The Civil War Continues

In 1866, Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1 of which was designed to force the states, and in particular the Southern states, to recognize equal civil rights for all, and in particular for the newly freed slaves. That Section, which is unambiguously the most important part of the current Constitution, has four operative provisions. The first overturns Dred Scott v. Sandford and declares that, yes, African-Americans are citizens of the United States. The second prohibits states from violating the privileges or immunities of American citizens. The third prevents them from depriving anyone of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and the last requires them to provide the equal protection of their laws. These four provisions are, in essence, the terms of settlement of the Civil War.

And in that settlement, as it was originally supposed to work, it was the first two Clauses that were supposed to do most of the work of guaranteeing substantive legal equality. After all, if blacks are citizens and you can't violate the rights of citizens, well, that sounds like black people have rights. Alas the Court has basically pretended that the second provision doesn't exist and that the first one has only a narrow technical meaning rather than a richer substantive one. As a result, the last two provisions are carrying a lot of weight they weren't originally meant to; the Equal Protection Clause in particular is the central doctrinal lynch-pin for just about all of the Court's equality jurisprudence. But the reason why it's there at all, back when they thought the Privileges or Immunities Clause was a thing, was because the Privileges or Immunities Clause addressed itself only to legislatures. But everyone knew that a Southern state could write the world's most even-handed, non-discriminatory legal code and yet legally entrench massive racial oppression, by the simple device of not enforcing those equal laws equally. The paradigm example of this would be a Southern state simply not punishing people who murdered black people.

Hmmm, where have I heard that before? Or, rather, where have I heard that since?

The thing about the Civil War is that it never really ended. We stopped having battles with armies but the central question that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to settle as the terms of the peace, the question of whether black people are full and equal members of American society, has never quite been resolved. And not just legally: Michael Brown and Eric Garner are just among the latest Civil War casualties. And the failure to punish their killers isn't just racism, it isn't just institutionalized racism, it is quite literally unreconstructed institutional racism, in the very precise sense of being the exact problem that the key Reconstruction Amendment was meant to eradicate. Having this not happen is what we fought that war over. And that means we're still fighting.

The Rationalization of the United States Senate

There's an interesting thing about the Democratic Senators who were defeated for re-election last night, or who retired and saw their seats taken by Republicans: they were almost exclusively from red states. Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Mark Begich of Alaska. Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Tim Johnson of South Dakota. Max Baucus of Montana. Only two came from "purple" swing states, namely Tom Harkin of Iowa and Mark Udall of Colorado, and in Colorado's case it has only recently started swinging. The result is that the losses tended to be concentrated among the more moderate Democrats, and therefore the Senate Democratic caucus which remains is more ideologically consistent than the current one.

Consider the following maps. First, here's the Senate on the eve of the 2006 elections:

Now here's what the Senate will look like next January:

That second map looks a lot more like your average Presidential election, doesn't it? Note that these Senates have similar numbers of Democrats, 45 in 2005 and 46 in 2015 (probably). But we've gained one net Democrat in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Oregon, plus two new ones in Virginia and a gain in Missouri that's kind of anomalous for these purposes. We've lost, on the other hand, Democrats from Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa, along with anomalous losses in Wisconsin and Illinois and the loss of both seats in Arkansas. Almost all of that has had the effect of lining the two parties up better with the real political/cultural dividing-lines in the country.



And in 2016, the Democrats will have pick-up opportunities that are mostly on the Democratic side of this line. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire are probably their best chances to gain seats. Those four would give us a 50/50 Senate that would basically be blue states in blue, purple states in purple, and red states in red. Really the only exceptions would be that Republicans would have a Senator from Maine and that Democrats would have Senators from West Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota. (Arguably Indiana is also an anomaly, but since Obama did win it one time it's hard to deny it its place among the vaguely purple-ish states at least.) Perhaps Democrats might also deserve one of North Carolina's two seats given that they have been competitive there of late, but Richard Burr should be somewhat vulnerable as well so that could happen. It's not impossible that Iowa will be competitive, or that Democrats could manage to take the second seat in Ohio. All of this would be entirely consistent with the basic geography of American politics.

And what all of this means, I think, is that if Democrats have a 2016 that's as fun as it should be, their restored majority caucus should be a lot more ideologically cohesive than their current one. So even though it will probably be smaller, say in the 51-53 range instead of the expiring 55, the median Senator may not have gotten much more conservative, and might even have moved somewhat to the left.

Of course, until then we have a median Senator who comes from the interior of an extremely cohesive Republican caucus, but it's not like the next two years were gonna be big ones for legislation anyway.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Final

Madison Bumgarner, ladies and gentlemen. Madison Bumgarner. I have nothing more to say.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #15

So, yeah, I meant to get this written before it was actually the middle of Game 7 already. I failed. Fortunately it's still early in Game 7 so there's not too much to say about how I already know this will change tomorrow. But it will change, probably a lot. Because tonight we get a game with a Leverage Index of 100%. But first, the penultimate update of the post-season. Hopefully this will be slightly more terse than my other updates.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #14

Remember when I was all excited about the double-digit WSWPA swings caused by Ryan Vogelsong, Brandon Finnegan, and Pablo Sandoval in Game 4? Yeah, well... They don't seem so impressive anymore. There was surprisingly little movement last night, because one dude sucked up basically all the WPA. People not named Madison Bumgarner didn't really do that much.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #13

Things may change 'round about the thirteenth! Because, finally, at long last, we have volatility! This is World Series baseball. This is what it's all about. People made double digit impacts on their team's chances of winning it all last night. That's new! The leaderboards you are about to see bear scant resemblance to the ones you're accustomed to seeing. Well, except that Eric Hosmer is still leading. Dude is on fire. But things got awfully shaken up, let's just say.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #12

Finally we had a nice close baseball game last night. You'd think that would mean we finally got our big moment, right? You'd think. Anyway, the Royals are going pretty well. The San Francisco Giants, meanwhile, have frittered away about a third of the WSWPA that they entered the series with. Also they're losing again tonight. Which would be bad for them. They'd have to win out. Mostly on the road. Go Royals.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Update #11

Game 2 of the World Series was soooo much better than Game 1. Eric Hosmer agrees.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboard Update #10

Looks like I am going to at least do the first single-game update for the World Series. Certainly it's a big update: lots and lots of movement on the leaderboards. That's because there was 31.25% of World Series Win Expectancy up for grabs last night. The previous high for Leverage Index was the 18.8% mark from Games 3 and 4 of the NLCS between the Dodgers and the Cardinals. So yesterday's game was two-thirds more important than the previous most important games in determining who will win the World Series. This is not surprising, of course, it's just striking nonetheless.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, League Championship Series Update

So, yeah. My plan of giving daily updates, as you may have noticed, fell completely through during the League Championship Series round. This, therefore, is the all-in-one-go update: it includes data from all nine LCS games. The leaderboards you are about to see, therefore, bear very little relationship to those we saw at the end of the Division Series round. I will try to do daily updates for the World Series, which shouldn't be too hard as there will only be one game each day.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards Meta-Update

So, there have been a bunch of League Championship Series games and I haven't given any further updates. This past weekend was a long weekend and I was on a mini-vacation over it, when disrupted my posting schedule. Since I'm already this far behind and since the LCS's are so close to being over, I think I'm just going to wait until they are completely over and then do a big update incorporating the entire round in one fell swoop. I honestly have no idea whether I'll do an update after each World Series game or just after the whole Series; I'll probably try to do one after each game if I can.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 8 (Final Division Series Update)

It took me a while to get this posted because there's a couple of days here without baseball. For these purposes these don't count as "days," they count as non-days, so this post is on time from a baseball-topological sense or something. Anyway, with the Division Series being over I'm going to add a new section to this post, one we'll see two other times: a post-mortem on the teams that have been eliminated and are going home.

Tomorrow the League Championship Series start up, bringing with them higher leverage! And also fewer players playing each day. Technically tomorrow is just the ALCS, so Saturday's update will just include that one game, and then Sunday there should be two games to incorporate.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 7

Today saw the third games of both National League Division Series. Down 2 games to none, the Washington Nationals beat the San Francisco Giants to keep their season alive and force a Game 4. The St. Louis Cardinals, meanwhile, beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in a series tied at one game apiece. It may seem counterintuitive given that the former was an elimination game, but the latter actually had twice as many points of World Series Win Expectancy on the line; in fact, it was the highest-"leverage" game, by that standard, since the Wild Card games.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 6

Two ALDS Game 3's yesterday, each with the perceived underdog team holding a 2-0 lead. Two sweeps. Yeah. The Detroit Tigers and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have officially recorded aggregate WSWPA figures of -12.5% for the post-season, dropping from, well, a 12.5% chance to win it all to a 0% chance. The games were pretty low-leverage, though (in the sense of total WSWE points up for grabs, if not exactly from the perspective of the losing team), so they didn't make a huge difference to the existing leaderboards.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Day 5

This post is being written a bit later than usual 'cause I spent the morning dealing with a dead car battery. It includes updates from yesterday's two NLDS games, in which the Giants took a 2-0 lead over the Nationals and the Dodgers tied up their series with the Cardinals at 1-1.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 4

Yesterday was quite the day of baseball. Four whole games! Baseball from noon to the wee hours of the morning. And some of the games were quite something. Below the fold you will see some deeply, deeply bizarre figures.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 3 (for real!)

This is a little mini-update, since the last update only included one of the two games played on the relevant date. In a few more minute there will be another, bigger update, featuring all four of the games from yesterday (a.k.a. Friday), but I just wanted to make sure there was a post featuring precisely all of the games through October 2nd.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 3*

Yesterday (okay, technically it was two calendar days ago, on the East Coast at least) there were two baseball games played. The Orioles gave the Tigers as 12-3 drubbing, and the Royals beat the Angels 3-2. Unfortunately, Baseball-Reference has only posted a box score for the first one. This is a problem because B-R gives me player WPA numbers to one further decimal than FanGraphs does. So the player leaderboards below don't include anyone from that second game, though the list of top plays would conceptually if there were any that made the cut and I'll note if anyone from the Royals/Angels game is in the top 10, even though I won't list them.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 2

It's Day 2 of the post-season! Or, really, it's day 3, but that means I have access to leaderboards from day 2. So here's the first update of the leaderboards I debuted yesterday, of the best players, worst players, and biggest plays from this year's playoffs, measured by WSWPA.

The Wild Card Games and World Series Win Probability Added

A year ago (wow, I did not remember it had been that long) I introduced the concept of World Series Win Expectancy and Win Probability Added. The idea is simple: you assume that every post-season game is a coin flip and use that assumption to determine the probability of winning the world series from any position in the playoffs, and then within each game you treat the Win Expectancy scale from 0 to 1 as corresponding to the interval from your WSWE if you win to your WSWE if you lose. Individual events that cause a change in your game Win Expectancy, and which therefore accrue Win Probability Added (positive or negative), generate World Series Win Probability Added, and we can therefore be pretty precise about which players and events have had the most impact.

This October, just for fun (and because I have lots of stuff to be procrastinating from) I'll keep a leaderboard of World Series Win Probability Added. I'll keep track of which players have done the most so far in the post-season to help their teams win the World Series, and of which players have done the most to help them fail to win it. I'll also keep track of the most momentous handful of plays. Right now this isn't a super exciting leaderboard. I'm only keeping track of one game, namely the (insane!) Royals/Athletics Wild Card game from last night, because Baseball-Reference (which, unlike FanGraphs, gives me WPA numbers to the tenth of a percent) doesn't put up its box scores until the next day. So right now this is just the WPA numbers from that amazing ballgame divided by eight (because if you win you have a 1/8 chance of winning, whereas if you lose you have, well, a 0/8 chance of winning, so there's one-eighth of WSWE on the line). Tomorrow's update will include the WPA numbers from both Wild Card games, divided by the same constant! But then after that we'll start having players with multiple games played and games of different leverages, so things will start getting interesting. Anyway, leaderboard is below the fold.

In Which I Go Out of Character and Strike a Blow for Concision

So, if you read this blog (which you appear to), you probably know that I tend to write rather lengthy blog posts. The same is true of basically everything I ever write: it gets long. I'd like to think, however, that most of the length is not just due to pointless excess verbiage, but rather because I'm just saying a lot of stuff. Regardless, there's a kind of irony in my critiquing someone else on grounds of insufficient concision. But what can I do when I read a sentence like this one:

The refusal of a legal order to recognize itself as hierarchically integrated into a more comprehensive legal order is justified, if the more comprehensive legal order suffers from a structural legitimacy deficit that the less comprehensive legal order does not suffer from.

Oh. My. God. Let me rephrase that:

The refusal of a legal order to recognize itself as hierarchically integrated into a more comprehensive legal order is justified, if the more comprehensive legal order is less structurally legitimate than the less comprehensive legal order.

I only altered the italicized part. I cut the part I modified down by maybe 40%. I'm pretty sure I cut the amount of stuff-that-gets-said in that part by precisely 0%. Seriously, what's the point of the "suffers from a structural legitimacy deficit" construction? The related phrase "democratic deficit" or "democracy deficit" keeps popping up in various forms of comparative constitutional law/theory that I've been encountering of late, and it drives me crazy. What's a democracy deficit? Deficit means shortfall, shortfall implies a baseline (e.g., the federal budget deficit is the shortfall of federal revenues relative to the baseline of federal outlays), so what's the baseline? Maximum Conceivable Democracy? Well that would be lovely, but in that case there's a "democracy deficit" everywhere and that's not really a huge problem because we live in an imperfect world and we do the best we can. If not that, then... what? The most democratic object in the frame of reference? Okay, but then why not just use plain old comparative language like what I used in my rewrite up above? It's a lot shorter and less jargon-y and you end up saying something that sounds a lot more like the natural way to say the thing you mean to say. Sheesh.


(I know it's been a while since I've written any posts, and that this is kind of a curious one to break up the drought. The trouble with law school is that I'm busy and I also have no shortage of actual people to discuss my ideas with, which means I feel less impetus to process those ideas by blogging about them. On the bright side I don't think I have any actual regular readers to whom I'm not related, so there probably aren't a ton of people aggrieved by my shortcomings in this regard.)

On the Politics of "They"

Kevin Drum just posted a little note on his blog announcing that he has "gone over to the dark side" and started routinely using "they" or "them" as gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns. I say, hooray! slash, why is this the dark side, exactly? I've long been an advocate of this as both the most natural way to talk, even putting politics aside, and essentially requisite once you take the politics into account. Anyway, here's Drum explaining his decision:

I'm not proud of this. But he or she has always grated on the ear. Likewise, using he some of the time and she some of the time is just too damn much work. And it's kind of confusing too. How careful are you going to be to use them equally? How much attention are you going to pay to make sure you aren't using them in gendered ways (he when you're writing about doctors, she when you're writing about nurses)? Etc.

 I would go a lot further as to both he or she and the alternation method: I think they're both flatly unacceptable for political reasons. The basic impulse here is that separate is not equal. Imagine, for instance, that for some reason we lived in a world where it was just baked into our language that we had to use a different third-person singular pronoun to refer to someone based on whether they were white or black. Or gay or straight. We wouldn't be okay with this, would we? I don't think we would, not even a little bit. And we most certainly would not be okay with either of these alternatives Drum identifies, the "X or Y" approach or just trying to mix and match. Because that would suggest that every time we referred to anyone, even a fictional person the details of whose persona are not important, we must give them a race, or an orientation, and make a special note of it in how we refer to them, and go out of our way to note that we're not doing that. Similarly, the way our language actually works, if the grammar pedants who oppose the "they" solution have their way, it is simply impossible to refer to a person without either giving them a gender or making an explicit, out-loud statement that you're not going to give them a gender. There is simply no natural way to just refer to someone as a person and as nothing else. Even "he or she" doesn't really refer to someone as a person, even awkwardly, because it's telling you that, while we're not assigning this person a gender, they have one (of course, everyone does, that's not the issue) and, more to the point, whichever gender they have is so important, so fundamentally definitional of their entire existence, that if we knew which one it was we would have to incorporate it into the way we refer to them.

In other words, a world where "he" and "she" are the only valid third-person singular pronouns valid for use as to human beings is a world which insists that all people are inherently defined by their genders. That's basically a denial of the common humanity of men and women and to me that's just flatly unacceptable. There's plenty of stuff to say about why the grammar pedants should lose on their own terms (Shakespeare uses the "they" construction, I'm pretty sure), but that's not the point. If the case were absolutely ironclad that using "they" this way was incorrect as a matter of linguistics, that wouldn't matter. At some point there's got to be a kind of popular sovereignty over language, a right of the people to amend their language if it no longer serves their need, and if we must accept that the English language as of today simply doesn't include a sufficiently egalitarian third-person singular pronoun, well, that's just an area that's crying out for amendment. And guess what! We've already been making that amendment (if it was ever needed in the first place; see above re Shakespeare), albeit in sort of a gradual, common law-y way. Good for us!

Did Somebody Say "Forgotten MVP Season"?

MLB.com currently features a link to this piece, dedicated to the proposition that Derek Jeter is underrated (or at least that he once was). How, you might wonder, do they defend this remarkable assertion? Because in 1999, when Jeter narrowly led all American League position players in bWAR and trailed Manny Ramirez by a tenth of a point in fWAR, he didn't win the Most Valuable Player award, or even finish in the top-5 in voting. Instead, Texas Rangers catcher Ivan Rodriguez won the award, while Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, who had one of the best pitching seasons of all time (and then followed it up with a similarly-dominant one the next year), finished second. Proof positive!, says this piece, that Jeter gets no respect.

Now, I could try to construct some arguments for why Jeter's low finish that year was deserved. He tailed off significantly in the second half, his OPS dropping from a ridiculous 1.065 to .903 (which is admittedly still great, but less absurdly great, particularly for 1999). His team had the best record in the American League, and would've needed to finish twelve games worse than it did to miss the post-season, so while it's true, as the article says, that Jeter was the best player on a winning team, it's also true that he didn't make much of a marginal difference in that team's regular-season outcome. (Obviously that form of that argument is a bit ludicrous, and I don't know if the same great-team penalty that Dave Cameron found in Manager of the Year voting has historically applied to MVP voting, but it's a logical extension of the things people said about why Mike Trout shouldn't win his awards.) Then there's the fact that, if we're talking about value as value, there's no plausible argument that anyone not named Pedro should've won that award.

And then there's the fact that WAR likely understates, perhaps significantly, the impact of a great defensive catcher like Ivan Rodriguez. I don't have any pitch-framing numbers from 1999, but I bet he was pretty good at it, and there's reason to think that the best pitch framers add a ton of value that way. The idea that catchers should get extra credit is a remarkably venerable one; Roy Campanella won three MVP awards while having only one league lead in any one major stat in those three years, while Yogi Berra won his three MVP awards without leading the league in anything the whole time. Neither was anywhere near the league lead in WAR. Pudge Rodriguez was way closer to the league WAR lead in 1999 than either Campanella or Berra were in any of their MVP seasons. So if Rodriguez was an undeserving winner that year, the Yankees should give back some hardware of their own.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about, not in the main. No, I'd like to talk about a different league and a different New York team, and a few different players who got a lot less MVP respect than they deserved. In 1998, John Olerud hit .354/.447/.551 and put up 8.1 fWAR/7.6 bWAR. That put him third in the National League per Fangraphs, behind Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire by half a win, and second per Baseball-Reference, half a win behind Bonds. But he only hit 22 home runs, not being part of the insane record chase of McGwire and Sosa, and his blend of pure hitting and great first base defense got so little respect that he finished a whopping 12th in the voting. Oh, and did I mention that, while the Mets didn't make the post-season that year, they did win 88 games, climbing out of a slump that had consumed the first two-thirds of that decade, finishing a game out of the Wild Card tie, and launching one of the best eras the team had ever seen? Sosa won the award, and it's tough to complain about that, but Olerud at least should've been near the top of the ballot.

Or how about eight years later, when Carlos Beltran hit 41 home runs and hit .275/.388/.594 while playing Gold Glove defense in center field? His 8.2 bWAR were second in the league, barely behind Albert Pujols, and his 7.6 fWAR was likely second behind Albert, though by a bigger margin. Oh, and the Mets made the post-season. In fact they dominated, winning 97 games and leading the entire league by nine victories. Beltran finished fourth in the voting. The next season, which the Mets spent in the thick of contention, Beltran's teammate David Wright hit .325/.416/.546, had a 30/30 season (30 home runs, 34 stolen bases), and also won a Gold Glove, deservingly. His 8.3 bWAR was second behind Pujols, while Fangraphs thought his 8.4 WAR led the league by half a win. And while it's true that the Mets suffered an ignominious collapse to miss the playoffs, Wright was no part of that: he hit .352/.432/.602 in September, and .397/.451/.575 during the 17-game collapse itself. He did an almost inhuman job of trying to carry his team, and it's hardly his fault that it wasn't quite enough. He likewise finished fourth in the voting. Who won these MVPs? Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins of the Phillies. Wright led Rollins by about 2 WAR by either metric, and Beltran led Howard by something like two or three wins. But Howard put up goofy home run and RBI numbers, and Rollins hit 20 triples and 30 homers while playing a good shortstop--and for the team that snuck past the Mets. So despite having the best position player (modulo Pujols) in the league two consecutive years, the Mets didn't even get a top-3 MVP finish out of things.

And then there's the curiosity that is Bernard Gilkey, 1996. In his first season with the Mets, the left fielder hit 30 home runs and 44 doubles en route to a .317/.393/.562 slash line, and also (so say the metrics) fantastic defense. He was right around the league lead in WAR by a position player not named Barry Bonds, with Baseball-Reference putting him a tenth of a point ahead of Ellis Burks and Fangraphs putting him the same distance behind Jeff Bagwell. Now I'm not saying he should've won the MVP. I mean, Bonds should've, and other than that, Mike Piazza should've. It's absurd that Ken Caminiti in fact did. But perhaps the guy who had one of the most productive seasons in the league should've finished a bit higher up than 14th?

That's four times that a Met has been either arguably the best position player in the National League or arguably the best position player in the National League who wasn't Bonds or Pujols (and we all know guys like that get held to a higher standard for winning MVPs). The best any of them did was fourth place in the voting. One of them finished outside the top-10 despite his team's having been in the thick of playoff contention, out of nowhere, all season long. So if we want to talk about "forgotten MVP seasons," let's not talk about Derek Jeter. The other side of that "most saturated media market in the country" can boast not one, not two, not three, but four MVP-caliber years that were already forgotten while they were happening over the span of barely more than a decade.

And none of those four players possess a single absurdist Gold Glove either, let alone five.

It's Not About Race, It's About Racism

I try not to watch much Fox News these days. Well, any days. I mean I've never watched any Fox News, except for that one time when Stephen Colbert went on the O'Reilly Factor. But in general I try to keep my exposure level to Fox, and to conservative media in general, to a minimum. That's the kind of thing that gets you rather criticized in some parts, but seeing a few clips of Fox's coverage of the Ferguson situation has reminded me why I have this policy. It... was kind of shocking. And disturbing.

But anyway, one of the themes of the rantings of the people on Fox was that it was wrongful of liberals generally to make Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown about race. So here's what I have to say about that: it's not about race. It's not about race at all. Michael Brown's shooting is not outrageous because Michael Brown was black. It's outrageous because a young man was murdered. (Yes, that's conclusory, but as far as I can tell there's no reason to think it was anything other than murder, except that the perpetrator was an on-duty cop and there seem to be people who increasingly think that it's just a logical impossibility for an on-duty cop to commit murder). It's doubly outrageous because the murderer was a member of the government, of law enforcement, sworn to protect the people. Which, you might think is a bit inconsistent with murder. And the outrage is compounded by the fact that this happens a lot. And it pretty clearly doesn't have to: other countries simply don't experience significant numbers of murders by their police officers (and also don't suffer rampant violent crime by the thus-emboldened criminals).

So where does race enter the story? Because essentially all the victims of police murder in this country happen to be black. Or to put it another way, race only enters the equation because racist, violent police officers put it there. Michael Brown's death was an outrage simply because he was human and he was murdered. The point is that he was murdered because he was black, as an awful lot of other people have been. So it's really not about race, and it's certainly not really about his race. It's about racism, and the racism which seems to spawn most of the police violence and brutality in this country. This is also, of course, why you see lots and lots of white people every bit as outraged as any black person about Ferguson (or at least very nearly; I wouldn't want to presume that those of us who don't live under this threat can quite understand just how terrifying it is). The conflict here isn't white against black, it's racists against non-racists. The former are a rather large subset of white people; the latter are a coalition of non-whites and white liberals. And those of us in the not-racist coalition are all equally outraged about Brown's death, and about the conservative indifference to his death (sorry, did I say conservative? I meant racist, it's so easy to get confused these days). We'd be equally outraged at the shooting of a white person by cops, except that, well... that doesn't happen so much.

Any guesses why that might be, Fox contributors?

::crickets::

Also, Regarding "Justified Shootings"

Okay, one last thought about the whole Ferguson thing. As part of their coverage of the Ferguson outrages this week, Vox.com put up a post called, "When is it legal for a cop to kill you?" The idea was to educate people about the law governing police shootings, which is basically that, as a matter of constitutional law, cops may shoot someone to protect their life or the life of a third party (as may anyone else who's in a position to do so), and they may also shoot a suspect fleeing a crime scene if and only if they have probable cause to think the suspect has committed a violent felony. And the main reaction I kept having to reading the article was, okay, but do you have to actually kill the person? Like, we can put on our philosopher's hats and think about when it's morally justified to kill someone, and we might come up with something a lot like these two situations. The first one makes a ton of sense: in a choice between "murderer kills innocent person" and "attempted murderer is killed," you choose option #2 every time (except, maybe, in some sort of action-movie scripted scenario where the attempted murder in question is actually justified for some reason, heh). The second one is a bit tougher to justify given the level of uncertainty that may often be involved, but at the very least we can see why not letting someone you know to be a murderer flee a crime scene has some of the same elements of not letting someone shoot someone else.

But just because killing the person in question might be somewhere above the ethical replacement-level line, that doesn't mean it's the best thing. Ideally you'd manage to both prevent the violence/apprehend the suspect and not kill anyone. Now, I get why it's not a great idea for cops to shoot dudes who point guns at other dudes in the leg. In that circumstance, I get shoot to kill, and honestly, if you point a gun at someone else and make it pretty damn clear you mean to shoot them, you don't have that much of a complaint if someone else shoots and kills you first.* But in the second circumstance? The only possible reason for preferring to shoot a fleeing suspect in the chest is that you're more likely to hit them that way. Stipulating that your bullet will find its target, shooting in the leg accomplishes 100% of what shooting in the chest would, minus the gratuitous killing. Hell, shooting with some sort of stun gun/tranquilizer dart/tazer would accomplish 100% of what shooting to kill would, minus the gratuitous killing.

So basically what I'm saying is, shouldn't there be some kind of narrow tailoring here? Shouldn't there be some effort to minimize the amount of killing that goes on, rather than just saying, "well, I can make a case that killing this person isn't worse than leaving them uninterfered-with, so I'm gonna kill them"? Shouldn't there maybe be a rule that, if you could've chosen a less-likely-to-cause-someone's-death option that would probably have gotten the job done just as well, you weren't exactly "justified" in using the more-likely-to-kill option instead? Maybe that can't be as a matter of law; maybe you shouldn't be sent to jail for such a decision. But shouldn't you, y'know, get fired for it? Or something? One way or another I know that other countries get by without having their police forces shoot so many people dead, so there must be something we could do to have that happen less often here that wouldn't be a disaster. It seems to me like a moral imperative of the first order that we try.


*Of course, there is the ol' grey zone where someone does something that makes it unclear whether they're about to try to shoot someone. Like, for instance, the guy who was shot earlier this week (not in Ferguson, I believe, just elsewhere in America, the Greatest Country Ever or so I'm told) carrying a toy, plastic rifle around a Wal-Mart. Or when someone goes to fish their wallet out of their pocket for ID or whatever and the policeman thinks they're going for a gun. (Because concealed carry doesn't have any downsides whatsoever...) I feel like the balance that an awful lot of police seem to strike in these situations is to basically give complete, 100% priority to protecting their own life, and 0% priority to making sure they don't kill an innocent person. That does not seem like a particularly good balance to me, since they're both, y'know, human beings who aren't in the act of trying to murder anyone. In fact, since the police officer but not the totally random dude off the street has literally signed up to risk their life in defense of the populace, I think there's a valid though by no means slam-dunk argument for giving more weight to not killing totally random innocent dudes than to letting cops protect themselves. But at the very least they've gotta give more weight to that interest than they do now, right?

My Problem with Washington v. Davis

Washington v. Davis is a 1976 Supreme Court case which ruled, in essence, that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause is not a self-executing ban on all government policies which have racially disparate impacts. That is to say, just because some policy has a more negative effect on black people than white people is not enough to make it into a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. To be even more specific, the point is that if all the person challenging the policy can show is that such a disparate impact exists, they lose; instead they need to show that the policy had racially discriminatory intent. Now, in some sense this has to be right. Most states fund themselves predominantly through property taxes and sales taxes and therefore have regressive tax codes, unlike the income-tax-funded federal government. Black people tend to be poorer, and are therefore disproportionately burdened by regressive tax codes. But the Equal Protection Clause cannot reasonably be construed as making sales taxes off-limits. My tendency has been, therefore, to say that I more or less agree with the statement in Washington v. Davis that disparate impact alone does not make a constitutional violation, though I might want to press pretty hard on letting disparate impact be considered evidence of discriminatory intent, perhaps even in the absence of any other evidence.

But then let's consider the specifics of the case Washington v. Davis itself, and how it relates to this week's outrage in Ferguson, Missouri. The facts of the case are that two African-Americans had applied for positions in the Washington, D.C. police department, and had been rejected based on their scores on Test 21, a verbal skills test used throughout the federal bureaucracy. They sued, because as it happens, black people failed Test 21 at a much, much higher rate than white people. (Like three times higher I think, roughly 60% versus 20%.) Now, interestingly, the Court also ended up ruling that, in fact, there was no disparate impact, because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 uses a disparate impact standard. I'm not exactly sure how they got to that conclusion, and my guess, from a judicial-sociology perspective, is that the main difference between dissenters Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan and the majority was their understanding of the disparate effects of the policy.

But in any event, now let's ask the key question: assuming, for the sake of argument, that the effect of Test 21 was to result in a more-or-less all-white police force in a majority-black city, and also assuming for the sake of argument that Test 21 was adopted with absolutely, positively no intent for that to happen, but only with intent to make sure that police officers had good verbal skills (an undoubtedly good thing!), is there really no problem here? Because, as we see so dramatically in Ferguson, the police are basically the instrument of government. They are the ones who actually impose governance and law upon the people. They are the ones who wield the violent force which the government is said to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of. And they, therefore, are the ones in position to perpetrate government abuse of the people. Hell, they're in a better position to do that than legislators, whose abusive actions can be more easily challenged in and nullified by the courts. When a cop kills someone, well, there's no such thing as compensatory damages for that.

And so I think there's a very real sense in which having a police force almost exclusively comprised of members of the historically oppressor race policing a large population of the historically oppressed race is kind of, y'know, just not okay, whether or not you meant for it to happen. For similar though arguably less weighty reasons ('cause we're not talking about the people walking around with guns on their hips), I think it's just not okay to have policies in place whose result is that your state bureaucracy is segregated into an all-male group of powerful office-holders and decision-makers and an all-female secretary pool. (That's the facts of the next case in the disparate impact sequence, Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney.) And I become particularly skeptical of the actual facts of Washington v. Davis when I think about how easy it is for verbal skills tests to become, in essence, whiteness tests. I mean, hell, there's a reason why segregationists used literacy tests. Now, yes, there does have to be some accommodation to the perfectly legitimate government interest in making sure its people can basically communicate. But guess what? Adult black people tend to communicate with one another pretty well. So if your "verbal skills test" is flunking most of them, maybe that means you're really testing mostly for "ability to talk like a white person," something that probably isn't that necessary for being a Washington, D.C. police officer. And shouldn't that be unconstitutional, even if it was kind of accidental? If we believe that the constitution commits us to racial equality (which we do; see Brown v. Board of Education), and if we believe that it forbids systems of caste, shouldn't it just not be possible to constitutionally set a whole bunch of white dudes to police a large black population?

Big Government, but Actually

So, I've written before about how I dislike the phrase "big government," or at least the way it gets used these days. This week's disaster in Ferguson, Missouri, where yet another young, unarmed black man was shot and killed by police and where those same police have responded to the wave of protests said murder occasioned by using military equipment on their own citizenry, is, I think, a really powerful demonstration of that point. Because this is big government, real big government. This is government which is big not in its budget or in its bureaucracy but in its capacity for physical force. And let's remember, physical force is what makes a government a government. Literally, governments are defined by their relationship to violence. That's how you tell what's the government in any given area, really: you look to see who has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Well, I say "legitimate," because I guess they're only one competitor in the illegitimate-use-of-force market, if a rather major player. And so I think the most meaningful possible sense of the phrase "big government" has got to be a government with an aggrandized relationship to violence. Like, say, a government which has gone around equipping local police forces with military equipment mainly because it (the military equipment) was there, meaning that the so-called "War on Drugs" just had to turn itself into an actual, literal war against the American people, or rather against those of the American people who have the misfortune of dark-colored skin. That's what we're seeing in Ferguson, and that's what's really worth railing against. That and the highly-related surveillance state form of "big government." There's a pretty good reason to think that a government which is spying on its populace and which has in essence armed itself against that populace as against an enemy military power is doing something wrong, and is at the very least a pretty real threat to the people it's meant to serve. There's no great a priori reason to think that a government with many regulations or with a large budget is doing something wrong. One of these things deserves to have the derisive "big government" label slapped on it, the other doesn't. At least Rand Paul has the decency to object to both.

Regarding the Definition of the Word 'Unscientific'

So, yesterday the left-wing part of the internet had a bit of fun reading this essay (of sorts) by one Charles C.W. Cooke for the National Review Online. Apparently NRO hasn't heard of single-page formatting, so that link goes only to page 1. The thing I'm gonna talk about in this post is on page 2. However, you should read the whole thing, because it is staggeringly, mind-blowingly, hilariously awful. It's basically a rant against the supposed "nerd culture" of American liberalism, with a bizarre fixation on Neil deGrasse Tyson as the emblem thereof. I could probably write a post that had a one paragraph per sentence ratio of response to this essay, but that is almost certainly a poor allocation of resources so I'm mostly gonna let it speak for, and against, itself.

But I did want to make a bit of a point regarding one particular paragraph late in the article. After criticizing liberals for claiming that their worldviews are driven solely by data, he says the following:

This is nonsense. Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon...

The sentence continues, but this is the part I'm interested in.

Polling Reveals Major Doublethink in America

George Orwell, in 1984, defined "double-think" as "[t]he power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." I mean, he defined it in a lot more detail than that, but that's the typical canonical statement. Well, Kevin Drum brings up a recent Gallup poll that asked people whether they thought various different things would improve the quality of governance in this country. He's mostly interested in the fact that an overwhelming majority think having more businessmen in Congress would be an improvement. That's admittedly a somewhat disconcerting result (really, guys? 18% more people think having more businessmen in Congress would be an improvement than having more women? that's pathetic) but it's not the thing I find most interesting. Here's the chart summarizing the results:

Focus on the third and fifth entries. Apparently 63% of people think that we'd be better off with more people in Congress who will pursue compromise rather than sticking hard to their principles, and 56% think we'd be better off with more people in Congress who would stick hard to their principles rather than pursuing compromise. 30% and 38%, respectively, disagree. Eeeeexcept... uhhh... those numbers add up to 119%. That is to say, a minimum of 19% of the respondents in this poll said both that X was better than Y and that Y is better than X. ...yeah.

All of which is to say, this poll is yet another piece of evidence that people are just super unhappy about the state of the world right now, in general. They're not upset at anyone in particular; or rather, they're upset at everyone. So anything you present as an alternative to the status quo is going to sound good. (Note that every single one of these got a net positive response.) That's true, apparently, even if you present two completely contradictory alternatives! (Okay I suppose they're not necessarily 100% contradictory if there are some people who fall into neither of those categories; maybe what people just want is a higher concentration of extreme compromisers and extreme hardliners, with few people in the middle of that particular spectrum. But I'm not buyin' it.) I bet if they had stuck "men" in their poll as one of the things we might put more of in Congress, they'd have gotten a positive result for that, despite the fact that the "women" question is literally the inverse of that question. 63% of their respondents literally said something that is equivalent to thinking it would be a bad thing if we had more men in Congress, but I bet you that an awful lot of those people would have said the exact same opposite had they been prompted.

So don't take polls like this too seriously.

The Argument for Keeping the Mets Together

The Mets are playing well right now. They're something like 7-2 over their current homestand, having won each of the three series in it and going for a sweep of the Marlins tomorrow behind suddenly en fuego Jacob deGrom. This is always really easy to do when things are going well over a short time scale, but I can't help myself from thinking that there's a really good argument to be made for keeping this current team together, more or less, for next year.

Here's what that roster could look like, more or less, using only people under team control already:

Regarding Stephen Drew

Sort of at random today I happened to be reminded of this article from FanGraphs from back over the offseason, basically wondering out loud why the Mets hadn't yet signed Stephen Drew given their obvious, glaring hole at shortstop in the form of one Ruben Tejada. And I happened to skim over some of the comments (something you can actually do on FanGraphs without wanting to gouge your eyes out afterwards), all of which thought that no matter what reasons the author could come up with why the move wasn't as obvious as everyone thought, it was obvious and Sandy Alderson should just stop making excuses and get it done. So I thought I'd just point the following out:

Ruben Tejada, 2014: .241/.356/.299, 0.7 WAR
Stephen Drew, 2014: .135/.198/.258, -0.4 WAR

Now, in a lot of ways that's unfair to Drew. Since the Mets didn't sign him, and in fact no one signed him until the Red Sox did mid-way through the season, he didn't get to play a normal Spring Training. In a sense these past 27 games in the Majors have been his Spring Training. So he'll probably pick up the pace, especially given his .175 BAbip. Tejada sports a perfectly normal .304 BAbip, although given his traditionally high line drive rates there's reason to think he could go higher than that and he's been hitting really well the past month or two. Tejada does have the better plate discipline numbers, with a 13.9% BB% and a 19.1% K% (although the former is somewhat inflated by intentional walks), while Drew has walked just 7.3% of the time and has whiffed a staggering 31.3% of the time. Drew has more power than Tejada, but if he doesn't start putting the bat on the ball a bit more he'll have trouble hitting replacement level. Oh, and it's also not like this came completely out of nowhere. Here's what Drew did last year in the playoffs for the World Series Champion Red Sox:

.111/.140/.204, 3.5% BB%, 33.3% K%

That's... even worse. At the time I remember the announcers speculating about whether Drew's awful performance would tank his free agent market. It appears to have done so (among actual GMs if not among internet commenters), and, well... so far it doesn't look like that was wrong. As a matter of basic human decency I hope that at some point Drew starts looking like a competent Major Leaguer again, but I gotta say, based on everything that's happened so far this year I would must rather have Ruben Tejada for $1.1 million than Drew for something like three years and $36 million, or even for just one year and $14 million really. This kind of looks like one where Sandy Alderson did the unpopular thing and was completely right in doing so.

Chris Young Just Earned His Salary for a Long Time

Boom.

A minute or so ago, there was a curious little exchange in the Mets game against the Miami Marlins. Ruben Tejada had drawn a walk with one out, bringing up the pitcher's spot. Terry Collins sent up Chris Young to pinch-hit, and the Marlins responded by removing starting pitcher Tom Koehler and bringing in right-handed reliever Brian Morris. The Mets' announcers were speculating that this might have been a cagey move on Collins's part: by sending up Young, he got the Marlins to bring their righty reliever into the game, and he could then respond with Bobby Abreu, who is (a) left-handed, and (b) better than Chris Young. Had he just sent Abreu out initially, they would have brought in a lefty reliever instead. Apparently that wasn't what Terry was thinking, though: he left Young in there, for one pitch.

Because Young homered on that pitch. To tie the game.

I immediately commented to a friend on IM that Chris Young had just earned his salary for the month. The thing is, I'm not sure I was wrong. He's being paid $7.25 million this year, and the season is obviously about six months long, so the monthly salary is something like $1.2 million. Now, the current understanding is that the market price of one Win Above Replacement on the free agent market is something like $6 million. One WAR is approximately equivalent to ten net runs, either added on offense or saved on defense (including, obviously, pitching). If we assume that Young's home run was worth +2 runs, that's +0.2 wins, which translates to... $1.2 million. Of course, a replacement-level player wouldn't necessarily have resulted in zero runs in that spot, so we can't really think of what Young did as being worth +0.2 WAR all by itself. Actually, though, FanGraphs says that CY has been worth 0.2 WAR today, so my calculation is pretty accurate.

And if I wanted to get a bit less context-independent, I could say that I was underestimating the value of what Young just did. Right now the Mets are a team that's been struggling all year but which has been playing well of late and has dreams of sneaking onto the fringes of contention at the All-Star break. Moreover, as I said a while ago, there are reasons to think this team should get better as the year progresses. Winning this series against the Marlins is important for keeping that momentum; if they could, for instance, sweep the Marlins, they'd get to just five games under .500 at the break. That sounds a lot better than seven games under, or even nine games under if they lose both of these games. This is, in other words, a pretty important game. And Young added a lot to their chances of doing just that. His blast increased the Mets' Win Expectancy by 35.6%. To put that in context, a team that wins a game has a total Win Probability Added of +50.0% for the day, since they started out with a 50% chance of winning and end with a 100% chance of winning. So +35.6% WPA is basically like adding 70% of a win, in fully context-dependent terms. And that's a win above average, a slightly more stringent standard than mere average. If we give Young credit for adding seven-tenths of a win instead of two-tenths, then that one swing on that one pitch that Young just faced was worth somewhere around $4 million, or over half of Young's salary for the entire year.

Think about that: with one swing, Chris Young may have just justified his presence on this team for the entire first half of the season.

Of course, teams should never, ever pay for "wins" in the WPA-derived sense I'm describing. There was no sense in which anyone, in March or earlier today, could have predicted that Young would hit such a meaningful blast. You pay for what you can expect to receive, and your expectations have to be largely context-independent, except perhaps for relief pitchers and maybe for elite pinch-hitter types. Besides, of course, it's not like that swing was the only thing Young has done this half-season; he's also hit .199/.280/.354 over 233 plate appearances (including that one today), which, combined with poor outfield defense, has been worth -0.3 WAR. (It was -0.4 WAR prior to his pinch-hitting appearance, presumably because of rounding effects.) So it's not like he's actually been worth a net positive amount of money so far.

But even though you can't pay for context in advance, you might be able to use context in retrospect to feel okay about the purchases you made. No matter how much we can't let ourselves think that the home run Chris Young just hit affects his "true talent" or what he's really worth, it was still worth a lot to this team. If the baseball gods had appeared to Sandy Alderson during that pitching change and asked him how much he would be willing to pay for a home run on the next pitch, it's possible that he would've said something in the range of $4 million. Chris Young delivered that value right there, and in a certain sense nothing takes that away. Through yesterday his contract may have been like lighting money on fire, but today, for one glorious pitch, Chris Young was worth every penny.

Your 2014 All-Stars

So they're announcing the selections to the 2014 All-Star Game right now. I just thought I'd briefly say how I'd set the starting lineups if I were managing for both sides (which would, in fairness, be rather weird). First, the AL:

Mike Trout, CF (R)
Robinson Cano, 2B (L)
Miguel Cabrera, 1B (R)
Jose Bautista, RF (R)
Nelson Cruz, DH (R)
Adam Jones, LF (R)
Josh Donaldson, 3B (R)
Salvador Perez, C (R)
Derek Jeter, SS (R)

Now the NL:

Carlos Gomez, CF (R)
Andrew McCutchen, LF (R)
Troy Tulowitzki, SS (R)
Giancarlo Stanton, DH (R)
Paul Goldschmidt, 1B (R)
Yasiel Puig, RF (R)
Aramis Ramirez, 3B (R)
Chase Utley, 2B (L)
Yadier Molina, C (R)

A few notes. Good god those are some super right-handed lineups. Honestly I could basically flip-flip Gomez and McCutchen, either in the outfield or in the lineup, though I'm probably more committed to putting Gomez in center field. You could move Puig to more around the top of the batting order, which is where he's mostly been hitting for the Dodgers, but with Gomez and McCutchen it's not like they're starved for leadoff hitters so I've got him hitting sixth. It's not like he doesn't have the power for an RBI spot, heh. I'm assuming that Stanton is the DH because, well... he's Giancarlo Stanton. And as for the AL... look, I know Derek Jeter isn't going to be batting ninth. He'll probably hit second. Or first. But he should be hitting ninth. As sort of a lesser-included-case of how he shouldn't be in the game at all. He's a below-average player. He's a below-average hitter. Fangraphs has him at 0.5 WAR, but that's giving him a bizarrely large amount of credit for his defensive work, which I don't buy. For all that they're gonna be going on and on about him, he's not a good player anymore, and if they've got to start him, they should at least bury him in the 9-hole.

Also, Kershaw's gotta start for the NL, there's no question there. And King Felix looks like he's been just clearly the best pitcher in the AL, so I'd go with him as well.

Every Sperm is Sacred, Declare Five Old Catholic Dudes In Robes

So apparently in the batch of orders issued the day after the final actual day of the Supreme Court's term, they basically indicated that yesterday's Hobby Lobby decision doesn't just apply to those methods of birth control which certain religious groups choose to describe as abortion-y. Apparently closely-held companies whose owners are Catholic, and particularly the kind of Catholic who thinks contraception and the recreational sex it makes possible are sinful, can get out of giving their employees health insurance that covers any kind of contraception. Basically, this:

Oh, and did I mention that the particular five Justices constituting this majority are all Catholics? Hmmm, interesting coincidence ya got there.

UPDATE: Attempts to Limit Hobby Lobby Turn Out To Be Gibberish

So my previous post was about how the way Justice Alito distinguishes the contraceptive mandate from other potential health insurance tells us that the real point of his opinion is that he doesn't think it's that important to provide universal access to contraception. Apparently that's not entirely correct. Apparently the Court assumed that the government interest in the case was compelling, and based its decision on the whole "least restrictive means" thing. But this is a problem. RFRA violations are those laws which substantially burden religion and which are not the least restrictive means to further a compelling government interest. Thus, if one thing is a RFRA violation and another isn't, then they must differ in one of three ways: either one of them substantially burdens religion and the other doesn't, or one of them is in furtherance of a compelling interest and the other isn't, or one of them is the least restrictive means to furthering such an interest and the other isn't. It could be all of those three, but it's gotta be at least one of 'em. But if Alito was stipulating the strength of the government's interest, then that can't be the difference. The fact that, in the passage quoted in the previous post, he discussed not the question of the burden on religion but of the government's interest suggests he thinks that vaccine mandates do substantially burden religion, so that can't be the difference. So the difference must be the least-restrictive-means thing, right? Well, wrong. Because as Justice Kennedy points out, the government could just pay for this part itself. That would be less burdensome on the Green family's religion. So would establishing an all-out single payer system where the government just does all of this stuff directly and leaves the employers out of it. And both of those are gonna be there as less restrictive alternatives for all of these mandates, aren't they? Like, the logic is in fact exactly the same, Alito's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

So.... it looks like the "legal reasoning" behind limiting this to contraception is basically just bullshit. There is no reasoning. It's narrow because Alito wants it to be narrow, as do Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas. Maybe because they think Congress might actually amend RFRA or something if they issued a broader decision? I dunno. But it seems pretty likely that the only reason why they're treating contraception differently from all other kinds of potential health insurance mandates is that it's suddenly become politically controversial, and/or that they're five old Catholic dudes who have been taught from birth to believe that contraception is sinful. Whatever it is, it ain't law.

Hobby Lobby is About Sex, not Abortion

One of the questions in the Hobby Lobby litigation was whether the exemption sought by these companies could be extended to things other than contraception. Could companies whose owners held somewhat less mainstream religious beliefs decide to stop covering, say, blood transfusions, or vaccines? Could religious "freedom" become a shield for racial discrimination? Nope, says Justice Alito. The ruling is strictly limited to contraception. Other medical things like transfusions or vaccines he essentially said would have to be considered in later cases, and might or might not survive the same test that the contraception mandate failed. And he specifically said that racial discrimination in employment practices cannot find support in this decision, that the government's interest in eradicating that evil is strong enough and direct enough that "religious freedom" is no shield against it.

Kevin Drum comments that the logic behind limiting the decision to contraception seems to be about abortion:

I think it's important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he's making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you're probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.

I don't think that's quite right.

Hobby Lobby and the Sanctity of Human Life

Ugh. Not a good day for the law. Not on any dimension. The policy of these decisions is horrible. Admittedly it's not as horrible as it could have been had Alito not decided to write deliberately narrowed opinions. But the price of that narrowness was absolute legal absurdity. I mean, there was plenty legal absurdity anyway, but the narrowness created even more. I don't really think it's possible to maintain that what the Court was doing today was law. Not really. And that actually offends me pretty deeply, as someone who believes that there is such a thing as doing law, for real, in the best sense of that word.

But here's a slightly ancillary thought I have about the Hobby Lobby decision. The purported reason why providing coverage to their employees that included contraception would have violated Hobby Lobby's religious beliefs is that certain forms of contraception were, in the store's owners' view, abortifacients. And we all know that opposition to abortion is that most sincere of religious beliefs; religious people of a certain type are committed to seeing abortion as murder, because they supposedly value the sanctity of human life. And, y'know, I gotta say, I see the ethical case that late-term abortion is something seriously resembling murder, or rather homicide (the difference being that the former assumes the wrongfulness of the act). I have pretty good reasons, I think, for not thinking this means we should criminalize it, although I do think there might be ways to regulate late-term abortions in some way. But I do think we should view late-term abortions as a pretty serious moral Bad Thing, and work hard to minimize the frequency with which it's the least-bad option.

But that's not what Hobby Lobby is about. Hobby Lobby is about birth control. It's about IUDs, which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg on the uterus wall. This, like a few other forms of birth control (but unlike, say, condoms), prevents pregnancy after the moment of conception rather than before it. It operates at the post-zygotic stage. And therefore certain religious types, though apparently not the medical or legal community, consider it to cause an abortion, and to end a human life. (Apparently scientific types think life begins at implantation or something.) Here the ethics aren't so complicated: the ethical badness of destroying a pre-implantation zygote is precisely zero. It's the same thing as killing a bacterium. It has one cell. It has no computing power, no sensory apparatus. It does not have experiences. It cannot feel pain. It does not have a beating heart. It differs in this regard, of course, from later-stage fetuses, but zygotes and blastocysts are just ethical nullities.

Now, my point could be that it's ridiculous, and kind of sick, to think that destroying one of these nullities is the same thing as killing a living human being. But it isn't. Rather, my point is that it is deeply sick to think that killing a living human being is the same as destroying one of these nullities. That is to say, I don't think it's really possible that anyone at all reacts to the death of a blastocyst or a zygote the way one is supposed to react to the death of a human being. I do think it's possible that people react that way to the death of an eight-month fetus or whatever, and at some point in between it flips, but let's just say that that point is sometime after there are at least 16 cells in the organism. And so if you maintain that you view the two as equivalent, that you think IUDs are murder, well, that's gotta tell us something about how much respect you have for, like, ordinary human life, right? And it tells us nothing good. I think it's gotta tell us that the sense in which you condemn ordinary murder is somehow cheaper than it should be. If the value that you place on human life doesn't change from the moment of conception all the way through the moment of death, I don't think that value can be as high as the value that I place on human life from birth through death. There's just no way you can actually be giving that much value to a zygote, not really. Maybe you have some kind of theological sophistry telling you that killing zygotes is sinful, but you can't really believe that aborting them is murder, not the way we mean that word.

So either there's an act of dishonesty going on, at some level, when people say they think these contraceptive devices cause murders, or these religious types have just tipped that their conception of the "sanctity of human life" is awfully shallow. One or the other, and neither is exactly great.

Judicial Review As Legitimation In Action!

One of my favorite arguments that's presented in my grandfather's book The People and the Court, which is a defense of the legitimacy of judicial constitutional review in a democracy, is about the way courts can serve a legitimating function. That is, if there's a law whose constitutionality, and thus legitimacy, is in controversy, having it subjected to rigorous judicial review and then get upheld can settle a lot of doubts about its constitutionality and thus legitimacy. The institution of judicial review, then, should significantly increase the confidence of the people that those laws which are being implemented are in fact constitutional and legitimate. It's a really cool theory. It's also the kind of thing you can imagine not happening in practice. (For example, I don't think very many Republicans were convinced by NFIB that the Affordable Care Act is in fact constitutional, although I know of only one Republican type who has anything particularly clever to say about why John Roberts' tax argument is wrong.)

Well, here's an example of it happening in practice. From Kevin Drum's latest piece about how using the Authorization for the Use of Military Force from just after 9/11 as the legal justification for various War on Terror-related activities isn't really okay anymore:

If Congress wants to give the president that power [of targeted killings of American citizens like al-Awlaki], it should debate and pass a law and the courts should rule on its constitutionality. That's the rule of law. And regardless of whether I liked the law, I'd accept it if Congress passed it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court declared it constitutional.

Just like that! That's exactly what's supposed to happen. The Court declares it unconstitutional, and people accept it as legitimate. Even if they don't like it, they accept it. Just so!

Of Course Delegation Is Necessary

For the work I'm doing I've been skimming through The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History, by Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman. In particular I'm interested in the discussions, scattered throughout the book, of the Necessary and Proper Clause, which the authors consistently refer to as the "Sweeping Clause." (This is interesting, because Lawson has written a different article in which he argues at great length that the Necessary and Proper Clause is not sweeping, that it in fact borrows certain very specific standards from agency law. Anyway.) In the course of this skimming I came across this passage:

There is no express "Nondelegation Clause" in the Constitution that forbids Congress from delegating legislative power. Neither, however, is there an express "Delegation Clause" that permits Congress to delegate legislative power. The latter conclusion is more important under the principle of enumerated powers. The President and courts generally cannot exercise legislative powers on their own initiative because they are not granted any such powers by the Constitution; they are granted only the "executive Power" and the "judicial Power," respectively. But what if Congress passes a statute that says, in essence, "the President shall exercise legislative power with respect to X." If the President obeys that command, isn't the President simply executing the law in fine Article II fashion? That would be true if the Constitution authorized Congress to pass the relevant law. Congress, however, generally cannot delegate legislative power for the simple reason that the Constitution does not affirmatively authorize such delegations. The only possible source for a general power to delegate would be the Sweeping Clause, but delegations of legislative power are not "necessary and proper for carrying into Execution" federal powers and therefore are not authorized by the Sweeping Clause.

That's a very interesting theory of the Non-Delegation Doctrine, and probably a more plausible one than I've heard before. Except it has a problem, which is the last clause of the paragraph. Who says delegation isn't necessary and proper for carrying the federal powers into execution? Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman, apparently. Now, it's possible that they have some quasi-tautological argument in mind here, that delegation can never be necessary because Congress could've just made the relevant laws itself. If so, well, that's quasi-tautological so there's a limit to how much I can argue with it. But, look, in the modern world, and arguably in any world ever, delegation absolutely is necessary. There's a reason why literally every single modern government, including democracies both presidential and parliamentary, feature massive bureaucracies which exercise considerable delegated lawmaking power. You just can't have the actual national legislature making every tiny little rule. Life is too damn complex and (with good reason) the processes for passing acts of Congress/Parliament are too onerous to be used for that purpose. In practice the only viable alternative to actual legislative delegation is de facto delegation; that is, the adoption of the routine practice of having things that aren't Congress write up laws and have Congress pass them as a matter of course, waiving all the usual procedural hurdles that make that difficult. That's not really very different. One way or another, lots of laws are going to be made through something other than what we think of as the main legislative process. That seems to be, as a matter of practical experience, as absolutely necessary for carrying the powers of government into execution as anything else.

Now, there's also that pesky word "proper." I suppose someone could try to say that delegation of legislative authority is "improper," because delegata potestas non potest delegari. But that doesn't feel like much more than a tautological ipse dixit: X is improper because X is improper. Delegation doesn't seem to violate any express prohibition in the Constitution, as the above quote notes, though I suppose in certain contexts one could try to make out a Due Process violation. Lawson himself has an interesting theory of what the "proper" means, again drawn from his agency theory of the Clause, where it basically means that things the agent (Congress) does must be in the interests of the principal (the people). Under that standard it seems obvious that lots and lots of delegation can be proper, if we accept the conclusion above that it's necessary for having a well-governed regime. Add it all up and I don't really see how, except by simply deciding to read the NDD into the word "proper," one can avoid the conclusion that the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes a hell of a lot of delegation.

Baseball's Real Exclusion of Women Problem

Last week Bradley Woodrum wrote a very interesting article on The Hardball Times called The Physical Obstacle for Women in Baseball. Unsurprisingly, it's a well-researched and thorough analysis of why it's going to be very, very hard for there ever to be a woman playing in Major League Baseball, even though (as the author and I agree) it would be very, very awesome if one ever did. There is, of course, a lot to say on this subject, much of which he said and much of which other people have said. The main thought I had, however, wasn't about players at all, because the thing about players is that there really are physical limitations that mean that the pool of MLB players will never be any less than about 99.9% male, if it will ever be less than 100.0% male. But, uhhhh, not everyone in baseball is a player, and the people who aren't players are not being paid to take part in a physical competition against the world's best men at said competition. They're being paid to coach those people, or to assemble teams of those people. (Or to do various lower-level jobs within the organization, but let's focus on the coaches and front office people for now.) As to all of these people, there is no particular reason why having lesser physical strength should be a particularly strong disadvantage, or even any disadvantage whatsoever. So you'd think that women could maybe do these jobs. Nope. Or at least, they aren't doing these jobs. Thirty MLB teams, thirty male managers, thirty male general managers (actually a bit more; some teams have divided general manager positions), and to the best of my knowledge, zero female coaches.

This is inexcusable. Not the managers and coaches thing--that I'm skeptical of, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "inexcusable," necessarily. There might be some genuine social problems with having female managers, although I'm not sure. Some of that might be the kind of thing the correct attitude toward which is just to trample over it and insist that it change, e.g. the resistance of a certain type of man to take orders from a woman. Get over it, guys. Other stuff about, like, locker room issues and the like might be a bit less repugnant on its own terms, but might also be the kind of thing that isn't or shouldn't ultimately be a big deal. But there might be some real problems, here in the all-too-terrible real world, problems that will also confront any woman who tries to play in MLB or in any other male professional baseball league but which should be less theoretically intractable than the basic physical differences.

But let's talk about general managers. They head the front office. That is to say, they do not travel with the team, they are not constantly in the clubhouse, they probably don't spend a lot of time in the locker rooms or the showers or slapping the players on their asses. Oh, and unlike the players' job, which is famously ninety-percent half-mental, the GM's job is one-hundred percent mental, full stop. At root a GM is a combination of an information processor and a merchant. There's sod all reason why a woman couldn't be exactly as good a GM as any man. I don't see how an ideal world wouldn't have 15 male and 15 female GMs, plus or minus some margin for random deviations any given year. We have none. It's obscene. Now, people will say that a GM should have experience in the game. Maybe, but Sandy Alderson, commonly considered one of the best front office-type baseball minds alive, never played professional baseball, while Ruben Amaro, Jr., commonly considered one of baseball's worst GMs, spent eight years in MLB. Of course, Billy Beane, another of the best GMs out there, did have a Major League career, while Dayton Moore, another of the worst, did not. It looks to me like there's not a whole lot of correlation there, that stuff other than whether you have experience as a baseball player determines who's a good GM. This might be particularly true given the whole trend toward statistically-inclined GMs: certain sexist beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding, women can actually do statistical analysis just about as well as men can. They can also probably hire equally good scouting directors, and utilize the information those scouting directors give them equally well.

So again, we're left with precisely zero reason why a woman shouldn't be the GM of some team. None whatsoever. And yet, "none whatsoever" is also the number of female MLB GMs. There's just no justification for this. We'll never change the fact that all or virtually all MLB players are gonna be men; that's basically a fact of life. The lack of female executives in baseball isn't. We can change that, and we should.

Regarding the Bechdel Test

(Don't read if you haven't seen Doctor Who at least through the episode "The Angels Take Manhattan.")

The Bechdel test has been in the news a lot recently. That's the supposed "test" for whether a movie (or, in principle, any other unit of moving-picture fiction, or any fiction I suppose) is adequately feminist/non-sexist. It has three requirements:

• That there be at least two female characters;
• That they talk, to each other; and
• That their conversation be about something other than a man.

 The test originates from this comic, by Alison Bechdel.

I like this test, basically. Certainly I agree with what I believe was the basic sentiment behind the original comic, that a world in which depictions of such conversations between two women are extremely rare or essentially nonexistent is in that regard a very bad world. And so I find very interesting this analysis from the newly relaunched FiveThirtyEight that found that movies made since 1990 which pass the test have received smaller budgets than those which fail it, and that passing movies have brought a greater return on investment than failing ones. As acknowledged by the article, the test has some problems, and can in a lot of cases break down. For instance, the movie Gravity "fails" the test, because it has precisely two real characters, one of whom, the protagonist, is female, and the other of whom is male. The female protagonist is a very strong character, but, y'know, she's up in space, all isolated and stuff. But for making broad-brush judgments against a whole bunch of movies in the aggregate, it works pretty well. We can anticipate that, on average, movies that fail the test will do a worse job of portraying good female character than ones that pass it, even if there are some exceptions on both sides.

Juan Lagares is Getting Victimized by the Mike Trout Phenomenon

Continuing on the same theme as my last post. Terry Collins gave the following explanation for why Juan Lagares is not in the lineup tonight:

"Juan is the center fielder," Collins said Friday afternoon. "We’ve got to somehow get his stroke back. He’s starting to expand the zone a little bit right now. When we get him back to where he’s taking some of those pitches, his defense is something we need, and we need very much. But we’re not scoring. So we’ve got to figure out how to get some runs."

The Mets Will Never Be Good As Long As Terry Collins Is Their Manager

Tonight the Mets play the Washington Nationals in the first game of a three-game series. They're two games behind the Nats for second place in the division (though they are themselves in fourth), so, say, sweeping the serious could be huge. Here's the lineup the team is going with tonight:

Eric Young, LF (S)
Daniel Murphy, 2B (L)
David Wright, 3B (R)
Curtis Granderson, CF (L)
Bobby Abreu, RF (L)
Lucas Duda, 1B (L)
Anthony Recker, C (R)
Ruben Tejada, SS (R)
Jon Niese, P (L)

They're lucky the guy they've got in the #9 spot is good at pitching, 'cause this is an awful lineup. It's not so much that it's awful offensively. Particularly the way Granderson hits away from Citi Field, it's more like mediocre, and could almost be good on a good day. But hooo boy the defense. I count two spots in the field, other than the one on the mound, where we've got good defensive players, and that's third base and left field. That latter is arguable, given the way Young's been misplaying balls of late. But you've then got Tejada and Murphy up the middle, who are solid enough if a bit lacking in range, Duda at first who's probably fine but nothing special, and, well, Curtis Granderson at this point in his career might be a good defensive right fielder. He might also be the third or fourth best defensive center fielder on the team. Abreu has basically no business playing the field.

Notable by their absence are Wilmer Flores and Juan Lagares. Flores was called up a few days ago to be the starting shortstop instead of Tejada. He was hitting .307/.360/.500 in AAA. Tejada is slugging .240 on the season. As for Lagares, well, he's perhaps the best defensive outfielder in all of baseball right now, and is also one of the three people on the roster right now with at least 10 plate appearances and a league-average wRC+ or better. Oh, and he's shown a minimal platoon split for his career. So he's not someone you'd want to take out of the lineup. Say, ever. Certainly you'd think he'd be in there on an essentially regular basis, with maybe the occasional day off against a really tough right-hander.

As it happens, today might be one of those days. Tanner Roark, the Nationals's starter tonight, has for his career allowed a .254/.315/.396 line to lefties, perfectly unimpressive for a pitcher, but a, well, .180/.215/.208 line to righties. He makes righties hit like a pitcher. So this would seem to be a good day to minimize the number of right-handed bats in the lineup. Sitting Chris Young, for instance, is an obvious call, since he has a huge platoon split. Both the catchers are right-handed so there's nothing you can do about that, and you're not gonna take David Wright out for anything. Arguably getting all three left-handed bats in your outfield is justifiable, although I'm honestly not sure I think, even with Roark's splits, that present-day Bobby Abreu will provide more value than Juan Lagares + not making Granderson play center. As for shortstop, well, they are both righties, but Tejada has a big platoon split and Flores a little one, so playing Tejada, who's a worse player overall, is just weird. He should only get the occasional start against a lefty, and probably not even then.

But the point isn't really today. It's that Lagares also sat out the last two days, also against right-handed pitching, in favor of an outfield of Young, Young, and Granderson. He also say out the first game at Yankee Stadium, and Flores sat out all four Subway Series games. Note that Chris Young is also right-handed. Note also that he is unambiguously a worse player than Lagares, probably on both sides of the ball right now. Note further that, had the amazing Lagares been patrolling center field last night when Alfonso Soriano doubled in the game's only run, he probably would've gotten to the ball an awful lot quicker and prevented Brian McCann from trying to score in the first place. So even with their offensive futility the Mets might not have lost the game in regulation, giving them a chance to outlast the Yankee bullpen and do something in extras.

Juan Lagares needs to play every day, or at least six days out of every seven. It's as simple as that. And yet, he keeps not playing. The only time he's been in the lineup in the last five baseball games was when the team was not only facing a left-handed starting pitcher but also had the DH spot available, allowing them to play four whole outfielders. The previous game, they also had the DH spot, but that went to Abreu, who went 0-3, and Lagares sat out while Young, Young, & Grandy got the call. This is ridiculous. So is the Flores thing. It's not even so much that lineup construction, in the sense of finding the best permutation of nine batters for nine batting order spots, has been a problem, it's that they've been picking the wrong nine guys on a daily basis. And it's been costing the team.

The bottom line is that I think well over half of the Mets losses this year have felt like they were in part on the manager. Certainly last night's was. Tonight's could well be again, depending on how Abreu and Granderson hold up in the field. And I haven't even mentioned all the shenanigans regarding his pitcher usage, which has been execrable. I think this could be a good team, honestly, if they would just deploy the players right. That shouldn't be the hard part. But it's been, jeez, like five years now, and Terry Collins has never once demonstrated that he is capable of doing that. I also don't see that much evidence that he's a great "leader of men" or whatever. For instance, right now David Wright is in a huge slump during the course of which he has started swinging at everything. You'd think a manager would be supposed to get him to stop doing that, and to be willing to take his walks if the pitchers don't want to pitch to him. That has yet to happen. And it looks like it's about attitude, because he's had a great eye at the plate his whole career.

By around the end of this season and certainly by the beginning of next one, this Mets team is going to have the talent to compete. It's gonna have a rotation featuring the likes of Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, and Zack Wheeler, plus perhaps Jon Niese, Dillon Gee, Rafael Montero, or Jacob deGrom. The bullpen will feature power arms like Jenrry Mejia and Jeurys Familia, perhaps rejoined by Bobby Parnell. Cesar Puello may become a contributing outfielder. It's a team that will be loaded with promise. But if Terry Collins is still the manager, I betcha they're gonna have another disappointing, because he just won't use what he's been given right. He'll keep turning winnable games into losses. Not every one of those will be a true marginal loss, because you don't win every winnable game, but it doesn't take that many marginal losses to turn a playoff team into an also-ran.

They need someone new. (And from what I hear it shouldn't be Wally Backman either; he's been decidedly odd as their AAA manager.)

The Mets Are Overperforming. Good for Them!

Earlier today, the Mets beat the St. Louis Cardinals 4-1, finishing off a victory over the defending league champions in a four-game series, 3-1. The win improved their record for the young season to 12 wins, 10 losses. They're tied with the Washington Nationals, the consensus pick to win the division, for second place in the National League East. So far, they look... pretty good.

And yet, so far they look absolutely terrible. Including today's game, Fangraphs pegs the Mets' batters at 1.0 Wins Above Replacement on the year, 28th in baseball, ahead of only the Diamondbacks and the 220-losses-in-the-past-two-seasons Astros. Mets pitchers, meanwhile, they have at 0.6 WAR, 27th in the league, ahead of the D-Backs, the Pirates, and the Reds. Admittedly they think the pitching has been a little bit better by runs allowed rather than by fielding-independent pitching, at 1.4 WAR, 21st in baseball. But still, at best the team has been terrible on offense and bad at pitching. To put it another way, the offense is sporting a .218/.296/.316 batting line, "good" for a .276 wOBA (which is terrible for a middle infielder) and a 76 wRC+, way below league average. The pitching, meanwhile, has an ERA- of 110, a FIP- of 112, and an xFIP- of 104. That's 24 points below average on offense, and something between 4 and 12 points below average on pitching. That's a terrible team. It's not a team that's two games over .500 and looking, just on the basis of wins and losses, like a possible Cinderella contender.

The Sacrifice Fly is Ridiculous

In the bottom of the first inning of today's Mets game, Eric Young, Jr. led off with what should have been an easy fly-out to left field but was instead missed by Justin Upton, putting Young on second base. Curtis Granderson hit a fly ball to deep right field, which was caught but which advanced Young to third. The Braves played the infield back, and David Wright hit a ground ball to second base. Because he was playing back, Dan Uggla had no chance to get Young at home, so instead he threw Wright out at first while the run came in. It was pretty obvious that Wright did more or less what he was trying to do. He wouldn't have minded doing more, but he just wanted to make sure that, since the Braves were giving him a run if he could just hit the ball on the ground, he got the job done. He walked back to the dugout not really feeling like he had failed. Nevertheless, the play lowered his batting average. (In fairness, he did then get four hits the rest of the game, so it's not like his batting average is really hurting for it right now.)

In the bottom of the 14th inning of the same game, with the score tied at 3, Kirk Nieuwenhuis led off with a walk. Ruben Tejada then hit a successful sacrifice bunt to advance Kirk to second base, prompting the Braves to take the curious step of walking Eric Young, Jr., who's struck out in every single game he's played this whole season, to pitch to Curtis Granderson, he of multiple 40-home run seasons in his past. That tells you how much Granderson has been struggling. It didn't really work out for Atlanta, though; their pitcher, Gus Schlosser, uncorked a wild pitch almost immediately, moving the runners to second and third with one out, meaning that Curtis only needed a fly ball to win the game. He got it, hitting it just deep enough to left field that, given Nieuwenhuis's speed, the winning run scored before Upton's strong throw had even reached home play. It was again obvious that this was exactly what Granderson had been trying to do, since, y'know, it would win the game, whereas if he struck out, or hit the ball on the ground to one of the drawn-in infielders, the Braves would have a chance to get out of it. Accordingly, this play did not lower his batting average, registering instead as a sacrifice fly. After all, it wouldn't be right to punish Granderson statistically for succeeding, right?

You can see the contrast I'm trying to set up here. Apparently a sacrifice fly hasn't counted as an at-bat since 1893, but the sac fly as a statistical category in its own right has only existed intermittently since then. It had a couple of brief runs prior to World War Two, but was finally instituted for good in 1954, and it's typically only since then that sites like Baseball-Reference give the SF stat. The theory behind it is that, in the sorts of situations in which a player can score on a fly ball, the batter is quite likely trying to hit a medium-deep fly ball, rather than trying to do anything more, even though they'll be out on the play. Except... isn't a batter also "trying," in exactly the same sense, to hit a weak ground ball to get a run in when the defense is conceding that run? Of course, it's arguable to consider that "trying," unlike with your average sacrifice bunt attempt, but I don't think it's much more or less arguable than the logic behind the sacrifice fly.

I'm not sure what I think should be done about this. Discontinue the sacrifice fly? That would feel very strange, if nothing else, since it's been around for the entire lives of most baseball fans. Decide that an RBI ground-out won't count as an at-bat either? That would perhaps be equally weird. Decide that on-base percentage, which has never exempted batters from the out made on a sac fly (though it does exclude sacrifice bunts, sensibly), is more important anyway? Yeah, that's probably the one. But since today's Mets game featured both ends of this disparity so prominently, I just wanted to point it out.