Well, That's Confusing

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll included a segment about gay marriage. The first part was a fairly simple "do you favor it?" question, with very nice 53% to 39% numbers in favor. But here's the second question: "Do you think each state should make its own laws on same-sex marriage, or do you think the federal government should make one law for all states on this issue?" That's... very confusing. When you talk about "making laws" in this way, it's natural to assume you mean legislative action, and it's absolutely impossible for Congress to pass a law establishing gay marriage in every state. There's the whole anti-gay marriage constitutional Amendment thing, but when people want to poll on that they typically do it in so many words. Now, what could actually happen that would make state laws on gay marriage pretty much uniform would be a Supreme Court decision declaring the right not to have marriage laws discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation protected by the Constitution. But it doesn't exactly sound like that's what this poll is talking about, either! (Also, that would still allow states to write their own marriage laws for themselves, they just couldn't write those laws in a way that was picky about the sexes of the two marrying persons.) So it's really unclear what they mean: an Act of Congress one way or the other, which is completely impossible, a constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage nationwide, or a Supreme Court case requiring gay marriage nationwide? It's unclear, and that makes it hard to interpret the results. For what it's worth, 49% want states to make their own laws, and 46% want one federal law. But I have no idea what that means! Do you?

Democrats: We Care About People

A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asked which party people thought was "most attuned and sensitive to issues that affect" various groups in society. (My apologies if the link doesn't lead anywhere that looks appropriate; I saw this poll on a poll-aggregating site, not on its own direct web page.) They asked this question for the following groups: religious conservatives, men and women in the military, small business owners, retirees, you and your family, stay-at-home moms, the middle class, working women, young adults under 30 years old, Hispanics or Latinos, and gays and lesbians. Interestingly, though this isn't my main point, most of these are groups that it is typically considered a self-evident good to be attuned to the interests of, but, notably, a whole lot of people would not feel that way regarding religious conservatives, including me, and a substantial but declining number would not feel that way about gay people. That probably explains why those questions produce such imbalanced results, because one of the political poles is proud to declare itself as attuned to that group's interests and the other pole is happy to accuse their opponents of being so attuned. But, as I say, not my main point.

Losing Mariano Rivera Hurts, Doesn't It?

During the month of April, the New York Yankees' bullpen was spectacular. Rafael Soriano had a 1.29 ERA. Boone Logan had an 0.96 ERA. Cory Wade was at 1.69. David Robertson, the set-up man and prospective future closer, had an ERA of, well, 0.00. Unscored upon. The great Mariano Rivera was arguably bringing up the rear with his pathetic 2.16 ERA, though the only runs he had given up were the two in a blown save and loss on the Yankees' Opening Day. So, a good bullpen. But then Rivera got injured, tore his ACL shagging fly balls prior to a game, and went down for the season. That led the Yankees to basically promote each of their relief pitchers, with Robertson becoming the closer and a chain reaction taking place behind that. So, how'd that go?

Well, so far in the month of May, Soriano's had a 3.86 ERA. Cory Wade, 3.38. Boone Logan, 3.68. And David Robertson was working on a 10.80 ERA before he, too got himself injured, straining a muscle in his ribcage. These four relievers went from a collective 0.95 ERA in April to a 4.56 ERA in May. It's not just the loss of Rivera directly that's hurt the Yankees, not just the fact that they don't have him available to pitch the ninth inning. It's that, with everyone yanked (so to speak!) out of their accustomed roles by his sudden injury, each of the remaining relievers has gotten worse. A lot worse.

Speaking as a Mets fan, I can only say that it's going to be fun watching the late innings of Yankees games for the rest of this season. For the first time in my memory.

Ike's Radical Home/Road Splits

If you've paid any attention to Mets baseball this year, you probably know that Ike Davis, projected as the team's cleanup hitter before the season, has not been hitting very well. Specifically he's got a .179/.237/.311 slash line, good for just a 54 OPS+, where 100 is league average. But here's the weird thing. In team road games, he's 16-for-57, with four walks, two doubles, and four home runs, including a mammoth one last night. That's a .281/.328/.526 slash line, everything you could ask for (well, except maybe a slightly higher OBP, but that's quibbling compared to his overall numbers) from Ike. Hell, he's driven in 10 runs in 14 games on the road, which extrapolates to a marvelous 116 RBI over the course of a 162-game season. The only trouble is, at Citi Field he's got just three hits, all of them singles, in 49 at-bats. Along with four walks that gives him a .061/.132/.061 line, which is, uh, bad for a pitcher. He's a left-handed first baseman who can hit the ball 500 feet. Not a pitcher. So... what? Why is Ike hitting like Ike when he's not at home, but hitting like Al Leiter when he is? I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. But it's an interesting thing to keep in mind, that in order to return to Ike Davis-esque form he just needs to start hitting at home like he's been hitting on the road.

No, the House did *Not* Vote to do X, Y, or Z

I keep seeing stories like this. "Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to ban the Justice Department from using any federal funds to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act in court." No, it didn't. It voted to pass through its House a bill that would, if also passed by the Senate and signed by the President, prevent the Justice Department from using any federal funds to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act. Except that might be unconstitutional. But never mind that, because the point is that all 435 Representatives, all 100 Senators, every upper-level Executive Branch officer, and everyone else who pays any serious attention to politics knows that the odds of this bill being passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed into law by the Democratic President, when its entire purpose is to kneecap said Democratic President, are strictly zero. Not 0.000001%, zero. So really, sweeping away a modest amount of formal labeling that in this case functions mostly as bullshit, the House passed a non-binding resolution expressing its discontent with the notion that the Justice Department might use federal funds to oppose DOMA in court. That's all it can do, so long as it insists upon doing things that are entirely acts of spite against the other branches of the government. It needs those other branches in order to have any real power. Individual Houses of Congress rarely, and the House of Representatives almost never, have any independent constitutional standing. The House of Representatives cannot vote to do something; only Congress can do that. Until then it's basically a press release from John Boehner's office. (Or maybe Eric Cantor's office.)

The Arc of the Moral Universe

In a lot of ways, Barack Obama is not the most left-wing American President ever. He's quite hawkish on foreign policy, although to be fair that really doesn't set him apart, and he's probably to the right of people like Kennedy and Johnson on economic issues. But he really is unambiguously the most left-wing President this nation has ever seen when it comes to so-called "social issues." Second on that list, of course, is Bill Clinton. That's not an accident. The phenomenon whereby the Democratic Party represents basically everyone whose personhood and legitimacy social conservativism tries to deny is a very recent thing. And the portfolio of groups to whom the political leaders of that left-wing coalition of cultural outcasts and minorities want to extend equality, in a symbolic/philosophical way at least, is getting larger by the minute.

My occasion for mentioning this is, of course, Obama's endorsement of gay marriage this afternoon. I find it a bit difficult to think of any significant way in which Obama currently opposes considering any group in society to not be entitled to full respect as human beings. (Obviously, he's nowhere near as radical on extending moral equality as I am, but then we non-specieists are a decided minority. Also you can argue about various types of criminals, but that's sort of a different thing.) And I think that this view, that basically every non-violent-criminal in human society is deserving of full and equal moral respect, commands roughly two-to-one support among young persons, meaning my generation, about half a generation above it, and everyone younger than us. Of course, that doesn't mean the opposing view, that a very large number of members of human society are deeply morally inferior and do not deserve respect, at least not in the ways that we liberals mean that word, is going away any time soon. But it does mean that it might become very seriously politically implausible to pander to that view rather soon.

Tiger Didn't Will the Ball Into the Hole, He Was Just a Great Putter

While Tiger Woods played the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass this morning, which he birdied, the announcers on the Live@ coverage of the 17th hole (that's what it's called!) talked about his recent lack of ass-whupping. They had a pretty general consensus that his swing looks good right now, but his mental confidence and the way that relates to his putting are what's holding him back. Now, I agree that confidence is a big part of it, but I think that's at least as important for the full swing as for putting. But they were discussing, as people are so wont to do, the impression that in his heyday Tiger would just make every clutch putt and could "will the ball into the hole," and that this ability has subsequently escaped him. But there's another explanation for his recent putting woes: especially because of his recovery from several injuries, he's been having to work incredibly hard on his full swing. And he's said on several occasions that this has prevented him from doing as much work as he would like to on his short game and putting. And putting is a skill! You can be good at it, you can be bad at it, you get better at it when you work on it and worse when you don't. Perhaps the reason why Tiger made so many clutch putts in his glory years is that he also made a hell of a lot of putts in less spotlit situations as well. He was just a good putter, and that came from solid technique maintained by the same countless hours of practice he spent on his full swing. What he needs to get his old form back, if this theory is correct, isn't just to suddenly start believing in himself again or whatever, but to have an extended period when his swing feels comfortable and he doesn't have to work on it so damn hard. Then he'll be able to get into a normal routine of practicing the long game, the short game, and putting in a balanced way, and hopefully be able to get every aspect of his game firing at once more often and thus resume his dominant winning ways.

The Limits of the Segregation Cases as a Model

A lot of the readings and discussion in the last unit of my Law & Society class on "Law and Social Change" tended to use the Brown v. Board of Education case and its progeny as archetypal examples. This is understandable; I did it myself. After all, the segregation cases are pretty demonstrably the biggest and best example of the United States legal system effecting large-scale social change, and although one can argue about how much the credit for those changes belongs to the court decisions that really just increases the allure of talking about these cases as the typical example. But they're not typical! These cases were really the first existential threat to the Southern social order of white supremacy. Well, okay, maybe the Civil War and Reconstruction at one point looked like it might be that, but at the very least these cases were the first existential threat since then, and probably the first such threat to actually proclaim itself as such, and to mean it. And of course they did mean it, and with support from Congress and the President they ended up more or less being that existential threat. And the Southern social order of white supremacy was, and arguably still is in its lingering legacies, the distinctive feature of American political structure. This was dominant issue of multiple centuries of our political history, and the Court announced that it intended to declare victory in that ancient struggle for one side, and then end the struggle. And, well, the struggle isn't entirely over, but it's a lot more over than it looked like it would ever be a century ago.

And you can't do that more than once! There is only one dominant issue in American political history, and the Brown case dealt with it. Other cases concerning other issues, by definition, don't deal with that preeminent issue. And I don't think I'm saying anything controversial by saying that race relations in this country have historically had a very different character than any other kind of issue. So, for instance, one might note that the Brown case and its progeny resulted in fairly little on-the-ground social change, desegregation, until the political branches of the federal government got involved with the Civil Right Act of 1964, and one might conclude from this that the legal system has relatively little independent ability to cause social change. I might disagree with that interpretation of the story of desegregation, but I'd like to make a broader point: the array of forces aligned around the Brown case was eminently singular. To use my favorite example, if at some point in the next few years the Supreme Court, or more precisely Justice Anthony Kennedy, grows a pair and decides to render a decision analogous to Brown on the issue of gay marriage, there will be no massive resistance. You'll find county clerks in Utah handing out gay marriage licenses the next day, or whenever the decision takes effect. If and when that decision comes, it will cause nearly immediate social change very directly, because the politics of gay rights are just not the same as the politics of racial civil rights in this country. The Brown case was great, and there's a lot to learn about law, society, and law and society from it, but one always has to be careful about over-generalizing from it. It really was a unique event.

The Jekyll and Hyde Mets

Tomorrow night, when Dillon Gee faces off against Cliff Lee in the finale of the Mets' three-game series in Philadelphia, the team will complete its sixth turn through its starting rotation. And there's an interesting pattern to those six revolutions of the pitching staff, as measured by Johan Santana's starts. The first time through they had four wins, their first four games, against just one loss. The second turn through they went 3 and 2. Then came their dreadful stretch including the series against the Giants; because of a double-header, the rotation lasted six games this time, and they went 1 and 5. But then they bounced right back, winning 4 and losing just 1 their next time through. And then they gave that right back again, with a 1-and-4 trip through the starting rotation. And now they're 4 and 0 so far this time through. So in five of the first six times through the Mets rotation, they've either had only one win or only one loss. And they look really, really bad during the bad trips around the rotation, but very good during the good ones. It'll be interesting to see if this pattern continues.

(Incidentally, the first spot in the rotation, Santana's games, has produced a 4-&-2 record; the second spot has given us a 4-&-2 record as well behind Dickey; the third spot, Niese's, is also 4-&-2; the fourth spot, formerly Pelfrey's but now patched together with Schwindens and Batistas, is 3-&-3; and the fifth spot, Gee's, is just 2-&-3. There was also that double-header start of Batista's, a loss that didn't fit into one of the normal rotation slots. We'll see if Gee can pull even tomorrow night.)

Adventures in Getting Statistics Right

In a previous post of mine, I cautioned against a certain way to get mixed up in calculating the odds of certain unlikely events. The specific case was a claim of two-million-to-one odds against a child being born on Leap Day to a mother also born on Leap Day, and my basic point was that on any given Leap Day there are always lots of babies born, so there's no need to double-count the odds against a Leap Day birth. So I'm pleased to see that another instance of what looks like the same double-counting is actually a valid one. The day which is now yesterday, May 3rd, 2012, apparently featured the first game in Major League history where both opposing starting pitchers were celebrating their birthdays. Ryan Dempster of the Cubs turned 35, and he was opposed by Homer Bailey of the Reds, turning 26. Now, I happen to think yesterday was a fine day for a birthday, as it was in fact my 21st, so I find this cool. A post on a certain Mets fansite I frequent, Amazin' Avenue, suggested that the odds of this occurrence are 1-in-133,402. That latter number is simply 365 * 365, so except for that whole Leap Day thing it's a pretty good approximation if we should really expect these to be independence events. Which we should! There's no remote guarantee that one of the pitchers on a given day will be celebrating a birthday, the way there is a guarantee that there will be many babies born on a given Leap Day, so we really should be surprised to the full extent of the 365-to-1 odds for both pitchers, and these odds are roughly correct. And, as there have been around 200,000 MLB games thus far, they suggest it is not particularly shocking that this was the first time this happened.

So, congratulations to Ryan Dempster and Homer Bailey for rockin' the May 3rd awesomeness!