The 2014 Mets, Part II: Corner Infield

So, it took me longer to get around to writing the second part of this series than I expected because of this. And also this. Obviously all of that changes the calculus quite a bit, but not necessarily as much as you might think. The trade didn't involve any players who were under contract for next year, and while Harvey will obviously be missed if he does miss the 2014 season, his replacements aren't going to be Chris Schwinden and it's not a certainty he will miss next year. So I'll keep on with the series, although to make my life a little bit easier I'm going to split the infield up into corner and middle. Up first: the corners! Note that I'm only considering the starters here, and will address the bench (infield and outfield, though not catchers since I've already addressed the backup catcher spot) in a separate piece. Also note that everything I said about catching stands exactly as I wrote it, despite the Harvey injury and the trade of Byrd and Buck. Perhaps, if anything, this makes it slightly more obvious that John Buck won't be back in next year, which I had considered obvious from the beginning. So here we go, the corner infielders.

Evaluating Policy Platforms By Their Relationship to the Status Quo, Right-Wing Racism Edition

Jonathan Chait has a very good post (as most of his are, though I'm not actually sure I agree with him in his recent spats with Matt Yglesias about college football and the impending war in Syria) about how conservatives are wrong that racism is over. The basic point he makes is that, while the conservative stance on racial issues is a lot less horrible than it was 50 years ago when Martin Luther King marched on Washington, it's still a good long way from perfect, in some ways that are genuinely pretty blameworthy even though it's genuinely not as bad as it used to be. It's sort of continuing on his earlier post about Republican voter suppression efforts, saying that while they're legitimately not as bad as Jim Crow disenfranchisement, they're still pretty bad. And while I agree with the substance of his posts, there's something I'd like to add.

The 2014 Mets, Part I: Catching

So, as I've been watching the Mets lose various baseball games of late I've been musing about how the 2014 Mets will be constructed, and how I think they should be constructed. The basic headline, I think, is that I think the 2014 Mets are not very far away from being a damn good team, anchored by a potentially dominant starting rotation. So I thought I'd do a series of posts about what I think should be done over the off-season to make the team into a potential contender. Each post will focus on one aspect of the team, with this one covering the catching situation and future posts probably proceeding to the infield, the outfield, perhaps the bench, and then the starting rotation (spoiler: the correct answer here is to do nothing, sit back, and enjoy the show!) and the bullpen. First of all, though, a few notes on what I feel should be the general philosophy behind this off-season. The Mets do have money coming off the books, as they've had for the past few years, and in principle they should be able to boost their payroll going forward, so there's some money to spend. However, I don't really think that they should try to create a whole new team through free agency acquisitions, both because that seems rarely to work and because the Mets have a lot of promising young players, so if they just do nothing the team should get better over the next several years anyway. A few nice acquisitions to speed that process up so that they're competitive in 2014 rather than 2015 would be nice, but they should as much as possible be acquisitions that don't involve either giving up currently-important pieces or forcing some currently-important pieces to be neglected or kicked to the curb. So, with that said, here's a look at the Mets' catching arrangement, which is arguably the simplest position to address in principle since it involves only two roster spots but does involve, in this case, one interesting decision. The format of this post should provide a template for the next several.

A Follow-Up To The Thing About That Starved Look

I just read this post at Slate about someone else's article bemoaning the supposed culture of shaming women for being too thin while celebrating fatness. It (the Slate post, not the pro-thin article) is really good, and it makes a good point as a follow-up to my recent post about how the supposed celebration of public figures who don't adhere quite as closely as some to the norm that says women are supposed to starve themselves as a method for being beautiful takes place in the context of not challenging the idea that those ultra-thin women are still the standard of female beauty. What it adds, I think, that I didn't emphasize very much in the original post but which is very important, is that the people who do have that skin-and-bones underweight look are in a very real sense the victims here. Of course they play an important role in perpetuating the standards that are victimizing them, but that doesn't change the fact of their victimization. And, accordingly, a large part of the point of insisting that the Gweneth Paltrow-Heidi Klum look isn't actually that attractive is to make it easier for people not to try and attain it, because it's not remotely healthy and, as the poor woman writing the article being critiqued in Slate keeps saying in a Stockholm Syndrome-y way, being that thin makes life kind of unpleasant in a lot of ways. But, in my opinion, the thing where a lot of women try to look like that to be "beautiful" won't go away just by saying that it's unhealthy, or that people who don't conform like Jennifer Lawrence are also hot, but that people who starve themselves fail to become hot themselves. That isn't, of course, to say that thin people can't be hot. For instance, I personally find both Michelle Wie and (especially in Seasons 3 and 6 of Buffy) Alyson Hannigan to be very attractive, and they're both really thin, but neither of them gives that feeling that they're thinner than they should be. That's the problem, and it shows, and it doesn't look good. Those of us who want to free society from the tyranny of forcing women to emaciate themselves need, I think, to put a lot of emphasis on that last part, for the sake of the very women who ruin their appearances by getting themselves too thin.

Ban Tanning Salons

No, seriously. Ban 'em. Outright. Make their very existence illegal. I'm not sure how much that could be done by the federal government, although given the way the Commerce Clause works these days probably a lot of it, but whoever has the power should just ban them. Or at the very least mandate that tanning beds be renamed "cancer pods" or something. This is perhaps the best-ever case for public-health paternalism, where you have people doing something that is flamboyantly bad for their long-term health who probably don't have any idea of the risk. And why are they doing this? Fashion. Which is to say, because other people are doing it and will expect it of them. Think of it like steroids in baseball, except the motive isn't gaining objectively superior athletic skills, it's coming a bit closer to society's expectations for how you're supposed to make yourself look. It's like people doing beauty-steroids for a beauty pageant. But if dope was banned, the judges would stop preferring the dopers, i.e. if you banned indoor tanning people wouldn't be expected to do it anymore. And it's not like people couldn't orange their skin up, either by spraying some orangeiness onto it directly or by, you know, going out in the sun, preferably wearing some goddamn sunscreen. They just wouldn't be able to pay other people to blast their skin with cancer as a method of orangeitude. I seriously do not see the counterargument here, except basically blind repetition of stuff about libertarianism or small government. There's not even the tobacco excuse, namely that lots of current smokers are genuinely addicted so if you just eradicated cigarettes you'd leave a whole bunch of people stranded. People don't get physically addicted to tanning beds, they just get sucked up in the culture of fashion. It's terrible, and it must be stopped.

Jennifer Lawrence Is Only "Not Thin" In The Sense Of Being "Not Starved"

This is kind of random, but recently I've seen a few things about Jennifer Lawrence, presenting her as being, like, an exemplar of good-body-image or whatever. And I don't exactly disagree, but I'd just like to point something out: Jennifer Lawrence is not fat. She is not chubby. She is not overweight, I don't think, although I don't know her actual height/weight numbers; at the very least she does not appear to be overweight. She's a rather slender young woman. What she is not, however, is someone who looks like she starves herself (which is what a lot of her quotes are about). She does not look gaunt, she does not seem to be just skin and bones, or even just skin, a bit of lean muscle, and bones. She does not, in short, look underweight. But that is not a bad thing. It's right there in the word "underweight," which on its face seems to suggest a sense of being under the ideal or desirable weight. If you are underweight, forgetting for a moment about any particular definition of the term in terms of Body Mass Index or whatever and focusing on the word itself, you weigh too little, and it's a bad thing. Jennifer Lawrence is by no means underweight, but let us all remember that that does not make her fat, or overweight. She looks, to my basically untrained eye, like someone who is at quite a healthy weight, and also one that makes her look very vibrant and, well, hot.

And I kind of feel like the treatment of Jennifer Lawrence as this body-image icon is really emblematic of the original problem here. An awful lot of women who are famous in whole or in part for being considered attractive, like Heidi Klum or Gweneth Paltrow, do have that starved look, and I personally find it really really unappealing. I think that's much of what's behind how I find fairly few of those public hotties to be actually attractive. Some women in that category, though, like Lawrence and like Christina Hendricks, do not have that look, but rather look a bit more like actual people. And these people tend to get discussed as the exceptions, the people who are doing something weird and controversial by not starving themselves in some bizarre attempt to look hot or something. Meanwhile, you don't often hear people actually saying that Heidi Klum or whoever is too thin to be attractive. Until that happens, I think, and until the discourse is more "what's wrong with all these hyper-thin people?" than "oh look, these slightly-less-thin people are so admirable!" the basic premise that women are supposed to be pencil-thin will still be there in the background, unchallenged even when those who rightly defy it are being lauded.

Why I Voted For Rush Holt

Earlier today I voted in the New Jersey Democratic Party primary election for the upcoming special election to the Senate seat vacated by the death of best-New-Jersey-politician-ever Frank Lautenberg. I voted for Rush Holt, who is currently my Congressman. Rush Holt is not going to win; the latest poll had him at 15%, competitive for second place with Rep. Frank Pallone (17%) but miles behind Newark Mayor Cory Booker who's at 54%. In a couple of months Booker will face Republican Steve Lonegan (who was Tea Party before it was cool) in the general election, and I will happily vote for him. I like Cory Booker. But I didn't vote for him, and I wish he weren't going to win. Here's why.

On "Diversity and 'Doctor Who'"

So, obviously, don't read this post if you're not a Doctor Who fan, and in particular if you haven't been keeping up on the massive breaking Who news from over this summer. Otherwise, carry on.

The Dominant Club

Baseball pitchers are supposed to get outs while avoiding runs, and the way to avoid runs is to avoid baserunners. The standard way to generate a baserunner is through a walk or a hit. The most dominant way to avoid a baserunner is via the strikeout. To be good, then, pitchers would like to strike lots of batters out while allowing very few hits or walks. But here's an interesting thing: almost no one in Major League Baseball history has managed to strike out more batters over their careers than they have allowed to reach base on a hit or a walk. As best I can tell, in all of MLB history only two starting pitchers have done this over the course of a whole career. Randy Johnson gave up 3346 hits and issued 1497 walks, a total of 4843, and he struck out 4875 batters, for a difference of +32. Pedro Martinez, the best starting pitcher ever in my opinion, allowed 2221 hits and 760 walks for a total of 2981 such baserunners, and he struck out 3154 men, for a difference of +173. No one else has ever maintained this feat over a whole career as a starting pitcher.

The Irony of Christina Hendricks

Read the following paragraph from Wikipedia, about the cultural influence of the extremely voluptuous Christina Hendricks on perceptions of female beauty:

Hendricks has been credited as having an ideal shape for a woman. British Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone praised Hendricks' hourglass figure as an ideal shape for women, saying "Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous... We need more of these role models. There is such a sensation when there is a curvy role model. It shouldn't be so unusual." Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara says her portrayal of Joan has revolutionized perceptions of beauty on television. She has been called the "new modern ideal of Hollywood glamour—full figured, voluptuous; a throwback to the days of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell and Veronica Lake." British designer Vivienne Westwood selected her to represent its "Get A Life" Palladium jewelry collection in March 2011. Westwood described Hendricks as "the embodiment of beauty." A study by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons attributed a 10% rise in 2010 of the number of British women receiving breast augmentation surgery in part to Hendricks' influence.

Spot the irony? All but the last sentence are trying to champion Hendricks as a role model of non-conformity to mainstream stereotypes of female beauty. The idea is that popular culture sends a message that the only way to be beautiful is to be extremely thin, and Hendricks, by being commonly considered highly beautiful despite not being particularly thin, helps subvert that message and replace it with the better one, that women with lots of different body types can be beautiful.

Then, of course, in the last sentence, we see that in fact a large part of the message of Christina Hendricks that has in fact gotten through to people in general is not that different body types can be beautiful but that you should look more like Christina Hendricks, and specifically you should go get a boob job.

Obviously I'm not criticizing Hendricks herself for this. The point is more that mainstream culture around female appearance is so twisted that you basically can't send that good message. If someone manages to be hot while not conforming to the stereotype of hotness, all that means is that we need a new stereotype of hotness to pressure everyone into conforming to. Great.


(In case anyone's wondering why I decided to write this particular post on this particular night, it's 'cause I just watched the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" of Firefly with my family.)