I was poking my way around the odds from Ladbrokes just now (mainly to see who they had favored to win the Honda Classic, the answer to which is Tiger Woods) when I noticed that the New York Mets are given just 100/1 odds of winning the World Series. That sounded a bit low, compared to the Baseball Prospectus odds I referenced in this earlier post. Turns out it's not that low; 100/1, obviously, projects to a roughly 1% chance of winning, while BP has the Mets at a 1.4% chance of winning it all. But the projections about the Mets odds of winning their division are another story. Ladbrokes puts them at 20/1. That implies roughly 5% chances of winning. They've got the Washington Nationals favored at 1/1, i.e. a 50% chance, followed by the Atlanta Braves at 23/10, roughly 30%; the Philadelphia Phillies at 27/10, roughly 27%; the 20-1 Mets; and the 50-1 Florida Marlins, circa 2%. Now, that adds up to about 114%, with the extra 14% obviously accounting for Ladbrokes' profits, so one would need to scale everything down a little bit to get real projected odds from this. But one can still see where they're relatively bearish or bullish compared to the BP odds. Answer: bearish on the Mets, bullish on the others.
Specifically, BP gives the Nationals a 52.1% chance of winning the NL East. That's roughly in line with the Ladbrokes odds, though given the scaling adjustment it means the bookies are slightly pessimistic about the Nationals. The Braves, though, are given just a 19.5% chance, and the Phillies just 14.7%. Between the two teams, the betting community is overrating by nearly 23%! They've got the Phillies with nearly twice the odds of winning that BP has, and the Braves with 150% of the Prospectus projection. BP Puts the Marlins at 0.7% chance to take the division, again quite a bit less than the 2% implied by the 50-1 odds. And then there's the Mets, who take home the remaining 13% of the Prospectus forecast, which does actually have to add up to 100%. Bettors, then, appear to be underrating the Mets. A lot. Like, by a 13:5 ratio, or actually by a bit more than that. Now, this is all conditional on our believing BP's projections reasonable, but they're not the only projection system that doesn't hate the Mets as much as the conventional wisdom does.
The moral of the story is, if for some reason you're interested in placing a bet on baseball at Ladbrokes, you probably shouldn't put your money on the Mets to win it all, but taking them to win the division, at 20-1, is probably not a bad proposition.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Antonin Scalia, Legislator from the Bench
It's not exactly news that the very same conservative jurists who love to accuse liberal judges of "legislating from the bench," i.e. making up justifications at the policy level for imposing a preferred outcome on society against the will of the legislature, often engage in exactly that activity. Indeed, I think they "legislate from the bench" a lot more than the liberals they're critiquing. Still, a recent trend in Antonin Scalia's jurisprudence takes this to terrifying new heights of literalness. During oral arguments about the Voting Rights Act today, apparently, Scalia questioned the idea that the 2006 VRA renewal's unanimous Senate passage vote was a point in its favor:
In both cases, Scalia is refusing to take Congress at its word, or, rather, at its vote. Apparently, every Senator voted to renew the Voting Rights Act in 2006, including a good many Southern ones. Now, maybe that just doesn't count at all, if we're only interested in the constitutionality of this piece of legislation and not in what Congress thinks on the matter. (Although, from what I hear, the argument is that Section 5 is too narrow, i.e. punishes these 9 Southern states when they don't really have worse problems than anywhere else, and that therefore we have to strike it down. I'd think that on that question, which strikes me as absurd to begin with, the votes of Southern Senators might be relevant evidence.) But that's not what Scalia's saying. Rather, he's saying that those votes didn't count. Why? Because Antonin Scalia thinks that the motives behind them were other than pure. Oh, these were political votes? They voted for it because they thought it was popular? Because it had a nice-sounding name, implied by Scalia to be kind of Orwellian? Well then, I guess we can infer that all the Southern Senators voting for the VRA actually thought it was horrible and unconstitutional and unfairly targeting their states out of outdated prejudices, despite the fact that they then voted for it. All of them. It's the same as in the ACA case: the fact that Congress enacted all these "ornaments" into law doesn't matter, even though they're operationally independent of the central planks of the legislation, because Antonin Scalia doesn't think they would've passed without those planks.
But guess what, Scalia? You're not in Congress. You're not a legislator; you weren't the floor manager for the ACA or for the 2006 VRA. You don't know how Congress works, and as a Supreme Court judge, you're not supposed to care. When Congress passes stuff, by definition the United States Congress as an institution approves of that stuff. And while we might not want to pay much attention to legislative records on general principles, if we're going to care at all we sure as hell need to care about the actual record, not the hypothetical one Antonin Scalia makes up in his head. This is legislating from the bench, not just in the sense of second-guessing the legislature's policy choices on the merits but in the sense of second-guessing that the legislature has made the policy choices it has in fact made. Scalia has really gone off the deep end, and it would be kind of sad were he not in a position to do so much damage to the world.
(Oh, and for what it's worth, the arguments against the constitutionality of the VRA are insane, and seem to me to be window-dressing around the fact that conservatives don't like it when the federal government uses its powers to attack racism. And also the fact that overturning the VRA might give the Republicans a partisan advantage. These guys disgust me, and if Kennedy sides with them, he loses an awful lot of points. Points he doesn't have to lose.)
"I don’t think there is anything to gain by any senator by voting against this act. This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress. They’re going to lose votes if they vote against the Voting Rights Act. Even the name is wonderful."This is... odd. Specifically, it's odd in that it involves a kind of legislative psychoanalysis, trying to logic out various reasons why Congresspeople acted as they did (that obviously make those actions look good for Scalia's cause) or what they would have done in some alternate universe. It feels very similar to the passage from the health care cases dissent where, well, I assume it was Scalia, went off on some weird line of thinking about how the PPACA had been a "Christmas tree" bill with lots of only-slightly-related "ornamental" provisions dangled off the central trunk of the law. Therefore, he claimed, if the individual mandate had been eliminated from the bill as it made its way through Congress, the whole rest of the package would not have passed either. Now, the typical standard for severability is that the destruction of one element of the law would make the other elements function improperly in such a way that no rational legislator would want to pass the whole without the part. That's not what would have happened with the ACA: everything in that bill except for the central regulations/mandate/subsidies triumvirate was operationally independent from that central "trunk," so while it might be true that politically the ACA wouldn't have passed without its core, it certainly isn't true that the bill minus its core is nonsensical as policy.
In both cases, Scalia is refusing to take Congress at its word, or, rather, at its vote. Apparently, every Senator voted to renew the Voting Rights Act in 2006, including a good many Southern ones. Now, maybe that just doesn't count at all, if we're only interested in the constitutionality of this piece of legislation and not in what Congress thinks on the matter. (Although, from what I hear, the argument is that Section 5 is too narrow, i.e. punishes these 9 Southern states when they don't really have worse problems than anywhere else, and that therefore we have to strike it down. I'd think that on that question, which strikes me as absurd to begin with, the votes of Southern Senators might be relevant evidence.) But that's not what Scalia's saying. Rather, he's saying that those votes didn't count. Why? Because Antonin Scalia thinks that the motives behind them were other than pure. Oh, these were political votes? They voted for it because they thought it was popular? Because it had a nice-sounding name, implied by Scalia to be kind of Orwellian? Well then, I guess we can infer that all the Southern Senators voting for the VRA actually thought it was horrible and unconstitutional and unfairly targeting their states out of outdated prejudices, despite the fact that they then voted for it. All of them. It's the same as in the ACA case: the fact that Congress enacted all these "ornaments" into law doesn't matter, even though they're operationally independent of the central planks of the legislation, because Antonin Scalia doesn't think they would've passed without those planks.
But guess what, Scalia? You're not in Congress. You're not a legislator; you weren't the floor manager for the ACA or for the 2006 VRA. You don't know how Congress works, and as a Supreme Court judge, you're not supposed to care. When Congress passes stuff, by definition the United States Congress as an institution approves of that stuff. And while we might not want to pay much attention to legislative records on general principles, if we're going to care at all we sure as hell need to care about the actual record, not the hypothetical one Antonin Scalia makes up in his head. This is legislating from the bench, not just in the sense of second-guessing the legislature's policy choices on the merits but in the sense of second-guessing that the legislature has made the policy choices it has in fact made. Scalia has really gone off the deep end, and it would be kind of sad were he not in a position to do so much damage to the world.
(Oh, and for what it's worth, the arguments against the constitutionality of the VRA are insane, and seem to me to be window-dressing around the fact that conservatives don't like it when the federal government uses its powers to attack racism. And also the fact that overturning the VRA might give the Republicans a partisan advantage. These guys disgust me, and if Kennedy sides with them, he loses an awful lot of points. Points he doesn't have to lose.)
Monday, February 25, 2013
What Vegans Did To Republicans
Apparently the later national PublicPolicyPolling survey covered a bunch of issues related to food. One of those questions, apparently, was whether people liked or disliked vegans. According to a tweet from PPP:
Rather, I think it's that they, and we vegetarians as well, make them feel bad. Very few Republicans are vegans or vegetarians. Most Republicans like to eat meat. And I think that, for many or most of them, that isn't just because they like how it tastes or whatever. They positively like the fact that they're eating the remains of a formerly living animal. It makes them feel powerful, like they have dominion over the earth. And vegans make Republicans feel bad about this. Sometimes this is through explicit criticism in conversation, or whatever, but it doesn't even need to be. Simply by adhering to a moral code that considers something these people do on a regular basis to be wrong, vegans and vegetarians by our very being imply that these meat-eating Republicans are doing something wrong. We're the worst possible manifestation of the liberal tendency to want to control everything about a person's life: we want to control what you can eat. And that's not even wrong, entirely, though I do know some vegans who'll tell you that what you eat is a personal choice (something I don't believe, on this particular issue). And we invade the natural social-conservative terrain of moralizing (though of course, if we get into the philosophical weeds, I could say that the vegan/vegetarian moralizing is consequentialist, while the typical Republican variety is deontological, so they're very different things). Basically, simply by being vegans or vegetarians we offend the Republican idea that the right kind of people, at least, can stomp around the world doing whatever they want, and making other people feel bad for doing the wrong things. So they dislike us: it's not surprising.
On our food poll we found that Republicans have a negative opinion of vegans...not sure what vegans ever did to them...Now, the answer to this could be that Republicans are associating vegans with the kind of people who commit illegal acts, mostly crimes against property, with an animal-rights-y agenda. It's fair enough to dislike the latter, I'd say, though insofar as they avoid violence against people I think it's also fair enough not to dislike them. But I don't think this is the impetus behind Republican dislike of vegans.
Rather, I think it's that they, and we vegetarians as well, make them feel bad. Very few Republicans are vegans or vegetarians. Most Republicans like to eat meat. And I think that, for many or most of them, that isn't just because they like how it tastes or whatever. They positively like the fact that they're eating the remains of a formerly living animal. It makes them feel powerful, like they have dominion over the earth. And vegans make Republicans feel bad about this. Sometimes this is through explicit criticism in conversation, or whatever, but it doesn't even need to be. Simply by adhering to a moral code that considers something these people do on a regular basis to be wrong, vegans and vegetarians by our very being imply that these meat-eating Republicans are doing something wrong. We're the worst possible manifestation of the liberal tendency to want to control everything about a person's life: we want to control what you can eat. And that's not even wrong, entirely, though I do know some vegans who'll tell you that what you eat is a personal choice (something I don't believe, on this particular issue). And we invade the natural social-conservative terrain of moralizing (though of course, if we get into the philosophical weeds, I could say that the vegan/vegetarian moralizing is consequentialist, while the typical Republican variety is deontological, so they're very different things). Basically, simply by being vegans or vegetarians we offend the Republican idea that the right kind of people, at least, can stomp around the world doing whatever they want, and making other people feel bad for doing the wrong things. So they dislike us: it's not surprising.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Match Play Is Awesome
Right now it's snowing (at certain altitudes) in Marana, Arizona. Marana, Arizona happens to be the place where the PGA Tour is right now. And they're not exactly playing right now, since there's snow accumulating on the greens (!), but if the precipitation turns into, say, a nasty wintry sleet, they'd be able to squeegee the snow off the greens and they would then start play. There are probably some tournaments where wintry mix would get them to stop playing, but this week is match play, and the great thing about match play is that you can get away with murder in terms of the conditions. Since the only thing that matters is who of two players gets a better score on a given hole, playing it at the same time, concepts of "fairness" don't apply. That usually just applies to the course set-up; for instance, I remember one year back when this was held at La Costa Resort & Spa when the fairway of some par-4 was flooded, so they moved the tees forward and played it as a par-3. Obviously, that's sort of a combination of conditions and course set-up, but the key point is that you could never just wantonly play a par-4 as a par-3 some given day in a stroke play tournament. Why not? I'm not sure; after all, everyone has to play the same course as everyone else. Nevertheless, you couldn't do that; there's some ethos against it. Likewise, when you get things like the 1974 Massacre at Winged Foot, people call it unfair, and when you get things like the 2011 U.S. Open at Congressional, where Jason Day posted a score that would have won almost any Open in history but finished eight shots behind Rory McIlroy, well, it's not called unfair exactly but it makes people start thinking about how these scores need to be reigned in.
In other words, people care about the score in stroke play, and they don't just care about relative scores, but absolute ones as well. Turning a par-4 into a par-3 would mean that the scores from that day were "wrong" somehow. Excessively hard or excessively easy conditions make the absolute scores look like they're calibrated wrong. Playing in snow will artificially inflate everyone's scores, and is particularly bad because it hits some people and not others. But in match play, you don't have to worry about any of that. Everyone's making birdies? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with birdies, or won with eagles. The course is mangling the field? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with bogeys, or won with pars. The first half of the field played in sleet, and then the clouds parted and the second half of the field played in warm sunshine? Great! Basically, because competition is broken up into tiny discrete units that don't communicate with one another, the world gets much simpler. Each unit of competition is the same as each other one: here are two people, here's a tee, a few hundred years that-a-way is a hole, let's see who gets there quicker. It's almost impossible for anything to alter the competitive nature of that concept. This makes match play much more flexible than stroke play, in practice, both in terms of what kinds of courses it can be played over and in terms of how wild the conditions can tolerably get. It's just one more reason why today, assuming they ever start playing again, is one of the most fun days in the golf year.
In other words, people care about the score in stroke play, and they don't just care about relative scores, but absolute ones as well. Turning a par-4 into a par-3 would mean that the scores from that day were "wrong" somehow. Excessively hard or excessively easy conditions make the absolute scores look like they're calibrated wrong. Playing in snow will artificially inflate everyone's scores, and is particularly bad because it hits some people and not others. But in match play, you don't have to worry about any of that. Everyone's making birdies? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with birdies, or won with eagles. The course is mangling the field? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with bogeys, or won with pars. The first half of the field played in sleet, and then the clouds parted and the second half of the field played in warm sunshine? Great! Basically, because competition is broken up into tiny discrete units that don't communicate with one another, the world gets much simpler. Each unit of competition is the same as each other one: here are two people, here's a tee, a few hundred years that-a-way is a hole, let's see who gets there quicker. It's almost impossible for anything to alter the competitive nature of that concept. This makes match play much more flexible than stroke play, in practice, both in terms of what kinds of courses it can be played over and in terms of how wild the conditions can tolerably get. It's just one more reason why today, assuming they ever start playing again, is one of the most fun days in the golf year.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The Dread Hand of Nate Silver
(Sorry it's been a while; I've been in a kind of law school admissions purgatory for the past couple of weeks.)
I happened to follow some links today and wind up on the Baseball Prospectus page that gives expected 2013 performances for each Major League Baseball team. They've got projected wins and losses, estimated odds of winning the division, of winning a wild card, of getting to the post-season (i.e. the previous two added together), even of getting to the not-the-silly-wild-card-game part of the post-season, and, of course, estimated odds of winning the world series. And as I cast my eye over this page, what I couldn't help noticing was the obvious influence of Nate Silver (and/or the influence of BP on Nate). Here's one example: the projections for each team's wins and losses are given to one decimal point. The Mets, for instance, are forecast to win 80.6 games this year. The odds of the Mets winning 80.6 games is precisely zero, because you can't win six-tenths of a game. I recall a point during the last election cycle where Nate publicly defended presenting his electoral vote projections to the tenth of a vote, despite the impossibility of receiving tenths of votes. (I'll save telling you what his reason was for later in this piece, for dramatic effect.)
The similarities, however, don't end after the decimal point.
I happened to follow some links today and wind up on the Baseball Prospectus page that gives expected 2013 performances for each Major League Baseball team. They've got projected wins and losses, estimated odds of winning the division, of winning a wild card, of getting to the post-season (i.e. the previous two added together), even of getting to the not-the-silly-wild-card-game part of the post-season, and, of course, estimated odds of winning the world series. And as I cast my eye over this page, what I couldn't help noticing was the obvious influence of Nate Silver (and/or the influence of BP on Nate). Here's one example: the projections for each team's wins and losses are given to one decimal point. The Mets, for instance, are forecast to win 80.6 games this year. The odds of the Mets winning 80.6 games is precisely zero, because you can't win six-tenths of a game. I recall a point during the last election cycle where Nate publicly defended presenting his electoral vote projections to the tenth of a vote, despite the impossibility of receiving tenths of votes. (I'll save telling you what his reason was for later in this piece, for dramatic effect.)
The similarities, however, don't end after the decimal point.
Friday, February 15, 2013
I Hate "Big Government"
No, not big government. "Big government." The phrase, not the thing. I don't like how people use those words. I may have written this post before, but since Republicans have kept saying, post-State of the Union, that Obama thinks "big government is the answer to everything," it's on my mind again. Basically, the definition of the "size" of government these days is the numerical size of its budget, possibly as a proportion of GDP. This is insane. Here's an example that's pretty minimal in how much it challenges the notion that overall levels of taxing and spending define the bigness or government: tax expenditures. According to a forthcoming Harper's Index, the state of Texas has budget expenditures in tax breaks for corporations equal to 50% of its actual budget. That doesn't show up as either taxing or spending, but it's a use of the tax code to create policy, i.e. to influence people's choices. As Matt Yglesias has been saying occasionally of late, one can also identify places where the alternative to a tax-and-spend program is a kludgy regulatory mandate. For example, single-payer health insurance would add a lot to the government's books, and it would require an increase in tax revenues, but in certain very obvious ways it's a much less invasive policy than the awkward framework of the Affordable Care Act, which involves some government subsidies but also various requirements that private actors either get or provide insurance. That's inefficient policy, and in my opinion, though it's not a particularly severe infringement of people's liberties, it's much worse along that dimension than proper national health insurance, which just doesn't involve liberty interests at all.
The government has the power to tax, and it can spend the dollars it acquires through taxation (or borrowing) in whatever way it pleases. Even the modern progressive income tax only amounts to a rather modest drag on how quickly one can accumulate wealth, unlike the confiscatory 91% taxes of yesteryear (specifically, the 50s, when Republicans were in charge). A government might use that power quantitatively more or less, but that's a pretty trivial shift in how "big" the government is, at least in the sense in which "big government" is supposed to sound kind of spooky and 1984-esque. Warrantless wiretapping, now that's big government, in the "big brother is watching you" sense, literally. Slightly higher Medicare spending? That might be "large government," or something, but it isn't meaningfully big government.
The government has the power to tax, and it can spend the dollars it acquires through taxation (or borrowing) in whatever way it pleases. Even the modern progressive income tax only amounts to a rather modest drag on how quickly one can accumulate wealth, unlike the confiscatory 91% taxes of yesteryear (specifically, the 50s, when Republicans were in charge). A government might use that power quantitatively more or less, but that's a pretty trivial shift in how "big" the government is, at least in the sense in which "big government" is supposed to sound kind of spooky and 1984-esque. Warrantless wiretapping, now that's big government, in the "big brother is watching you" sense, literally. Slightly higher Medicare spending? That might be "large government," or something, but it isn't meaningfully big government.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Citizen Obama
So, that was a pretty good speech. Not one of his entries in the annals of great American rhetoric, but a very solid group of policy proposals with some very nice philosophical defense of liberalism sprinkled in. Of course, none of the stuff will happen, but it's nice to see him advocating good stuff nonetheless.
The thing I noticed in particular, though, was the continuation of Obama's "citizen" theme. I don't remember whether it was in the Inaugural or some slightly previous speech, but there was a nice long passage about citizenship at some point over the past couple of months. (Possibly his election victory speech, actually.) I like this because it's more than a mere ideological philosophy (though those are good too), it's an actual political philosophy. And it's an important one. I don't have a lot of original stuff to say on the subject, but I've been thinking over the course of the past couple of days about how categorically different democratic government and non-democratic government are. In fact, I think that describing them that way is misleading. It makes it sound like they're two somewhat different ways of doing the same thing, "government." That's wrong. Democratic governance is, ultimately, the process by which the peoples of a nation come together to make decisions about the direction of their society. Non-democratic "governance" is when some completely random person, or group of persons, who happens to have a lot of dudes with guns loyal to and/or paid by him (it's usually, but not always, a him), sets up in the middle of some country and tells everyone in said country that, if they don't do exactly what this "sovereign" says, they'll be killed. Those aren't the same thing at all.
The thing I noticed in particular, though, was the continuation of Obama's "citizen" theme. I don't remember whether it was in the Inaugural or some slightly previous speech, but there was a nice long passage about citizenship at some point over the past couple of months. (Possibly his election victory speech, actually.) I like this because it's more than a mere ideological philosophy (though those are good too), it's an actual political philosophy. And it's an important one. I don't have a lot of original stuff to say on the subject, but I've been thinking over the course of the past couple of days about how categorically different democratic government and non-democratic government are. In fact, I think that describing them that way is misleading. It makes it sound like they're two somewhat different ways of doing the same thing, "government." That's wrong. Democratic governance is, ultimately, the process by which the peoples of a nation come together to make decisions about the direction of their society. Non-democratic "governance" is when some completely random person, or group of persons, who happens to have a lot of dudes with guns loyal to and/or paid by him (it's usually, but not always, a him), sets up in the middle of some country and tells everyone in said country that, if they don't do exactly what this "sovereign" says, they'll be killed. Those aren't the same thing at all.
Monday, February 11, 2013
The Greatness of Ryan Howard
This is sort of random, but I was reading a baseball-related comment thread the other day wherein some people were debating whether or not the Phillies would be any good this upcoming season. Basically, one person said that, look, they haven't been much good of late, but they do have six players with great resumes: Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Ryan Howard. The other person responded with skepticism about the idea that Howard can be considered "great." The substance behind that claim is that Howard is a poor defensive first baseman who can't run, so in order to be a great player he doesn't just need to be a great hitter, he needs to be a great hitter, and this he is not. Sure, he puts up gaudy home run totals, with 300 in the first 9 years of his career. And sure, his batting line of .271/.364/.551 looks nice. But since he plays in Philadelphia, a very good hitter's park, it's not as impressive as you might think. And as for his most notable stat, his gaudy RBI numbers (149 in 2006, 136 in 2007, 146 in 2008, 141 in 2009, a total of 920 over 1098 games), well, the RBI stat is pretty much a joke in these circles these days. After all, RBI is mostly a function of how many people happen to have been on base for you. Scoring runs is a team effort, but we dish out individual statistical credit for it in somewhat arbitrary ways.
This last point has always slightly bothered me. Is there really no value to the RBI as a measure of individual performance? I don't think so. As with pitchers' wins, it's a stat that has a lot of noise against fairly little signal, but that doesn't mean there's no signal or that you can't tease it out from the noise. Consider the difference between Ryan Howard and Adam Dunn. They're rather similar players; Dunn has a career line of .240/.370/.499, and has also played in a lot of pitcher's parks. Dunn is, perhaps, a slightly worse hitter than Howard (and much worse overall), averaging 38 home runs and 96 runs driven in per 162 games, to Howard's 44 HRs and 136 RBIs. But the difference in home runs, a little less than 16%, is a lot less than the nearly 42% gap in RBI rates. Is that just about their teams, or do the players themselves have something to do with it? Well, we can disaggregate team contribution from player contribution by looking at performance in different bases-occupied situations. This isn't perfect, since the speed of baserunners can vary in ways that affect the ease of driving in runs, but it does most of the work for us. So, how do Howard and Dunn stack up in those different situations?
This last point has always slightly bothered me. Is there really no value to the RBI as a measure of individual performance? I don't think so. As with pitchers' wins, it's a stat that has a lot of noise against fairly little signal, but that doesn't mean there's no signal or that you can't tease it out from the noise. Consider the difference between Ryan Howard and Adam Dunn. They're rather similar players; Dunn has a career line of .240/.370/.499, and has also played in a lot of pitcher's parks. Dunn is, perhaps, a slightly worse hitter than Howard (and much worse overall), averaging 38 home runs and 96 runs driven in per 162 games, to Howard's 44 HRs and 136 RBIs. But the difference in home runs, a little less than 16%, is a lot less than the nearly 42% gap in RBI rates. Is that just about their teams, or do the players themselves have something to do with it? Well, we can disaggregate team contribution from player contribution by looking at performance in different bases-occupied situations. This isn't perfect, since the speed of baserunners can vary in ways that affect the ease of driving in runs, but it does most of the work for us. So, how do Howard and Dunn stack up in those different situations?
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Rocco for the Hall of Fame!
Okay, it's a little early to be advocating that explicitly. But we can always hope! The occasion for the hope is the fact that, in Rocco Mediate's Senior (er, um, Champions) Tour debut, he just shot an eleven-under 61 to take a three-shot lead heading into the last round. He's a decent bet to win. Now, people always win their Senior Tour debut, or at least it's kind of a thing that happens a lot, because the youngest players on that tour have a noticeable advantage and one typically debuts immediately after turning 50. Still, Rocco could be one of those people who goes out and has himself a great Senior Tour career after only a decent PGA Tour career.
And the thing is, according to the rules, you're eligible for the Hall of Fame if you have 20 wins between the regular and Senior PGA Tours. Rocco only won 6 times on the regular tour, so he'd need 14 Senior Tour wins to qualify; that would place him T17 on the current list of players with the most Senior victories. Now, most of the people who are qualified for the Hall of Fame ballot through the combined regular/senior wins criterion and most of whose wins have come from the Senior Tour are not in the Hall of Fame. Hale Irwin has the most Senior wins all-time, with 45 and 7 majors, and is in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 20 PGA Tour wins and 3 US Open Championships. Lee Trevino's second with 29 wins and 4 majors, and is also in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 2 US Opens, 2 British Opens, and 2 PGA Championships. Then we get Gil Morgan and Miller Barber, with senior careers totalling 25 wins, 3 majors and 24 wins, 5 majors, respectively. But neither of them won a regular major, or won more than 11 PGA Tour events, and neither is in the Hall of Fame. Rocco would be very much in their category, even if he has a great senior-tour career. So, why do I think he might sneak his way into the Hall of Fame when other players with similar resumes to his potential have not?
Because of Torrey Pines. Because of Tiger Woods. Because of the 2008 U.S. Open, and the playoff, and the agony. Because he was the foil for one of the greatest moments in golf history, and because if one shot had gone differently over those first 90 holes he would've been the protagonist of an at-least-as-great moment. Because he's Rocco, and he is genuinely famous. Yeah, he's famous for one moment, not for a long glorious career. Roger Maris, who spent a very long time holding the single-season home run record, is not in the baseball Hall of Fame, and never came that close to it. But if Rocco really does have a renaissance on the Senior Tour, and racks up well over a dozen wins with some majors thrown in, then you could add to his single shining moment a genuinely great senior career, and given that there exists a Senior Tour ballot-qualification pathway, that ought to count for something. Neither the shining moment nor the senior resurgence would on its own justify his enshrinement, but if Rocco can combine them, I think he would deserve it.
And the thing is, according to the rules, you're eligible for the Hall of Fame if you have 20 wins between the regular and Senior PGA Tours. Rocco only won 6 times on the regular tour, so he'd need 14 Senior Tour wins to qualify; that would place him T17 on the current list of players with the most Senior victories. Now, most of the people who are qualified for the Hall of Fame ballot through the combined regular/senior wins criterion and most of whose wins have come from the Senior Tour are not in the Hall of Fame. Hale Irwin has the most Senior wins all-time, with 45 and 7 majors, and is in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 20 PGA Tour wins and 3 US Open Championships. Lee Trevino's second with 29 wins and 4 majors, and is also in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 2 US Opens, 2 British Opens, and 2 PGA Championships. Then we get Gil Morgan and Miller Barber, with senior careers totalling 25 wins, 3 majors and 24 wins, 5 majors, respectively. But neither of them won a regular major, or won more than 11 PGA Tour events, and neither is in the Hall of Fame. Rocco would be very much in their category, even if he has a great senior-tour career. So, why do I think he might sneak his way into the Hall of Fame when other players with similar resumes to his potential have not?
Because of Torrey Pines. Because of Tiger Woods. Because of the 2008 U.S. Open, and the playoff, and the agony. Because he was the foil for one of the greatest moments in golf history, and because if one shot had gone differently over those first 90 holes he would've been the protagonist of an at-least-as-great moment. Because he's Rocco, and he is genuinely famous. Yeah, he's famous for one moment, not for a long glorious career. Roger Maris, who spent a very long time holding the single-season home run record, is not in the baseball Hall of Fame, and never came that close to it. But if Rocco really does have a renaissance on the Senior Tour, and racks up well over a dozen wins with some majors thrown in, then you could add to his single shining moment a genuinely great senior career, and given that there exists a Senior Tour ballot-qualification pathway, that ought to count for something. Neither the shining moment nor the senior resurgence would on its own justify his enshrinement, but if Rocco can combine them, I think he would deserve it.
Monday, February 4, 2013
The Passionate Society
My current reading material for my Classics of Political Economy course is The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman. The part I've been reading consists mainly of a survey or summary of the treatment of passions in mainstream philosophy from the very early says of Saint Augustine through (with a bit of a skimming over the Dark Ages) the eighteenth century. At least, that's as far as I've gone so far. And the thing I find really striking is that it is the almost unanimous opinion of the thinkers Hirschman has quoted that passions are bad. Augustine, for instance, defined three kinds of lust, namely sexual lust, lust for money/possessions, and lust for power, and, obviously, thought they were all sinful and bad. That continued to be the position of the more-or-less religious segments of the philosophical community until, well, the present day, really. Opposition to that view, that all passions are bad and people should abstain from indulging them because they're bad and people should want to be good, came from people who said, wait a minute, that's not realistic. Instead of just telling people their passions are bad, which won't work (even though it's true), let's try to discover which passions are less bad, and use them to control the others. For instance, David Hume is said by this author to have advocated restraining the "love of pleasure" through the "love of gain."
Now, when I read that sentence, my immediate thought was that it was simply insane. What's wrong with the love of pleasure? Pleasure is great! Almost by definition! It doesn't get much better than pleasure. If people were on the whole more devoted to pursuing pleasure, and less to pursuing gain, everyone's lives would probably be better. Sure, it would pose problems for our particular economic structures, but as the world gets more and more prosperous that becomes less and less of a problem, as seen in the general trend toward more leisure time. That's a straight-up gain-for-pleasure trade, and I think it a most sensible one. After all, what's the point of gaining stuff if not enjoying it? And if the point of gaining stuff is to enjoy it, why try to gain stuff if you could be doing other stuff that was more enjoyable than having the stuff would be? Now, stuff is nice, and can lead to lots of pleasure, so a pure love-of-pleasure agenda wouldn't exterminate the acquisitive interest, but on a very basic level it seems to me that Hume had it backwards.
But I think that's just emblematic of my broader point in this post, which is that the view that passions are bad has lost. Though I'm sure a lot of lingering religious institutions don't like this fact, it is unquestionably true that in modern Western society, people accept as a matter of fact that passions are basically good. We don't deny that they can have problematic consequences, and that one should avoid acting on one's passions if doing so will have problematic consequences, but fundamentally we just don't view the suppression of passions as an end in itself. Rather, we view the expression of passions as an end in itself, possibly the main point of life and at least one of the main ones. We live in the passionate society. The reading I'm currently doing is largely devoted to examining how the passion for material acquisition made the switch from being Bad to Good. Of, I think, at least equal importance and magnitude is the transformation in attitudes toward sexual and romantic passion. The passion for power is a somewhat different animal in the modern world than it was in the time periods I've just been reading about; for one thing, it's a lot less possible for one random person to gain meaningful political power except by holding office in the government of a nation-state, and for another, economic power becomes ever more important leading this passion to dovetail with the material-acquisition passion to ever-greater degrees. But even in the life of the American republic there has been a shift in attitudes toward political ambition. In the olden days, it was taboo to actively campaign for President. Yeah. 'Nuff said.
What I think is behind all of this is the basic hegemony of more-or-less utilitarian ethics. That's a very loaded word that means an awful lot of things, most of which I don't mean in this context, but what I do mean is that teleological and deontological ethics have become massively less influential over the past couple of centuries. Perhaps the best term for their competitor is consequentialist, but what really separates these kinds of ethics isn't their form. After all, one can express achieving one's telos as a consequence, and perform a pseudo-consequentialist calculus that will effect a teleological ethics, or express a pseudo-deontological ethical rule saying "don't harm other people" that would effect a consequentialist ethics. The difference is almost entirely that in consequentialist ethics, "good" is treated as almost synonymous with "advancing the interests of beings" for some class of beings and some class of interests. And the interests are typically things like pleasure or utility or happiness. Again, you can bend that structure back toward one of the old-fashioned kinds of ethics, but in practice people don't. Something is good if it makes people happy. Something is bad if it makes people sad. In that world, passions are the basic thing we're trying to satisfy. If two people meet up in a bar and go off to a hotel and have sex, and both enjoy the experience a lot, and then go their separate ways by mutual consent, that's great! They've both just satisfied their passions, and good for them. We only really discover "bad" when one person's passion interferes with another's.
Obviously I think this was a change for the better. But then I would: I'm a proud citizen of the passionate society. Good or bad, however, I do think that this wholesale shift in our society's philosophy of ethics and desire and pleasure is really interesting. I'll close this philosophical musing with a few lines from that great thinker, Angelus:
Now, when I read that sentence, my immediate thought was that it was simply insane. What's wrong with the love of pleasure? Pleasure is great! Almost by definition! It doesn't get much better than pleasure. If people were on the whole more devoted to pursuing pleasure, and less to pursuing gain, everyone's lives would probably be better. Sure, it would pose problems for our particular economic structures, but as the world gets more and more prosperous that becomes less and less of a problem, as seen in the general trend toward more leisure time. That's a straight-up gain-for-pleasure trade, and I think it a most sensible one. After all, what's the point of gaining stuff if not enjoying it? And if the point of gaining stuff is to enjoy it, why try to gain stuff if you could be doing other stuff that was more enjoyable than having the stuff would be? Now, stuff is nice, and can lead to lots of pleasure, so a pure love-of-pleasure agenda wouldn't exterminate the acquisitive interest, but on a very basic level it seems to me that Hume had it backwards.
But I think that's just emblematic of my broader point in this post, which is that the view that passions are bad has lost. Though I'm sure a lot of lingering religious institutions don't like this fact, it is unquestionably true that in modern Western society, people accept as a matter of fact that passions are basically good. We don't deny that they can have problematic consequences, and that one should avoid acting on one's passions if doing so will have problematic consequences, but fundamentally we just don't view the suppression of passions as an end in itself. Rather, we view the expression of passions as an end in itself, possibly the main point of life and at least one of the main ones. We live in the passionate society. The reading I'm currently doing is largely devoted to examining how the passion for material acquisition made the switch from being Bad to Good. Of, I think, at least equal importance and magnitude is the transformation in attitudes toward sexual and romantic passion. The passion for power is a somewhat different animal in the modern world than it was in the time periods I've just been reading about; for one thing, it's a lot less possible for one random person to gain meaningful political power except by holding office in the government of a nation-state, and for another, economic power becomes ever more important leading this passion to dovetail with the material-acquisition passion to ever-greater degrees. But even in the life of the American republic there has been a shift in attitudes toward political ambition. In the olden days, it was taboo to actively campaign for President. Yeah. 'Nuff said.
What I think is behind all of this is the basic hegemony of more-or-less utilitarian ethics. That's a very loaded word that means an awful lot of things, most of which I don't mean in this context, but what I do mean is that teleological and deontological ethics have become massively less influential over the past couple of centuries. Perhaps the best term for their competitor is consequentialist, but what really separates these kinds of ethics isn't their form. After all, one can express achieving one's telos as a consequence, and perform a pseudo-consequentialist calculus that will effect a teleological ethics, or express a pseudo-deontological ethical rule saying "don't harm other people" that would effect a consequentialist ethics. The difference is almost entirely that in consequentialist ethics, "good" is treated as almost synonymous with "advancing the interests of beings" for some class of beings and some class of interests. And the interests are typically things like pleasure or utility or happiness. Again, you can bend that structure back toward one of the old-fashioned kinds of ethics, but in practice people don't. Something is good if it makes people happy. Something is bad if it makes people sad. In that world, passions are the basic thing we're trying to satisfy. If two people meet up in a bar and go off to a hotel and have sex, and both enjoy the experience a lot, and then go their separate ways by mutual consent, that's great! They've both just satisfied their passions, and good for them. We only really discover "bad" when one person's passion interferes with another's.
Obviously I think this was a change for the better. But then I would: I'm a proud citizen of the passionate society. Good or bad, however, I do think that this wholesale shift in our society's philosophy of ethics and desire and pleasure is really interesting. I'll close this philosophical musing with a few lines from that great thinker, Angelus:
Passion. It lies in all of us, sleeping, waiting, and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir, open its jaws, and howl. It speaks to all of us, guides us. Passion rules us all, and we obey. What choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love, the clarity of hatred... and the ecstacy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dark. Without passion, we'd be truly dead.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Phil's Dominant Week
Okay, the week isn't officially over yet, but the bookmakers at Ladbrokes are giving Phil Mickelson 1/14 odds, i.e. predicting that he'd win the Waste Management Phoenix Open 14 out of 15 times from this position. It's about as close to being over before it's over as a golf tournament can be. That, not surprisingly, is a bit of a testament to how good Phil Mickelson has been playing this week. He's at -24, and holds a six-shot lead over Brandt Snedeker. He's led the tournament wire-to-wire thus far, opening with a 60 that could've easily been a 59, following it up with a 65 that could've been a whole lot better had he not driven the ball into the water on 18, and adding a 64 today to effectively put this thing away. In fact, it's felt like every single day Phil's had one of the best rounds of the entire field. And he has! In fact, it's kind of impressive how well he's been doing compared to the best round anyone else has had.
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