Team-Adjusted Wins

Last year, Felix Hernandez went 13-12 for the Seattle Mariners while C.C. Sabathia went 21-7 for the New York Yankees, David Price went 19-6 for the Tampa Bay Rays, and Jon Lester went 19-9 for the Boston Red Sox. King Felix won the Cy Young Award, however, largely because his 2.27 ERA and 249.2 innings pitched were both miles better than the corresponding numbers put up by the other three pitchers (3.18/237.2, 2.72/208.2, and 3.25/208.0, respectively). Some persons complained about this, arguing that while ERA, innings pitched, and the Wins Above Replacement metric largely derived from those two figures are nice, having an essentially .500 won-loss record just isn't okay for the pitcher anointed as best in the league. Well, here's a way to synthesize these two concerns: team-adjusted wins.

Not Your Father's Republicans, Part N

I've recently hit upon a way of describing the problems of the current Republican Party (actually, I devised this when talking politics with someone who got paired with me and my dad for a round of golf the other day). In the past, you could describe the party as being basically the Capitalism 101 Republicans. That is to say, standard introductory economics textbooks are often filled with lots of paeans to the way that free markets work, and assorted well-intentioned but misguided liberal schemes for interfering with the market to help people would end up being problematic. For instance, the standard little diagrams about how minimum wages or rent control do more harm than good. Combined with an implicit understanding that maximizing real GDP is the only valid economic policy goal, i.e. turning a blind eye to any and all issues of distribution, this leads us to a kind of standard right-of-center platform.

What the Mets Should Do

They should go all-in on Yu Darvish, and then hope to use that signing to lure Ichiro Suzuki into okaying a trade to the Mets in exchange for Jason Bay. That's on the assumption that the team will be reasonably willing to try not to suck next year. Now sure, I know Ichiro has sucked this year, but a) there's significant evidence he ought to be playing better; b) he's the kind of player, in common with Jose Reyes, who ought to benefit rather than suffer from CitiField's spacious dimensions, and c) Jason Bay's kind of awful, too. Obviously the main point here is still Darvish, but I do think the lateral Ichiro-for-Bay move would be a benefit. Duda-Pagan-Suzuki is a better outfield than Bay-Pagan-Duda; obviously, substituting someone better for Duda or someone different for Pagan doesn't change that fact. And I like the idea of a lineup that starts Reyes-Suzuki-Wright-Davis. Plus, obviously, the Santana-Darvish-Niese-Dickey-Gee rotation would be sick.

Anyway, just a thought. They won't do it, but it would be cool.

Defamation has to be FALSE!!!

Charles Krauthammer writes, in a recent column about Barack Obama's (long overdue) decision to accuse Republicans of a more-or-less intentional sabotage of the American economy to boost their party's prospects in the 2012 election:

Charging one’s opponents with bad faith is the ultimate political ad hominem. It obviates argument, fact, logic, history.

Let's start with the fact that this is an inaccurate description of "ad hominem." Wikipedia recognizes several kinds of argumentum ad hominem: the abusive, in which you attack Person X's character to undermine a point Person X is making; the circumstantial, in which you argue that Person Y's position and circumstances automatically incline them to make the point they are making, meaning that it carries less weight; and the "tu quoque," which in English I think would be rendered "you're one to talk," meaning that Person Z has done a thing that they say is bad.

Why I Still Dislike the Word "Progressive"

A few months ago I wrote a post with very nearly the same title as this one. I'm writing a sequel to it, of sorts, which also ought to incorporate an idea I've sometimes had that I can't seem to find on my blog yet. This sequel is occasioned by a post on Daily Kos that is attempting to outline a comprehensive theory of liberalism. The money quote, as I see it:

Instead, the progressive vision of government is simple: government is the entity most responsible for ensuring equality of opportunity.

Never mind that, as it happens, I quite like the idea of ensuring equality of opportunity, especially if you construe the words as, uh, liberally as I think you should. Indeed, an earlier post of mine attempting to define the fundamental philosophy of liberalism reaches a conclusion that can be viewed as nearly identical to this statement above. But I have a rather severe problem with this way of phrasing the liberal vision, namely that it isn't really a complete political philosophy, by which I mean that it does not address the idea of why we ought have government in the first place.

The 17th Amendment and the States

Texas Gov. Rick Perry apparently is one of the people who opposes the 17th Amendment, which shifted the election of Senators from a power of state legislatures to something handled by direct popular election in each state. Here's the quote:

I think the issue is about consolidating the power in Washington, D.C. The 17th Amendment is one of those where they were making... the states were historically more in control when they decided who those senators were going to be. They took the states out of the process at that particular point in time. So that’s the... uh... the historic concept of checks and balances, when you had the concept of the federal government and the states. The 17th Amendment is when the states started getting out of balance with the federal government, is my belief.

Now, see, he's not entirely wrong about this. It is indeed very possible that the switch to direct election of Senators created a political culture in the federal government that is less respectful of state power, and/or less reticent about using federal power, depending on your point of view. But what Perry glosses over entirely is why exactly this is a bad thing.

Rape Abortions and Paternalism

Rick Santorum's argument against allowing abortions in the case of rape apparently includes the following: that it would "put her [the woman] through another trauma." I don't mean to comment here on the merits of the overall issue, but if our concern here is for the woman, surely we should let her decide? No woman who doesn't want an abortion gets one (and if they do, that's a different subject entirely); how do we make the woman's life better by denying her the choice of whether she prefers the trauma of an abortion to the trauma of bearing her rapist's child? Again, not commenting on whether the woman should have the right to make that choice vis-a-vis the fetus (here), but if we're concerned for the woman we should let her decide what's best for her herself, right?

Why Rick Perry Is *Not* Headed to the White House

With Texas Gov. Rick Perry's announcement for the Republican Presidential nomination today, there's an article on CNN by James Moore arguing that Perry will win the election. Moore, author of a book about Karl Rove's role in George W. Bush's rise to power, is a Texan left-winger, strikes me as someone a little bit spooked by the rest of the nation's apparent willingness to consider his state's hideous governors. The first half of the piece is a rather sound analysis of why Perry will beat, most importantly, Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination. At this point I do think Perry's the favorite; Pawlenty's dead, Romney's a dead man walking (see the events of today), and Bachmann offers nothing Perry doesn't, while lacking the same level of established stature. But it's his "analysis" of the general election that strikes me as, well:

A Further Thought on Spoilers

Apparently all the talk about spoilers is occasioned by a study "showing" that people prefer short stories that have been spoiled. First of all, a short story is extremely different from a long story. Maybe for short stories of the variety they describe the plot is just a medium for the writing, but I really think it's got to be very different for something like the Harry Potter books. I don't know, I'm not a short story writer (though I know someone who is), but it strikes me that one shouldn't draw conclusions about all types of stories based on a study about one particular variety of story, the written short kind.

But more to the point, what are we debating? Suppose we prove that, let's say, in the aggregate people do not mind hearing a story (of whatever variety) spoiled. Where does that get us? That it is sometimes acceptable to spoil a story for someone? That someone has the right to not mind or even to positively desire a spoiler? No one disputes that. That someone, for instance my father, does not actually have the right to say, "no thank you, actually, I'd rather not have stories spoiled for me"? God I hope not. Even if some study claimed that it could prove that even someone who says they don't like spoilers actually won't mind them, I feel like if somebody says "don't spoil this story for me," it's a pretty disrespectful thing to do to then spoil it for them. So all we're really debating, I think, is whether someone has the right to issue a spoiler to someone else whose attitude regarding spoilers they do not know. I feel like the answer to that has to be no, because a) the unwanted spoiler is a worse offense than then not-given-but-would've-been-ok spoiler, and b) it doesn't take that much effort to ask someone if they're okay with spoilers or put a spoiler warning on something.

So maybe most people in the aggregate don't mind spoilers for short stories. Maybe they even don't mind them for other kinds of story. But that doesn't change the fact that someone can still say they'd rather experience a story unspoiled at least the first time, and it doesn't change the fact that one should respect that desire and be cautious of violating it accidentally.

The Supercommittee's Trigger

The idea behind the trigger mechanism backing the so-called supercommittee is that it will make cuts to things that both parties like, therefore forcing both parties to come together and reach a deal to avert those cuts. But it strikes me that's not quite correct. There are a fair number of Republicans at this point who have decided that cuts to defense spending are acceptable. It's certainly not anything like the highest priority on their list of policy goals. Likewise, there are a fair number of centrist-y Democrats who are fine with cutting domestic spending. So it strikes me that, rather than saying there are cuts to things Republicans like and cuts to things Democrats like, we should say that there are cuts to things Republicans don't like and cuts to things Democrats don't like. That changes the dynamic considerably: Republicans can now say, well, if we don't get a deal then at least we get domestic spending cuts, while Democrats can say, well, if we don't get a deal then at least we get defense spending cuts. That should make each party reluctant to support a deal that has too much stuff they don't like and not enough stuff they do like. So I'm thinking, trigger mechanism, here we come... (Barring, of course, the sensible deal in early 2013 to repeal the trigger's cuts.)

Re: Spoilers

My dad is someone who feels, more strongly than anyone else I know I think, that he does not want to be told anything about a story (literature, movie, television show, etc.) that he will read/watch in the future. Not even the classic "spoiler" thing of giving away the ending per se; he wants to be told absolutely nothing. Matt Yglesias, on the other hand, writes a post today called "The Case for Spoilers." It's an interesting point: he argues that one sign of a good story is that it can hold up to having been spoiled, that even if you know what's coming you still just appreciate the way the story moves toward that conclusion. The main point I would make in response is to emphasize the last line of his piece: "There’s no storytelling machinery that sets them ["it was all a dream" endings] up that can be appreciated on re-viewing."

Corporations Are Not People, Continued

Apparently Mitt Romney is of the opinion that "corporations are people, my friends." It's apropos of nothing, but Tiger Woods just went +6 through 15 holes so I have nothing better to do than present the argument for why corporations are not, in fact, people. It starts like this: of course corporations are not people, you idiots. Do they look like people to you? No. A corporation, among other things, has no corporeal physical entity, whereas a person most definitely does. People eat, drink, breathe, sleep, walk around, talk, etc. Corporations do none of those things. So: corporations, not people.

Recall Elections and Total Political Warfare

A recall election in Wisconsin tonight could result in the Democrats taking back the state Senate and remove Republican Gov. Scott Walker's ability to pass his agenda on a party-line basis. Great! On a substantive matter, I think it would be awesome if the Democrats win these recalls, and pretty sweet if Russ Feingold kicks Gov. Walker's ass in a recall of his own next year, too. But here's the thing: recall elections are a really, really bad idea. There are reasons why we let our legislatures sit for fixed terms of several years. You want government responsive to the people, definitely, but you don't necessarily want it to be a weathervane that follows every swirling breeze of public sentiment. Striking the balance between those competing desires was a big part of what the people who designed our government were thinking about. A recall process that allows for a new election at any time kind of destroys that balance. In theory, anyone who gets sufficiently mad about anything a politician has done to spend the money gathering signatures can force a recall, and once that happens all hell breaks loose (see: California, 2003). Recalls are a bad idea.

Babe Ruth Wasn't That Good

Okay, so that's kind of a lie: Babe Ruth was pretty good. And, beyond having been good, he was a central figure in the development of baseball. As the first person to figure out that, hey, hitting lots of home runs is a mighty good idea, he introduced the game to a whole new era. But I do think that, in a certain way, one can give him a little bit too much credit for having been the first guy to figure out that home runs are good. To show how this is so, I'll compare him to Barry Bonds.

From 1914 through 1935, Babe Ruth his 714 home runs, leading the majors twelve times in fourteen years. His on-base percentage was .474, and he led the majors ten times. His slugging percentage was .690, and he led the majors thirteen times out of fourteen years. All of that is very impressive. From 1986 through 2007, Barry Bonds hit 762 home runs, leading the league twice including a year when he hit 73. His on-base percentage was .444, and he led the league ten times including leading the majors six of his last seven years. His slugging percentage was .607, and he led the league seven times. All of that is rather impressive as well. Which was more impressive? Well, according to the Wins Above Replacement statistic, Bonds accumulated 171.8 WAR as a hitter, while Ruth racked up 172.0. So, very similar.

Creating New Parties

Matt Yglesias has a post about the idea that the Republican Party's formation in the 1850s means that newly-formed third parties can be successful in American politics. His point is that it's not a good example, because the Republican Party was largely comprised of assorted Northern politicians, both Democrats and Whigs, who joined this new party mid-decade. That's true, but I think that's sort of one facet of the larger point I've sometimes thought up about the creation of the Republican Party: no one has ever created a third political party in this country and dethroned one of the two established parties. No one. Ever.

A note on "Partisan Gridlock"

I keep hearing people say that we suffer from a situation of partisan gridlock in federal American politics these days. That is untrue. What we suffer from is a situation of Republican gridlock. The Republican Party has decided that it is going to use every available tool at their disposal to advance their agenda and hinder that of their opponents. That means doing things that go way beyond the scope of what the rules shaping our government were ever designed to encompass. It means doing things that are extravagantly in bad faith. It means threatening, as they've done over the last month, to pursue policies they themselves believe would be disastrous. The aggregate result of that is gridlock, and refusal on the part of our government to find solutions to our pressing problems. But it's not about partisanship. It's about Republicans being horrid. It's a one-sided affair.

Home State Winnings

Here's a fun fact: only two people in history have won a U.S. Presidential election without carrying their home state's electoral votes. In 1844, James Polk of Tennessee lost that state by 0.1% to Henry Clay of Kentucky. Then, in 1916 (a strange election to begin with, given Woodrow Wilson's bizarre three-way victory in 1912 and the fact that it's one of only two times that a President's re-election margin has been narrower than his initial victory) President Wilson lost New Jersey rather healthily to Charles Evans Hughes of New York, though he did capture a higher percentage of the popular vote in New Jersey than he had four years earlier. Polk is the only person ever to do this without already having been President, of course.

As for Presidential losers? Well, there have been 60 losing major-party Presidential candidates in our history, by my count, including multiple losers like William Jennings Bryan. Together they have won their home state just 33 times, or 55%. There appears to be some streakiness here as well: through 1848 73% of losers won their home state. Then, through 1884, just 45% of losers won their home state. As if that weren't bad enough, from then through 1956 just 25% of losers were successful at home. Since Adlai Stevenson's double defeats to Eisenhower, though, only George McGovern (who lost a landslide) and Al Gore (who won the election) lost their home states, a loser home winning percentage of 86%.

So, what does this tell us about the 2012 elections? Well, I think it's kind of a reasonable conclusion that if the Republican can't win their home state, they aren't very well favored to win the election. Sure, there's no particular reason to say this must be, and after all Al Gore did essentially win his election, but the fact remains that it is incredibly historically rare for someone who isn't currently President to win a Presidential election without the support of their native state. Let's look at the people FiveThirtyEight ranked recently as either a member of the "top tier" or a "wild card," as opposed to a "long-shot." Let's be honest, I don't care about guys like Buddy Roemer in this analysis. So, here goes:

Why Not Make Sound Budgeting Constitutional?

Matt Yglesias gives us his concept of a Progressive Balanced Budget Amendment. The idea is basically to make something like the pay-as-you-go rules constitutionally mandated, such that no act of Congress could increase the long-term debt level. Though I have some problems with the workability of this idea in practice, I'm actually drawn toward thinking it's a good idea in theory, for reasons that relate to my thinking about the proper way to do budgeting.

A Minor Point

Lucas Duda, currently playing right field for the Mets, is a rather popular player with the team's fanbase. He's a big, hulking guy with an amusing name. A name which, in fact, appears to fit rather neatly into a line from some movie, The Big Lebowski, that goes "the dude abides." Evidently it's a rather famous line. Anyway, people including Gary Cohen have taken to referring to Duda as "the big Lebowski," a double pun based on the line and his personal girth. And, of course, people slide his name into that quote. Except they do it wrong. People say "the Duda abides," which is flagrantly wrong, the correct version being, of course, "the Duda bides," which actually has the same phonemes in the same order. A minor point, but one I think is worth making.

Okay, so I'm bored and have nothing better to do. So sue me.

Trades, Relative Value, and Daniel Murphy

If you stipulate that all teams will evaluate the quality of all baseball players the same way as each other, and that all teams have the same needs as one another, then trades could never happen. How could they? Team A would never give up Player X for a player or players of lesser value, but Team B wouldn't offer players worth more than Player X. Therefore, the fact that trades do, in fact, happen means that different teams evaluate different players differently, or that teams have different needs from one another, or both. Really it's both, but I think the different needs of different teams is the primary motivator. There's the short-term/long-term divide between teams trying to "win now" by acquiring established players in exchange for prospects and teams looking to the future by trading their established players to acquire prospects. But sometimes teams just have different holes in their rosters. We have four outfielders but need a pitcher, you have a few young starters coming up to replace your veterans but are shaky in the outfield, let's make a trade.

Lineup Optimization

My dad and I had been discussing the concept of lineup optimization recently, so just now I did a little fooling around with an online lineup optimizer tool. I put in the players for an all-time Mets team as I conceive it (Piazza [C], Hernandez [1B], Alfonzo [2B], Reyes [SS], Wright [3B], Jones, Cleon [LF], Beltran [CF], Strawberry [RF], Johnson, Howard [DH]) with each player's stats from their Mets tenure. And it spat out the following lineup: Wright/Piazza/Alfonzo/Strawberry/Beltran/Johnson/Reyes/Jones/Hernandez. Uhhh.... what?!

Here's the thing about these online lineup optimizer tools that shocks me: all they use is on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Seriously? Is anyone seriously asserting that nothing matters in constructing a lineup except OBP and SLG? Not speed? Not contact hitting? Nothing about the difference between two doubles vs. a home run? Not keeping a nice alternation of left- and right-handed hitters? And that's conceding that we ignore the effects of who protects whom in the lineup, or of players' psychological inclinations to bat in certain spots (for instance, don't bat Jose Reyes third!). Nothing about the statistics of baseball matters except OBP and SLG? Another simulator I saw seemed a bit more nuanced, asking for percentages for all four kinds of hit, walks and hit-by-pitches combined, and then outs. Still, we're caring awfully little about anything except the exact result of an individual at-bat. I find it extremely hard to believe that nothing else matters.

Pelosi's Choice

Apparently Rep. Peter DeFazio says that Joe Biden told House Democrats that Barack Obama was willing to invoke the 14th Amendment option if "all else failed." If that's really true, why shouldn't Nancy Pelosi make all else fail? From what I've heard, she has the power to sink this deal if she wants to. Obama may not prefer a constitutional crisis to a deal, though sensibly he prefers a constitutional crisis to an economic catastrophe. But I think Nancy Pelosi might prefer the constitutional showdown, right? The vote is in the middle of being held, and it sits at 167-101 in favor as I'm writing, but there are a lot of Democratic votes that haven't come in yet. It'll be interesting to see what happens if this does indeed fail.

How Democrats Should Play Going Forward

Here's what I see as the medium-term Democratic strategy for making the world suck less than it might otherwise, given that the Republicans control Congress right now:

1. Spend every day between now and early November 2012 making sure you win the election.
2. Win the election. That means re-electing Obama, holding the Senate with as big a margin as possible, and taking back the house.
3. Let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. Mention Step 5 on this list while you do this step.
4. Abolish the effing filibuster. Seriously, guys. It's time. No way you'll have anything near 60 votes in the next Senate, and you need to be able to do something.
5. Early in the next Congress, pass a tax reform bill that a) introduces a carbon tax, b) closes assorted regressive tax loopholes and tax expenditures, and c) plows most, all, or slightly more than all of the revenues from the first two into cutting taxes for lower/middle class people, adjusting the impact of Step 3.
6. Roll back as much of the cuts from the current deficit deal or any future spending-cuts agreement made under the Republican rule, and pass a bunch of new programs that Democrats like. Go crazy, you're in charge again.

Obviously the key to this is Steps 1 and 2. The point is that as long as Republicans control any branch of the U.S. government public policy in this country is going to slowly, inexorably decay toward utter suckitude. That's bad. So rather than worrying too hard about how much the Republican House is able to mess things up (although you should still fight that as much as possible), just make sure we don't have another two years of this nightmare. The trick of Steps 3 and 5 is that they allow Democrats to get more revenues, restructure the tax code in various ways that we like, and shift tax burden off of the lower reaches of the income distribution all at once, by using the one tax situation where Democrats have the leverage. Do all of this, and the Republican Congress will not have managed to inflict too terribly much harm on the world.

I hope.

And in other news...

There's a headline on Huffington Post right now that reads "White House Orders Insurers to Cover Birth Control with No Copays." Just another one of the small but genuinely important public policy wins that happen every few days because there is a Democrat in the White House and not a Republican. Whatever you think of how Obama's handled the big stuff, the stimulus and health-care reform and the economy and now this debt deal, he's still President, he's still a Democrat, and that means that every once in a while we see a headline telling us that U.S. public policy just got a little bit better in some small but meaningful way.

The Debt Deal and Obama's Preferences

What does the fact that Barack Obama was willing to cut this deal tell us about his own, true preferences? Well, here we start with the observation that, as best I can tell, this is about as good as anything calling itself a deal was going to be. Republicans were never going to accept revenue increases in this deal, so any deal wouldn't include revenue increases. The total number here is on the small end of the numbers that had been mentioned and the cuts are relatively backloaded, the debt limit will be raised through the next election, etc. Moreover, the cuts include a whole frickin' lot of defense spending cuts, which is kind of a win-win. So conditional on there being a deal, this one is not bad.

So, if we accept that basic position about the substance of the deal, what are we left with? Obama prefers getting some deal to getting no deal. That's it. And what happens if we don't get a deal? Either economic catastrophe if the executive branch takes its least active/creative approach or constitutional crisis if the Administration decided to use some unilateral executive power. I happen to think that preferring a reasonably not-bad deal to the "economic catastrophe" option is a little more than completely reasonable. As for the constitutional crisis, while I myself would've found such a spectacle kind of fun and I reckon Obama would have won it, I don't think the President is crazy to not be thrilled at the prospects. If down the road Obama agrees to lots more spending cuts to sundry domestic programs and the big social security trio and then winds up getting all of the Bush tax cuts extended permanently, well yeah, that would suck. But that would suck in the absence of this deal, which I think you can plausibly argue was the best possible outcome once this whole debacle got started, and if Obama manages to fight hard during those future battles and then we win the 2012 elections then the whole thing won't be so bad. That's my take.

UPDATE: Re: this Paul Krugman blog post, I think I more or less agree with Krugman about what I would have done. But that's mainly because I would kind of enjoy the constitutional crisis that would ensue if, let's say, Obama minted a couple of $1 trillion platinum coins and Republicans then impeached him over it, which oh boy would they ever. Or if he just said, screw the debt limit, I have executive power. Or something. He'd get his ass impeached, and while I think there's a pretty good chance that he would win the PR battle over said impeachment I also think that I understand his desire not to put his name on a list that currently reads: Andrew Johnson, (Richard Nixon), Bill Clinton. Clinton won the PR battle over his impeachment, too, but when people discuss his Presidency they don't put the fact that he got impeached in the "pro" column. I don't blame Obama for not wanting that, even if Paul Krugman or I might've been less averse to it.