I jest, of course. We've known he's a liberal for a long time. Back in 2008, the three main contenders for the Democratic nomination, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards, were all basically mainstream, run-of-the-mill liberals, with Edwards perhaps a bit more economically populist than the other two. There aren't really any areas of heterodoxy, except that in his capacity as President he's done less to change some things than liberals would've liked, and has sometimes defended those things in the process. (Though he has usually also said stuff about how he'd like to reform them.) But, like a lot of basically liberal Democrats who are politicians with national or quasi-national aspirations, Obama has often had to be a bit skittish about some of his liberalism. There are some issues that are thought to be just so politically difficult that you don't want to talk about them very much, if you can help it.
But not today. Tonight's State of the Union Address was, well, pretty unremarkable in the way that most big speeches are unremarkable; it didn't really "change anything." But I was impressed with how unabashed Obama was about being a liberal Democrat. He basically outlined a pretty thorough broad-strokes policy platform for the American left, and issued a kind of unspoken dare to the Republicans to dislike his agenda (and to try and stop it). And that included, for what I think was the first time in his Presidency, spending a lot of time talking about environmental issues. And not just his usual somewhat weasely, politician-y "all of the above" nonsense, although that of course was there, too. No, some serious environmental stuff. Multiple minutes on climate change, and the need for clean energy. He said he was going to do some sort of executive action increasing conservation through federal lands, or something (it's hard to catch the details of these newly-announced policy proposals in real time, heh). I've long since resigned myself to the fact that we never get a satisfying amount of environmentalism in our Big Obama Speeches, but for once I didn't need to be. I had no complaints on that score.
Oh, and he talked about guns. I suppose he did that last year, too, when the Newtown shootings were very recent, and maybe the year before because Gabby Giffords' shooting was very recent. But this year, he didn't really have to. There have been shootings recently, the whitehouse.gov feed's graphics mentioned four in the last week, but no big national-news tragedies. And yet, talk about guns he did. That's long been a third rail of Democratic politics; the assumption is that Democrats can't talk about guns and win. Maybe that's not really true when Republicans defend positions so extreme that most gun owners don't even agree with them, allowing Democrats to simultaneously play offense and play to the crowd. But I got the sense that Obama didn't even care. He believes that gun control is the right thing to do, so he said so.
The impression I got was of a President who doesn't have to worry about re-election anymore, and knows it, and is enjoying the freedom that gives him. He can say what he wants, and perhaps more importantly he can do what he wants, insofar as he has the legal authority to do so. And so he's gonna do a lot less of the usual persistent appeasement of the hypothetical center, and much more just pursue a legitimately Democratic, liberal agenda. That's always been his agenda, I think; now he's just a bit less hesitant about flying his flag proudly for all to see. It's a breath of fresh air, and I would not be surprised if it's more effective politically than conventional wisdom would tend to suggest.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
The Congress That Wasn't There
Steve Calabresi has, I believe, been known to observe an interesting feature of the U.S. Constitution which, he thinks, reveals something about how the Founders viewed the Executive branch. While Congress is clearly considered the most important of the three branches, hence its placement in the first Article and that Article's length compared to those establishing the Executive and Judiciary, it was only really supposed to exist part of the time. Congress would have a couple of sessions per year, each lasting a couple of months. The rest of the time Congressmen would be at home in their states or districts, and given the state of transportation in 1789 it would be no easy thing to re-assemble Congress when it wasn't in session. When its members were out of town, in other words, Congress basically didn't exist. The President, on the other hand, always existed. He has no sessions and no recess; he's the President for every hour of all 1461 days of his term. The idea, Calabresi would (sensibly, I think) infer, is that the laws always need enforcing, but they don't always need changing. That, after all, is what a legislature does, at any given moment, and if the existing set of laws is working well enough you don't need anyone to do any new legislating all the time. The President can just set about running the government with the authority given him by the current laws. Now, Calabresi goes on to draw various conclusions about the scope of executive authority, I think, but that's not my point here.
No, my point is about what happened to this disparity between the President and Congress over time. Basically, it went away. As transportation has improved, we've reached the point where Congress does basically always exist. They're in session all the time now, except maybe over Christmas. Even when they're in recess, they could reassemble for an important vote with less than a day's notice. This has corresponded with a decline in the sensibility of the "laws don't always need to be changed but they always need to be enforced" point. In 1789, there wasn't that much statutory law. Most of the law was common law. That made the idea that the existing corpus of statutes would be working well enough to get along for a couple of months without any new laws relatively plausible. With the explosion of the regulatory state, a federal code that governs basically everything the Constitution allows federal governance of, and an incredibly complicated feedback process between the administrative agencies, the subjects of their regulation, and Congress, that idea is a lot less plausible now. We need a Congress basically all the time, or at least a Congress that's on call all the time and getting stuff done nearly all of the time.
But while it is a lot less plausible now than it used to be, that old idea hasn't lost all relevance. In fact, the current Congress basically might as well be out of session, back in their districts with a month's journey back to Washington. There is no overlap between the set of non-trivial legislation Barack Obama would sign into law and the set of non-trivial legislation that John Boehner and 217 of his closest friends would pass through the House. More to the point, everyone knows this, except maybe some centrist media types. Even if there are some ideas for new legislation that you'd think would satisfy both parties' agendas, Obama Derangement Syndrome prevents the Republicans from admitting it. So we don't get any new laws. But we have old laws, and Obama gets to administer them. That actually gives him a lot of policy-making authority, which he'll hopefully make major use of this year. That's somewhat different from the 1789 concept, but the similarity is unmistakeable: our government right now consists of an executive branch, a judicial branch, and an extensive legal code, with a legislature which could in theory exists but is currently choosing to act like it doesn't.
Now, no one is exactly happy with the current state of federal statutory law. And Republicans are surely not happy with letting Obama use his authority to enforce such things as new environmental regulations. There are probably things Congress could be doing, major pieces of legislation it could be passing that should be net improvements over this President-and-no-Congress status quo from both parties' perspective. But the Republicans aren't willing to offer Obama anything that he'd find better than the status quo; that's Obama Derangement Syndrome, wherein the simple fact that Obama likes something is sufficient reason for Republicans to dislike it, independent of its actual merits. They keep offering him things that they want but that he doesn't want; given his ability to just keep on takin' care that the laws be faithfully executed, he has absolutely no reason to agree to those things. Thus the era of manufactured crises: every time the status quo expires, every time we actually need new statutory authorization for the government to continue operating, this dynamic vanishes. Obama can't just keep on running the government. In theory, taking away that floor on potential outcomes gives the Republicans the power to get Obama to agree to something he likes worse than the status quo. In practice, Republicans also lose the floor on possible outcomes, and they're not as willing to free-fall into the abyss as they'd like us all to believe, for some reason. Or maybe they're just not willing for us to believe that they're that willing to fall into the abyss.
Either way, it looks like they've finally gotten the message that manufactured crises don't really work. That means we might be in for a whole year or so in which Congress pretends not to exist, and the President is perfectly happy to go along with that pretense.
No, my point is about what happened to this disparity between the President and Congress over time. Basically, it went away. As transportation has improved, we've reached the point where Congress does basically always exist. They're in session all the time now, except maybe over Christmas. Even when they're in recess, they could reassemble for an important vote with less than a day's notice. This has corresponded with a decline in the sensibility of the "laws don't always need to be changed but they always need to be enforced" point. In 1789, there wasn't that much statutory law. Most of the law was common law. That made the idea that the existing corpus of statutes would be working well enough to get along for a couple of months without any new laws relatively plausible. With the explosion of the regulatory state, a federal code that governs basically everything the Constitution allows federal governance of, and an incredibly complicated feedback process between the administrative agencies, the subjects of their regulation, and Congress, that idea is a lot less plausible now. We need a Congress basically all the time, or at least a Congress that's on call all the time and getting stuff done nearly all of the time.
But while it is a lot less plausible now than it used to be, that old idea hasn't lost all relevance. In fact, the current Congress basically might as well be out of session, back in their districts with a month's journey back to Washington. There is no overlap between the set of non-trivial legislation Barack Obama would sign into law and the set of non-trivial legislation that John Boehner and 217 of his closest friends would pass through the House. More to the point, everyone knows this, except maybe some centrist media types. Even if there are some ideas for new legislation that you'd think would satisfy both parties' agendas, Obama Derangement Syndrome prevents the Republicans from admitting it. So we don't get any new laws. But we have old laws, and Obama gets to administer them. That actually gives him a lot of policy-making authority, which he'll hopefully make major use of this year. That's somewhat different from the 1789 concept, but the similarity is unmistakeable: our government right now consists of an executive branch, a judicial branch, and an extensive legal code, with a legislature which could in theory exists but is currently choosing to act like it doesn't.
Now, no one is exactly happy with the current state of federal statutory law. And Republicans are surely not happy with letting Obama use his authority to enforce such things as new environmental regulations. There are probably things Congress could be doing, major pieces of legislation it could be passing that should be net improvements over this President-and-no-Congress status quo from both parties' perspective. But the Republicans aren't willing to offer Obama anything that he'd find better than the status quo; that's Obama Derangement Syndrome, wherein the simple fact that Obama likes something is sufficient reason for Republicans to dislike it, independent of its actual merits. They keep offering him things that they want but that he doesn't want; given his ability to just keep on takin' care that the laws be faithfully executed, he has absolutely no reason to agree to those things. Thus the era of manufactured crises: every time the status quo expires, every time we actually need new statutory authorization for the government to continue operating, this dynamic vanishes. Obama can't just keep on running the government. In theory, taking away that floor on potential outcomes gives the Republicans the power to get Obama to agree to something he likes worse than the status quo. In practice, Republicans also lose the floor on possible outcomes, and they're not as willing to free-fall into the abyss as they'd like us all to believe, for some reason. Or maybe they're just not willing for us to believe that they're that willing to fall into the abyss.
Either way, it looks like they've finally gotten the message that manufactured crises don't really work. That means we might be in for a whole year or so in which Congress pretends not to exist, and the President is perfectly happy to go along with that pretense.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Applying the Ad Coelum Rule Literally
For my Property class I'm currently reading a Ninth Circuit case from 1936 holding that land owners did not have the right to exclude air traffic from the airspace above (or, as the court put it, superjacent to) their property. The only reason anyone would think they did is the legal principle cuius est solum eius usque ad coelum et ad infernos. "Whoever owns the soil owns also to the heavens and to hell." Before the advent of air travel, people thought this applied literally, that property over a certain portion of the Earth's surface gave you the rights to everything above and below that surface. Since the 1940s, no one thinks that anymore; the principle still applies, but within reasonable bounds in both directions, more or less defined by what you can make use of. Airplanes can fly over your land, so long as they fly high enough so as not to do any damage to your property. The courts that rejected the ad coelum principle's application to air traffic gave a pretty plausible sketch of why it would be absurd to apply it literally. But they didn't go far enough, though.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Does Work Necessarily Have Disutility?
I just had an incredibly interesting conversation with my father inspired by my earlier post arguing, with perhaps somewhat overly provocative rhetoric/title, that liberals shouldn't push for a "jobs guarantee," they should push for an "ability to have a decent life guarantee" independent of whether someone is currently "employed." Among the things that came up was the way that economic thinking can be somewhat blinkered, and can draw conclusions that aren't necessarily true, and also my assertion that "work sucks," or more technically that most things people do as paid labor have negative net utility for the people doing them. But thinking about it in more depth, I'm not sure that's true. The inference from which one would draw that conclusion is that just about no one would actually do their job if they weren't being paid for it. You'd think that something with net positive utility, all things (other than money) considered, would be something you'd willingly volunteer to do, even in the absence of compensation.
The problem with that inference, though, is that we live in a society where one simply must have a certain amount of income in order to live a basically comfortable life, and the only way for most people to get that income is to get someone to pay them to do stuff. Even if, say, I would rather have a career as a law professor and write various books and articles and teach classes and such than just not do any of that, independent of the compensation issue, I still need to get some money somehow. And the fact that I can do that stuff, assuming I can (which is what, in my case, the next decade or so will determine), and the fact that it's stuff other people would like to see done gives me power. Given that I need some income in order to live a decently comfortable life, it much behooves me to use that power as leverage over people who have a bunch of money to get them to give me some of it. That's just as true if the job has net positive utility to me as it is if it has net negative utility. I have a strong incentive to effectively pretend the work has disutility, so that I can credibly say to potential employers that I won't do the work unless they pay me at least X or whatever. More generally, assuming I'm at least somewhat selfish, I might as well use this leverage to just get as much money out of my employer as I can, even beyond the point of relative comfort, even if I would in theory be willing to do the job for free.
Now, this doesn't really have any consequences for the question of whether we should have the government give people money only if they do work in exchange for it or just because we don't want them to starve. The kind of work in question almost certainly would have significant disutility, and besides, just because I like doing something doesn't mean you should coerce me into doing it. But both just for thinking about society and for various kinds of reformist policy thinking, it's an important dynamic to understand. People don't, and shouldn't, be paid the bare minimum amount that would compensate them for the disutility of their labor. That workers have ways of exerting power to get more than that bare minimum compensation is among the great victories of modern liberalism. And it means we can't necessarily infer from the fact that no one would, in the real world, do their job for free the fact that their work has negative utility in some theoretical sense. It's more complicated than that.
The problem with that inference, though, is that we live in a society where one simply must have a certain amount of income in order to live a basically comfortable life, and the only way for most people to get that income is to get someone to pay them to do stuff. Even if, say, I would rather have a career as a law professor and write various books and articles and teach classes and such than just not do any of that, independent of the compensation issue, I still need to get some money somehow. And the fact that I can do that stuff, assuming I can (which is what, in my case, the next decade or so will determine), and the fact that it's stuff other people would like to see done gives me power. Given that I need some income in order to live a decently comfortable life, it much behooves me to use that power as leverage over people who have a bunch of money to get them to give me some of it. That's just as true if the job has net positive utility to me as it is if it has net negative utility. I have a strong incentive to effectively pretend the work has disutility, so that I can credibly say to potential employers that I won't do the work unless they pay me at least X or whatever. More generally, assuming I'm at least somewhat selfish, I might as well use this leverage to just get as much money out of my employer as I can, even beyond the point of relative comfort, even if I would in theory be willing to do the job for free.
Now, this doesn't really have any consequences for the question of whether we should have the government give people money only if they do work in exchange for it or just because we don't want them to starve. The kind of work in question almost certainly would have significant disutility, and besides, just because I like doing something doesn't mean you should coerce me into doing it. But both just for thinking about society and for various kinds of reformist policy thinking, it's an important dynamic to understand. People don't, and shouldn't, be paid the bare minimum amount that would compensate them for the disutility of their labor. That workers have ways of exerting power to get more than that bare minimum compensation is among the great victories of modern liberalism. And it means we can't necessarily infer from the fact that no one would, in the real world, do their job for free the fact that their work has negative utility in some theoretical sense. It's more complicated than that.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Why Does No One Suspect Randy Johnson of Steroid Use?
I'm not saying he did steroids. I just think it's weird no one else is. One of the main markers of steroid use, people think, one of the only things that actually shows up in the empirical record is that they allow players to remain effective later into their careers. Traditionally baseball players would start declining around the age of 30 to 33, and then drop off sharply after something like 35. During the Steroid Era, players were staying successful into their forties. So here's a career trajectory comparison between two of the best pitchers of the 90s and 2000s: Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez. Let's look at each of them through the age of 28 and then after the age of 29:
Young Pedro: 125 W, 56 L, 1576.1 IP, 2.68 ERA, 168 ERA+, 10.4 K/9, 2.5 BB/9, 6.7 H/9, 38.5 WAA, 52.0 WAR
Pedro through his age 28 season was historically dominant. Actually, his age 28 season itself was historically dominant, as his ERA was less than half that of the next lowest qualifier in the AL.
Old Pedro: 94 W, 44 L, 1251.0 IP, 3.23 ERA, 139 ERA+, 9.6 K/9, 2.3 BB/9, 7.5 H/9, 22.9 WAA, 34.0
That's... not much of a decline. He was a bit worse, but still pitched at a Hall of Fame level. What he didn't do, though, was pitch for very long. Well less than half his career was after his age 29 season.
Young Randy: 49 W, 48 L, 818.0 IP, 3.95 ERA, 101 ERA+, 9.0 K/9, 5.7 BB/9, 7.1 H/9, 0.1 WAA, 7.6 WAR
During the same part of his life when Pedro was rocketing to stardom, Randy Johnson was... okay? Average-ish? His strikeout and hit rates showed promise, but he was walking batters like his name was Oliver Perez.
Old Randy: 254 W, 118 L, 3317.1 IP, 3.13 ERA, 146 ERA+, 11.0 K/9, 2.7 BB/9, 7.3 H/9, 68.1 WAA, 96.7 WAR
Randy Johnson had a Hall of Fame career entirely after his age-28 season. And not even a borderline one, a greatest-of-the-great one. It's a good thing, too, 'cause he might as well not have been in the league until age 29 at all. Unsurprisingly, he's second all time in WAR after the age of 29 to Cy Young; Phil Niekro, knuckleballer extraordinaire, is third. He was 880th in WAR up to age 28. Yeah.
Now, there's a perfectly good explanation for why 28-year-old Randy Johnson had never been anything but a mediocre pitcher but 29+-year-old Randy Johnson was one of the most dominant pitchers of all time: he figured out his control. He always had the unhittable, strikeout stuff, but as Sandy Koufax will tell you, that only matters once you figure out how to throw it in the zone. Still, he did the same thing Bonds and Clemens and Palmeiro did. Actually, he did it even moreso: he had the most WAR of any player in baseball over the age of 35 from 1994 on. Yeah, including Bonds. Together they have a big lead over Clemens, and he's a ways in front of #4 on the list, Jamie Moyer. (Who, uh, wasn't doing steroids, I don't think.) So why, of the three people who put up more than 40 WAR after the age of 35 in the steroid era, is Randy Johnson exempt from suspicion? No one elsee seems to be. Well, that's not quite right: various people seem to be, like Frank Thomas, for no articulable reasons. But it cannot be denied that Randy Johnson had exactly the lack of age-related decline thought to be distinctive of steroid use. That's more evidence than we have on Piazza or Bagwell.
Young Pedro: 125 W, 56 L, 1576.1 IP, 2.68 ERA, 168 ERA+, 10.4 K/9, 2.5 BB/9, 6.7 H/9, 38.5 WAA, 52.0 WAR
Pedro through his age 28 season was historically dominant. Actually, his age 28 season itself was historically dominant, as his ERA was less than half that of the next lowest qualifier in the AL.
Old Pedro: 94 W, 44 L, 1251.0 IP, 3.23 ERA, 139 ERA+, 9.6 K/9, 2.3 BB/9, 7.5 H/9, 22.9 WAA, 34.0
That's... not much of a decline. He was a bit worse, but still pitched at a Hall of Fame level. What he didn't do, though, was pitch for very long. Well less than half his career was after his age 29 season.
Young Randy: 49 W, 48 L, 818.0 IP, 3.95 ERA, 101 ERA+, 9.0 K/9, 5.7 BB/9, 7.1 H/9, 0.1 WAA, 7.6 WAR
During the same part of his life when Pedro was rocketing to stardom, Randy Johnson was... okay? Average-ish? His strikeout and hit rates showed promise, but he was walking batters like his name was Oliver Perez.
Old Randy: 254 W, 118 L, 3317.1 IP, 3.13 ERA, 146 ERA+, 11.0 K/9, 2.7 BB/9, 7.3 H/9, 68.1 WAA, 96.7 WAR
Randy Johnson had a Hall of Fame career entirely after his age-28 season. And not even a borderline one, a greatest-of-the-great one. It's a good thing, too, 'cause he might as well not have been in the league until age 29 at all. Unsurprisingly, he's second all time in WAR after the age of 29 to Cy Young; Phil Niekro, knuckleballer extraordinaire, is third. He was 880th in WAR up to age 28. Yeah.
Now, there's a perfectly good explanation for why 28-year-old Randy Johnson had never been anything but a mediocre pitcher but 29+-year-old Randy Johnson was one of the most dominant pitchers of all time: he figured out his control. He always had the unhittable, strikeout stuff, but as Sandy Koufax will tell you, that only matters once you figure out how to throw it in the zone. Still, he did the same thing Bonds and Clemens and Palmeiro did. Actually, he did it even moreso: he had the most WAR of any player in baseball over the age of 35 from 1994 on. Yeah, including Bonds. Together they have a big lead over Clemens, and he's a ways in front of #4 on the list, Jamie Moyer. (Who, uh, wasn't doing steroids, I don't think.) So why, of the three people who put up more than 40 WAR after the age of 35 in the steroid era, is Randy Johnson exempt from suspicion? No one elsee seems to be. Well, that's not quite right: various people seem to be, like Frank Thomas, for no articulable reasons. But it cannot be denied that Randy Johnson had exactly the lack of age-related decline thought to be distinctive of steroid use. That's more evidence than we have on Piazza or Bagwell.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Might the Thirteenth Amendment Have Passed Earlier?
Well, no. Obviously not, not as history actually played out. No slave state was ever going to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment (not the real one, anyway, as opposed to the proposed one that would have given slavery constitutional protection for all time), and at no time prior to the Civil War were there ever anything close to enough free states to pass an Amendment all on their own. In fact, once New York and New Jersey abolished slavery the percentage of free states never wavered more than ten percentage points away from 50% in either direction.
So obviously I'm talking about a slightly alternate history. The divergence, I think, wants to start around 1831-32, when Nat Turner's slave rebellion caused many Southern states, most prominently Virginia, to genuinely consider the future of slavery, with some advocating a move toward gradual emancipation. Obviously, that side lost the debate, but what if they had won? Could there have been enough free states and gradual-emancipation states together to pass some sort of anti-slavery amendment without a war?
In 1832, there were twelve slave states and twelve free states. Three-quarters of twenty-four would have been eighteen, so we need six more free states, or at least states perhaps willing to vote for an anti-slavery Amendment. Virginia's one. But let's also say that, had Virginia seriously moved away from slavery, the border states, the ones less Southern than Virginia, would have done so as well. That's Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, at the very least. Maybe Missouri as well, and that's up to five, one short of the requirement. This would have made the Missouri Compromise line the line for slavery throughout the country, east as well as west. It also wouldn't quite have been enough for an amendment. If we assume that every state which joined the Union between 1836 and the start of the war would have been aligned as it actually was, this would have been the high point for the prospects of getting the Thirteenth Amendment through ahead of its time.
If, however, Virginia and the border states had rejected the cause of "slavery today, slavery tomorrow, slavery forever" in 1832, the addition of future states might not have happened as it did. Those states probably wouldn't have signed off on national immediate abolition, but they also probably wouldn't have minded admitting more free states and tipping the long-term political balance away from slavery. Perhaps Arkansas might have been admitted as a free state, which would have brought the free or quasi-free states to 72% of the country. Adding Michigan would take that up to 73%, on the eve of the Mexican-American War. But, in this scenario, that war might well not have happened. Or, alternately, prospective free states such as Iowa and Wisconsin might have been admitted before Texas and Florida were added as slave states.
Let's suppose that happened: Arkansas, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin were added to the 1832 mix, with no new slave states. That brings the total to 21 free/quasi-free states, 7 slave states: three-quarters precisely! And in that scenario, those twenty-one states would have been able to band together and pass some sort of compromise, gradual anti-slavery amendment. Perhaps prohibiting the addition of more slave states, prohibiting anyone not currently a slave from being enslaved, rolling back the fugitive slave laws, restricting the slave trade, etc. It wouldn't have been as ringing as the real Thirteenth Amendment, but it might have avoided war and after the phase-out period the practical difference would vanish.
The 1831-32 Virginia slavery debates, in other words, could have been a turning point in American history. Had the other side carried the day, it would have become awfully feasible for the opponents of slavery to achieve a political victory without resorting to a massive, bloody civil war. Now, this alternate Thirteenth Amendment might have triggered war between the seven hold-out slave states and the free majority, but they might have gone along with a sufficiently compromise-laden amendment. Hell, once they saw that the anti-slavery forces were gaining political ascendance they might have been willing to cut a deal on a Thirteenth Amendment that would gradually abolish slavery but on the most lenient terms possible. Plus, had there been a war it would've been over a lot quicker, with only a small handful of relatively small states against the entire rest of the country. American history would be an awfully lot less tragic; the future of civil rights after the abolition of slavery might even have been less of a struggle. Of course, it's probably not a matter of luck that things didn't turn out that way; the pro-slavery side won those debates for a reason, after all. But it's interesting, and a bit heartbreaking, to think about.
So obviously I'm talking about a slightly alternate history. The divergence, I think, wants to start around 1831-32, when Nat Turner's slave rebellion caused many Southern states, most prominently Virginia, to genuinely consider the future of slavery, with some advocating a move toward gradual emancipation. Obviously, that side lost the debate, but what if they had won? Could there have been enough free states and gradual-emancipation states together to pass some sort of anti-slavery amendment without a war?
In 1832, there were twelve slave states and twelve free states. Three-quarters of twenty-four would have been eighteen, so we need six more free states, or at least states perhaps willing to vote for an anti-slavery Amendment. Virginia's one. But let's also say that, had Virginia seriously moved away from slavery, the border states, the ones less Southern than Virginia, would have done so as well. That's Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, at the very least. Maybe Missouri as well, and that's up to five, one short of the requirement. This would have made the Missouri Compromise line the line for slavery throughout the country, east as well as west. It also wouldn't quite have been enough for an amendment. If we assume that every state which joined the Union between 1836 and the start of the war would have been aligned as it actually was, this would have been the high point for the prospects of getting the Thirteenth Amendment through ahead of its time.
If, however, Virginia and the border states had rejected the cause of "slavery today, slavery tomorrow, slavery forever" in 1832, the addition of future states might not have happened as it did. Those states probably wouldn't have signed off on national immediate abolition, but they also probably wouldn't have minded admitting more free states and tipping the long-term political balance away from slavery. Perhaps Arkansas might have been admitted as a free state, which would have brought the free or quasi-free states to 72% of the country. Adding Michigan would take that up to 73%, on the eve of the Mexican-American War. But, in this scenario, that war might well not have happened. Or, alternately, prospective free states such as Iowa and Wisconsin might have been admitted before Texas and Florida were added as slave states.
Let's suppose that happened: Arkansas, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin were added to the 1832 mix, with no new slave states. That brings the total to 21 free/quasi-free states, 7 slave states: three-quarters precisely! And in that scenario, those twenty-one states would have been able to band together and pass some sort of compromise, gradual anti-slavery amendment. Perhaps prohibiting the addition of more slave states, prohibiting anyone not currently a slave from being enslaved, rolling back the fugitive slave laws, restricting the slave trade, etc. It wouldn't have been as ringing as the real Thirteenth Amendment, but it might have avoided war and after the phase-out period the practical difference would vanish.
The 1831-32 Virginia slavery debates, in other words, could have been a turning point in American history. Had the other side carried the day, it would have become awfully feasible for the opponents of slavery to achieve a political victory without resorting to a massive, bloody civil war. Now, this alternate Thirteenth Amendment might have triggered war between the seven hold-out slave states and the free majority, but they might have gone along with a sufficiently compromise-laden amendment. Hell, once they saw that the anti-slavery forces were gaining political ascendance they might have been willing to cut a deal on a Thirteenth Amendment that would gradually abolish slavery but on the most lenient terms possible. Plus, had there been a war it would've been over a lot quicker, with only a small handful of relatively small states against the entire rest of the country. American history would be an awfully lot less tragic; the future of civil rights after the abolition of slavery might even have been less of a struggle. Of course, it's probably not a matter of luck that things didn't turn out that way; the pro-slavery side won those debates for a reason, after all. But it's interesting, and a bit heartbreaking, to think about.
Lucas Duda is Such a DH
Just for fun and because I have an exam tomorrow so I need to find ways to procrastinate (it's okay, it's okay, I'm on top of things), I spent about five minutes just now implementing an idea I've had before. Using the framework of wins above replacement, it is somewhere between possible and easy to determine how valuable a given hitter would have been had they been employed solely as a designated hitter. The idea is that hitter WAR is composed of five elements: runs above average from batting, from baserunning, and from fielding; a positional adjustment; and a boost to provide the gap between league average and replacement level. Batting and baserunning together are called, by FanGraphs anyway, "Offense;" fielding runs and the positional adjustment together are called "Defense." Making everyone a DH wouldn't affect their Offense score, or their Replacement runs. What it would do is affect their Defense score, a lot. Now, taking anyone and pretending they had played a different position would change their Defense score, and usually in a way that would be utterly impossible to calculate. We do not know how good a shortstop Keith Hernandez would have been, or how good a catcher David Wright would be. But, see, every DH has exactly the same number of fielding runs above average: zero. DH's don't field, that's the beauty of it. So making everyone a DH simply replaces their combined Defense score with the positional adjustment for a DH, which is something like -17.5 runs per 600 plate appearances. Easy. Then we can see which players lost the most, which great players hold up the best as full-time DHs, and who might actually have been better served as a DH.
Let's start with that last one: the player whose career WAR would have been the most higher had he done nothing by DH is Danny Tartabull. His career Defense score was -202.8 runs, per FanGraphs; as a DH he would only have given up 170.4 runs in that category. So, while he was actually worth 22.6 career wins above replacement, as a DH he would've been worth 26 WAR. Tartabull is one of only two players with a minimum of 1000 career plate appearances who both would've been better off as a DH and would've been above average as a DH; the other is Ken Phelps, with 9.5 actual WAR and 9.6 DH-WAR. Several players, interestingly, were or are below replacement level on their actual careers but would have been above replacement as full-time DHs. Chief among these is the man with the second highest difference between his DH-WAR and his real WAR: Lucas Duda. He's produced 0.8 runs below replacement for the Mets, as a corner outfielder and first baseman. As a DH he'd've been worth 1.8 wins above replacement. Trade him to the AL already, guys.
Let's start with that last one: the player whose career WAR would have been the most higher had he done nothing by DH is Danny Tartabull. His career Defense score was -202.8 runs, per FanGraphs; as a DH he would only have given up 170.4 runs in that category. So, while he was actually worth 22.6 career wins above replacement, as a DH he would've been worth 26 WAR. Tartabull is one of only two players with a minimum of 1000 career plate appearances who both would've been better off as a DH and would've been above average as a DH; the other is Ken Phelps, with 9.5 actual WAR and 9.6 DH-WAR. Several players, interestingly, were or are below replacement level on their actual careers but would have been above replacement as full-time DHs. Chief among these is the man with the second highest difference between his DH-WAR and his real WAR: Lucas Duda. He's produced 0.8 runs below replacement for the Mets, as a corner outfielder and first baseman. As a DH he'd've been worth 1.8 wins above replacement. Trade him to the AL already, guys.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Why We Abandoned the 14th Amendment
In 1868 the American people ratified the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which, if you read its text, gave every citizen a broad set of protected constitutional rights and provided every American with a strong guarantee of equality. By 1896 the Amendment was more or less a dead letter, not even prohibiting de jure racial segregation. It had already been robbed of the vast majority of its force long before then, though. In 1883 that broad set of protected rights was held to be essentially trivial in scope. And all the way back in 1873 the Amendment was held not to give Congress the power to directly regulate racial discrimination by private individuals. This is, well, weird. In one sense it's not particularly strange: after all, the America of 1896 or 1873 was in no way ready for true racial equality, or the other kinds of equality the Amendment has since been held to guarantee. But... neither was 1868 America, right? So why did it enact the damn thing in the first place? You'd almost think that something changed between 1868 and 1873. Something big, something that would seriously change our expectations about the American polity's attitudes toward a federal guarantee of individual rights and civil equality.
And you would be right. Something big did happen: we let the South back in. Eleven states joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. Precisely zero Senators or Representatives from those eleven states cast votes on the Fourteenth Amendment, yea or nay. Now, the Southern states did ratify the Amendment, but they were forced to by the all-northern Congress. People have argued that this undermines the legitimacy of the 14th Amendment. I'm not interested in that question here; the point is simply that the Fourteenth Amendment was the product of an entirely northern politics. It was also one of the last things that all-northern politics would ever get to do.
By 1873, every Southern state was back in the Union. In the 1870 census, those states made up almost exactly one quarter of the total population, and a very slightly higher percentage of electoral votes. Their addition meant that the political center of 1873 would have been around the 67th percentile of conservativeness in the 1868 all-northern political culture (assuming the entire South was to the right of that position, which feels safe, on racial issues at least). Or to put it another way, it is entirely possible that there was a genuine strong majority favoring the kind of equality the Fourteenth Amendment seems to establish and that by as early as 1873 that the American people did not want that kind of radical change. Because "the American people" changed in the interim. A political coalition favoring the Fourteenth Amendment's broad principles could easily find itself victorious in 1868 but on shaky footing at best as soon as five years later, hesitant to enforce its own creation for fear of political liability.
In a sense, then, the question is which expression of the will of the people we should treat as dominant, as legitimate. Obviously the normatively correct answer is the 1868 version. That's also why I don't really care about whether the 14th Amendment is formally illegitimate because it was enacted through coercion: as between the cause of racial (and more general) equality and the strictures of the Article V ratification process, I'll take the former every time. Without the Reconstruction Amendments, the U.S. Constitution as a whole would be illegitimate. You could try to argue, though, that we can't treat the text of the Fourteenth Amendment as a true expression of the will of the American people, that the Slaughter-House Cases, Civil Rights Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson should essentially be retroactively read as the original intent of that Amendment because they represent the attitudes of the country as a whole.
Of course, that entire line of inquiry would depend on giving a damn about the original intent of the American people of 1868. Fortunately, what matters is not what they wanted or thought but what they did, and (except insofar as the 14th Amendment is invalid, which I don't think it is for various reasons) what they did was to guarantee to all the equal protection of the laws, and to protect the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States. Nice and simple. But if we're puzzled by the fact that We, the People seemed to disavow our own act beginning just half a decade after we made it in the first place, we shouldn't be. We were just a different People.
And you would be right. Something big did happen: we let the South back in. Eleven states joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. Precisely zero Senators or Representatives from those eleven states cast votes on the Fourteenth Amendment, yea or nay. Now, the Southern states did ratify the Amendment, but they were forced to by the all-northern Congress. People have argued that this undermines the legitimacy of the 14th Amendment. I'm not interested in that question here; the point is simply that the Fourteenth Amendment was the product of an entirely northern politics. It was also one of the last things that all-northern politics would ever get to do.
By 1873, every Southern state was back in the Union. In the 1870 census, those states made up almost exactly one quarter of the total population, and a very slightly higher percentage of electoral votes. Their addition meant that the political center of 1873 would have been around the 67th percentile of conservativeness in the 1868 all-northern political culture (assuming the entire South was to the right of that position, which feels safe, on racial issues at least). Or to put it another way, it is entirely possible that there was a genuine strong majority favoring the kind of equality the Fourteenth Amendment seems to establish and that by as early as 1873 that the American people did not want that kind of radical change. Because "the American people" changed in the interim. A political coalition favoring the Fourteenth Amendment's broad principles could easily find itself victorious in 1868 but on shaky footing at best as soon as five years later, hesitant to enforce its own creation for fear of political liability.
In a sense, then, the question is which expression of the will of the people we should treat as dominant, as legitimate. Obviously the normatively correct answer is the 1868 version. That's also why I don't really care about whether the 14th Amendment is formally illegitimate because it was enacted through coercion: as between the cause of racial (and more general) equality and the strictures of the Article V ratification process, I'll take the former every time. Without the Reconstruction Amendments, the U.S. Constitution as a whole would be illegitimate. You could try to argue, though, that we can't treat the text of the Fourteenth Amendment as a true expression of the will of the American people, that the Slaughter-House Cases, Civil Rights Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson should essentially be retroactively read as the original intent of that Amendment because they represent the attitudes of the country as a whole.
Of course, that entire line of inquiry would depend on giving a damn about the original intent of the American people of 1868. Fortunately, what matters is not what they wanted or thought but what they did, and (except insofar as the 14th Amendment is invalid, which I don't think it is for various reasons) what they did was to guarantee to all the equal protection of the laws, and to protect the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States. Nice and simple. But if we're puzzled by the fact that We, the People seemed to disavow our own act beginning just half a decade after we made it in the first place, we shouldn't be. We were just a different People.
Monday, January 13, 2014
Work Sucks, Let's Stop Forcing People To Do It In Order To Live
Matt Yglesias has what strikes me as a very good post about the idea, popular among some left-wingers, of a "jobs guarantee," in which the government would commit to providing employment for anyone who couldn't get it elsewhere doing some sort of relatively routine work. This idea strikes me as one that you'd come up with if you had a general lack of aversion to governments doing things to solve problems directly (as I do and as, I think, Yglesias does as well) and if you had for some reason defined unemployment as bad, as such. That is to say, it ignores the question of why unemployment is bad. It would, therefore, solve unemployment itself because, well, of course it would, that's what a "jobs guarantee" is, it's taking the concept of unemployment off the table. But it wouldn't necessarily do very much to reduce the badness which unemployment currently creates.
The primary harm of unemployment is that you don't get paid for doing work. That's how our society works: as an initial condition anyway, subject to modification around the edges by government programs, people get money by working for it. (Well, most of us do, anyway, those of us who don't get to make money through investments.) No work, no money; no money, going on living gets very hard. But the thing is, there are very, very few jobs in the world that anyone would do if they could collect the same salary while not doing it. Or to put it another way, the "work" side of things has disutility, even for those of us who have pretty good jobs (in which case the disutility is low enough that there's a huge surplus when you factor in the utility of the money). As compared to just handing out the same amount of money we'd be paying them to do work under the "jobs guarantee," then, the jobs guarantee imposes a loss on its purported beneficiaries: they have to work. Moreover, they have to work at what would probably not be very pleasant jobs.
The question, then, is whether there's any purpose to imposing that cost, or more specifically to enforcing that cost as a condition of receiving public assistance. Presumably the purpose is the same as the motive behind the destruction, by the early capitalists, of all means people might have of making a living without a wage: to induce people to do work. But... that's a right-wing motive, yes? Not that liberals (as opposed to communists) think we should abolish the concept of paying a wage for labor, but we generally want to make society do a bit less to coerce people to do unpleasant work on pain of starvation, homelessness, and death. We're the people who should say, of a guaranteed basic income that wasn't dependent on employment, "yes, this will probably reduce GDP a bit, but that's okay because we're prosperous enough to afford it and it will increase human happiness." The problem of unemployment isn't the lack of stuff to do, isn't the idleness, it's the lack of money. The liberal approach should be to guarantee that the lack of money won't get too terrible.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't problems to unemployment. For instance, being unemployed long-term or when you're a young adult can make it much harder to get employment going forward. Since nobody's proposing to abolish the general concept of capitalism, that's a harm done to unemployed people. Federal makework as part of a "jobs guarantee" probably wouldn't do much to solve that, anyway. Moreover, liberals have other, better solutions to the problem of there not being enough work to do: government spending and/or aggressive monetary policy to boost aggregate demand! This would have the added benefit of contributing to rising wages, production (partially canceling the effects of a GBI or a simulacrum thereof), and bargaining power for workers.
As the Yglesias post notes, a jobs guarantee looks inferior in every way to some combination of unconditional cash grants, non-cash public services where appropriate, appropriate monetary policy, and wage subsidies. You would only come to the idea of a "jobs guarantee" if you forgot why we want jobs. We don't want them for the jobs, we want them for the not starving. It is and should always be a key plank in the liberal platform that not starving shouldn't depend on finding someone to pay you to do something for them, even if it's the government paying you. The alternative is the kind of coercion right-wingers use to force people into working terrible jobs for the benefit of the bosses. The liberal solution is clear: guarantee a living, not a job.
The primary harm of unemployment is that you don't get paid for doing work. That's how our society works: as an initial condition anyway, subject to modification around the edges by government programs, people get money by working for it. (Well, most of us do, anyway, those of us who don't get to make money through investments.) No work, no money; no money, going on living gets very hard. But the thing is, there are very, very few jobs in the world that anyone would do if they could collect the same salary while not doing it. Or to put it another way, the "work" side of things has disutility, even for those of us who have pretty good jobs (in which case the disutility is low enough that there's a huge surplus when you factor in the utility of the money). As compared to just handing out the same amount of money we'd be paying them to do work under the "jobs guarantee," then, the jobs guarantee imposes a loss on its purported beneficiaries: they have to work. Moreover, they have to work at what would probably not be very pleasant jobs.
The question, then, is whether there's any purpose to imposing that cost, or more specifically to enforcing that cost as a condition of receiving public assistance. Presumably the purpose is the same as the motive behind the destruction, by the early capitalists, of all means people might have of making a living without a wage: to induce people to do work. But... that's a right-wing motive, yes? Not that liberals (as opposed to communists) think we should abolish the concept of paying a wage for labor, but we generally want to make society do a bit less to coerce people to do unpleasant work on pain of starvation, homelessness, and death. We're the people who should say, of a guaranteed basic income that wasn't dependent on employment, "yes, this will probably reduce GDP a bit, but that's okay because we're prosperous enough to afford it and it will increase human happiness." The problem of unemployment isn't the lack of stuff to do, isn't the idleness, it's the lack of money. The liberal approach should be to guarantee that the lack of money won't get too terrible.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't problems to unemployment. For instance, being unemployed long-term or when you're a young adult can make it much harder to get employment going forward. Since nobody's proposing to abolish the general concept of capitalism, that's a harm done to unemployed people. Federal makework as part of a "jobs guarantee" probably wouldn't do much to solve that, anyway. Moreover, liberals have other, better solutions to the problem of there not being enough work to do: government spending and/or aggressive monetary policy to boost aggregate demand! This would have the added benefit of contributing to rising wages, production (partially canceling the effects of a GBI or a simulacrum thereof), and bargaining power for workers.
As the Yglesias post notes, a jobs guarantee looks inferior in every way to some combination of unconditional cash grants, non-cash public services where appropriate, appropriate monetary policy, and wage subsidies. You would only come to the idea of a "jobs guarantee" if you forgot why we want jobs. We don't want them for the jobs, we want them for the not starving. It is and should always be a key plank in the liberal platform that not starving shouldn't depend on finding someone to pay you to do something for them, even if it's the government paying you. The alternative is the kind of coercion right-wingers use to force people into working terrible jobs for the benefit of the bosses. The liberal solution is clear: guarantee a living, not a job.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
How To Reform Hall of Fame Voting
Don't try. Give up. But don't give up on the idea.
Okay, a bit of explanation. A lot of people are pretty outraged about the voting process for the MLB Hall of Fame. Last year no one was elected, this year Craig Biggio missed by two votes and almost certainly would've made it were it not for the 10-vote maximum, lots of voters are publicizing their absurd ballots and their even-more-absurd reasonings for those ballots, no one has any coherent sense of how to handle the whole steroid issue, etc. Apparently the BBWAA is going to consider reforming the 10-vote limit for next year. Other people are suggesting other, more radical reforms. I have an idea along those lines:
Okay, a bit of explanation. A lot of people are pretty outraged about the voting process for the MLB Hall of Fame. Last year no one was elected, this year Craig Biggio missed by two votes and almost certainly would've made it were it not for the 10-vote maximum, lots of voters are publicizing their absurd ballots and their even-more-absurd reasonings for those ballots, no one has any coherent sense of how to handle the whole steroid issue, etc. Apparently the BBWAA is going to consider reforming the 10-vote limit for next year. Other people are suggesting other, more radical reforms. I have an idea along those lines:
Give up on the existing Hall of Fame!
Like I said, radical.
Words Cannot Express How Much I Love the Chris Christie Scandal
Chris Christie is one of the very, very few Republicans who scares me a little bit for 2016. Generally their candidates suffer from the fact that their party's entire platform is hideously unpopular, particularly as this leads prominent Republicans toward some combination of craziness, idiocy, or dishonesty. Christie, however, has shown a bit of an interest in actual governance, and has kind of a lingering halo from his genuinely good handling of Hurricane Sandy. He polled categorically better against Hillary Clinton than just about any other prominent contender for the Republican nomination, and is the only person I've seen leading her in any national polls. I've always been skeptical he could survive the primary, particularly because of that time he actually literally hugged Obama (the attack ad writes itself; it's just a .gif of that moment, on a loop). But hey, we were all skeptical that Romney could survive a primary. Nothing was impossible, and if he could get nominated, Christie stood to be the most formidable possible opponent. Oh, and not only is Christie the scariest 2016 Republican contender around, he's also my home state's governor. For another four years. Ugh.
Imagine my delight, then, as it has transpired that his office deliberately engineered a traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey to punish its mayor for endorsing his sacrificial lamb of an opponent, Barbara Buono.
The scandal's been brewing for a while, but only recently has there been clear proof that (a) members of his inner circle were involved, and (b) it most definitely was not a traffic study, but rather a very deliberate infliction of pain on innocent voters (with almost maniacal levels of indifference) as political payback. So now it's a proper scandal, one that will consume at least a couple of media cycles and could well do lasting damage to his political fortunes. Obviously people say that a lot of things will be of lasting political impact when they happen, and they are almost always wrong. There are some reasons, however, to think this time we might be right.
Imagine my delight, then, as it has transpired that his office deliberately engineered a traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey to punish its mayor for endorsing his sacrificial lamb of an opponent, Barbara Buono.
The scandal's been brewing for a while, but only recently has there been clear proof that (a) members of his inner circle were involved, and (b) it most definitely was not a traffic study, but rather a very deliberate infliction of pain on innocent voters (with almost maniacal levels of indifference) as political payback. So now it's a proper scandal, one that will consume at least a couple of media cycles and could well do lasting damage to his political fortunes. Obviously people say that a lot of things will be of lasting political impact when they happen, and they are almost always wrong. There are some reasons, however, to think this time we might be right.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Hall of Fame Not Keeping Up With Time
In 2013, no recent players were inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame. That was a travesty, as there were arguably so many deserving players on that ballot that one could not have voted for all of them under the 10-vote maximum rule. This year the ballot was even more crowded, and the travesty of last year did not repeat. Not quite. The voters elected Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas to the Hall. All are unambiguously deserving. I haven't seen yet whether Maddux beat Tom Seaver's record for highest percentage of votes. Thomas getting in first-ballot is interesting given the voters' typical bias against people who played DH a lot. But, as with last year, the story really isn't who got in, it's who didn't get in. My previous post detailed who I thought was deserving and who I'd have voted for, and I'm not going to repeat that. I am just going to point out that, by inducting only three new players, the Hall of Fame is not keeping up with the pace at which deserving candidates are added to the ballot.
All three newly-elected players were on their first ballot. That's weird in and of itself. It also means that zero of the people on last year's ballot got in that year or this year. One of those, Jack Morris, was in his final year of eligibility, meaning we will no longer have to hear obnoxious baseball writers angrily insisting that he deserves induction even though he obviously doesn't. The others, though, will get more chances, so in a sense there's no harm done. Except... this ballot is getting awfully crowded. You really can't vote for everyone who deserves to get in. And today's results, while not as bad as last year's, will contribute to keeping that logjam going, and will even make it a bit worse. Because Maddux, Glavine, and Thomas were not the only deserving new names on the ballot. Mike Mussina (somewhat arguably) and Jeff Kent (even more arguably) will now join the crowd of plausibly-deserving players on next year's ballot. A ballot, by the way, which will see the addition of Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, and Gary Sheffield, not to mention Hall of Very Good types like Brian Giles, Nomar Garciaparra, and Carlos Delgado. The year after that will feature new names Ken Griffey, Jr., Jim Edmonds, Billy Wagner, and Trevor Hoffman. Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Vladimir Guerrero will join the party in 2017, followed by Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Scott Rolen, Andruw Jones, Bobby Abreu, and (in the somewhat unlikely event he doesn't make it back to the majors) Johan Santana.
You get the point. Simply to keep up with the influx of new deserving candidates, the BBWAA needs to be voting in about four players per year. And that's the level that won't drain the logjam at all. If they want to get the ballot back to a place where voters can actually pick everyone they think is deserving, they need to be putting in something like six or seven people per year. They're not going to do that, of course, which means an awful lot of deserving people are going to miss out over the next few years. It's a damn shame. It's also a problem that goes back a long way. This massive influx of deserving candidates was predictable, after all. To prepare itself, therefore, the Hall should've been running ahead of the addition of new deserving candidates for several years. Like, for instance, the 2012 ballot, whose strongest newly-added candidate was the eminently undeserving Bernie Williams. That would have been a good time to put in, say, three new people, and clear a bit of space for the upcoming flood. I was particularly hopeful that Lee Smith would get in, since he's (to my mind) deserving but was clearly not gonna survive this onslaught, as indeed he seems not to have done. Instead, they inducted only Barry Larkin, who wasn't even close to being the best candidate on that ballot, though he is deserving. So after wasting a whole bunch of years when electing two or three people would've meant clearing space on the ballot for future years, the Hall has got itself stuck needing to elect historic numbers of people per year to clear the backlog. It's ridiculous, and honestly if they keep leaving out the vast majority of deserving players on each year's new ballot it's really going to make the Hall of Fame irrelevant going forward.
All three newly-elected players were on their first ballot. That's weird in and of itself. It also means that zero of the people on last year's ballot got in that year or this year. One of those, Jack Morris, was in his final year of eligibility, meaning we will no longer have to hear obnoxious baseball writers angrily insisting that he deserves induction even though he obviously doesn't. The others, though, will get more chances, so in a sense there's no harm done. Except... this ballot is getting awfully crowded. You really can't vote for everyone who deserves to get in. And today's results, while not as bad as last year's, will contribute to keeping that logjam going, and will even make it a bit worse. Because Maddux, Glavine, and Thomas were not the only deserving new names on the ballot. Mike Mussina (somewhat arguably) and Jeff Kent (even more arguably) will now join the crowd of plausibly-deserving players on next year's ballot. A ballot, by the way, which will see the addition of Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, and Gary Sheffield, not to mention Hall of Very Good types like Brian Giles, Nomar Garciaparra, and Carlos Delgado. The year after that will feature new names Ken Griffey, Jr., Jim Edmonds, Billy Wagner, and Trevor Hoffman. Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Vladimir Guerrero will join the party in 2017, followed by Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Scott Rolen, Andruw Jones, Bobby Abreu, and (in the somewhat unlikely event he doesn't make it back to the majors) Johan Santana.
You get the point. Simply to keep up with the influx of new deserving candidates, the BBWAA needs to be voting in about four players per year. And that's the level that won't drain the logjam at all. If they want to get the ballot back to a place where voters can actually pick everyone they think is deserving, they need to be putting in something like six or seven people per year. They're not going to do that, of course, which means an awful lot of deserving people are going to miss out over the next few years. It's a damn shame. It's also a problem that goes back a long way. This massive influx of deserving candidates was predictable, after all. To prepare itself, therefore, the Hall should've been running ahead of the addition of new deserving candidates for several years. Like, for instance, the 2012 ballot, whose strongest newly-added candidate was the eminently undeserving Bernie Williams. That would have been a good time to put in, say, three new people, and clear a bit of space for the upcoming flood. I was particularly hopeful that Lee Smith would get in, since he's (to my mind) deserving but was clearly not gonna survive this onslaught, as indeed he seems not to have done. Instead, they inducted only Barry Larkin, who wasn't even close to being the best candidate on that ballot, though he is deserving. So after wasting a whole bunch of years when electing two or three people would've meant clearing space on the ballot for future years, the Hall has got itself stuck needing to elect historic numbers of people per year to clear the backlog. It's ridiculous, and honestly if they keep leaving out the vast majority of deserving players on each year's new ballot it's really going to make the Hall of Fame irrelevant going forward.
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