In the family, it is clear, for several reasons which lie in its very nature, that the father ought to command. In the first place, the authority ought not to be equally divided between father and mother; the government must be single, and in every division of opinion there must be one preponderant voice to decide. Secondly, however lightly we may regard the disadvantages peculiar to women, yet, as they necessarily occasion intervals of inaction, this is a sufficient reason for excluding them from this supreme authority: for when the balance is perfectly even, a straw is enough to turn the scale. Besides, the husband ought to be able to superintend his wife's conduct, because it is of importance for him to be assured that the children, whom he is obliged to acknowledge and maintain, belong to no one but himself. Thirdly, children should be obedient to their father, at first of necessity, and afterwards from gratitude: after having had their wants satisfied by him during one half of their lives, they ought to consecrate the other half to providing for his. Fourthly, servants owe him their services in exchange for the provision he makes for them, though they may break off the bargain as soon as it ceases to suit them. I say nothing here of slavery, because it is contrary to nature, and cannot be authorised by any right or law.Now, to a certain extent one shouldn't judge Rousseau too harshly for this passage. It was probably no worse, and perhaps even a bit more enlightened, than the conventional wisdom of the day. He at least makes a nod toward the general equality of the sexes, for example. Moreover, this is found in a tract on political economy, not economy in the original sense, pertaining to a single household. The point of discussing the natural patriarchy of a family in this passage is to go on, in the next one, to contrast a political society with a family, and argue that a political ruler does not hold his command by natural right as the father does. The claims he makes in this paragraph are probably best understood as allusions by Rousseau to the conventional wisdom about Topic X for the purpose of making a point about Topic Y. Those mitigating factors aside, however, my god how piggish the ideas in that paragraph are.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
The Patriarchy of Rousseau
There's a lot I like about the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. There is also, however, a lot to dislike. As I've been reading his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and now the Discourse on Political Economy, I keep bumping into passages that basically make me want to say, "Rousseau, you pig!" Like this one, for example:
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Political Donations Can't Be Irrelevant to Profits
The Chamber of Commerce, in opposing a petition to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking for a requirement that public companies disclose all political donations, had occasion to state that it "believes that the funds expended by publicly traded companies for political and trade association engagement are immaterial to the company’s bottom line." This is impossible. Every dollar that a company gives to a political cause is a dollar it doesn't have, i.e. a dollar subtracted from its bottom line. Insofar as it's true, then, that political donations do not cause a change in anything else about a company's costs or revenues, the expected marginal change in a company's bottom line on each dollar spent on political donations is -$1. Now, companies aren't usually supposed to do things where the marginal expected effect on the bottom line is -$1 per dollar spent. It's kind of irresponsible, from a business stand-point. Even things like charitable donations aren't thought to have an expected value of -$1; the assumption is that having a decent charitable reputation will generate goodwill, and therefore sales, for a company. You could imagine that some companies might try to do something similar with political donations, trying to generate goodwill with a particular segment of the political market and thereby acquire a loyal customer base. But that, of course, depends on conspicuous generosity, not on secret donations with non-disclosure. How might dollars spent on politicking make up some of their immediate losses? I don't know. Perhaps the corporations in question expect to fare better in a world where their preferred candidates are in office, either because they think they'll receive favors or because they think those candidates' policies will make the world a better place for them to inhabit. But I'm pretty sure that, when a corporation makes a political donation, it expects to get recoup some of that money, somehow. And if it doesn't, it's making an irresponsible business decision. So, by the very logic of profits and economic self-interest, the Chamber's statement must be wrong: funds expended for political engagement are extremely material to the bottom line, one way or another.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
The Lockdown and Letting the Terrorists Win
My professor just quoted some public commentator who cancelled a debate with him that had been scheduled for today as having questioned the lockdown of Boston last week. Why, if the point of terrorism is to create terror, did we let them win? Why did we fold to our terror, and shut down a whole city? Well, here's the answer: how many people got killed during the lockdown? As best I understand, not a one. That, to me, is a win. I'll take "letting the terrorists win" in the sense of acting scared for a day or two any day, if it means no one gets killed. Or, to put it another way, you wouldn't have had to tell me to "shelter-in-place" last Friday, I'd've done it of my own initiative. You could scarcely have paid me enough to step out the front door. Good god, I would've been terrified. For my life. And rationally so: there was a real danger. Terrorists try to create fear. This is within their power. Violence creates danger creates fear. We can't fight them on this: if they get to cause violence, they get to cause fear. We can try to prevent them causing violence. You know what did a great job of that? The lockdown and manhunt.
This is not to say that we should always do anything possible to avoid exposing anyone to any possible violence. Shutting down all airplanes forever, for instance, would have massive adverse consequences. Telling everyone to stay inside for a day, however, is not in that category: it was a sensible precaution against a specific, imminent threat, and it successfully prevented any further casualties from the manhunt.
This is not to say that we should always do anything possible to avoid exposing anyone to any possible violence. Shutting down all airplanes forever, for instance, would have massive adverse consequences. Telling everyone to stay inside for a day, however, is not in that category: it was a sensible precaution against a specific, imminent threat, and it successfully prevented any further casualties from the manhunt.
Stanton's Slumps
Giancarlo Stanton is playing very badly right now. Like, very badly. For the three previous years of his career, Stanton's average 162-game season would have included 41 home runs, 101 runs driven in, 36 doubles, and a triple-slash line of .270/.350/.553. Those are good numbers. They probably also don't represent his ceiling; he's pretty clearly got the best raw power in baseball, or very nearly the best. Through 13 games this year (a figure depressed by several games he missed with a minor injury), Stanton has had 48 at-bats. He has nine hits. Two of them were doubles; none of them were home runs. He's struck out 20 times, which in fairness is only somewhat above his career rate of roughly 3 at-bats per strikeout. He has walked nine times, which is solid; oddly, only one of those was an intentional walk. That's an overall line of .188/.316/.229, which is, well, decent for a pitcher. Not very good for the best pure power hitter in the game. Also, Stanton has only driven in a single solitary run, and that's a new update since the last time I had checked, when he had 0 RBI on the year. What gives?
People will often say, of various players around this time of year, that if you slump like so-and-so has done to start the year in August, no one notices. It's not quite true; at the very least the people watching a given team every day, the announcers and the manager and the diehard fans, notice the 3-for-20 slumps in August. But let's consider whether Stanton has had a slump like this before. The answer is that yes, he has. Three times before he's had a home run drought of at least this magnitude, once in each of his full seasons. But only one of those, his rookie year, was as bad as his overall play this April.
People will often say, of various players around this time of year, that if you slump like so-and-so has done to start the year in August, no one notices. It's not quite true; at the very least the people watching a given team every day, the announcers and the manager and the diehard fans, notice the 3-for-20 slumps in August. But let's consider whether Stanton has had a slump like this before. The answer is that yes, he has. Three times before he's had a home run drought of at least this magnitude, once in each of his full seasons. But only one of those, his rookie year, was as bad as his overall play this April.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Beauty, Horror, and Observers
It is often observed, in one form or another, that the universe contains a great deal of beauty and a great deal of horror. The statement does not, I believe, need much justification. The horror is apparent just about everywhere on this planet, and in this part of the world especially apparent after a week like this past one. It's not just in the human world, of course; that's the point of the whole "nature, red in tooth and claw" thing. The beauty, however, is equally apparent, from the brilliance of the stars to the serenity of a natural landscape to a gorgeous human being to the beauty of, say, a random act of kindness. This post is not about the balance between the two. No, it's about the relationship between the two.
Consider the following. Many thousands of light years away, in the heart of our galaxy, a supermassive black hole is sitting there eating. That's what it does: it eats other stars, other systems, other worlds. Is that horrible? It's certainly an awful lot of destruction. I contend, however, that it is not horrible. (Probably, that is.) As best we can tell, none of the worlds being eaten by that black hole, or any other for that matter, have any life on them, let alone sentient, complex life. We don't normally consider it a horror if we smash a rock, though it is certainly destructive. A black hole eating up stars and planets and asteroids is the same thing. And, given that it's not horrible, it can be cool, and interesting, and maybe even beautiful, in its own strange way. A universe that had no life, then, would be wholly free of horror, as might one devoid of complex, sentient life. Horror requires suffering, and suffering requires a sufferer.
Conversely, how about some particularly pleasant astronomical phenomenon? A nebula, for instance, or an aurora. Is that beautiful? Well, people might disagree, but an awful lot of people think an awful lot of such things are very beautiful indeed. But, hang on, that's an intrinsically subjective statement: a lot of people think such things are beautiful. But are they? Well, that's an absurd thing to ask. Beauty is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can't describe something as beautiful without a frame of reference, specifically without someone observing it. But consider the implications of that fact. If beauty can only exist in the context of observation, then the universe is not beautiful unless it has some observers in it. And observers must be life forms. Probably they even need to be complex, sentient life forms in order to actually impart beauty on the things their senses detect.
But, hang on. I just said that the presence of (complex, sentient) life forms is a necessary condition for the presence of horror in the universe. Now the very same thing is a necessary condition for the presence of beauty as well? Oops. In fact I think it may be true that complex, sentient life forms might sort of be sufficient conditions for both beauty and horror as well. Horror because, well, presumably these creatures aren't immortal, which means they'll die eventually, which makes a certain amount of pain and suffering inevitable. Beauty is probably more controversial a claim, and one I won't try too hard to justify, but I think it's likely that some sense of aesthetic pleasure will pretty naturally develop in any such creatures.
What we have, then, is an intimate connection between horror and beauty in the universe. If there are no living things, the universe has no value. No beauty or wonder or magnificence, but also no horror or terror or evil. The universe is just empty of anything except stuff. But the very thing we might try to do in order to allow the possibility of the positive values, creating some sentient beings, is precisely the thing that will, perhaps inevitably, bring all the negative values rushing in along with the good ones. You literally cannot have the good stuff without the bad stuff; whether it's possible to have pain and horror and misery without having there be anything beautiful in the universe is, I think, a fairly uninteresting question, since it's not like that's something we're trying hard to accomplish.
One final note is that value spreads through the universe in an interesting way once we do create some sentient life forms. (Where "we," of course, probably means impersonal forces over billions of years.) You're unlikely to have them from the beginning of the universe's existence, so for all the time that the universe exists lifeless, it is valueless as well. Right? Well, not really. Because beauty, in particular, is a quality of observation, and the curious thing about observation is that it comes at the end of the causal chain. It's an effect, not a cause (although it might then cause other things, of course). But that means that an observation event becomes beautiful at its end, while the signal that was observed as being beautiful was created and sent at the beginning of the event. Was that signal beautiful from the beginning? Perhaps it was, since after all it is the thing being observed that we consider beautiful and that thing only enters the picture at the very beginning of the process. But it can only have been beautiful in retrospect, or, if you like, it always was beautiful, but it didn't really become something that had been beautiful until the signal arrives at its destination. The result of which is that our lifeless universe was already beautiful, if there will ever be living things in the future who will observe the signals created by that universe while it was lifeless. That is, of course, what happens, since light (and all other information) takes time to travel through space. When we look at a star, we're looking at it some thousands or millions of years ago. When we look at a distant galaxy, we're looking at it billions of years ago, perhaps from back when the universe was lifeless. And if we think it looks beautiful, we can only think that it looked beautiful all those years ago. So once we have living beings observing our vast universe, they impart value on it even before they ever existed. Value cascades backwards through the causal chains of observation, retroactively giving life to the long-gone lifeless periods of the universe's history. Kinda neat, if you ask me.
Consider the following. Many thousands of light years away, in the heart of our galaxy, a supermassive black hole is sitting there eating. That's what it does: it eats other stars, other systems, other worlds. Is that horrible? It's certainly an awful lot of destruction. I contend, however, that it is not horrible. (Probably, that is.) As best we can tell, none of the worlds being eaten by that black hole, or any other for that matter, have any life on them, let alone sentient, complex life. We don't normally consider it a horror if we smash a rock, though it is certainly destructive. A black hole eating up stars and planets and asteroids is the same thing. And, given that it's not horrible, it can be cool, and interesting, and maybe even beautiful, in its own strange way. A universe that had no life, then, would be wholly free of horror, as might one devoid of complex, sentient life. Horror requires suffering, and suffering requires a sufferer.
Conversely, how about some particularly pleasant astronomical phenomenon? A nebula, for instance, or an aurora. Is that beautiful? Well, people might disagree, but an awful lot of people think an awful lot of such things are very beautiful indeed. But, hang on, that's an intrinsically subjective statement: a lot of people think such things are beautiful. But are they? Well, that's an absurd thing to ask. Beauty is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can't describe something as beautiful without a frame of reference, specifically without someone observing it. But consider the implications of that fact. If beauty can only exist in the context of observation, then the universe is not beautiful unless it has some observers in it. And observers must be life forms. Probably they even need to be complex, sentient life forms in order to actually impart beauty on the things their senses detect.
But, hang on. I just said that the presence of (complex, sentient) life forms is a necessary condition for the presence of horror in the universe. Now the very same thing is a necessary condition for the presence of beauty as well? Oops. In fact I think it may be true that complex, sentient life forms might sort of be sufficient conditions for both beauty and horror as well. Horror because, well, presumably these creatures aren't immortal, which means they'll die eventually, which makes a certain amount of pain and suffering inevitable. Beauty is probably more controversial a claim, and one I won't try too hard to justify, but I think it's likely that some sense of aesthetic pleasure will pretty naturally develop in any such creatures.
What we have, then, is an intimate connection between horror and beauty in the universe. If there are no living things, the universe has no value. No beauty or wonder or magnificence, but also no horror or terror or evil. The universe is just empty of anything except stuff. But the very thing we might try to do in order to allow the possibility of the positive values, creating some sentient beings, is precisely the thing that will, perhaps inevitably, bring all the negative values rushing in along with the good ones. You literally cannot have the good stuff without the bad stuff; whether it's possible to have pain and horror and misery without having there be anything beautiful in the universe is, I think, a fairly uninteresting question, since it's not like that's something we're trying hard to accomplish.
One final note is that value spreads through the universe in an interesting way once we do create some sentient life forms. (Where "we," of course, probably means impersonal forces over billions of years.) You're unlikely to have them from the beginning of the universe's existence, so for all the time that the universe exists lifeless, it is valueless as well. Right? Well, not really. Because beauty, in particular, is a quality of observation, and the curious thing about observation is that it comes at the end of the causal chain. It's an effect, not a cause (although it might then cause other things, of course). But that means that an observation event becomes beautiful at its end, while the signal that was observed as being beautiful was created and sent at the beginning of the event. Was that signal beautiful from the beginning? Perhaps it was, since after all it is the thing being observed that we consider beautiful and that thing only enters the picture at the very beginning of the process. But it can only have been beautiful in retrospect, or, if you like, it always was beautiful, but it didn't really become something that had been beautiful until the signal arrives at its destination. The result of which is that our lifeless universe was already beautiful, if there will ever be living things in the future who will observe the signals created by that universe while it was lifeless. That is, of course, what happens, since light (and all other information) takes time to travel through space. When we look at a star, we're looking at it some thousands or millions of years ago. When we look at a distant galaxy, we're looking at it billions of years ago, perhaps from back when the universe was lifeless. And if we think it looks beautiful, we can only think that it looked beautiful all those years ago. So once we have living beings observing our vast universe, they impart value on it even before they ever existed. Value cascades backwards through the causal chains of observation, retroactively giving life to the long-gone lifeless periods of the universe's history. Kinda neat, if you ask me.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Put the Bat on your Goddamn Shoulders, Guys!
The New York Mets entered the bottom of the ninth in today's baseball game against the Washington Nationals trailing by a run. They had the top of the order due up, namely (today) Justin Turner, Daniel Murphy, and David Wright. Now, Turner in particular is no power hitter, and neither really is Murphy although he's been hitting for more power than usual so far this year. But still, what you want out of them, and especially out of Turner, is just to reach base somehow. And Turner got to a 3-1 count against Rafael Soriano. And then he swung at the next pitch, a fastball that I'm pretty sure was up and out of the strike zone, fouling it back. He also swung at the next pitch, which in fairness probably was a strike, and lined out to right field. Murphy then also got into a 3-1 count, whereupon he swung at a good slider on the outside corner of the plate and hit a weak ground ball to first base. David Wright, then, got behind 1-2 and then worked out a walk. How'd he manage that? Well, he didn't swing at the various pitches Soriano threw that weren't in the strike zone. Then up came cleanup hitter John Buck, who swung at a first-pitch slider that was either perfectly placed on the corner or outside, and hit a weak ground ball to the shortstop, ending the game.
Is it that hard for a guy in that spot where they're just trying to get on base to just not swing 3-1? The pitcher's been demonstrating some wildness, you're not going to hit a home run, and if he misses the plate, you're on first base. An out has not been made. Everything's good. Even if he does throw the ball over the strike zone, you're not out yet, it's just a full count. At the very least, Turner and Murphy should've been extremely selective, yeah? As in, like, don't swing at a shoulder-level fastball or a slider, anywhere? Gah, it's so infuriating when hitters swing themselves out of an inning like that: Soriano was trying to walk Turner, and Turner just said, no thanks. And then Buck, of course, after Soriano fell behind two batters and walked a third, swung at a first-pitch slider and made the last out of the ballgame. Geez.
Is it that hard for a guy in that spot where they're just trying to get on base to just not swing 3-1? The pitcher's been demonstrating some wildness, you're not going to hit a home run, and if he misses the plate, you're on first base. An out has not been made. Everything's good. Even if he does throw the ball over the strike zone, you're not out yet, it's just a full count. At the very least, Turner and Murphy should've been extremely selective, yeah? As in, like, don't swing at a shoulder-level fastball or a slider, anywhere? Gah, it's so infuriating when hitters swing themselves out of an inning like that: Soriano was trying to walk Turner, and Turner just said, no thanks. And then Buck, of course, after Soriano fell behind two batters and walked a third, swung at a first-pitch slider and made the last out of the ballgame. Geez.
Fox you, Fox
The New York Mets are playing a baseball game starting in a few minutes. It'll probably start before I finish writing this post, though it hasn't yet. It's a FOX game, meaning it gets played on Saturday afternoon (they used to be at 4 p.m., but this seems to be at 3) and the team's own broadcast doesn't get to carry it. I think I recall that there used to be only one FOX game each Saturday, but now there appear to be several, and since there's only one FOX channel showing these games, they have to decide which parts of the country see which games. Now, I'm currently located in Providence. They have apparently decided that, rather than watch the Mets and Nationals, I am most likely to be interested in the Detroit Tigers and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. I am currently located 147 miles from Citi Field in Queens, 359 miles from Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., 600 miles from Comerica Park in Detroit, and 2571 miles from Angels Stadium in Anaheim. But apparently they project me to care more about the Tigers and Angels.
The consequence of this is that I have no way to watch the game. No way whatsoever. Normally, when one's local TV doesn't carry a given game, that's because one is out of its market, and if one has an MLB.TV subscription one can watch the local broadcast online. For a national broadcast, like FOX or ESPN, you can't do that, of course, but, well, it's a national broadcast. You can't be out of market. Except that FOX isn't a true national broadcast: it's a national lottery broadcast, where you might get to watch the game you want. So all I can do is get up Gameday and listen to the Mets' radio broadcast over my computer, which is fine since Howie Rose and Josh Lewin are so much better than any FOX announcers. But still, the principle is supposed to be that you can watch any baseball game anywhere if you have the MLB.TV subscription. This is not the case in practice. The more routine problem is that the local blackout zones, areas where you can't watch a given game online because you're in one of the teams' local media markets, correlate only rather roughly with the actual range of the relevant TV stations. But there's also this problem that FOX blocks out multiple games every Saturday and only allow any given person to watch one of them. This is not acceptable, and eventually it's going to need to change. Either they could concoct some way to let people have access to any one of the three FOX games, or they need to let people watch those FOX games that they don't actually have TV access to online. Something needs to give here.
The consequence of this is that I have no way to watch the game. No way whatsoever. Normally, when one's local TV doesn't carry a given game, that's because one is out of its market, and if one has an MLB.TV subscription one can watch the local broadcast online. For a national broadcast, like FOX or ESPN, you can't do that, of course, but, well, it's a national broadcast. You can't be out of market. Except that FOX isn't a true national broadcast: it's a national lottery broadcast, where you might get to watch the game you want. So all I can do is get up Gameday and listen to the Mets' radio broadcast over my computer, which is fine since Howie Rose and Josh Lewin are so much better than any FOX announcers. But still, the principle is supposed to be that you can watch any baseball game anywhere if you have the MLB.TV subscription. This is not the case in practice. The more routine problem is that the local blackout zones, areas where you can't watch a given game online because you're in one of the teams' local media markets, correlate only rather roughly with the actual range of the relevant TV stations. But there's also this problem that FOX blocks out multiple games every Saturday and only allow any given person to watch one of them. This is not acceptable, and eventually it's going to need to change. Either they could concoct some way to let people have access to any one of the three FOX games, or they need to let people watch those FOX games that they don't actually have TV access to online. Something needs to give here.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Golf is Hard, Y'All
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who is generally rather awesome, recently tweeted the following:
Over the course of the past few days, as the Masters has momentarily commanded the nation's attention, I've seen a bunch of discussion by not-actual-golf-fans that's struck me as rather wrongheaded, for instance this Josh Levin column at Slate (rightfully) condemning people who called for Tiger to disqualify himself in the wake of his somewhat unusual ex post facto penalty, but going beyond that to condemning the game of golf for its insistence on rules like "don't ground your club in a hazard." I'm not sure what it is about golf that makes it so easy to misunderstand. Is it because so much of the game takes place entirely in the minds of the individual players, rather than in the much-more-visible interactions among players? For whatever reason, it seems like people who don't play golf and/or aren't serious fans just can't really imagine what it's actually like to play it, or the logic of the rules of the game, or what makes it exciting. That's okay, of course, in the grand scheme of things, but as someone who is very serious about golf, it's kind of frustrating.
"Golfers want silence when hitting stationary balls at their feet. Baseball batters, in screaming crowds, hit 90 mph fastballs"Yeah, we do want silence, and yeah, people who play team sports play in massive screaming crowds, they hope. That's because golf is harder, precisely because the balls we're hitting are stationary. We don't have anything to react to. This is not just my idea; it's a common element of why people who play other sports say that golf is harder than their chosen profession. And so yeah, golfers need quiet. The batter can hone in on that incoming fastball, and react to it, and let the homogenized roar of the crowd fade into the background. For a golfer, there's nothing outside your own mind controlling your timing; since crowd noise would be the only remotely changing thing commanding the attention of your senses, it would make creating an internal timing more or less impossible. Also, of course, in the team sport situation, everyone is playing amidst the exact same crowd noises, and the games are precisely zero-sum, at every stage. In golf, you'd never have the noise evenly distributed around the course, so some players would have it worse than others.
Over the course of the past few days, as the Masters has momentarily commanded the nation's attention, I've seen a bunch of discussion by not-actual-golf-fans that's struck me as rather wrongheaded, for instance this Josh Levin column at Slate (rightfully) condemning people who called for Tiger to disqualify himself in the wake of his somewhat unusual ex post facto penalty, but going beyond that to condemning the game of golf for its insistence on rules like "don't ground your club in a hazard." I'm not sure what it is about golf that makes it so easy to misunderstand. Is it because so much of the game takes place entirely in the minds of the individual players, rather than in the much-more-visible interactions among players? For whatever reason, it seems like people who don't play golf and/or aren't serious fans just can't really imagine what it's actually like to play it, or the logic of the rules of the game, or what makes it exciting. That's okay, of course, in the grand scheme of things, but as someone who is very serious about golf, it's kind of frustrating.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
When Wins Matter
One of the traditional baseball statistics most eschewed by modern sabermetric types is pitcher's Wins (and, implicitly, losses). Like Runs Batted In and Runs Scored, these constitute assigning credit for a team accomplishment somewhat arbitrarily to an individual player. There's just so much confounding the causal link between individual performance and the statistical record that the latter is a really terrible tool for measuring the former. It's just not hard for even a mediocre pitcher to put up 15+ wins on a really great team, especially if it's a great offensive team, and conversely even a great pitcher can have a hard time getting much above a .500 record on a poor team. You want to look at things like the pitcher's ERA, or even to go beyond that in looking only at those things that are most under a pitcher's control.
But I think there are cases when the Win is a very good way to measure a player's performance. Take last night's Mets game, for instance. They were playing the Twins, in Minnesota, in fact. The Twins recently acquired an open-air stadium, and in April in Minneapolis that can lead to games being played in some odd weather. Specifically, when the game began it was snowing. The Mets put up five runs in the first inning against Twins starter Vance Worley. Then Jon Niese gave up a couple of runs in the bottom of the first. Then the Mets put up five more in the top of the second, against Worley and a relief pitcher who came on with 0 outs in the inning and went on to pitch into the sixth. This was, rather clearly, a day on which it was going to be difficult to pitch well, due to the weather. In such a situation, with a huge lead in his pocket and in tough conditions, I would assert that what mattered was not so much that Niese pitch well in the conventional sense, i.e. prevent runs from scoring. No, what mattered was that he get the win. Go five innings, don't cough up the lead, and get into the clubhouse giving the bullpen only a moderately large amount of work to do. And he did just that, putting up zeroes in the second, third, and fourth innings before surrendering three runs, one earned, in the bottom of the fifth. Then the bullpen came on, shut the Twins down, and the Mets won the game. Mission accomplished.
Niese didn't have a particularly good line last night. He pitched five innings, he gave up five runs, three earned, while walking four and striking out just one. But he got the win. And he got the win by handling the adverse conditions better than the opposing team's starter. In these specific circumstances, that's really all that matters, even though usually you want a lot more out of your starter than just eking out a nominal Win. Jon Niese didn't pitch particularly well last night, but he did what he needed to do, and both he and the Mets were rewarded with a victory.
But I think there are cases when the Win is a very good way to measure a player's performance. Take last night's Mets game, for instance. They were playing the Twins, in Minnesota, in fact. The Twins recently acquired an open-air stadium, and in April in Minneapolis that can lead to games being played in some odd weather. Specifically, when the game began it was snowing. The Mets put up five runs in the first inning against Twins starter Vance Worley. Then Jon Niese gave up a couple of runs in the bottom of the first. Then the Mets put up five more in the top of the second, against Worley and a relief pitcher who came on with 0 outs in the inning and went on to pitch into the sixth. This was, rather clearly, a day on which it was going to be difficult to pitch well, due to the weather. In such a situation, with a huge lead in his pocket and in tough conditions, I would assert that what mattered was not so much that Niese pitch well in the conventional sense, i.e. prevent runs from scoring. No, what mattered was that he get the win. Go five innings, don't cough up the lead, and get into the clubhouse giving the bullpen only a moderately large amount of work to do. And he did just that, putting up zeroes in the second, third, and fourth innings before surrendering three runs, one earned, in the bottom of the fifth. Then the bullpen came on, shut the Twins down, and the Mets won the game. Mission accomplished.
Niese didn't have a particularly good line last night. He pitched five innings, he gave up five runs, three earned, while walking four and striking out just one. But he got the win. And he got the win by handling the adverse conditions better than the opposing team's starter. In these specific circumstances, that's really all that matters, even though usually you want a lot more out of your starter than just eking out a nominal Win. Jon Niese didn't pitch particularly well last night, but he did what he needed to do, and both he and the Mets were rewarded with a victory.
Gov. Nathan Deal (R-GA) Thinks Segregated Proms Are Acceptable
Some high school in Georgia apparently has a tradition of holding racially segregated proms. It's a public high school, apparently, but "gets around" the whole "this is flagrantly unconstitutional" thing by saying that these aren't proms run by the school, they're just privately organized & funded by the families in the district/county. This is, obviously, unacceptable, and various people have been trying to organize an integrated prom. They have been met with resistance. The story has caught the attention of, you know, non-racists around the country, who've been agitating to get the integrated prom to happen. Some of them have asked Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, a Republican, to support the integrated prom. Today, his spokesman responded:
Governor Nathan Deal, Republican of Georgia, just endorsed the right of his state to conduct racially segregated public school functions. He should never, ever hear the end of this. I assume no one will ever care about it ever again.
"This is a leftist front group for the state Democratic Party and we're not going to lend a hand to their silly publicity stunt."Now, this tries not to explicitly state the Governor's support for the segregated proms, but I think it implies at the very least that he thinks it's okay for a Georgia public high school to have segregated proms. The phrase "silly publicity stunt" suggests that this is something one would only care about or object to if one were a bunch of radical leftists, which suggests that Gov. Nathan Deal, not being a radical leftist, neither cares nor objects. He thinks it's fine and dandy that this county public school organizes racially segregated proms, in 2013. Maybe he himself, were he on the school board, would suggest that they change their policy; we can't really say for sure on way or the other. But he definitely doesn't think it's the kind of thing that simply can't be allowed to happen. If the people of Wilcox County, Georgia want to run segregated proms, well, that's their right, and anyone trying to mess with it is conducting a "silly publicity stunt."
Governor Nathan Deal, Republican of Georgia, just endorsed the right of his state to conduct racially segregated public school functions. He should never, ever hear the end of this. I assume no one will ever care about it ever again.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
A Proposed Trade
The Mets are rumored to have their eyes on some potentially-available high-profile outfield trade targets: Carlos Gonzalez and Giancarlo Stanton. One of these things is not like the other, so I'll ignore CarGo and focus on Stanton, one of the best players in the game. The speculation is that the Mets would have to give up both Zack Wheeler and Travis d'Arnaud, the two top prospects in the system, to land Stanton. I would not want to do that trade. I would, however, jump at a trade involving Wheeler and Wilmer Flores. Flores is the Mets' #2 position-player prospect, so he's not that much of a downgrade. He's not necessarily a downgrade at all for the Marlins, who have Placido Polanco playing third base, Wilmer's most likely position at this point, this year. That's not exactly a long-term solution. Their catchers, on the other hand, are the up-and-coming type. Now, I don't think that Wheeler + Flores by themselves are enough to bring back Stanton. Perhaps the Marlins might accept a Lucas Duda in addition? Their first-base situation is an absolute mess; they're going with essentially a fourth-string first baseman right now. And Duda has crazy raw power, just like Stanton; he would replace a lot of Stanton's home runs right away, if not his defensive prowess. You'd probably need to throw in a lower-level prospect or two to get the trade done, but I think Wheeler + Flores + Duda + low-level prospects for Stanton might make sense for both sides. Giancarlo is playing miserably right now and, honestly, just isn't in a position to succeed in Miami. You know he wants out, he's playing like someone who wants out, and there's no way the Marlins keep him anything like long-term. Meanwhile, Flores and Duda are both people who just don't really fit on the Mets, and Wheeler, well, we'd miss him, but we've got a lot of exciting pitching prospects and we don't have Giancarlo Stanton. If the Marlins wanted, say, Daniel Murphy instead of Duda, that would be fine as well; we've got Valdespin a potential decent replacement at second base. If Sandy Alderson could manage to pull off this trade without giving up d'Arnaud, and plunging the organization back into the depths of catching despair, I will be extremely impressed. And the Mets would, all of a sudden, look a lot more like a contender with Stanton's bat in the middle of their lineup.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Sorry Guys, but Obama's Reasonableness Strategy Worked
President Barack Obama, a Democrat, recently released a budget proposal which included certain benefit cuts to Social Security, mostly through the adoption of "chained CPI," a lower measure of inflation that's probably pretty accurate in the general context, though not a great measure of inflation for the elderly. Liberals are not happy. The White House protests that this budget is not meant to be Obama's vision of ideal federal policy, but as a measure designed to get Republican support. (Of course, that ain't goin' well.) A recent Daily Kos post accepts the notion that Obama doesn't himself want to cut Social Security, and concludes that this proposal is probably part of his long-time need to appear reasonable, to give the impression that he's willing to make concessions to the Republicans. But they're still not happy with him, and they question the strategical efficacy of this approach in the past:
Also, it has always been my contention that it was predictable in advance (i.e., I predicted it in advance) that the Republicans would be unable to take "yes" for an answer. That meant that Obama could keep saying "yes, yes, yes" without actually being in danger of causing any really bad laws to be passed. He could propose things he himself did not want and would never accept, hell, he could propose things that, in his heart of hearts he knew he'd have to veto, because there was no effing way the Republicans would go along with any of them. From a purely pragmatic/utilitarian/strategic perspective, it makes complete sense to pretend, in a pretty Machiavellian way, to be willing to make lots and lots of concessions, because Obama could reasonably know in advance that Republicans would never take yes for an answer, which would both get him off the hook for the bad things he had proposed and make the Republicans look like clowns. He did it, it worked on both counts, and he won his election. That looks like a successful strategy to me.
Now, that doesn't necessarily explain why he's still working the same play, given that he isn't up for re-election any time soon. Maybe he's trying to keep making the Republicans look silly with an eye toward the 2014 midterms; who knows. And I think some of the detailed, tactical critiques of the handling of the 2011 debt ceiling affair are probably valid; I'm by no means convinced that his maneuvering was in all respects optimal. But it's too easy by half to just say that his strategy of deliberately looking reasonable and willing to compromise didn't work. He's still President, right?
It didn't help him last time he bent over backwards to make a deal—the infamous debt ceiling negotiations of 2011.This is, uh, not true. Yeah, Obama didn't exactly win the debt ceiling negotiations on the policy merits. It may have had bad long-term consequences to admit the legitimacy of using the debt ceiling as a negotiation chip. But the man did get re-elected. In fact, he got re-elected in the wake of an historic shellacking in the midterms and with a mediocre economy (though not, as many have pointed out, an economy bad enough that you'd actually predict defeat for the incumbent based on historical data). It was always my contention that, from the day the House Republicans took their majority on January 3rd, 2011, winning Obama's re-election simply trumped any other strategic goals. And we did it! He won! Now, there's no way to prove that his reasonableness strategy was essential to that winning. But it really feels to me like it helped. By early 2012 Obama had completely defined the Republicans as unreasonable, blind obstructionists who couldn't take "yes" for an answer and couldn't be trusted to govern. He got the media to buy this perception. And it was true! They couldn't take yes for an answer, and they couldn't be trusted to govern. That looks to me like a strategy that succeeded: he defined the opposition in highly negative terms and himself in correspondingly flattering ones, and then he won re-election, a victory by no means assured in advance.
Also, it has always been my contention that it was predictable in advance (i.e., I predicted it in advance) that the Republicans would be unable to take "yes" for an answer. That meant that Obama could keep saying "yes, yes, yes" without actually being in danger of causing any really bad laws to be passed. He could propose things he himself did not want and would never accept, hell, he could propose things that, in his heart of hearts he knew he'd have to veto, because there was no effing way the Republicans would go along with any of them. From a purely pragmatic/utilitarian/strategic perspective, it makes complete sense to pretend, in a pretty Machiavellian way, to be willing to make lots and lots of concessions, because Obama could reasonably know in advance that Republicans would never take yes for an answer, which would both get him off the hook for the bad things he had proposed and make the Republicans look like clowns. He did it, it worked on both counts, and he won his election. That looks like a successful strategy to me.
Now, that doesn't necessarily explain why he's still working the same play, given that he isn't up for re-election any time soon. Maybe he's trying to keep making the Republicans look silly with an eye toward the 2014 midterms; who knows. And I think some of the detailed, tactical critiques of the handling of the 2011 debt ceiling affair are probably valid; I'm by no means convinced that his maneuvering was in all respects optimal. But it's too easy by half to just say that his strategy of deliberately looking reasonable and willing to compromise didn't work. He's still President, right?
Bringing a Knife to a School Shooting
There was, apparently, another violent rampage at a school in Texas. Fourteen people, at least, were injured. So far, none have died, including the perpetrator. Now, the report says several are in critical condition at local hospitals, so that may change, and, you know, the only thing stopping me from praying that it doesn't is that I'm an atheist. I sure as hell am hoping. But, here's the thing about this dreadful incident, which makes it serve as an actually-kind-of-neat illustration of a pretty important point: the assailant used a knife. This was a school stabbing, not a school shooting. And so far, no one has died.
Conservatives always like to say that guns don't kill people, people kill people, with the sometimes-stated implication being that if you take away a murderer's guns they'll just find some other way to kill people. Fox News once went on a really hilarious, though, you know, sick little discussion about all the clever and inventive ways a man who wanted to kill his girlfriend but didn't have a gun could manage it. The events of today demonstrate, however, that it's an awful lot harder to kill someone if you don't have a gun. Even with a knife, more or less the second-best killing-people tool, it's a lot harder. One person, armed with a gun, against a large mass of people is at a considerable advantage, and should rather routinely be able to kill many of those people. One person, armed with a knife, against a large mass of people is not at that much of an advantage. He's incredibly dangerous, of course, and could do a lot of damage, but it is both true that it's conceivably possible for the mob of potential victims to gang up on and overpower him and that even when he does succeed in getting his knife in contact with a victim's body he's not all that likely to deal a mortal wound.
Now, none of that is to suggest that a man with a knife attacking a crowd of people is a pleasant summer day's entertainment. It's an extremely dangerous situation with the potential for pain, lasting trauma, or death. But it's a whole frickin' lot better than the same man with a gun, even just an ordinary pistol, attacking the same crowd of people. If we got rid of all the guns, yeah, murderers would still try to murder people. Would-be mass-murderers would still try to mass-murder people, or would still want to, one imagines. But they'd succeed an awful lot less, and that might even mean that they would try an awful lot less. Today in Texas there was a school stabbing, and no one has yet died. If only every violent attack at a school went that way.
Conservatives always like to say that guns don't kill people, people kill people, with the sometimes-stated implication being that if you take away a murderer's guns they'll just find some other way to kill people. Fox News once went on a really hilarious, though, you know, sick little discussion about all the clever and inventive ways a man who wanted to kill his girlfriend but didn't have a gun could manage it. The events of today demonstrate, however, that it's an awful lot harder to kill someone if you don't have a gun. Even with a knife, more or less the second-best killing-people tool, it's a lot harder. One person, armed with a gun, against a large mass of people is at a considerable advantage, and should rather routinely be able to kill many of those people. One person, armed with a knife, against a large mass of people is not at that much of an advantage. He's incredibly dangerous, of course, and could do a lot of damage, but it is both true that it's conceivably possible for the mob of potential victims to gang up on and overpower him and that even when he does succeed in getting his knife in contact with a victim's body he's not all that likely to deal a mortal wound.
Now, none of that is to suggest that a man with a knife attacking a crowd of people is a pleasant summer day's entertainment. It's an extremely dangerous situation with the potential for pain, lasting trauma, or death. But it's a whole frickin' lot better than the same man with a gun, even just an ordinary pistol, attacking the same crowd of people. If we got rid of all the guns, yeah, murderers would still try to murder people. Would-be mass-murderers would still try to mass-murder people, or would still want to, one imagines. But they'd succeed an awful lot less, and that might even mean that they would try an awful lot less. Today in Texas there was a school stabbing, and no one has yet died. If only every violent attack at a school went that way.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Hey, Chauvinist Men: It's Your Fault You Can't Compliment Women On Their Appearance
So, last week President Barack Obama said the following of California Attorney General Kamala Harris (who, I might add, I consider sort of a AA-level Presidential prospect for the Democrats, or who could be nominated to the Supreme Court some day soon):
That's the end of the story, unless one wishes it weren't true that men can't ever compliment women (who aren't in the business of making money from their appearance, e.g. actresses or models or whatever) on their appearance in public. If one thinks this is a bad thing, and I'm certainly inclined to think it's not an ideal thing, one then needs to ask whose fault it is. But the answer is not, as Matt Yglesias jokingly tweeted, "feminazis." The point is not that men have just always been offering these innocent compliments and those horrible feminists, who don't think women should be sexy or something, are irrationally offended by it, those silly feminists. No, it's the reverse. An awful lot of men just don't know how to live in a world where half the people they meet are women, some of whom might be attractive and some of whom might not be. I'm reminded of the story from a few months ago of a woman who was fired explicitly because her boss found her so attractive that he felt tempted to have an affair with her, and felt it was hurting his marriage. This is not an acceptable thing to have happen. This thing where, once a man becomes away of a woman as a potential object of attraction (whether she is, in fact, attractive or not), he stops being able to think of her as a person, with an intellect and a personality and skills and an independent existence, just needs to stop. And if it stopped, if it really, really stopped, if it really became true that when considering, say, who to vote for for Senator, or Governor, or President, or whatever, men could be aware of the sexiness or lack thereof of a female candidate and not have it affect their voting behavior one bit, and similarly in various other circumstances, then it might be possible to say something like what Obama said in a non-problematic way. After all, Kamala Harris is pretty attractive (I imagine that, if she is nominated and confirmed for the post, she'd be the most attractive (to [straight] men) Supreme Court Justice ever). If observing that fact both was and was perceived to be genuinely unconnected from any consideration of her effectiveness as an Attorney General, or her potential effectiveness as Governor or President or Justice, then it would more closely resemble just a friendly compliment. But that can't happen until men, as a group, shape up, and get their act together. (I use the third-person because I'd like to think that I'm pretty decent on this score.)
Beautiful women, just like their attractive male counterparts, can be brilliant, competent, effective, etc. Unattractive women, just like their unattractive male counterparts, can be brilliant, competent, effective, etc. Or they can not be any of those things, just like men of various levels of attractiveness. In principle it should be true that one can compliment beautiful women without undermining them as workers or professionals or politicians (though the issue of implicitly insulting "less attractive" women, an admittedly very subjective category, would never go away), but that can only happen once everyone in society, and particularly men and particularly men in positions of power, recognize the above facts, and act accordingly. As with most things, if chauvinist men would stop being so damn chauvinist, the feminists would start having a lot fewer problems with their actions.
"She's brilliant and she's dedicated, she's tough... She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking Attorney General. It's true, c'mon!"This... is problematic. There are all sorts of reasons to believe Obama didn't mean this in any kind of subordinating way or in any way other than just as a friendly compliment to an ally of his. However. It is true, it is undeniably true, and in fact President Barack Obama has subsequently acknowledged it to be true that women who try to pursue a career in some sort of professional field (a set which increasingly resembles "women") get judged on their appearance, and it hurts them. Not the results of the judgment; no, that appears not to matter. Attractive women, unattractive women, whatever: being judged on their appearance hurts them. It makes sense, or at least it makes a positivist kind of sense in that it's not surprising: since historically women were considered not to have the "male" qualities of intelligence, competence, etc. that would make a good professional, and only really to be there to look pretty, anything that reminds us of a woman's appearance brings that antiquated view along with it. So Obama's comments were problematic, even though they weren't meant as part of an effort on the part of Men to oppress Women In The Workplace. Obama has apologized to Harris, and she's accepted his apology.
That's the end of the story, unless one wishes it weren't true that men can't ever compliment women (who aren't in the business of making money from their appearance, e.g. actresses or models or whatever) on their appearance in public. If one thinks this is a bad thing, and I'm certainly inclined to think it's not an ideal thing, one then needs to ask whose fault it is. But the answer is not, as Matt Yglesias jokingly tweeted, "feminazis." The point is not that men have just always been offering these innocent compliments and those horrible feminists, who don't think women should be sexy or something, are irrationally offended by it, those silly feminists. No, it's the reverse. An awful lot of men just don't know how to live in a world where half the people they meet are women, some of whom might be attractive and some of whom might not be. I'm reminded of the story from a few months ago of a woman who was fired explicitly because her boss found her so attractive that he felt tempted to have an affair with her, and felt it was hurting his marriage. This is not an acceptable thing to have happen. This thing where, once a man becomes away of a woman as a potential object of attraction (whether she is, in fact, attractive or not), he stops being able to think of her as a person, with an intellect and a personality and skills and an independent existence, just needs to stop. And if it stopped, if it really, really stopped, if it really became true that when considering, say, who to vote for for Senator, or Governor, or President, or whatever, men could be aware of the sexiness or lack thereof of a female candidate and not have it affect their voting behavior one bit, and similarly in various other circumstances, then it might be possible to say something like what Obama said in a non-problematic way. After all, Kamala Harris is pretty attractive (I imagine that, if she is nominated and confirmed for the post, she'd be the most attractive (to [straight] men) Supreme Court Justice ever). If observing that fact both was and was perceived to be genuinely unconnected from any consideration of her effectiveness as an Attorney General, or her potential effectiveness as Governor or President or Justice, then it would more closely resemble just a friendly compliment. But that can't happen until men, as a group, shape up, and get their act together. (I use the third-person because I'd like to think that I'm pretty decent on this score.)
Beautiful women, just like their attractive male counterparts, can be brilliant, competent, effective, etc. Unattractive women, just like their unattractive male counterparts, can be brilliant, competent, effective, etc. Or they can not be any of those things, just like men of various levels of attractiveness. In principle it should be true that one can compliment beautiful women without undermining them as workers or professionals or politicians (though the issue of implicitly insulting "less attractive" women, an admittedly very subjective category, would never go away), but that can only happen once everyone in society, and particularly men and particularly men in positions of power, recognize the above facts, and act accordingly. As with most things, if chauvinist men would stop being so damn chauvinist, the feminists would start having a lot fewer problems with their actions.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Something is Wrong with Relief Pitcher WAR
In 2010, both Brian Matusz of the Baltimore Orioles and Neftali Feliz of the Texas Rangers were rookie-elligible pitchers. Matusz started 32 games for the Orioles, pitching 175.2 innings (around 5.5 innings per game), won 10 games and lost 12. He gave up 88 runs, 84 of them earned, for an ERA of 4.30, slightly below league average. He struck out 143 (7.3 per 9 innings), walked 63 (3.2/9 IP), and allowed 19 home runs (1.0 per 9), numbers good for a 4.05 FIP. Felix, meanwhile, appeared in 70 games, all in relief, 59 of which he finished (which led the league). He pitched 69.1 innings, had a 4-3 record, and racked up 40 saves, third in the league behind Rafael Soriano and Joakim Soria. He allowed 21 runs, all earned, for an ERA of 2.73 and an adjusted ERA+ of 165. He struck out 71, walked only 18, and allowed just 5 home runs, for per-nine-inning rates of 9.1 K, 2.3 BB, and 0.6 HR and a 2.96 FIP. Oh, and he did all this in Arlington, a great hitter's environment (which is accounted for in the ERA+ number but nothing else). Those numbers, apparently, gave Brian Matusz, slightly-below-average not-particularly-innings-eating starter, 2.8 fWAR and 3.0 bWAR.* Dominant closer Neftali Feliz, meanwhile, got 2.0 fWAR and 2.3 bWAR.
This can't be right, can it? Is it really true that a mediocre starter is more valuable than a great closer? This is an incredibly counter-intuitive result, so we should be skeptical of it. Of course, its counter-intuitive nature doesn't mean we should dismiss it out of hand; for a lot of people it's counter-intuitive that a solid defender at a medium defensive position like second base or center field who draws a lot of walks can be more valuable than the guy who leads the league in home runs and RBI but plays left field, badly, can't run, and draws about a dozen walks a year. But it's true, and the Wins Above Replacement statistic basically forces you to take all those other things besides the flashy power into account. So maybe it is true that Matusz was better than Feliz in 2010, or more valuable anyway, despite how weird that feels to me. But boy does it ever feel weird. And it's not the case that I can't back up my weirdness with objective numerical analysis.
This can't be right, can it? Is it really true that a mediocre starter is more valuable than a great closer? This is an incredibly counter-intuitive result, so we should be skeptical of it. Of course, its counter-intuitive nature doesn't mean we should dismiss it out of hand; for a lot of people it's counter-intuitive that a solid defender at a medium defensive position like second base or center field who draws a lot of walks can be more valuable than the guy who leads the league in home runs and RBI but plays left field, badly, can't run, and draws about a dozen walks a year. But it's true, and the Wins Above Replacement statistic basically forces you to take all those other things besides the flashy power into account. So maybe it is true that Matusz was better than Feliz in 2010, or more valuable anyway, despite how weird that feels to me. But boy does it ever feel weird. And it's not the case that I can't back up my weirdness with objective numerical analysis.
Stardust and Stories
The episode of Doctor Who that just aired, The Rings of Akhaten, was not, I'd say, among the very greatest episodes of the show. Personally I liked it; some people seem to have rather hated it. What it did, indisputably have, however, were two really great speeches by the Doctor. Since there doesn't seem to be any way to get good transcripts of new episodes immediately following their broadcast, I've transcribed these speeches, and they can be found below the fold. Obviously, don't look if you haven't seen the episode.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Relativity and Hit Batsmen
A follow-up, hopefully brief, to my previous post about my desired redefinition of the at-bat. In that piece I suggested a new statistic, Alternate At-Bats or AB', with AB' = AB + BB - IBB + SF. Alternate Batting Average, or AVG', then becomes (H + BB - IBB)/AB' = (H + BB - IBB)/(AB + BB - IBB + SF), which looks eerily similar to the current definition of On-Base Percentage except that it excludes intentional walks and hit-by-pitches. But then, at the end of my piece, I suggested that I would like to see hit batsmen given more inclusion in pitching stats, and in particular treated like walks for the sake of statistics such as WHIP (Walks and Hits per Innings Pitched) or BB/9 (Walks per 9 Innings). Why the difference? The answer is that a batter hit by a pitch looks very different depending on your point of view: it's all relative.
In evaluating players' skill levels in the context of a one-against-one competition such as baseball's battle between batter and pitcher (and yes, other people have non-zero influence, but those two are the primary combatants), it seems to me that we should care about their success rate in those situations when they are genuinely trying to win the confrontation and their antagonist is giving them a legitimate opportunity to succeed or to fail. This is important, because if you aren't given an opportunity to fail then your success doesn't say anything about how good you are. Likewise, if you aren't genuinely trying to succeed, then your failure isn't really about how good you are or aren't, either, it's about the fact that you were pursuing an unorthodox strategy. (Of course, deliberately making outs via the sacrifice bunt is painfully orthodox at this point, but in principle it's a deviation from the ordinary norms of what batters are trying to do, namely to reach as many bases safely as possible.)
But note the asymmetry here. You have to be genuinely trying to succeed. Your antagonist doesn't. They simply have to be giving you an opportunity to fail. Because we're not evaluating them, we're evaluating you. Now, oftentimes one party's lack of interest in succeeding will inherently deny the other party the opportunity to fail, as in the intentional walk or the sacrifice bunt. But other times it won't. When a pitcher pitches around a fearsome hitter in a tight spot, rather than giving them an outright intentional walk, the batter could decide to swing at the pitches out of the strike zone, and get himself out. It works the other way, too: your antagonist can be genuinely trying to beat you, but still fail to give you an actual opportunity to lose the battle. This typically happens through incompetence. On some level we recognize that a batter facing a meltdown-Rick Ankiel type, who's just lost all ability to throw the ball within three feet of home plate, isn't really demonstrating any skill in drawing a walk: it was handed to them.
Of course, these nuances within the category "unintentional walk" are sufficiently difficult to discern that there's no point trying to distinguish them statistically. You wouldn't want to try to label certain pitch-around walks as IBBs, and while it's true that any idiot could have drawn a walk against Rick Ankiel during his melt-down, that doesn't mean they wouldn't get credit for it. But hit batsmen are different. When the pitch is thrown that eventually hits a batter, the pitcher is presumably trying to succeed at getting the hitter out. The hitter is presumably trying to succeed at reaching base safely. And the batter is giving the pitcher a meaningful chance to fail, because if they threw the pitch over the middle of the plate it might get hit hard. But, as it turned out, the pitcher didn't give the batter a meaningful chance to fail. The plate appearance ended due to something (presumptively, if not actually) outside the batter's control. The pitcher had a chance to make a genuine competition out of that pitch, or that plate appearance, and blew it: that is a failure. But because the pitcher's failure was a failure to create a genuine competition, and that failure occurs before the batter would have any causal input on anything, we can't truly say that it was a success for the hitter. It was, in terms of the result, but it's success by default, success because the other person didn't really show up to the battlefield. So the hit-by-pitch is meaningful or meaningless, depending on whether you're watching from the mound or watching the ball slam into you.
Oh, and also, though I forgot to say this in my closing lines of the previous piece, I'd like to see WHIP' and BB/9' excluding intentional walks, as well as including hit batsmen, for the obvious reason that an intentional walk is not an actual demonstration of wildness but rather a strategic calculation on most likely the manager's part.
In evaluating players' skill levels in the context of a one-against-one competition such as baseball's battle between batter and pitcher (and yes, other people have non-zero influence, but those two are the primary combatants), it seems to me that we should care about their success rate in those situations when they are genuinely trying to win the confrontation and their antagonist is giving them a legitimate opportunity to succeed or to fail. This is important, because if you aren't given an opportunity to fail then your success doesn't say anything about how good you are. Likewise, if you aren't genuinely trying to succeed, then your failure isn't really about how good you are or aren't, either, it's about the fact that you were pursuing an unorthodox strategy. (Of course, deliberately making outs via the sacrifice bunt is painfully orthodox at this point, but in principle it's a deviation from the ordinary norms of what batters are trying to do, namely to reach as many bases safely as possible.)
But note the asymmetry here. You have to be genuinely trying to succeed. Your antagonist doesn't. They simply have to be giving you an opportunity to fail. Because we're not evaluating them, we're evaluating you. Now, oftentimes one party's lack of interest in succeeding will inherently deny the other party the opportunity to fail, as in the intentional walk or the sacrifice bunt. But other times it won't. When a pitcher pitches around a fearsome hitter in a tight spot, rather than giving them an outright intentional walk, the batter could decide to swing at the pitches out of the strike zone, and get himself out. It works the other way, too: your antagonist can be genuinely trying to beat you, but still fail to give you an actual opportunity to lose the battle. This typically happens through incompetence. On some level we recognize that a batter facing a meltdown-Rick Ankiel type, who's just lost all ability to throw the ball within three feet of home plate, isn't really demonstrating any skill in drawing a walk: it was handed to them.
Of course, these nuances within the category "unintentional walk" are sufficiently difficult to discern that there's no point trying to distinguish them statistically. You wouldn't want to try to label certain pitch-around walks as IBBs, and while it's true that any idiot could have drawn a walk against Rick Ankiel during his melt-down, that doesn't mean they wouldn't get credit for it. But hit batsmen are different. When the pitch is thrown that eventually hits a batter, the pitcher is presumably trying to succeed at getting the hitter out. The hitter is presumably trying to succeed at reaching base safely. And the batter is giving the pitcher a meaningful chance to fail, because if they threw the pitch over the middle of the plate it might get hit hard. But, as it turned out, the pitcher didn't give the batter a meaningful chance to fail. The plate appearance ended due to something (presumptively, if not actually) outside the batter's control. The pitcher had a chance to make a genuine competition out of that pitch, or that plate appearance, and blew it: that is a failure. But because the pitcher's failure was a failure to create a genuine competition, and that failure occurs before the batter would have any causal input on anything, we can't truly say that it was a success for the hitter. It was, in terms of the result, but it's success by default, success because the other person didn't really show up to the battlefield. So the hit-by-pitch is meaningful or meaningless, depending on whether you're watching from the mound or watching the ball slam into you.
Oh, and also, though I forgot to say this in my closing lines of the previous piece, I'd like to see WHIP' and BB/9' excluding intentional walks, as well as including hit batsmen, for the obvious reason that an intentional walk is not an actual demonstration of wildness but rather a strategic calculation on most likely the manager's part.
At Bat
I have a theory about the baseball statistic "at-bat." An at-bat is any time a batter comes to the plate, sees some pitches off a pitcher, and either strikes out or puts some pitch in play, other than as a sacrifice bunt or a sacrifice fly. Notably, it excludes walks. But colloquially, we don't make this exclusion. Actually, we don't make a lot of the other exclusions either. Dustin Pedroia just drew a great walk off Mariano Rivera, and the NESN announcers said that he "had a great at-bat." Technically, no he didn't, because he didn't have an at-bat at all. He had a plate appearance. I have a theory about this divergence between the colloquial usage and the official definition: originally, all walks were considered intentional walks. This emerges from considering what feels to me like the organic evolution of the rules of baseball. The point, originally, was for the pitcher to throw something for the batter to hit, that the defense would then field and we'd see whether the batter reached base safely etc. But there were some difficulties: what if the batter hit the ball straight back? You couldn't expect a defense to cover a whole 360 degrees. So we get foul territory. What if the batter just kept refusing to hit what the pitcher was serving up, even though it was perfectly hittable? The game could go on forever if the batter could be infinitely selective, so we get the strikeout: If you see three hittable pitches that you don't demonstrate that you could hit, you're out. Conversely, though, it's unreasonable to expect a batter to swing at a pitch above his head, or behind his back, so we require pitchers to throw the ball to a certain area where the hitter's expecting it and can plausibly reach it. If the pitcher fails to do that enough times, the batter gets first base. Simple, right? And when you tell it that way, the base-on-balls feels very much like it's what happens when a pitcher passes on facing a given hitter. The point is to get a ball in play for the defense to handle, but the pitcher elected not to give the batter anything to hit. The batter didn't get a chance to do the thing batters are supposed to do, namely to hit the ball. In a sense, even though he stood in the batter's box and faced some pitching, the batter didn't get a chance to be truly "at bat."
This comes off very differently once batters start trying to draw walks, and pitchers start trying to get strikeouts. Now it feels like the base-on-balls represents, not a decision by the pitcher to pass on facing a certain hitter, but a victory for the batter over the pitcher in their confrontation. The batter came to the plate with the intention of reaching base, the pitcher had the intention of getting him out, and precisely one of them succeeded. It wasn't the pitcher. Maybe that was because the pitcher was trying to throw strikes, and failed; maybe it was because the pitcher was scared of the batter, and really did pitch around him; maybe it was a thirteen-pitch at-bat with half a dozen foul balls with two strikes, where the pitcher was throwing a decent percentage of pitches for strikes but eventually four balls just piled up. Any which way, it wasn't an avoided confrontation, it was a confrontation, and one side won it. That feels very much like a turn at bat, doesn't it?
Now, what isn't an at-bat is an intentional walk. So the way I'd revise the at-bat statistic would be to include unintentional walks only. Just add them in, to both the numerator and the denominator of the revised 'batting average' statistic. Perhaps also add in sacrifice flies to the denominator; I'm unsure about that one.* Sacrifice bunts should definitely be excluded and intentional walks should definitely be excluded, as they represent cases in which one side or the other genuinely wasn't trying to win the confrontation. I'm not sure what to do with hit-by-pitches. For the pitcher they feel very similar to walks: you let a batter reach first base, but without the dangers associated with a single on a ball in play of runners taking extra bases etc., because of control problems. For the batter, though, they feel quite different: if you draw a walk, it means you matched wits with the pitcher and came out ahead. If you get hit, well, he just plunked you. Certainly it is a skill; Chase Utley's been hit in nearly 3% of his plate appearances, while Jose Reyes gets drilled about 0.1% of the time, and not since 2010. And it clearly does represent a success in the whole not-getting-out thing. But, I dunno... ideologically, or something, it feels like we shouldn't be treating getting hit by a small hard object thrown very fast as a laudable accomplishment and something players should be developing a talent for.
So I think I'd redefine the at-bat as AB + BB - IBB + SF, where AB represents at-bats as currently defined. Batting average, then, would be (H + BB - IBB)/AB', where AB' is the new formulation of at-bats. This is, I think, a good measure of the proportion of the time that a hitter prevails when he enters a confrontation with the pitcher genuinely trying to reach base and the pitcher genuinely trying to prevent him from doing so. This is basically just on-base percentage minus the intentional walks and the hit-by-pitches, reflecting the fact that I do think on-base percentage, i.e., let's pay attention to walks, is basically superior to batting average as currently defined, i.e. let's not, but also the fact that IBBs and HBPs do feel different from the hitter's perspective, like they weren't really given a chance to compete with the pitcher. Now, we should also care about on-base percentage as such; for instance, a large part of Barry Bonds' skill was intimidating the opposing pitchers so much that they rightly chose to give him first base outright rather than even attempt to face him (even once when it meant forcing in a run!). Perhaps we might also want to expand the on-base percentage calculus, penalizing batters for sacrifice bunts, double plays grounded into, and being caught stealing, to reflect an overall "how good are you at not burning through your team's limited supply of outs?" metric. Including sacrifice bunts would mean that we'd be penalizing players for things that are deliberate strategy, but if AVG' became closer to what OBP is now, it would presumably regain much of its discarded importance, and OBP could become less of an "up is always better" thing and more of just a descriptor. High AVG' would always be desireable; a high OBP' - AVG' gap would be nice, but not particularly essential, and not necessarily all that much under a player's own control.
Also, I'd definitely like to see statistics such as "Walks per 9 innings pitched" for pitchers redefined to include hit batsmen. I know that cuts in precisely the opposite direction from how I want to treat HBP's for batters, but as I said, I do think it feels very different for pitchers than it does for hitters.
*On the one hand, a sacrifice fly is not deliberate in the way a sacrifice bunt is, i.e. you'd prefer to have hit that fly ball a bit harder or on a slightly different angle and have had a hit or a home run instead. On the other hand, it is definitely true that players will try to maximize their chances of getting at least a sacrifice fly, i.e. some kind of fly ball to the outfield, at the expense of overall on-base percentage in certain situations. On the third hand, this can also happen in situations where a ground-out will score a key run, and we don't give hitters credit for sacrifices when they get RBI ground-outs. It's a whole bloody mess, and I'm inclined to say that the batter did a thing which, from their point of view, ideally would've resulted in their reaching base, even if they might've been uncommonly satisfied with a particular outcome that did not include their reaching base, so let's count it as an at-bat. I think you see dugouts treating players who've just had an RBI ground-out very similarly to players who've just had an RBI sac-fly.
This comes off very differently once batters start trying to draw walks, and pitchers start trying to get strikeouts. Now it feels like the base-on-balls represents, not a decision by the pitcher to pass on facing a certain hitter, but a victory for the batter over the pitcher in their confrontation. The batter came to the plate with the intention of reaching base, the pitcher had the intention of getting him out, and precisely one of them succeeded. It wasn't the pitcher. Maybe that was because the pitcher was trying to throw strikes, and failed; maybe it was because the pitcher was scared of the batter, and really did pitch around him; maybe it was a thirteen-pitch at-bat with half a dozen foul balls with two strikes, where the pitcher was throwing a decent percentage of pitches for strikes but eventually four balls just piled up. Any which way, it wasn't an avoided confrontation, it was a confrontation, and one side won it. That feels very much like a turn at bat, doesn't it?
Now, what isn't an at-bat is an intentional walk. So the way I'd revise the at-bat statistic would be to include unintentional walks only. Just add them in, to both the numerator and the denominator of the revised 'batting average' statistic. Perhaps also add in sacrifice flies to the denominator; I'm unsure about that one.* Sacrifice bunts should definitely be excluded and intentional walks should definitely be excluded, as they represent cases in which one side or the other genuinely wasn't trying to win the confrontation. I'm not sure what to do with hit-by-pitches. For the pitcher they feel very similar to walks: you let a batter reach first base, but without the dangers associated with a single on a ball in play of runners taking extra bases etc., because of control problems. For the batter, though, they feel quite different: if you draw a walk, it means you matched wits with the pitcher and came out ahead. If you get hit, well, he just plunked you. Certainly it is a skill; Chase Utley's been hit in nearly 3% of his plate appearances, while Jose Reyes gets drilled about 0.1% of the time, and not since 2010. And it clearly does represent a success in the whole not-getting-out thing. But, I dunno... ideologically, or something, it feels like we shouldn't be treating getting hit by a small hard object thrown very fast as a laudable accomplishment and something players should be developing a talent for.
So I think I'd redefine the at-bat as AB + BB - IBB + SF, where AB represents at-bats as currently defined. Batting average, then, would be (H + BB - IBB)/AB', where AB' is the new formulation of at-bats. This is, I think, a good measure of the proportion of the time that a hitter prevails when he enters a confrontation with the pitcher genuinely trying to reach base and the pitcher genuinely trying to prevent him from doing so. This is basically just on-base percentage minus the intentional walks and the hit-by-pitches, reflecting the fact that I do think on-base percentage, i.e., let's pay attention to walks, is basically superior to batting average as currently defined, i.e. let's not, but also the fact that IBBs and HBPs do feel different from the hitter's perspective, like they weren't really given a chance to compete with the pitcher. Now, we should also care about on-base percentage as such; for instance, a large part of Barry Bonds' skill was intimidating the opposing pitchers so much that they rightly chose to give him first base outright rather than even attempt to face him (even once when it meant forcing in a run!). Perhaps we might also want to expand the on-base percentage calculus, penalizing batters for sacrifice bunts, double plays grounded into, and being caught stealing, to reflect an overall "how good are you at not burning through your team's limited supply of outs?" metric. Including sacrifice bunts would mean that we'd be penalizing players for things that are deliberate strategy, but if AVG' became closer to what OBP is now, it would presumably regain much of its discarded importance, and OBP could become less of an "up is always better" thing and more of just a descriptor. High AVG' would always be desireable; a high OBP' - AVG' gap would be nice, but not particularly essential, and not necessarily all that much under a player's own control.
Also, I'd definitely like to see statistics such as "Walks per 9 innings pitched" for pitchers redefined to include hit batsmen. I know that cuts in precisely the opposite direction from how I want to treat HBP's for batters, but as I said, I do think it feels very different for pitchers than it does for hitters.
*On the one hand, a sacrifice fly is not deliberate in the way a sacrifice bunt is, i.e. you'd prefer to have hit that fly ball a bit harder or on a slightly different angle and have had a hit or a home run instead. On the other hand, it is definitely true that players will try to maximize their chances of getting at least a sacrifice fly, i.e. some kind of fly ball to the outfield, at the expense of overall on-base percentage in certain situations. On the third hand, this can also happen in situations where a ground-out will score a key run, and we don't give hitters credit for sacrifices when they get RBI ground-outs. It's a whole bloody mess, and I'm inclined to say that the batter did a thing which, from their point of view, ideally would've resulted in their reaching base, even if they might've been uncommonly satisfied with a particular outcome that did not include their reaching base, so let's count it as an at-bat. I think you see dugouts treating players who've just had an RBI ground-out very similarly to players who've just had an RBI sac-fly.
On When to Get Married
For some reason there have been a lot of posts on the internet recently arguing about the correct time to get married. Should people get married young? (I.e., like, 23, whereas "marrying young" used to mean more like 19.) Should people get married at the currently-more-conventional late-twenties time? After that? People are advancing arguments in various directions, some of which take the form "I did X, and it worked for me" and others of which are trying to be more general economics or morals arguments. But I feel like they're all kind of missing the obvious:
Now, I think it's possible some people might disagree with my approach to this question. Most criticism, I think, would focus on the word 'love,' and suggest that one might want to get married even if you don't feel a passionate romantic love for your partner. (I once read an article, on Huffington Post of course, titled something like 'Why You Shouldn't Marry For Love,' although I think it should've replaced the last word with 'lust' based on how it's written, which makes it obviously right.) These arguments, when they're not just flagrantly anti-feminist and thus not worth addressing, are usually economical in nature, or trying to be. Life is just easier with multiple earners, or whatever. In my opinion, it's a pretty important policy priority for society to make these economic arguments for marrying someone you don't love as empirically invalid as we can manage. Marrying not for love has obvious massive psychological costs; insofar as possible, people should never feel compelled or incentivized to do it.
But if we like my approach, and I do quite like it, it raises an interesting problem for the whole "when should you get married?" question: different people will meet the criteria at different times. Some people might not meet it at all. If you meet your soulmate* in college, or even in high school, and feel absolutely confident (even after acknowledging the perils of young love) that you want to be with them by the time you're both 23, go ahead and get married: good for you! If you don't meet someone like that until your late twenties, or your thirties, or your forties, don't get married until you do, and good for you as well. If you never meet someone like that, well, that's unfortunate for you, but, you know, don't get married, and good for you. Hopefully the non-married existence of those of us who haven't met the right person yet, and had them reciprocate the feelings, won't be too terribly miserable, both because we'll be able to support ourselves and because we'll be able to, you know, have a social life and have a sex life if we want to, and so on. Ideally, there is no answer, defined in non-relativistic terms, to this question, because the answer is, get married iff you find someone worth marrying.
*Use of this word not meant to imply anything about destiny; I'm just using it as shorthand for the thing I described in my marriage criterion above.
Get married if and only if you have met someone with whom you have fallen in love, and who has fallen in love with you; you both want to spend the rest of your lives with each other, possibly including raising a family; and you both feel sufficiently confident about all that that you want to take advantage of legal institutions that provide a broad variety of benefits if you remain together but will make your lives pretty miserable if you ever split up.On this view, marriage is a symptom, not an effect. And it's a symptom of a really good thing! Finding someone you love enough that you want to spend the rest of your life with them, and who feels the same way about you, is a huge, huge positive for your life. (Of course, one or both of you might be wrong, or turn out to be wrong eventually, but that's where the part about confidence levels comes in.) This makes, for instance, studying the effect of marrying early or late or whatever difficult: insofar as people are doing it the way I'm saying they should, obviously people who get married young will be happier, for the intervening years at least, because they've happened to find a massively happiness-generating situation sooner.
Now, I think it's possible some people might disagree with my approach to this question. Most criticism, I think, would focus on the word 'love,' and suggest that one might want to get married even if you don't feel a passionate romantic love for your partner. (I once read an article, on Huffington Post of course, titled something like 'Why You Shouldn't Marry For Love,' although I think it should've replaced the last word with 'lust' based on how it's written, which makes it obviously right.) These arguments, when they're not just flagrantly anti-feminist and thus not worth addressing, are usually economical in nature, or trying to be. Life is just easier with multiple earners, or whatever. In my opinion, it's a pretty important policy priority for society to make these economic arguments for marrying someone you don't love as empirically invalid as we can manage. Marrying not for love has obvious massive psychological costs; insofar as possible, people should never feel compelled or incentivized to do it.
But if we like my approach, and I do quite like it, it raises an interesting problem for the whole "when should you get married?" question: different people will meet the criteria at different times. Some people might not meet it at all. If you meet your soulmate* in college, or even in high school, and feel absolutely confident (even after acknowledging the perils of young love) that you want to be with them by the time you're both 23, go ahead and get married: good for you! If you don't meet someone like that until your late twenties, or your thirties, or your forties, don't get married until you do, and good for you as well. If you never meet someone like that, well, that's unfortunate for you, but, you know, don't get married, and good for you. Hopefully the non-married existence of those of us who haven't met the right person yet, and had them reciprocate the feelings, won't be too terribly miserable, both because we'll be able to support ourselves and because we'll be able to, you know, have a social life and have a sex life if we want to, and so on. Ideally, there is no answer, defined in non-relativistic terms, to this question, because the answer is, get married iff you find someone worth marrying.
*Use of this word not meant to imply anything about destiny; I'm just using it as shorthand for the thing I described in my marriage criterion above.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Illegal
One bit of news today is that the Associated Press stylebook has condemned the phrases "illegal immigrant" and "undocumented immigrant." This is part of the general campaign to stop referring to those who have committed illegal immigration, and are currently living in the country illegally, as "illegals." The obviously-correct idea is that a person isn't illegal, an act is. Okay, fine, I'm not generally one to gripe about political correctness, and I do think that "illegals" is offensive. But quite aside from the lack of any remotely concise way to refer to, you know, illegal immigrants after this style change, I'm not sure it follows logically from the central valid criticism. To me, "illegal immigrant" is, on a pure linguistic level, equivalent to "one who immigrates illegally." Right? The "illegal" is modifying the action of immigration, which is concealed by the fact that the whole thing has been turned into a noun by replacing -ation with -ant. Given how much of a set phrase "illegal immigration" is, I honestly think that's how the related phrase "illegal immigrant" reads: it's the noun form of what is essentially a single word that happens to have a space in the middle. Alternately, one can say that "immigrant" refers to a person in their capacity as one who immigrates. While it is definitely true that a person's existence is not illegal (unless they've been sentenced to death, perhaps, but that's a whole separate issue), it makes sense to me to say that, if I take a person who has committed illegal immigration, their existence as an immigrant is illegal. Thus, illegal immigrant: one who is an immigrant illegally.
Now, that's some seriously involved semantics, and if the way it plays out in general society is that people hear "illegal immigrant" as having a similar connotation to "illegals," then we might as well stop saying it. But I don't think it has the same implication; whereas one delegitimizes a person altogether, the other only refers to the illegitimacy of one facet of their existence, that of being an immigrant.
Now, that's some seriously involved semantics, and if the way it plays out in general society is that people hear "illegal immigrant" as having a similar connotation to "illegals," then we might as well stop saying it. But I don't think it has the same implication; whereas one delegitimizes a person altogether, the other only refers to the illegitimacy of one facet of their existence, that of being an immigrant.
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