Earlier today, Barack Obama gave a speech in which he said that: Congressional leaders from both parties are close to a deal to avert the so-called "fiscal cliff;" that deal has not yet been reached; it is the Republicans' fault that the deal is not being reached; and the Republicans are not going to get their preferred solution to this whole situation. Rumor has it that House Republicans have been seriously pissed off at this speech, and are basically refusing to vote on anything tonight because Obama said mean things about them. What I'm wondering is whether that sequence of events might've been deliberate on Obama's part. It's been obvious all along that the fundamental logic of the deal-making favors Democratic policy results if we go over the cliff into the new year: Obama can then say to Republicans, okay, here's the Obama tax cut, and in exchange for my letting you pass it, which will be giving me what I want anyway, I'll make you give me a bunch of other stuff that I want. Republicans would be in a very difficult position to resist that tactic. So it makes sense for Obama to want to go over the cliff for a day or two. But, as has been usual for the last two years, it's quite important for him to make sure people blame Republicans for it. So making a very public display of having been working on a deal until the last minute, and getting House Republicans to sabotage any potential deal because they felt personally offended by Obama, is arguably the best of all relevant worlds. People keep doubting that Obama is incorporating the craziness of the Republicans into his strategy, which he would typically have been doing by offering more in deals than he actually wanted to give up, secure in the knowledge that House Republicans can't take yes for an answer. But I think that this time, it might well be the truth: Obama had a big noisy press conference because he wanted to throw the House Republican caucus into a hissy-fit, delivering him a more advantageous tactical situation while squarely delivering them the blame.
Happy New Year?
Monday, December 31, 2012
Saturday, December 22, 2012
He did it!
The Doctor saved us!!!
(Okay, given my earlier post about time zones and all, maybe I have to wait another few hours before December 21st, 2012 has good and truly bitten the dust across all of planet earth. Whatever.)
(Okay, given my earlier post about time zones and all, maybe I have to wait another few hours before December 21st, 2012 has good and truly bitten the dust across all of planet earth. Whatever.)
Friday, December 21, 2012
It's Always the End of the World as We Know It
(NOTE: If you haven't seen through the end of Season 7, Part I of Doctor Who, it's possible you won't want to read this post. I think the quote I use isn't particularly spoilerish, but still.)
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Time Zones and Doomsday
I just got done reading this rather thorough take-down of the idea that this Friday, December 21st, will be a "doomsday" because a certain cycle of a certain Mayan calendar ends on it on Slate's new really cool astronomy blog. Accordingly, because I need some way of procrastinating on my constitutional-theory paper that's due, well, on doomsday itself, I thought I'd share a thought I recently had about doomsday predictions. If you forecast that the end will fall on a certain calendar date, which time zone do you mean that in? Is it December 21st, Eastern Standard Time? Or Greenwich Mean Time? (In Doctor Who it does tend to be London time, as far as I can tell, though it's usually only relevant for Christmas specials.) Tokyo time? What? Does it happen at the first instant that it's December 21st anywhere on earth, or at the one brief moment, twenty-four hours later, when it's December 21st everywhere on earth? Or just at some point during the day that's December 21st, 2012 for the location of the Mayan civilization? Whenever it happens, it'll be nighttime for half the planet, and while the day is a nice naturally-occurring measurement unit, the placement of the dividing-line between one day and the next is a wee bit arbitrary. Astronomers tend to consider a day as lasting from noon to noon, for instance.
Now, this is certainly not the biggest problem with doomsday prophesies by any stretch of the imagination. Still, worth keeping in mind that there isn't even a uniform date across the whole planet, let alone a uniform time. And if we're talking about a fated planet-wide Armageddon, you'd think it would have some slightly more eternal reference-frame than just the dating conventions of twenty-first century human civilization. Just a thought.
Now, this is certainly not the biggest problem with doomsday prophesies by any stretch of the imagination. Still, worth keeping in mind that there isn't even a uniform date across the whole planet, let alone a uniform time. And if we're talking about a fated planet-wide Armageddon, you'd think it would have some slightly more eternal reference-frame than just the dating conventions of twenty-first century human civilization. Just a thought.
Friday, December 14, 2012
The Fundamental Logic of Not Making Trades
Time to distract myself from national tragedy with... the probable impending trade of the New York Mets' best and most awesome player! ...oh well, it's something, at least.
Trades are weird. You'd kind of think trades wouldn't happen People talk about two teams "agreeing" to a trade, but really, what happens in a trade is a disagreement. Team X thinks that Player Package A is superior to Player Package B, while Team Y thinks that B is superior to A. So they swap, and everyone's happy. Perforce, this involves either teams disagreeing on the "absolute" values, so to speak, of the players involved or teams giving different "relative" values to different types of player. The impending negotiations between the Mets and the Blue Jays regarding R.A. Dickey are a marvelous case study.
Trades are weird. You'd kind of think trades wouldn't happen People talk about two teams "agreeing" to a trade, but really, what happens in a trade is a disagreement. Team X thinks that Player Package A is superior to Player Package B, while Team Y thinks that B is superior to A. So they swap, and everyone's happy. Perforce, this involves either teams disagreeing on the "absolute" values, so to speak, of the players involved or teams giving different "relative" values to different types of player. The impending negotiations between the Mets and the Blue Jays regarding R.A. Dickey are a marvelous case study.
The Intent of a Gun is to Destroy
'Tis the season for arguing about guns, apparently, because some homicidal maniac decided to make it so.
One of the many, many arguments against meaningful gun control that really pisses me off is the idea that other things beside guns also kill people. This can take the form of, as in the really bizarre Fox News segment a few days ago that was featured, and annihilated, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, coming up with all the other creative ways that someone who committed murder with a gun could've committed the same murder without a gun.* Or it can involve the simple observation that most people don't die from being shot with a gun, and not even most people who die the kind of death where you suffer some kind of violent physical trauma are killed with guns. Cars, for instance, kill lots of people, and knives can be very effective as an alternate means of murdering someone. But you don't see anyone proposing to ban cars or knives, do you?
This argument entirely misses what I would call the intentions of an object. The intention of a car, for instance, is to transport a person over a moderate distance at a moderately high speed. That's why cars exist, it's what they're meant to do. In the course of being used to do the thing they're intended to do, when they're used wrong, people sometimes get killed, but killing is not the intention. Likewise with, say, heavy-duty kitchen knives: their intention is to cut cooking ingredients. They can be used in a non-intended way, to cut living human flesh, but again, killing is not the intention of the object. To kill someone with a knife, a human needs to add intent to kill. For a car to kill someone, a human needs to use it wrongly, though not necessarily with any ill intent.
Now, admittedly, one might protest my fairly obvious next point by saying that the intention of a gun is not to kill either. Setting this question as phrased aside for the moment, I will simply assert that the intention of a gun is destruction. Knives and cars and baseball bats and airplanes, though they can all be turned into highly effective weapons, are first and foremost designed for creative uses: cooking and driving and playing and flying. There is, on the other hand, nothing creative that a gun wants to be used for. You can use a gun in a work of art, I suppose, but people don't make guns to make art with them. They make guns to efficiently destroy things. The intended target might be a piece of marked paper on a wall, or a helpless defensive animal in the woods, or a tyrannical Brit (think 1770s), or a home invader bent on rape and pillage, and these acts of destruction we might want to condone. Well, some of us might, anyway. But the simple fact remains that all a gun wants to do is destroy stuff. Guns will sometimes just kill people because they feel like killing people, as when they misfire during cleaning or whatever. A society with a lot of guns in it is a society filled with tiny little objects filled with malice for whatever lies in their sights, and no wish other than to destroy.
Not only does this make guns an inherently violent object in a way that baseball bats or cars or even knives are not, it speaks to the logic of eradicating them. What do we lose if we get rid of guns? We lose nothing creative, for guns are not creative objects. If we eradicate knives, we lose the ability to prepare food efficiently, and to open packages. If we eradicate cars, we lose the ability to transport people efficiently throughout society. If we eradicate guns? I contend that we lose nothing of value, nothing except destruction. As a society we must eternally struggle with the fact that knives and cars and baseball bats can become instruments of destruction, for we have substantial reason to desire the continued existence of these things. There is, however, no logic telling us that we must struggle with the innate desire of firearms to become instruments of destruction. We have simply chosen to tolerate it, because some of us enjoy destroying the right kind of thing.
One of the many, many arguments against meaningful gun control that really pisses me off is the idea that other things beside guns also kill people. This can take the form of, as in the really bizarre Fox News segment a few days ago that was featured, and annihilated, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, coming up with all the other creative ways that someone who committed murder with a gun could've committed the same murder without a gun.* Or it can involve the simple observation that most people don't die from being shot with a gun, and not even most people who die the kind of death where you suffer some kind of violent physical trauma are killed with guns. Cars, for instance, kill lots of people, and knives can be very effective as an alternate means of murdering someone. But you don't see anyone proposing to ban cars or knives, do you?
This argument entirely misses what I would call the intentions of an object. The intention of a car, for instance, is to transport a person over a moderate distance at a moderately high speed. That's why cars exist, it's what they're meant to do. In the course of being used to do the thing they're intended to do, when they're used wrong, people sometimes get killed, but killing is not the intention. Likewise with, say, heavy-duty kitchen knives: their intention is to cut cooking ingredients. They can be used in a non-intended way, to cut living human flesh, but again, killing is not the intention of the object. To kill someone with a knife, a human needs to add intent to kill. For a car to kill someone, a human needs to use it wrongly, though not necessarily with any ill intent.
Now, admittedly, one might protest my fairly obvious next point by saying that the intention of a gun is not to kill either. Setting this question as phrased aside for the moment, I will simply assert that the intention of a gun is destruction. Knives and cars and baseball bats and airplanes, though they can all be turned into highly effective weapons, are first and foremost designed for creative uses: cooking and driving and playing and flying. There is, on the other hand, nothing creative that a gun wants to be used for. You can use a gun in a work of art, I suppose, but people don't make guns to make art with them. They make guns to efficiently destroy things. The intended target might be a piece of marked paper on a wall, or a helpless defensive animal in the woods, or a tyrannical Brit (think 1770s), or a home invader bent on rape and pillage, and these acts of destruction we might want to condone. Well, some of us might, anyway. But the simple fact remains that all a gun wants to do is destroy stuff. Guns will sometimes just kill people because they feel like killing people, as when they misfire during cleaning or whatever. A society with a lot of guns in it is a society filled with tiny little objects filled with malice for whatever lies in their sights, and no wish other than to destroy.
Not only does this make guns an inherently violent object in a way that baseball bats or cars or even knives are not, it speaks to the logic of eradicating them. What do we lose if we get rid of guns? We lose nothing creative, for guns are not creative objects. If we eradicate knives, we lose the ability to prepare food efficiently, and to open packages. If we eradicate cars, we lose the ability to transport people efficiently throughout society. If we eradicate guns? I contend that we lose nothing of value, nothing except destruction. As a society we must eternally struggle with the fact that knives and cars and baseball bats can become instruments of destruction, for we have substantial reason to desire the continued existence of these things. There is, however, no logic telling us that we must struggle with the innate desire of firearms to become instruments of destruction. We have simply chosen to tolerate it, because some of us enjoy destroying the right kind of thing.
Why Today Is Not The Day For Gun Control
In the wake of yet another one of these stupid bloody mass shootings, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said this:
This is one of those subjects where there's just an absolute consensus that nothing will ever be done about it. Climate change is another, although I have somewhat more hope there that Republicans can be made to realize that a carbon tax is a sensible, market-based conservative solution to a genuine national problem. ("Somewhat more" does not mean "a lot," just "more than zero.") But the fact that this consensus is right as long as there are 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives only underscores the importance of making there not be 218 House Republicans anymore. Presidents are supposed to get slaughtered in their six-year midterms. It's very important that 2014 buck that trend. Today is just one more tragic reason why. Republican control of the House makes it impossible to get the national government to do anything to solve national problems, or to make the lives of the American polity better or to prevent tragedies. Republican control of the House must, therefore, end.
"There is, I am sure -- will be, rather -- a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I do not think today is that day."A whole lot of people on the left are getting understandably pissed off about this. The rule that we can never discuss gun policy when the costs of America's absurd, wicked gun policy are most apparent is one that serves to eternally prejudice the debate in favor of the pro-gun side, and it legitimately sucks to hear a Democratic Administration endorsing it. But I think the reason why they keep saying this is readily apparent, and can be expressed in three words: Speaker John Boehner. Calls for Congress to pass new anti-gun legislation face an inescapable problem in the fact that Republicans control the House of Representatives, and that we can predict with pretty high certainty that any anti-gun measure will garner exactly 0 votes from House Republicans. Those two facts together make it absolutely impossible that Congress will enact any new legislation on the subject for the next two years. That sucks, but it's true, and there's very little anyone can do (except perhaps to shoot a bunch of Republican Congressmen, which, for the record, I am not advocating!) to make it stop being true. And, this being the case, I can understand why the White House feels that there's no point starting an argument that will only cost them political capital when there's absolutely zero potential to get anything out of it.
This is one of those subjects where there's just an absolute consensus that nothing will ever be done about it. Climate change is another, although I have somewhat more hope there that Republicans can be made to realize that a carbon tax is a sensible, market-based conservative solution to a genuine national problem. ("Somewhat more" does not mean "a lot," just "more than zero.") But the fact that this consensus is right as long as there are 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives only underscores the importance of making there not be 218 House Republicans anymore. Presidents are supposed to get slaughtered in their six-year midterms. It's very important that 2014 buck that trend. Today is just one more tragic reason why. Republican control of the House makes it impossible to get the national government to do anything to solve national problems, or to make the lives of the American polity better or to prevent tragedies. Republican control of the House must, therefore, end.
Congress Can Criminalize a Romantic Weekend Across State Lines
In 1910, the United States Congress passed the White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act, prohibiting the transport of women across state lines for "immoral purposes." The intention behind the law was to strike at interstate prostitution networks and human trafficking. This is a fairly ambitious use of Congress' Commerce Power to begin with, but what happened next was even more striking. The "immoral purposes" phrasing is absurdly ambiguous, after all, so it's no surprise that prosecutors started bringing charges against people who crossed a state line merely to have sex. Consensual sex. With no money involved.
Some time in the three years after the Mann Act was passed, Farley Drew Caminetti, a married man, traveled from Sacramento, California, to Reno, Nevada with his mistress. A friend of his did the same. Their intent was very much to have sex with their mistresses in Reno. Their wives alerted the police, and Caminetti and his friend were arrested. They were then found guilty of violating the Mann Act, despite the fact that there was no prostitution involves. Extramarital affairs, after all, are considered immoral by plenty of people, and in 1913 by just about everyone. They then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in 1917, upheld the conviction. The case was mainly concerned with statutory interpretation, i.e. did the Mann Act mean to encompass non-commercial sex in its "immoral purposes" framework, but implicitly there's a constitutional question lurking here as well. After all, two people having sex is not particularly commercial in nature, unless it's prostitution, which this case wasn't. Some readings of the Commerce Clause power might say that, while interstate crossings for commercial sex may be prohibited through that power, interstate crossings for free, consensual sex cannot be. The Court didn't read it that way, though. That's not really surprising, given that it had already upheld the Mann Act and that it has never embraced the view that "commerce" only means the narrow, economic sense of exchange of goods for other goods and/or money.
Still, I think it's kind of remarkable that Congress could, if it so chose, prohibit a young unmarried couple traveling across state lines to some resort place or whatever for a romantic weekend together. Now, perhaps these days the Court would wheel in the various individual rights provisions to limit this apparent power. Nothing in the alterations of Commerce Clause doctrine would preclude such a result, however: this is a state line crossing we're talking about, and no case has yet backed down from the notion that Congress can hit anyone or anything that crosses a state line with as much force as it wants for whatever reason it wants. Pretty striking.
(In case you're asking yourself why I just wrote a blog post that seems to bemoan the limitless scope of Congress' powers, I'm beginning to work on a paper for school in which I plan on arguing that Congress' enumerated powers should be limited even in their most concrete applications by various structural principles and through relation to individual-rights provisions.)
Some time in the three years after the Mann Act was passed, Farley Drew Caminetti, a married man, traveled from Sacramento, California, to Reno, Nevada with his mistress. A friend of his did the same. Their intent was very much to have sex with their mistresses in Reno. Their wives alerted the police, and Caminetti and his friend were arrested. They were then found guilty of violating the Mann Act, despite the fact that there was no prostitution involves. Extramarital affairs, after all, are considered immoral by plenty of people, and in 1913 by just about everyone. They then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in 1917, upheld the conviction. The case was mainly concerned with statutory interpretation, i.e. did the Mann Act mean to encompass non-commercial sex in its "immoral purposes" framework, but implicitly there's a constitutional question lurking here as well. After all, two people having sex is not particularly commercial in nature, unless it's prostitution, which this case wasn't. Some readings of the Commerce Clause power might say that, while interstate crossings for commercial sex may be prohibited through that power, interstate crossings for free, consensual sex cannot be. The Court didn't read it that way, though. That's not really surprising, given that it had already upheld the Mann Act and that it has never embraced the view that "commerce" only means the narrow, economic sense of exchange of goods for other goods and/or money.
Still, I think it's kind of remarkable that Congress could, if it so chose, prohibit a young unmarried couple traveling across state lines to some resort place or whatever for a romantic weekend together. Now, perhaps these days the Court would wheel in the various individual rights provisions to limit this apparent power. Nothing in the alterations of Commerce Clause doctrine would preclude such a result, however: this is a state line crossing we're talking about, and no case has yet backed down from the notion that Congress can hit anyone or anything that crosses a state line with as much force as it wants for whatever reason it wants. Pretty striking.
(In case you're asking yourself why I just wrote a blog post that seems to bemoan the limitless scope of Congress' powers, I'm beginning to work on a paper for school in which I plan on arguing that Congress' enumerated powers should be limited even in their most concrete applications by various structural principles and through relation to individual-rights provisions.)
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Analyzing Peter Bourjos
(This is all in light of my previous post.)
Apparently people are speculating that a trade centered around Peter Bourjos moving from the Angels to the Mets and R.A. Dickey moving from the Mets to the Angels. That's a horrible idea; Bourjos is not worth R.A. Dickey. He's not worth Jon Niese. But is he worth having at all?
One might be given pause by the fact that he hit .220/.291/.315 last year in limited usage as a reserve outfielder (195 PA), accumulating just a 73 wRC+ and having been on pace for about -24 runs above average from batting over a full season. He's a spectacular enough defender that he was still worth 1.9 fWAR and 1.1 bWAR last year, but still, the awful hitting gives one pause. Moreover, his genuinely good season of hitting in 2011, when he hit .271/.327/.438 with 12 home runs, 11 triples, and 22 steals, en route to a roughly 4.5 WAR season (when combined with his being a brilliant center fielder) was sustained in large part by a .338 BAbip, which looks unsustainable given his low line drive percentage (14.5% over the course of his career, worst in the majors over that period).
Except... when I plug his numbers into an xBAbip calculator, which projects a batting average on balls in play by the nature of those balls in play, I find that Bourjos if anything under-performs his expectations on balls in play. Using 2012 numbers, in which offense (including BAbip) was way down, his 2012 season should've produced a .300 BAbip, instead of the .274 it did produce. In 2011, sure, he was outperforming slightly; that year should've been a .331 instead of a .338 by 2011 numbers, and would've been just .321 in 2012. Meanwhile, in 2010, his rookie season, Bourjos had just a .228 BAbip but his batted balls should've resulted in more like a .285. So over the course of his young career, Bourjos has had some genuinely bad luck on his balls in play, even considering the trajectories on which he's hit those balls. Why is this true, despite his woeful lack of line drives? Probably because he hits quite few fly balls, which have the worst BAbip of anything; for someone who doesn't hit many home runs, this is a sensible approach.
I think, therefore, that Bourjos would be worth picking up, for a low enough price. (I.e., not for Dickey or Niese!) Even when he's been a lousy hitter, he's been a valuable player because of his speed and defense, and there's reason to think that his offensive results so far have been a floor rather than a ceiling. He'd fill exactly the Mets biggest hole, and with a bit of coaching from Dan Hudgens, might even be able to improve his offensive approach a bit. And when he's good, Bourjos has shown that he's not just good, he's really good, like 4+ WAR good.
The Murphy + McHugh for Bourjos trade I outlined in my previous post would leave the Mets with an offensive cadre of Josh Thole (C), Anthony Recker (C), Ike Davis (1B), Jordany Valdespin (2B), Ruben Tejada (SS), David Wright (3B), Lucas Duda (LF), Peter Bourjos (CF), Kirk Nieuwenhuis (RF), Justin Turner (IF), Zach Lutz (IF), Mike Baxter (OF), and, well, someone else. Not sure who. If they were then to sign Scott Hairston and, perhaps, trade Duda and another one of their non-top-flight pitching prospects to some AL team in exchange for, maybe, a better backup catcher type, that would be a good offensive core. Maybe toss in a backup middle infielder type to make up for the fact that they'd have a Valdespin/Turner combo manning second base. You'd have a lineup that could be Bourjos/Tejada/Wright/Davis/Hairston/Kirk/Turner/Catcher against lefties, and Bourjos/Valdespin/Wright/Davis/Kirk/Baxter/Tejada/Thole against righties, or something.
I can't stress enough how much the Mets shouldn't give up either Dickey or Niese for Bourjos, or even for a package centered around him. But Bourjos for Murphy and McHugh, or something similar on our end, strikes me as eminently fair, and a deal that would improve both teams.
Apparently people are speculating that a trade centered around Peter Bourjos moving from the Angels to the Mets and R.A. Dickey moving from the Mets to the Angels. That's a horrible idea; Bourjos is not worth R.A. Dickey. He's not worth Jon Niese. But is he worth having at all?
One might be given pause by the fact that he hit .220/.291/.315 last year in limited usage as a reserve outfielder (195 PA), accumulating just a 73 wRC+ and having been on pace for about -24 runs above average from batting over a full season. He's a spectacular enough defender that he was still worth 1.9 fWAR and 1.1 bWAR last year, but still, the awful hitting gives one pause. Moreover, his genuinely good season of hitting in 2011, when he hit .271/.327/.438 with 12 home runs, 11 triples, and 22 steals, en route to a roughly 4.5 WAR season (when combined with his being a brilliant center fielder) was sustained in large part by a .338 BAbip, which looks unsustainable given his low line drive percentage (14.5% over the course of his career, worst in the majors over that period).
Except... when I plug his numbers into an xBAbip calculator, which projects a batting average on balls in play by the nature of those balls in play, I find that Bourjos if anything under-performs his expectations on balls in play. Using 2012 numbers, in which offense (including BAbip) was way down, his 2012 season should've produced a .300 BAbip, instead of the .274 it did produce. In 2011, sure, he was outperforming slightly; that year should've been a .331 instead of a .338 by 2011 numbers, and would've been just .321 in 2012. Meanwhile, in 2010, his rookie season, Bourjos had just a .228 BAbip but his batted balls should've resulted in more like a .285. So over the course of his young career, Bourjos has had some genuinely bad luck on his balls in play, even considering the trajectories on which he's hit those balls. Why is this true, despite his woeful lack of line drives? Probably because he hits quite few fly balls, which have the worst BAbip of anything; for someone who doesn't hit many home runs, this is a sensible approach.
I think, therefore, that Bourjos would be worth picking up, for a low enough price. (I.e., not for Dickey or Niese!) Even when he's been a lousy hitter, he's been a valuable player because of his speed and defense, and there's reason to think that his offensive results so far have been a floor rather than a ceiling. He'd fill exactly the Mets biggest hole, and with a bit of coaching from Dan Hudgens, might even be able to improve his offensive approach a bit. And when he's good, Bourjos has shown that he's not just good, he's really good, like 4+ WAR good.
The Murphy + McHugh for Bourjos trade I outlined in my previous post would leave the Mets with an offensive cadre of Josh Thole (C), Anthony Recker (C), Ike Davis (1B), Jordany Valdespin (2B), Ruben Tejada (SS), David Wright (3B), Lucas Duda (LF), Peter Bourjos (CF), Kirk Nieuwenhuis (RF), Justin Turner (IF), Zach Lutz (IF), Mike Baxter (OF), and, well, someone else. Not sure who. If they were then to sign Scott Hairston and, perhaps, trade Duda and another one of their non-top-flight pitching prospects to some AL team in exchange for, maybe, a better backup catcher type, that would be a good offensive core. Maybe toss in a backup middle infielder type to make up for the fact that they'd have a Valdespin/Turner combo manning second base. You'd have a lineup that could be Bourjos/Tejada/Wright/Davis/Hairston/Kirk/Turner/Catcher against lefties, and Bourjos/Valdespin/Wright/Davis/Kirk/Baxter/Tejada/Thole against righties, or something.
I can't stress enough how much the Mets shouldn't give up either Dickey or Niese for Bourjos, or even for a package centered around him. But Bourjos for Murphy and McHugh, or something similar on our end, strikes me as eminently fair, and a deal that would improve both teams.
Hot Damn, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim appear to be planning on signing free agent outfielder Josh Hamilton. If true, that would leave the Angels with a seriously stacked top of the batting order, with Hamilton, Albert Pujols, Mark Trumbo, and Mike Trout. It also would give them a surplus of outfielders, with Hamilton, Trout, Trumbo, and Peter Bourjos. Bourjos, in particular, looks a bit redundant; he's like Mike Trout only not as good at baseball. In fairness not many are as good at baseball as Mike Trout is; the point is really that he's a similar style—gifted defensive outfielder, speedy leadoff-type hitter, right-handed outfielder. What the Angels, assuming they do sign Hamilton, are lacking is infielders: they currently project to play Howie Kendrick at second base, Erick Aybar at shortstop, and Albert Callaspo at third. Those players were all quite good in 2012, totaling around 10 bWAR, but none of them were exactly whizzes at the plate, with Callaspo's .331 OBP leading the group and that coming with just a .361 SLG attached to it. The team is also rather top-heavy when it comes to pitching: they've got C.J. Wilson and Jered Weaver to lead their rotation, and a solid core of Ernesto Frieri, Ryan Madson, and Sean Burnett in their bullpen, but not a lot beyond those guys. The rotation currently projects to fill out with Tommy Hanson, on whom the Braves just gave up, Joe Blanton, who, c'mon, is Joe Blanton, and Jerome Williams, who spent half of last year in the Angels' rotation and then the half of it after they acquired Zack Greinke in the bullpen, with a combined 4.58 ERA between the two roles.
What I'm getting at, in case it wasn't clear, is that I think there's a trade to be had between the Angels and the Mets. The Mets' major need right now is for a right-handed outfielder, preferably a defensively gifted center fielder, and also preferably someone who would provide either power or speed. That describes Peter Bourjos perfectly, and, oh look, he's redundant on the Angels! The Mets, meanwhile, have a boatload of young or young-ish pitchers any one of whom could be a solid back-of-the-rotation Major League starter: guys like Dillon Gee or Collin McHugh in particular, but also Chris Schwinden and Jeremy Hefner. We also have Daniel Murphy, who on our team gets forced into an awkward position at second base because his natural position, third base, is, well, blocked until 2020. Murphy and McHugh to the Angels for Bourjos strikes me as fair for both teams. The Mets would be able to slot Bourjos into center field and the leadoff spot, while putting someone, probably Jordany Valdespin to start with, at second base, and perhaps complementing him at some point in the season with Wilmer Flores. The Angels could make Murphy their everyday third baseman, a position at which he's pretty good defensively, have Callaspo as a utility infielder, and slot McHugh into the rotation, probably in the #5 slot. I think that would improve both teams, and I think it's something both teams could easily agree to. Now, I do not think that Bourjos is worth trading either of the Mets' top potential pitching trade chips, R.A. Dickey and Jon Niese, but Murphy plus McHugh seems eminently fair.
The Angels have just pulled off a stunning coup, if this report is true, and one that leaves them with an imbalance of resources. The Mets just happen to have a neatly complementary resource imbalance. The signing of Josh Hamilton, in addition to improving the Angels, might be able to improve the Mets as well.
No, Conservatism Is Not Individualistic
A number of discussions I've had recently have featured my interlocutor blandly asserting that the Republican Party, and conservative ideology, is individualistic. I would, therefore, just like to take a moment to point out that this is wrong. So that I'm not just making stuff up, I'll even link to a blog post of Kevin Drum's that quotes from a scientific(ish) study about the moral attitudes of liberals and conservatives. (That post is actually about misperceptions of the moral attitudes of ideological groups, but my focus is just on the evidence about the actual attitudes.) The money quote:
So the next time you hear someone say that the Republicans are the party of individuals, don't believe them. It's not true.
"Liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do."The way I'd put it is that liberals value individuals, and therefore, among other things, want group structures to benefit individuals. We want the community to help and take care of the individuals in that community, and the reason we want this is that we care about the individuals. We also want, insofar as it's consistent with the above goal and the welfare of other individuals, to let individuals do whatever they individually want to do. Conservatives, on the other hand, are opposed to the community-helping-individuals thing, at least if the helping is organized through a collective public entity (i.e. the government) rather than through individual private acts (i.e. charity). Basically (and this is painting with a bit of a broad brush) conservatives are okay with individuals helping themselves and individuals helping other individuals (if they want to), but they particularly care about individuals helping the group entity, for the sake of that group entity. Liberals want the group/individual relationship to run the other way. Which of these is more individualistic, do you think? Individuals pressed into service for the good of the group, or group structures created and maintained for the good of individuals? A mix of on-your-own-ism and patriotic-loyalty-ism is not individualism. One might almost call it anti-individualism, since there's very little interest in having public policy concern itself with the interests of the individuals who make up the polity. Or one might just call it conservatism, and admit that that word refers to a philosophy that opposes publicly-coordinated efforts to improve the lives of individuals (poor ones, at least) and favors the firm imposition of community norms and values upon individuals who might like to dissent from those norms.
So the next time you hear someone say that the Republicans are the party of individuals, don't believe them. It's not true.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Robots and Communism
There have been a bunch of blog posts from the liberal bloggers I frequent recently about robots. Specifically, the apparently-growing trend toward replacing human workers with robots. Matt Yglesias, in particular, thinks that this is a good thing, that will allow society to shift human resources into other sectors like health care and education, where actually having people in the room matters, without losing material plenty. Kevin Drum, who started this particular debate, and Paul Krugman, who just added his two cents to it, focus more on the negative disruptive aspects. I'm going to focus on one particular little throw-away line at the end of Krugman's post, where he mentions that the capital/labor dimension of inequality has "echoes of old-fashion Marxism" as one reason why it hasn't gotten much attention from mainstream economists.
Friday, December 7, 2012
The Extremely Odd Career Path of R.A. Dickey
Perusing R.A. Dickey's baseball-reference.com page a few minutes ago, I noticed the massive oddness in his "similar players" section. The baseball-reference similarity scores judge players based on their career totals, and does not distinguish timing, although one can deduce timing from the changes in "most similar players at age X" over time. But because Dickey's career had such an odd path, the "most similar players" aren't remotely like him. Specifically, over the last three years, during his age 35, 36, and 37 seasons, Dickey posted 12.1 bWAR, while having accumulated only 0.2 bWAR during his entire prior career. That's weird!
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