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.