoretically be able to prevent other kinds of hard contact? I think what we have here is a case of square peg-ism. A lot of what goes into BAbip is luck, certainly. And it's damned difficult to measure whether a pitcher really has a low BAbip as an inherent quality of their own or whether it's just that they're getting lucky. You could watch every play, or have some sort of batted-ball tracker tell you when people give up hard line drives or little dribbling ground balls. Then you could, perhaps, quantify whether a pitcher does genuinely give up hard contact or whether it's just a lot of ground balls finding holes, etc. But they don't yet have a system to do that; similarly they don't have a good way to measure a fielder's range, other than raw "plays made" numbers. So what do you do when there's an element of skill you can't measure easily? Well, you assert that it doesn't exist. Can't measure it, it must not be real.

No thank you.

What the Mets Should Do

Evidently the Mets have axed Brad Emaus and promoted Justin Turner. The move makes sense to me; Emaus wasn't hitting at all and looked worse defensively than Daniel Murphy. So now the question is, does this make any other roster moves start to look enticing? I think it does. First of all, Justin Turner can play shortstop. He's played 53 games at the position in the minor leagues. Jose Reyes, when healthy, plays all day, every day; specifically, from 2005 through 2008 he averaged five missed games per season and averaged 8.8 innings of shortstop per game he played. I think Turner is every ounce of shortstop backup we need unless Jose goes really seriously down, in which case Ruben Tejada makes perfect sense as the promotional backup shortstop. So there's no need for Chin-lung Hu on the major-league roster (though he's got an endearing name), given that he's got a career .507 OPS. That's the obvious move to make. The other one is to consider, once Jason Bay comes back, whether we need two backup outfielders on the team at once; both Scott Hairston and Willie Harris can play all three outfield positions.

Now, if you had the starting lineup of Thole/Davis/Murphy/Reyes/Wright/Bay/Pagan/Beltran and pared the bench down to Paulino/Turner/Hairston or Harris, that leaves the question of which two players to add to that bench. Nick Evans seems like a pretty good candidate, since he can play all four corner positions and hits really well. Not sure who the fifth bench player should be, though.

Divide the Question

There are two separate questions regarding Jose Reyes' future with the Mets, and I think people often conflate them. Here's how I see the basic issue: the Mets have the following players under team control next year: Johan Santana, Jason Bay, David Wright, R.A. Dickey, and D.J. Carrasco. Add in Francisco Rodriguez' $3.5 million buyout if his option doesn't vest, and that's a baseline salary of $64 million. Obviously, they need twenty more players. Question #1 is what overall level of salary they're going to want to wind up around. Will it be the same $150 million they're at now? A wee bit less than that? Or barely higher than the $64 million they're already on the hook for? I should note that I am of the opinion that if they end up under $100 million next year, or even really particularly close to $100 million, it's a case of ownership malpractice by the Wilpons, and morally they ought to sell the team rather than gut it to accommodate their own entirely deserved money problems.

Question #2 is, if the Mets are going to have non-negligible money to invest in the team beyond that $64 million in current contracts, what's their first priority? Well, let's ask what the team would look like if they didn't bring in anyone new to add to that team. I didn't include players currently in the arbitration or pre-arbitration stages, because the website I got this info from didn't include them. So the team would be Thole/Davis/Murphy/Tejada/Wright/Bay/Pagan/Duda, Santana/Pelfrey/Niese/Dickey/Mejia, and a bunch of bench players or relief pitchers. If you want to add to that, what would you do? Depending on exactly how those five prospective starting pitchers work out, you'd consider trying to get a new and better starter. Maybe you'd want to bring in an elite closer, if one's on the market. Maybe you'd want something in the outfield.

Or maybe you'd want an All-Star shortstop, beloved by your fanbase, who fits perfectly into your home stadium's wacky dimensions, and provides elite speed, well above-average power for both a shortstop and a leadoff hitter, and, in reality, plus-level on-base skills for a leadoff hitter. Who has seriously Gold Glove or MVP potential, one of these years. A guy who's given your team a .566 winning percentage in games when he's gotten on base, compared to just a .410 winning percentage since he came up in games that don't feature him standing on first base, smiling. A guy who you know wouldn't mess up the team chemistry if you signed him, 'cause he's already the spark in this team's engine, and whom, therefore, the team's chemistry would miss dearly if he left. And who, because of his loyalty to your team, might be willing to take a little bit of a discount to sign with you instead of someone else. Maybe you'd want that guy.

Seriously, the point is, of course if the Mets are going to become a second division team next year, with a payroll befitting the Royals rather than a team located in the biggest metropolitan area in the nation, then Jose Reyes will not be on that team. And if that's the way the Mets want to go with that team, honestly, it'll be good for Reyes' career to get off that team; maybe he can to go Boston and lead them off to a World Series. But if the Mets don't become that team, unable to spend anything resembling the amount of money it's been accustomed to shelling out for the last few decades; if, instead, the Mets decide to continue being a big-market team with a big-market payroll and ambitions of doing good if not great things, then it strikes me that there's a very good case to make the first $12-15 million they reinvest above their current contracts the money it will take to get Jose Reyes to stay in Queens. It's one question whether the Wilpons are going to suck the team dry next year. It's another question whether Sandy Alderson rationally ought to want Jose Reyes back, if he's given the money to make that a possibility. Let's talk about them separately, and honestly, please.

SIDE NOTE: It occurs to me that, if Santana recovers well from this injury, Santana-Dickey-Mejia-Niese-Pelfrey is a nasty starting rotation. If the Mets can have that rotation next year, some sort of decent bullpen, and Reyes still on the team anchoring the offense, it could be a really fun 2012.

BREAKING: Jose Reyes Still not a low-OBP Leadoff Hitter

Through sixteen games this year (small sample size, I admit, but bear with me), Jose Reyes has a .351 on-base percentage; as a result, the Mets have a .351 OBP out of their first spot in the batting order. That's eighth in the Major Leagues, as well as fifth in the National League. That's 68th percentile in the NL, in case you were counting, which to me says distinctly above-average, nearly top quarter of the league. Now, it strikes me that OBP is of particular importance to a leadoff hitter specifically while they are leading off the game, and in his capacity as the actual first batter of the game Jose Reyes has a nifty .500 OBP so far this year. That's tied for third in the majors, behind only the .600 mark put up by Rickie Weeks of the Brewers and the .533 from Chris Getz of the Royals (note that those are team numbers, actually; those are the teams' primary leadoff hitters). Let's say we think that overall OBP and actual leading-off OBP are of approximately equal value for a leadoff hitter, and add the two together. Then Jose has a .851 mark, fourth in the majors behind the Pirates with Jose Tabata (.931), the Brewers with Weeks (.953), and the Cubs with Starlin Castro (1.016), and note that Castro, at least, appears to be on a distinctly BAbip-fueled run, sporting a .435 mark in that department compared to Reyes' much more reasonable .338. The lesson? Jose Reyes is well above average as a leadoff hitter, specifically if we only care about on-base percentage. At least, he is so far this year, and he was last year, and there's no reason to think he won't keep being this year because .351 is a little below where his OBP has been in his best years. Then you add in the world-class speed (6 for 6 so far!) and the above-average power, both for a leadoff hitter and for a shortstop (tied for second in the NL for extra-base hits!), and the glove, and you have a truly great player. The low-OBP line against him is just a fraud.

Side note: on their careers, the overall OBP numbers from Jose Reyes and Rickey Henderson, the inevitable comparison for any leadoff hitter, are .335 and .401, a difference of 66 points in Rickey's favor. As the fist batter of the game, however, Jose's OBP rises to .342 and Rickey's actually declines to just .380, narrowing the gap to just 38 points. Since it does seem to me like getting on base is something that matters particularly in that first plate appearance, or when leading off an inning generally (in which case it's .336 against .391, still narrower but more narrowly), maybe the gap between Jose and the greatest leadoff hitter of all time in this metric isn't as substantial as it might seem. Interesting that, while both raised their slugging-percentage performance when leading off the game or an inning (Reyes, .447 or .445 against .434 career; Henderson, .436 or .440 against .419 career), Reyes also upped his game in terms of getting on base for the beginning of the game while Rickey seemed to be a little less patient when he was the first man up in an inning.

UPDATE: On the day today, Starlin Castro went 1-4 getting on base, and Rickie Weeks is 1-6 as the Brewers play the Phillies in extra innings. Weeks at least has fallen back behind Reyes on the year.

Objectivity

The Mets should trade Jose Reyes, we are told. He does not have a high On-Base Percentage for a leadoff hitter, we are told, and he is injury-prone, we are told. Never mind that neither of these claims is true (leadoff hitters don't have high OBPs in general, and Reyes had one injury in 2009 aggravated by the idiot trip to Puerto Rico last year and prior to that had been fifth in the Majors in games played from 2005 through 2008). Reyes is in the final year of his contract (that part is true!) and the Mets will not want to pay the nine-figure contract deal they'd need to give him to keep him for a low-OBP (not true!), injury-prone (not true!) leadoff hitter/shortstop.

And, in particular, we are told that the Mets will trade him, because Sandy Alderson is a fan of sabermetrics and moneyball and so on and so forth, and therefore will not consider fan adoration. He'll just trade Reyes, because It Makes Objective Sense. But there's a problem here: what the Mets would probably get for Reyes in a trade in June or July would be a couple of medium-level prospects, probably pitchers. The Mets have some pretty damn ass-kicking pitching prospects already, mind you. Moreover, historically prospects gained in trades have a tendency of doing very, very poorly. The odds of getting someone who will be even close to Reyes-caliber eventually from a Reyes trade is tiny. So objectively, it doesn't really make sense to trade him. And the argument that Sandy Alderson will definitely trade him because he doesn't value stolen bases and he thinks Reyes' OBP is too low and he thinks Reyes will be too expensive and he will want to restock the farm system overlooks one thing, namely that Sandy Alderson also doesn't think that it's usually a good idea to try to import a big-name free agent superstar onto your team. He's said that he thinks that tends to mess up team chemistry. Well, okay: if you aren't going to get new superstars, doesn't that just make it that much more important to hold onto the ones you already have? And he's said explicitly that fan animosity was a part of his decision to cut Castillo and Perez. None of this is non-objective, mind you: fan animosity was probably a big part of what was making Castillo, at least, have trouble playing well. And fan adoration is probably a big part of what helps Jose play so well. So objectivity is about a lot more than saying, "low OBP, has been injured, is in walk year, we must trade." There are a lot of other factors to consider, and they all point toward trading Reyes as being a big, big mistake.

Defensive Metrics

Apparently through the first two weeks plus of the baseball season, Mets second baseman Brad Emaus is tied for third in the league at his position in Ultimate Zone Rating, one of the fancier fielding metrics. Yeah. Okay. I've watched really seriously most of the Mets games so far this season. He's not good. He's fumbled more than one simple double play ball, one of which led rather directly to one of the Mets' crushing losses to the Rockies. I'm pretty sure he's messed up other plays, too. And I can't recall seeing him make very many spectacular plays where he got to a ball you never expected him to catch, or made a really strong throw where he needed to spin and fire right on the money to get the guy by a tenth of a stride, or whatever. He seems kind of mediocre. I've seen Daniel Murphy make a couple of distinctly plus-level plays, and I don't think I've really seen him messing up at all, and apparently UZR likes him less well than it likes Emaus. My overall conclusion is that UZR is not very good.

One thing I have noticed is that a whole lot of balls have been hit at Emaus. Ground balls to the second baseman  have been fairly common. Since one major component of a lot of fielding stats is "range," which is defined as plays per inning, obviously that's going to give him an inflated rating. That's part of why I think defining range in terms of number of plays made is a dreadful way to go, because players don't all face the same dispersion of batted balls. The Mets, over the past few years, have conventionally been a fly-ball team, which leads to Jose Reyes getting somewhat below-average numbers of plays, thus hurting his performance on the fancy metrics. Okay. He's still a brilliant defender with outstanding range, in the actual real-life meaning of "range." So these metrics are fundamentally missing the point, at least to some degree.

The Unanimous Constitutional Waiver

A thought has just occurred to me about Justice Scalia's argument from tradition, which I critiqued in this post. From time to time I've had the thought that there is an automatic mechanism for waiving any provision of the Constitution, which requires actually no formal proceedings. The way it works is, everyone in the entire nation decides not to challenge violations of that provision in court (or at least everyone who might have standing to mount the challenge does). Then the unconstitutional practice goes unchallenged and unreviewed by the judiciary, and is allowed to continue. In other words, the people of the United States may at any time amend the Constitution by unanimous vote of non-litigation. You can make an argument that the prayer-at-school-graduations tradition Scalia waxes so nostalgic over had been the subject of a long-time sanction-by-lack-of-challenge, and therefore was perfectly constitutional.

But here's the thing about this unanimous constitutional waiver: it only holds so long as it really is unanimous. Saying, "yesterday everyone in the country was willing to give this unconstitutional practice a pass, so today your complaint against it is deemed invalid" is putting several carts and horses in awkward positions relative to one another. Yes, something which is technically unconstitutional can become kind of de facto constitutional if no one chooses to challenge it and give the courts an opportunity to declare it invalid. But, being de facto, this kind of informal constitutionality must perforce vanish as soon as the fact it depends on, no one's having challenged in a court of law, is no longer a fact! So yes, maybe long-held traditions are informally constitutional even if they seem to contradict what the Constitution says. But this only applies until someone decides to complain about it; after then, you can't rely on the historical tradition, you have to actually consider the merits of the individual case.

The Worst Argument I've Ever Heard

A passage describing a Kenyan case involving the right to prepare a defense:

"The applicant, who had been detained in prison prior to trial, alleged that his prison guards frequently raided his cell, confiscating notes he had prepared for consultation with defense counsel. Subsequently, the appellant was denied all access to pen and paper and thus was unable to prepare a defense. The court held that the claim was without merit as there were many other prisoners awaiting trial under similar circumstances yet none had complained that their ability to prepare a defense was hampered."

Seriously? That was the argument? We're doing this to lots of other people, too, and none of them have complained about it yet, so screw you? Does this even need rebutting? If your ability to enjoy a right is dependent on other people's also complaining when that right is violated, it's not really your right. I'm curious how many others of those defendants would've needed to complain simultaneously before that court became willing to entertain their pleas.

God, this just sickens me. Like, uhhhhh, hello, this guy is standing in front of you, complaining, now? Care to notice?

Side note: this is similar to the Scalia/tradition complex of issues. The argument here is sort of that this kind of treatment was traditional and had never been previously challenged, but of course in both cases the question is whether the traditional, unchallenged practice in question is actually valid, regardless of whether anyone wanted to challenge it previously.

While We're on the Subject of Scalia...

Later, from the same dissent:

"I would deny that the dissenter's interest in avoiding even the false appearance of participation constitutionally trumps the government's interest in fostering respect for religion generally."

First of all, as an atheist, let me just say, Justice Scalia, that I don't think you quite get how distinctly unpleasant it is to feel this "respect for religion" raining down on you, especially when it comes from the state. Respect for religion comes damn near equating disrespect for non-religion, and condemning an individual's theological beliefs is something, I thought, that the state wasn't supposed to do.

But more to the point, the government's interest in fostering respect for religion? Isn't the entire point that the government doesn't have that interest? It strikes me that between the commands, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and "Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise thereof," you have overall a framework in which, if nothing else, the government is not allowed to state an interest in either promoting or suppressing religion. It may sometimes aid religions for secular reasons, i.e. the tax-exempt status for churches in their capacity as charities, and it may sometimes hinder religions for secular reasons, i.e. the refusal to allow the Mormons to conduct polygamous marriages. But it's not allowed to do something because it likes a religion, or because it dislikes a religion, or because it likes or dislikes religions in general. Scalia has this thing where he insists that it's fine for the government to favor religion over nonreligion, as long as it doesn't favor a particular religion. I wonder whether he would be okay with laws that seek to suppress religion generally, as long as they want to hinder all religions equally.

Tradition and Originalism

I'm currently reading the opening passages of a dissent by Mr. Injustice Scalia from a case holding that nondenominational prayer at the beginning of a public high school's graduation ceremony was unconstitutional. Here are the passages that have got me thinking:

"In holding that the Establishment Clause prohibits invocations and benedictions at public-school graduation ceremonies, the Court--with nary a mention that it is doing so--lays waste a tradition that is as old as public-school graduation ceremonies themselves, and that is a component of an even more longstanding American tradition of nonsectarian prayer to God at public celebrations generally. ... Today's opinion shows more forcefully than volumes of argumentation why our Nation's protection, that fortress which is our Constitution, cannot possibly rest upon the changeable philosophical predilections of the Justices of this Court, but must have deep foundations in the historic practices of our people."

Notice something about this rhetoric? Not once does he mention the law. He does not even state that the Court is overturning legal precedents or traditions, merely that its current holding will destroy a cultural tradition. As best I can tell, the force of his legal argument, to the extent that he is making one in this passage, is that, well, we as a nation have always done X, therefore X must be constitutional. But there's a problem with that, isn't there? Isn't it possible that we were doing something for a very long time that was genuinely unconstitutional but which nobody noticed was unconstitutional? My professor in this course is Steve Calabresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society, a former clerk of Scalia's, and a professed originalist. But he believes that originalism is not about insisting that any American tradition must be valid. Instead, Professor Calabresi argues, an originalist should admit that people can misinterpret their own rules. For instance, he says, his analysis of the historical record suggests that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause was designed to prevent the creation of a caste system. That was the original intent. Now, very few of the legislators enacting that Amendment thought that the various differential treatments of women that were traditional in their society constituted a caste system. They were wrong about that. According to Professor Calabresi's philosophy of originalism, this means that the Equal Protection Clause does protect sex discrimination, even though its drafters most certainly thought it did not, because they misunderstood the fundamental principle they were enacting into law. (Incidentally, Justice Breyer's most recent book also argues for examining original intent at the level of underlying principles.) Applying this same idea to the case of invocations at public-school graduation, Scalia is perfectly within his rights to argue that the Court is overturning precedent, although I'm not sure there's any specific Supreme Court precedent for him to cite. But it's not enough to say that something is traditional to show that it is Constitutional. It's possible that the centuries of Americans holding invocations at their high school graduations were in fact violating the true, original meaning of the Establishment Clause all along, and they just didn't realize it.

Nancy Pelosi, MVP

She gets a lot of flack, obviously, for being wildly unpopular and for having had her caucus suffer a rather crushing defeat last year. But I still think that Nanci Pelosi is the person who, starting in 2007, has done the most to advance the progressive agenda. Apparently she was instrumental in convincing Obama to hit the Republicans as hard as he did in his speech on Wednesday, and she was instrumental in getting all of no Democrats to vote for Paul Ryan's budget. She's one hell of a whip, and she's easily the most powerful person in America who is a true, committed, liberal (as opposed to something more center-left). And when we take back the House next November, I look forward to seeing her become Speaker once again.

Symbolic Voting

A whole lot of liberal Democrats, including Leader Nancy Pelosi, voted against the funding resolution. That's interesting. I wonder how many of them would've voted nay if they were the marginal tie-breaking vote. There are a lot of issues where I can easily say, "if I weren't the deciding vote I would vote this way," but if it came down to it and I actually was the tie-breaker in the legislature then I might have to sit down and think a little bit. I felt like we saw something of this same dynamic with Dennis Kucinich with the health-care reform bill: he said he would vote no, but then once it became clear that yeah, his vote might actually make the difference, he came around and voted yes. I think this is an interesting phenomenon, and I'm sort of curious how much this sort of thing goes on in Congressional voting patterns.

Congressional Compensation

Apparently a new poll shows that all of no one thinks Congressmen should be paid over $150,000 per year. Boy do I get why people think that. But I also think I pretty strongly disagree. There's a few reasons why: a) Members of Congress are public servants, representing the people in our representative government. Those are the kind of person we should value and treat well. b) People respond to incentives, or so me econ textbooks tell me. If I could go be a Congressman but I could also go into the private sector and make a hell of a lot more money, at the margins I'll be less inclined to try to run for Congess. c) I suppose you could say that you don't want those motivated by monetary greed in Congress, only those who want to do it out of civic duty. Problem is, it's a lot easier to live on $150,000 per year in Washington, D.C. (and I imagine costs of living actually aren't low for a Congressman) if you have several million dollars in your bank account to start with, so this will be yet another way to encourage rich people to run our political power structure in addition to our economic power structure. d) If somebody wants to be a public servant for the purpose of cashing out, they can do it anyway by serving in Congress for a while and then becoming a high-powered lobbyist. It happens all the time. In any event, there's still always the power-hungry motivation, so it's not clear you gain very much in terms of shrinking selfish motives for becoming a Congressman by lowering nominal Congressional salary.

Finally, of course, notice that a $200,000 salary per Congressman is only $87,000,000 per year, which is quite honestly not very much in terms of the federal budget. So this isn't really about fiscal responsibility; it's a rounding error on the federal budget. It's about two things, how well we want to reward our democratic representatives and what kind of incentive structure we want to set up for people to try to become representatives. And on both those counts I think you don't gain anything by pinching pennies with our Congressmen.

Mejia Watch

Jenrry Mejia has pitched three games at the AAA level in his career. In the first, he pitched eight innings, taking a no-hitter pretty deep into the game before allowing a solo home run, the only run he allowed. The next two came this season; in the first he threw 6 innings, in the second 6.2, and he allowed a total of 0 runs on 6 hits. This brings his minor-leagues innings-pitched total to 265, with an ERA of 2.51. After the 1983 season, the Mets' top pitching prospect had thrown 269.2 career minor-league innings with a career ERA of 2.57. And he hadn't pitched above the level of A-ball. Those numbers look eerily similar to Mejia's numbers as of this instant, don't they? That pitching prospect was, of course, Dwight Gooden, who did some pretty good things in his first few years with the Mets. My point is, of course, that I think a point is fast approaching in this season after which Jenrry Mejia will be ready to be a Major League starting pitcher. I don't know that we've necessarily reached that point yet; after all, I think a lot of people think Doc was rushed to the big leagues and that it hurt him down the road. But the Mets don't exactly have the starting rotation of the Phillies these days. Pelfrey's been struggling, Chris Young is dealing with some sort of (hopefully minor) injury, neither Niese nor Dickey is really getting the results so far, and Chris Capuano's only had one start, which was only so-so. With the exception of Pelfrey, who has been struggling the very worst so far, none of these players has pitched more than one good season in the last few years. Hopefully at some point one of them will get bumped to make room for the return of Johan Santana (and hopefully Santana will be good upon his return). But suppose one of them gets injured or just plain can't cut it? At what point will the Mets say, hey, we've got one hell of a pitching prospect ready to go down in Buffalo, let's give him a shot?

The Poetry of Home Runs

In yesterday's game, Jose Reyes hit a pair of triples. That may seem an odd sentence for a post about home runs, but they both would've been home runs in most other ballparks, and quite a few rows back in Philadelphia, and they both looked like fly balls instead of the more standard triples fare line drives. So they sparked the following two thoughts of mine about home runs, the first of which I've had before. I think that one of the things that makes home runs so cool is that the instant they're hit the game stops. From the second that the hitter makes contact with a ball that ends up being a home run, excluding inside-the-park ones (which are awesome for other reasons) and the occasional marginal weird one, there's nothing anyone can do to change anything for upwards of a minute. The ball travels through the air, out of the reach of any of the fielders, soaring into the distance; the runner or runners all proceed around the bases taking as much or as little time as they want, it really doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Time practically stops as far as the game is concerned. It's the only time that that's really true: nothing on the field matters, starting the very split second that a home-run ball is hit. Even if it looks like it just barely stayed fair, it doesn't matter, because it was always on that line even if it was a close line. The crack of the bat, and then, boom, as far as the game is concerned you might as well go to sleep for a hundred years and then discover that the umpire just threw the pitcher a new ball and the next hitter has stepped into the batter's box. One swing, and time stops, or more to the point time doesn't stop but everything else does.

The other thought is derived largely from the fact that the second pitch Jose drilled for a triple was a curveball. I'm a huge curveball fan, and I think that great curveballs look just so unhittable, but this instance of Reyes hitting a curveball gave me the following thought. The pitcher has the ball. The pitcher controls the ball, the pitcher controls the game. The pitcher then throws the ball, letting go of it but maintaining control of it, making it curve and loop and arc the way they want, if they're good. The ball flies through the air as an agent of the pitcher's will and craft. It is painting a picture the way the pitcher wants it to (hopefully). Normally, if the hitter puts the ball in play, it then becomes not entirely anyone's control. The ball still has some of the pitcher's intent in it, but also some of the hitters, and with that array of mixed intentions it goes out to be dealt with by the fielders, who give it some intent of their own. Everything becomes all jumbled. The ball starts out pure, and then becomes chaotic. But when a home run is hit, it's different. When the bat hits the ball, the ball doesn't just leave the state of being purely the pitcher's creature. It gives its allegiance wholeheartedly to the hitter. It belongs to the hitter now, it does the hitter's bidding only. And it is under no one's control except the hitters, and it never will be again (except sitting on a mantelpiece). At the instant of contact the ball switches from being a pure pitcher's object to being a pure hitter's object. There's a sort of purity and grace in a home run that way, just the way there's a certain purity and grace in a called strikeout where the ball just flies through the air for 60 feet and 6 inches doing the pitcher's bidding purely and perfectly the whole way. Obviously the chaos of the ball in play is a very large part of what makes baseball fun to watch, but I think the contrast between that and the dynamic purity of home runs makes for a really interesting part of that whole mix.

Anyway, those are just two of my way-the-hell-too-poetic thoughts about home runs for the day. Meanwhile, Jose needs to hit some actual home runs one of these days, poetry or not.

Truth and Morality

This is completely random, but I just stumbled across the following question left on a blackboard in the room where my Brown Dems meeting was held: "Are there any true moral statements?" Quite honestly, this strikes me as an exceedingly easy question to answer. It hinges entirely on whether or not one is willing to accept some sort of bedrock principle defining either Good or Bad in some way as the foundation of your system of morality. If you are (for instance, I'd say that "for sentient beings to be happy is good and for sentient beings to suffer is bad"), then there are plenty of moral statements that are true as a matter of logical deduction from that starting assumption. And it is an assumption, mind you: I don't think there is a way to construct a whole system of morality without making a decision about what sort of moral axiom you use, and rationality itself cannot provide that postulate. You can pick the principle I described as being my own above, or a different one. I could argue with you about it, but I don't think what I'd be appealing to was ultimately your rational side. I would be trying to convince you that your principle disagrees with my principle in cases where your deep-seated visceral reaction is that your principle gets it wrong.

And if you don't take some sort of bedrock moral assumption? Then what is there to say? If you don't define good or bad, then there is no good and no bad, and therefore no morality to talk about. If what this question really means is, can there be a system of morality that completes itself based solely on logic and empiricism, wholly without relying on the kind of assumption I'm describing, I think the answer is no. But I also don't think that's a problem, because it's really not that hard to just set some postulates. We do it all the time in math, and quite honestly we do it all the time in life generally (starting with the assumption that the world really exists, or at least that we should act as if it does).

Jose Reyes, MVP

Ten games into the season, and guess who's leading the major leagues in triples? Okay, that one's too easy. How about leading the majors in at-bats, and the National League in plate appearances? Well, he's a leadoff hitter; that happens almost automatically if he's playing every day. But guess what? It's the same guy who's leading all of baseball in hits, with sixteen in ten games. That's a pace for 256 in 160 games, for what it's worth, as well as a .340 batting average. Meanwhile Jose is on pace to score about 110 runs if he plays 160 games. There's a couple of things he isn't doing yet (home runs, steals, walks), but those will come around if he keeps playing this way. Let me tell you this: if Jose Reyes keeps on hitting at .340, which I think he is eminently capable of doing, he'll be the Most Valuable Player in the National League. No doubt about it. And, what do you know, Fangraphs says he's been worth 0.5 wins above replacement through the first ten games of the season. Multiply that out to 160 games, and you've got an 8-win season. That's the statutory definition of MVP-level. Go Jose!

The Reality-Based Community, Part N

We are told that this budget battle was a decisive victory for Republicans. And I'll admit, the policy aspect of it kinda sucked. But the politics? Well, let's see: a new poll says that Democrats approve of the budget deal by 38 net points while Republicans disapprove by 2, 48-35 people give Obama credit for the deal's having been reached and shutdown's having been averted, Obama sports a +9 approval rating for handling the budget battle compared to -10 for leaders in Congress, and while 25% think the Republicans gave away too much just 18% say the same of Obama. That looks to me like the President came out of this smelling like a rose, even if on the substance he might've been dragged through a few thorny bushes.

What Is Religion?, Continued

I should note that immediately after I wrote my previous post about religion as authority, I read a few paragraphs in the same Canadian opinion that talk about how if freedom of religion is what's important then we can't define it in terms of authority figures, it has to be about individual conscience etc. Fine, that's all very well and good. But now I don't see where you draw the line to differentiate between religious and secular belief systems. The Court talks about how defining religions in terms of authority would get courts into the business of scrutinizing what is and isn't a religious authority and which of an individual's beliefs comport with some religious authority's say-so. But what I want to know is, how then do you draw the line between religious and secular beliefs? Taking the Court's definition, literally the only part that actually makes it religious is the bit about "foster[ing] a connection with the divine," and even then it caveats with "or with the subject or object of that spiritual faith." How frickin' porous can you get? Strictly speaking I think I could construct a not-facially-absurd argument for why my overall worldview is religious. And I'm a militant atheist. Now, admittedly, that argument would be BS, but still, I think there are a lot of beliefs that I'd call non-religious that this definition would include. So I'm sort of curious, what criterion can we use to define religion that behaves like a good statistic, i.e. produces the intuitive result somewhat more than 90% of the time but also the occasional counterintiutive one? Specifically, since I imagine people aren't looking to tell people whom intuition would say are religious that no, they aren't, can we come up with a bright line to draw that includes all people we would say instinctively are in a religion and also a small number of those who we wouldn't, and in a logical way? I'm curious what it would be, aside from authority, which would obviously work pretty damn well. And in any event, does anyone really think that whatever criteria we come up with will be things we'd rather have courts parsing than authority? 'Cause to me, that sounds like a quagmire or even a thicket, as Justice Frankfurter might say.

Of course, one alternative would just be to scrap the whole idea of trying to protect freedom of religion above and beyond freedom of conscience. But I guess that was never really on the table, so...

What Is Religion?

The section of my comparative constitutional law textbook I'm reading right now is about freedom of religion, and in particular what constitutes religion. The Canadian Supreme Court declares that:

"Defined broadly, religion typically involves a particular and comprehensive system of faith and worship. Religion also tends to involve the belief in a divine, superhuman, or controlling power. In essence, religion is about freely and deeply held personal convictions or beliefs connected to an individual's spiritual faith and integrally linked to one's self-definition and spiritual fulfillment, the practices of which allow individuals to foster a connection with the divine or with the subject or object of that spiritual faith."

(As a side note, it should say that it allows individuals to think they've fostered a connection with the divine etc., since one can't foster an actual connection with something that doesn't exist, and someone's got to be wrong.) But my main point is somewhat different. This definition is missing something. Suppose that I say, tomorrow, that I have hit upon some New World Religion, which I am thusfar the only adherent of. I am not worshiping the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim God, nor any of the various gods or divinities of Hinduism, Buddhism, the ancient Greek mythology, or any other religion known to man. I created this new religion for myself, just now. Perhaps I'd call it revelation, who knows. And I say that my religion requires me to do various things which I could not do in a given society unless I were doing them for my religion, and let's be honest, there are lots of such things. Would the government allow me to do those things?

Of course not.

The missing component in the above definition is that religions are defined primarily by religious communities, and by and large religious communities are defined by some sort of authority figure. Religions are more or less highly centralized, but basically if you say "I am a believer in religion X," you also mean "I am a member of religious group X and follow religious authority figures A, B, and C." We can quibble about how integral the authority part is (Buddhism might be a counterexample, but then again, that feels like one of those things that make Buddhism less religion-like and more philosophy-like). Most religions that I know of have some sort of sacred texts, which are considered Authoritative, and some sort of clergy that wields the Authority of those texts. And all religions are defined by large groups of people, in absolute if not percentage terms, who claim to follow the same Authoritative Texts and obey the same Authoritative Clergy. So as my dad sometimes says, the biggest difference between a religious belief system and a secular belief system is that the religious belief system involves Authority, and the more people that Authority wields its authority over and the more authoritative that authority is, the more we can say for certain that a given belief system is, in fact, a religion. So, to get kind of cynical and/or radical about it, the business of protecting religious belief systems over and above secular belief systems is very largely the business of giving state sanction to beliefs held only under the auspices of some authority figure. Fun, huh?

Unbalanced Inputs Yield Unbalanced Outputs

Nate Silver has what I think is a very good article addressing the question of whether the budget deal was more favorable to Republicans than it should have been, given that Democrats control, you know, two of the three institutions in the legislative process. He makes the point that the deal reached was probably for considerably fewer budget cuts than the median member of the House actually would've liked. Perhaps it was not as far to the left of that median-Representative-preferred position as it should have been, he says, given how far to the left of that goalpost the President and the median Senator are. But it's unreasonable, he says, to argue that because Obama ended up with more cuts than John Boehner's original request he caved more than 100%.

I'd go a step further. I think that not only did the median member of the House want more cuts than they got but also the median member of the House had a very different priority structure than the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House (and also than John Boehner himself, which Nate alludes to). Specifically the incentive to compromise was a lot weaker. Why? Because the alternative to compromise was a government shutdown, which a) liberals think would be even more macroeconomically disastrous than spending cuts, b) John Boehner thought would damage his reputation as Speaker considerably, and c) Tea Party-style Republicans, who right now think that the federal government is quite simply in the business of doing evil, might even have preferred to simple budget cuts, and though that's a bit of a stretch it's certainly clear that a whole lot of Representatives didn't disprefer a shutdown very emphatically. That means, of course, that they ought to be in a stronger negotiating position, because their threshhold for how much of their own way they need to get before they're willing to take the deal is naturally a lot higher than their adversaries. The House, the Senate, and the President are all veto players in this game: any one of these institutions could, in this instance, force a shutdown. Since the weapon each side wielded was the shutdown, it follows that the side most willing to use its weapon would end up with the best result. I never thought we were going to win this budget battle. Elections have consequences, people: elect a House comprised of radical Republicans, and you're going to get policies that look kind of radical and Republican.

Editorial Position

I just read a couple of online articles arguing about whether Joss Whedon really gets to count as being all that feminist. I'm not going to quote extensively from them or link to them because they reference things in episodes that various members of my family haven't read, but I had a problem with both of them, the anti-Whedon especially but also somewhat the pro-Whedon. I felt like, to a very great degree, the anti-Whedon article used the following argument style: "X happens in episodes of Buffy, X shows bad things happening to women or women having trouble dealing with adversity, therefore Joss Whedon isn't really a feminist." Meanwhile, to a fairly large degree although possibly less exclusively, the pro-Whedon article made the following sort of retort: "Yes, but, Y also happens in episodes of Buffy, and Y shows women being empowered and fully human, therefore Joss Whedon is really a feminist." But to me there's a problem with this kind of argument: it entirely ignores the concept of editorial opinions.

Look, maybe lots of stuff does happen in Buffy showing women being taken advantage of, etc. But it's still very possible that the opinion the show is presenting to you is that those things are bad. For instance, the anti article educes the fact that the first man Buffy sleeps with loses his soul as an immediate consequence as a sexist trope. But a) it wasn't Buffy's fault that Angel lost his soul, it was that stupidly-designed Gypsy curse, and neither she nor Angel had any way to know that, and b) I don't think we're supposed to think that it was particularly nice or just or decent of the Gypsies to curse Angel into never being able to experience true happiness without becoming an evil psycho killer again. We're supposed to think that it sucks. And that it sucks for Buffy, too, and that it's really, really unfair to her. (As a side note, "depicting bad things happening to women" is not an antifeminist thing to do. Bad things happen. The antifeminist thing would be to suggest overall that women couldn't cope with the fact that bad things happen, and "couldn't cope" not as in crying your eyes out after your boyfriend has become a soulless, evil killer and you can't help feeling [incorrectly!] that it's your fault, but as in actually being unable to deal in the long run with the various misfortunes that befall you. And I don't think that that message is what Buffy presents.)

In other words, yeah, maybe the "trope" of having a man lose his soul and become evil after sleeping with a woman is kind of antifeminist, taken at face value. But why should one take it at face value? Look at it in context, and specifically in the context of the world they live in. A feminist creating a fictional world does not have to create a world that is itself a feminist paradise. Indeed, it's probably difficult to convey a strongly feminist message in a world that is already a feminist paradise. All they need to do is create female characters who overall do a good job of dealing with adversity and overcoming obstacles. And I think it is eminently apparent that, at least in the context of Buffy, Joss Whedon does that.

More on Transcendence

A while back I wrote some posts about a certain metric I had come up with to measure "transcending the numbers," concluding that Jose Reyes transcends the numbers better than Derek Jeter. My sister points out to me that, whereas my metrics measured the importance of a player's success to their team, "transcending the numbers" is kind of more supposed to be about things like "little things like making pitchers work and getting runners over and putting the ball in play and hustling and stuff like that." It's a fair enough critique, but let's see if it changes the result. Each of these, I think, has an actually pretty direct way to measure it: respectively, pitches per at-bat, productive out percentage, strikeout rate, and infield hit rate. The last of these is the most questionable, since you add in the component of speed, but I still think it's the best possible one. We could add in double-play rate, though that also has lots of confounding elements. In any event, how do the two New York shortstops stack up? Answer: Jeter still doesn't win.

On the Subject of John Franco...

In a previous post I argued that John Franco ought to be in the Hall of Fame. I did this using a variety of statistics, both standard ones and somewhat more esoteric ones. Well, I was just reading an article on FanGraphs about the statistic "shutdown," which is awarded (by the online stats-generating community) for any relief pitcher who enters a game and increases his team's chance of winning the game, defined by win expectations, by at least 6%. Meltdowns are the inverse stat, awarded for relievers who reduce their team's chances by at least 6%. The cutoffs are designed such that it's on about the same scale as saves. This is supposed to be the truly Advanced, sabermetric-approved relievers stat, because it doesn't fetishize the ninth inning. Okay, fine. Wanna know who's fourth all-time in shutdowns? That would be John Franco, with 463. He trails exactly three pitchers, Hoffman (518), Rivera (507), and Lee Smith (478), who also bloody well ought to be in the Hall. So can we stop saying that Franco fails the strict scrutiny of sabermetrics? No, he wasn't just about accumulating artificial saves. He was a damn good relief pitcher. Oh, and while it's complained of Franco that he never had a 40-save season, he shut down 43 games in 1988. So let's just quit pretending that he doesn't deserve to be in the Hall, okay? He does, that's the end of it.

300th Post

The Masters Par-3 Contest is one of the awesomest things ever, specifically because of the tradition of having Jack, Arnie, and Gary play together, all miked up. Meanwhile, THE MASTERS STARTS TOMORROW!!! (I'm a little bit excited.)

Interesting

Some numbers on approval of the Libya decision strike me as interesting. A week ago it was 47-36 in favor, now it's 50-37 in favor. Very similar, right? Nope. Because net approval is down 19 points among Republicans, from 54-29 in favor to just 47-41 in favor, while Democrats have made a 17-point jump from 49-36 all the way to 59-29 in favor. So the partisan coalition of the pro-intervention crowd has changed significantly. And since Republicans are less likely to vote for Obama anyway, that could matter.

Volatility At The Top

Seven players, we are told, have a chance to be World Number One after this week's Masters if they win. But on further investigation, I discover that it's not just that: there would be very little possibility for those ahead of any of these seven players to defend their positions with high finishes. The last-ranked player in our group of potential #1's is, ironically, Tiger Woods (though he's accustomed to being the lowest-ranked player who could be #1 next week, usually because he's the only one!). If Tiger wins the Masters, I project that with the 100 ranking points from the win he'd get to 7.953 average points. If Martin Kaymer, current World #1, misses the cut at the Masters, he'll be at just 7.798 average points. To stay ahead of a victorious Tiger, Kaymer would need to get at least 7.6 points from Augusta. In order to do that, he needs to finish in the top-18. Obviously, that's possible, though he's never made the cut at Augusta. But in order for World #2 Lee Westwood to stay ahead of Masters Champion Tiger, he would need approximately 32 points, which requires a finish in the top-3. And World #3 Phil Mickelson would need 60 points to stay ahead of Tiger, and there's only one way to do that: he would have to finish second. (That would be ironic: Tiger wins the Masters, Phil finishes second, and Phil becomes #1.) So, while Kaymer has a fairly plausible scenario to fend off Tiger, essentially no one else does. Also note that Mickelson can get to #1 if he finishes solo second and Kaymer does no better than 18th, while Westwood can take the top spot with a finish inside the top-4 depending on Kaymer's results. Kaymer, for his part, would need the following results to defend against wins by the other six players: vs. Woods, 18th or better; vs. Casey, nothing? Hmm, that's weird, my numbers suggest that Paul Casey doesn't have this opportunity. It's possible that Steve Stricker is actually the 7th, or there is no 7th. Whatever. vs. McDowell, 54th or better; vs. Donald, top-3; vs. Mickelson, solo 2nd, vs. Westwood, no chance at defending. So there's a huge amount of volatility this week. If any of these guys wins, the odds are overwhelming that they'll be #1 six days from today (especially NOT McDowell, who's worse off than Tiger because he's got a larger denominator). Anyway, that's my analysis of how things will play out in the world rankings if one of the top players is in the mix to win the Masters. Should be exciting.

How To Evaluate Presidential Candidates

I think that one good thing to look at for early Presidential polls is not so much how Obama's doing against individual Republicans but the difference between his net approval ratings and his margins against various candidates. For instance, the recent Fairleigh-Dickinson poll has Huckabee at E, Romney at -1, Christie at -6, Pawlenty at -14, Gingrich at -15, and Palin at -20 against Obama. But it also has Obama with 44/48 approval numbers, a net -4. Assuming that changes in the approval ratings of incumbent Presidents will produce very similar changes in his performance against his opponents, which I think is reasonable, I think one good way to read this poll is that Huckabee is giving Obama a 4-point handicap, while Romney's giving him 5 points, Christie 10, Pawlenty 18, Gingrich 19, and Palin 24. These are the expected margins on election day if Obama's got 50/50 approval ratings by then. They're what the opposition candidates contribute to the election beyond its inherent referendum-on-the-incumbent quality. None of these Republicans is contributing less than -4. I think that's a broader trend across all polls, by the way: Obama consistently outperforms his approval numbers in the match-ups, and that probably means that yes, these candidates are all lousy. Just something to keep an eye on.

Not the Conventional Reaction, But Still...

So, we all know that recently some Republican Congressman from Wisconsin claimed that his family of seven is struggling on the Congressional salary of $174,000. Various of his constituents and commentators from the world in general criticized/mocked him for that, because, you know, that's not a bad salary. And, you know what, I agree: he's an upper-middle-class American, more materially prosperous than 99.5% or so of the world's populace. So it's silly of him to refer to himself as "struggling." But it is still true that we ought to be increasing the salaries of our elected representatives, our judges, and public servants generally. Why? Because a) these people are doing good work, serving the public, and that's something we should reward from a moralistic perspective, and b) we do want to make careers in public service attractive. In particular, if you start out being not-particularly-rich and you go to DC to be a public servant, given that the cost of living in DC is rather exorbitantly high, it's not the easiest of livelihoods. Which makes it a lot easier for people who are particularly rich to begin with to want to be public servants. Which gets us lots of rich people running our country. If, on the other hand, we pay people enough that they really can make a high-quality living being a public servant, then people who are not rich will want to be public servants somewhat more readily. Similarly, since campaigning takes up a large percentage of your time while you're, you know, campaigning, any public financing of campaigns really ought to include stipends for the candidate's living expenses. Yes, it feels like they then get to live at taxpayer expense, but it also means that the un-rich get to run for office without the prospect of spending a few months with essentially no income. It's all very well and good to talk about how all of this will give people greedy, money-grubbing incentives to want to be public servants, but if the alternative is a world where only rich people, who are likely to follow a generally pro-obtaining-money philosophy in their whole life, are public servants, you get kind of the same thing in the end, except with less equal opportunity to be, say, a Congressman.

On Individual Rights

In this post I am going to describe my own personal opinion of the structure of individual rights. This is, to be clear, not a positivist opinion. I'm not describing the structure of individual rights in, say, the American Constitution as written, though I might argue later that it's reasonable to read my notion of individual rights into the Constitution. Rather I'm making what you might call a "natural law" argument, except that I wouldn't phrase it in terms of natural law as that has various religious or top-down implications. But I am definitely talking about how I think one ought to approach the question of individual rights. Here's my basic thesis: the only individual right is the right to the pursuit of happiness, and any specific individual right may be derived from that right.

Antifederalists

I sometimes use the term "antifederalist" to describe the modern Republican Party's intense opposition to federal power. It strikes me as a reasonable term. But, of course, it's not the original meaning of that word. Originally an antifederalist was someone who opposed what is now the highly venerable United States Constitution, and preferred to stick with (a possibly amended version of) the Articles of Confederation. But it turns out, that's today's GOP, too. This balanced budget amendment that's making the rounds today includes a supermajority requirement for raising taxes. You know what was one of the very worst things about the government under the Articles? That's right, the supermajority requirement for raising taxes. So these Republicans are literally saying that the single biggest deal that the new constitution made as compared to its predecessor should be rolled back. They are truly the antifederalists. I thought we had gotten over this a few hundred years ago.