Creatively Structuring Contracts: Yoenis Cespedes Edition

One rumor about the Mets' pursuit of Yoenis Cespedes is that he doesn't just want an opt-out after the first season of a potential three-year deal, but after the second season as well. That's pretty extreme: the ability to opt out is a very useful one, essentially shifting an awful lot of risk onto the other side. If the player performs, he can seek a new, even bigger deal on the open market; if he doesn't, the team is stuck with what now probably looks like a not-so-fantastic contract. In no case does the team get to enjoy the normal fantastic bargain that comes when you sign a player and then they're even better than you anticipated. This year has seen an awful lot of opt-outs in star players' contracts, but mostly only one of them. (I think there's one deal that gives someone, perhaps Heyward, two opt-outs after consecutive seasons in the middle of a long-term deal.) The idea of giving the player an opt-out after every season is not super appealing for a team. It's a lot like turning every season into a player option, and player options are great. For players.

But I have an idea about how something like this design could be made to work in a way that might benefit both parties. Typically, contract years have one of four statues: guaranteed, team option, player option, or mutual option. Typically the salary of a team option year will be very high, and of a player option year very low; in both cases the side with more control is giving back some money in return. In that last category, the contract is extended only if both the team and the player want it to be; the size of the buy-out typically depends on which side declined the option. But what about combining team and player options in a different way? What if you had, basically, sequential options? So, at Step One, the team gets to exercise an option to just plain keep the player under contract, no questions asked--but, with a very high salary. Maybe even higher than a regular team option would be. If they decline that option, then the player has an option to extend his current contract at a significantly lower salary, or to become a free agent.

For the player, they get most of the benefits of an opt-out/player option, except that some of those benefits are realized not in the form of control over their own destiny but in the form of cash. For the team, it's better than an opt-out, because they have a lot more control if they decide the cash is worth it. And they get the benefit of giving the player something to play for every single year. That could be particularly relevant with someone like Cespedes, where it's rumored that teams don't want to just give him a large guaranteed contract for fear he'll get all Manny/Hanley-esque. This is a way to do that on a truly perpetual basis without giving up the insane amount of control that an opt-out after each year would give up. In principle I could see a contract structured like this over a basically indefinite period, if the dollars were balanced the right way on each side. (This would probably mean that the player option's value would decline substantially after a few years.) It's designed to make each side okay with whatever the other side does at any time. That way, a player and a team who aren't quite comfortable just signing on with each other for a term of six or eight or ten years might nonetheless be willing to sign on to a framework of perpetual tolerable uncertainty covering just such a term.

I feel like this is the logical next step after this off-season's opt-out craze.

The Mets Should Give Cespedes Five Years

Apparently the Nationals are offering Yoenis Cespedes a five-year deal, while the Mets have no interest (reportedly) in going beyond three years. This seems to me an obvious mistake. At 5 years, $100 million (around where the Nationals' offer is believed to be), you're paying Cespedes to be worth under 3 wins above replacement per year. He's been in the Majors for four years. Yearly WAR totals, averaging Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs: 3.4, 1.9, 3.7, 6.5. It's tough to project this guy not to be at least something like a 3.5 win player, if not 4, and if he's that then 5/$100 is an entirely fair contract. Perhaps a bargain. And the funny thing about the reluctance to go longer-term is that the one big concern about Cespedes and the Mets disappears after 2017, because that's when Curtis Granderson's contract expires. At that point, you could quite naturally move Cespedes to right field rather than having to play him primarily in center, and he's a really good defensive corner outfielder.

And I don't actually buy that long-term payroll constraints, and the need to pay their young pitchers, will be that much of a problem. In 2020, the Mets will have the following players under contract at sub-free agency prices: Kevin Plawecki, Domonic Smith, Dilson Herrera, Amed Rosario (as well as several other shortstop types), Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, and (I think) Zack Wheeler. Now, none of these guys with the possible exception of someone like Smith or Rosario would still be making the league minimum; they'd all be in arbitration, many of them in their last round of arbitration. You'll also have David Wright on the books at $12 million that year, because his contract was middle-loaded. Put it all together and I just don't see how having Cespedes under contract at a pretty reasonable rate is going to be a problem for that team. Not if the payroll has actually risen back to a more ordinary level, after what looks like it should be a pretty prolonged period of the team's being really good.

So yeah, if the Nationals sign Cespedes to 5/$105 or something like that, that's just not gonna be okay, and the Mets' reluctance to go that far really does seem to signal that something remains deeply rotten with the team's long-term financial situation.

Bernie Sanders, Continued

Just a brief follow-up to my last post about Bernie Sanders. I suggested there that you need to take on forces like white supremacy and the patriarchy before you can have the kinds of economic reforms Sanders wants to have. That's not quite right; it's not really a strict chronological thing. Which is good, because the fight against white supremacy, the fight against patriarchy: these aren't really fights you win. They're fights you fight, forever if need be. If we can't have progress until those fights are won, well, we'll all be dead before we have any progress. And of course we had things like the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank without vanquishing racism or whatever.

But I do think it's important to understand the fight, and to understand that these seemingly economic fights are also the fight against these various more cultural forms of oppression. And it just occurs to me--indeed, this is the impetus for this post--that not understanding this is what leads an awful lot of Democrats, apparently Sanders among them, to be just dumbfounded as to why poor white people vote Republican. Don't they know it's against their own interests?!? Well, no, maybe because they have a different conception of those interests. This is the Southern Strategy, and it's hardly the fraud Democrats often like to make it out as when we recognize that white Southerns really, really care (many of them, at least) about white supremacy, at least in its relatively more genteel modern forms. Our instinct is to just keep repeating how much better off they'll be economically under our policies, and I think that's probably a big mistake.

I don't know exactly how you fight this fight when you understand it better. Maybe you just recognize that the opposing side is in a long-term demographic decline and content yourself with beating them. I have a feeling this country won't really become the America that it's supposed to be until we actually manage to do something about the whole "white people are awful" thing, though, even if there stop being enough terrible white people to form a viable political party. In any event the demographic decline doesn't really address the sex equality stuff. What I do know, or at least what I believe, is that you can't fight it at all if you don't understand it, and you'll find yourself losing other fights you really just can't fathom why you didn't win.

In Defense of Cautious Football Coaches.

FiveThirtyEight is on a crusade. Well, I guess they're just one of many people on this particular crusade, but since I'm not a football fan they're most of where I encounter it. Specifically it's the crusade to get football coaches to be less conservative in their decision-making about things like punting or going for it on 4th down. Or about two-point conversations. They've got another piece today, arguing that a couple of NFL coaches who made ill-fated decisions in this weekend's playoff games had committed "crimes against middle-school math." This is basically because, in certain situations, you can show using simple math that going for two-point conversations after touchdowns is the correct call by win expectancy, even when failing to convert would mean falling one point short. Roughly speaking that's because you often lose in overtime; to a first approximation it's a 50/50 shot, and if you're on the road it's a lot worse than that. So if you're a road team with something approaching a 50% chance of making your two-point conversion when it would win you the game outright, it's better to go for it.

But I feel like this is missing something: maybe the goal isn't always to maximize win expectancy. This is perhaps the most radical idea in all of sports. Maybe it's even more radical than the whole "maybe we shouldn't really be playing football at all, guys" thing. It's close, anyway. Well, there's a category of things called "sportsmanship," I guess, where it's routine not to maximize win expectancy. But I'm talking more broadly than that. Maybe we care about things other than just the end-of-the-day result. My hypothesized other value in this context is that losing now and losing later are different things. The 538 calculations implicitly treat them as the same, and indeed, one week later they have awfully similar consequences. But it's possible, isn't it, that they're not really the same. And if losing later is better than losing now, then you get something out of the cautious, "wrong" decisions the 538 people inveigh against in exchange for those points of Win Expectancy. You get to keep playing. You get hope, at least a few more minutes of it. Maybe, sometimes, that's worth it.

Now, I don't know anything about football, really, but I do know baseball, and I know that I always breathe an immense sigh of relief whenever the Mets tie up a game. The difference between one run down and a tie is, to me, the most emotionally significant one there is late in games, because it means you're not losing. It means something has to go wrong in order for the game to end with a bad result. Of course, something might go wrong, and if you're not leading then you need something to go right before something goes wrong. (Against the Royals in the World Series, for instance, that felt juts about impossible.) But, phew, not losing is a wonderful feeling. It's the feeling of, okay, we were down 8-1, maybe, but we've just put up a six-run inning--but that seventh run, that's what makes it mean something. That's a multitude of sins washed away; that's a fresh start to the ballgame. The go-ahead run can seem almost unimportant in comparison, even though it's not, really.

Now, baseball isn't football. There's rarely a situation that calls for a genuine strategic choice here, although for what it's worth, in the late innings, if I'm down a run and have a chance to sacrifice-bunt a runner over to third base with one out, I'm gonna do that more often than not, even though it's at best a neutral move from a win probability standpoint, because I'd rather attain that wonderful status of not losing now and worry about the actual winning part later than go for broke now and fail. But maybe similar concerns aren't really felt by football fans. And maybe the immense awesomeness of winning now by going for that two-point conversion with seconds left in the fourth quarter would outweigh them, if ever anyone would try to do it. But the point, really, is just that it's a little too simple to do the win probability analysis and call it a day. There might be things besides just who wins and who loses at the end of the day that matters.

The Mets lost the World Series. They lost it despite having led in the late innings of four of five games; they could almost as easily have won the series in five games. And in Game 5, Matt Harvey was pitching the game of his life. For eight innings. Eight glorious, shut-out, five-hit innings. With nine strikeouts. But then came the ninth inning. The team was up 2-0, Harvey had thrown 102 pitches, and the Mets had Jeurys Familia, ace closer, waiting in the bullpen. Terry Collins brought Harvey back out to start the ninth. He walked Lorenzo Cain, I believe after a few close calls that he maybe should've had. Then Cain stole second and Eric Hosmer doubled. Familia came in and got three ground-ball outs, and indeed, had Lucas Duda made a routine throw home on the second of them, the game would've ended. But he missed, and Hosmer scored, and the Royals went on to beat up Addison Reed and Bartolo Colon in the 12th to claim the Series.

It's easy to criticize Terry Collins there for making the wrong move. And maybe, in a pure win-maximization sense, he did. But Mike Francesa did a segment about it the next day, plus or minus a weekend or two, and said, look. Collins chose to trust his player. He put his faith in Matt Harvey, who had pitched lights-out with all his heart that day. And it backfired. But isn't that what sports is all about? We're here to see great players do incredible things, are we not? Matt Harvey completing that game would have been legendary. (To my mind, the first eight innings still deserve to be legendary; they sure were amazing to watch.) Isn't it a better world where managers will put their faith in their greatest players and give them the chance to do incredible things, even when that doesn't make the most sense, then where they meticulously hew to what some probability chart tells them about optimal strategy?

I found that segment incredibly moving, and it helped me find a real sense of peace about the fact that the Mets lost the Series. Now, I still don't think I agree with Collins' managing: I would absolutely have brought Harvey back out for the ninth, but the leash would have been precisely one baserunner. After that first walk I would absolutely have brought Familia in, no questions asked. That, to me, would have struck the right balance between putting your faith in your player and still also doing what's necessary to win. But Francesa helped me remember that it isn't, it shouldn't be, all about winning. That way lies becoming the Yankees. Sports, ultimately, is entertainment, and we should play the game in a way that's fun, even if that sometimes means losing when we could have won. There are worse fates.

I don't know if this is what's going on in these football contexts, but I wish the public discourse on the issue would at least consider the possibility.

On the Hyde Amendment, Single-Payer, Bernie Sanders, and Socialism

Hillary Clinton recently called for repealing the Hyde Amendment, the federal law which prohibits federal funds from being spent on abortion. That is, among other things, surprisingly radical for a candidate most known for her cautious, calculating, pragmatic manner. It's also interesting because Bernie Sanders, the generally more radical candidate opposing her, has not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, come out in favor of repealing the Hyde Amendment. Which is funny, when you think about it, because Sanders is thoroughly pro-choice, and of course is most notorious these days for his proposed single-payer health care system. In which the federal government would pay for all the health care.

But if the Hyde Amendment is still around, then that won't include abortion.

At best this would lead to a market for supplemental abortion insurance, or just to women paying for abortion out of pocket. That's the at-best scenario, and it's pretty much a nightmare from a reproductive rights perspective. The worst-case scenario would be if private insurance, and maybe even private out-of-pocket purchase of medical treatment, were actually outlawed, which would effectively outlaw abortion itself. (That would almost certainly be unconstitutional under current doctrine, certainly as to abortion and maybe more generally.)

So, the first thing to say about all this is that someone needs to ask Bernie Sanders about the Hyde Amendment. Like, yesterday. But that's not really the crux of the issue: he'll almost certainly say he supports repealing it. He assuredly does support it on the merits, and there's no great political loss to admitting it.

The deeper issue, I think, is what it says about him that he didn't think of this when he was drafting his proposal. Because, it's a big issue. In a single-payer system, every aspect of medical treatment is subject to intense politicization, and this is a country where that could get seriously problematic, very fast. This is actually one of the virtues of the liberal-capitalist order: it's very good at letting people decide what they want for themselves, and having there be people willing to give it to them (so long as they can afford it--aye, there's the rub), even if other people aren't too happy about that. Single-payer, even if it allowed private insurance around the margins, would complicate that happy "live and let live (if you're not poor)" picture a lot. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth doing; that "if you're not poor" part is a really big problem. But it's not just a fantasy issue. It's a genuine cost to achieving an awful lot of good, and Sanders shows no sign of recognizing that it must be paid. This is for me the big issue with the fact that, at certain points in the past, he wanted to let the states administer the new single-payer system. Really, Bernie Sanders? An awful lot of states would make decisions about what should and should not be covered that you would really not like. He's backed off that position for now, but the lack of attention to the analogous issues at the federal level, e.g. the Hyde Amendment, doesn't give me a ton of confidence that he understands the real problem here, or has good ideas for what to do about it.

And then of course there's just the fact that the politicization of medicine would add an entirely different dimension to the fight. Paul Krugman has been talking a bunch lately about how it's tough to get a single-payer system from where we are because it really would impose losses on a bunch of important stakeholders. Well, once you remember that the Hyde Amendment exists we've got a whole other fight on our hands. There's been controversy in recent years about requiring employers to provide insurance that covers contraceptives. Imagine the explosion that would ensue if we proposed to have the federal government cover the full cost of abortions for everyone. Which is not to say that we shouldn't do it! We should, in an ideal world. This is a fight that deserves to be won. That's slightly different, though, from saying that it would be won, or even that the victory would be worth the fight.* 

More to the point, perhaps, is that Sanders does not seem to anticipate that fight, or the others like it that would surely come. And this has me thinking about a recent Ta-Nehesi Coates article and its discussion of the view that Sanders and his ideological comrades have toward racial justice issues:

"[Sanders sees] black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.

This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible."

My feeling about this is that it's almost the other way around. It's not that adopting socialism would make racism and its effects disappear. It's that racism itself, as a separate and distinct ideology, is a big part of what's stopping us from being more socialistic. There was some research, which I could probably dig up if I wanted to spend a bit of time on it, trying to figure out why, descriptively, causally, why the United States has such a meager welfare system. Ultimately the study concluded that it's all about race, or more specifically racism: American whites don't have solidarity with black people, and therefore resent having their wealth redistributed to black people in a way that middle-class Germans don't resent having their wealth given to poorer Germans. (Interestingly we can see a related phenomenon playing out in the European Union right now; it turns out the Germans and the French don't have that much solidarity with the Greeks after all, and therefore experience a similar resentment and a reluctance to support the much-poorer people of Greece.)

And similarly with issues of sex and gender. There's a lot about the social democratic agenda that is deeply threatening to the patriarchy, there really is. Just as there is with white supremacy. Someone like Sanders is right about that. But he seems to assume that this means we should focus our energy on attacking Capital (capitalized for sinister emphasis, of course), and that when we defeat it, all those identity-politics fights will take care of themselves. But I feel like if you don't appreciate the independent power of the patriarchy, of white supremacy, in American political life, then you won't appreciate the true nature of the struggle to make America better. And you'll lose. Because you'll rush headlong at the one enemy you're focused on and let yourself be surrounded by the other armies in their coalition. Better to attack each of those allies--whose support Capital needs but to whose defense Capital cannot necessarily come--in turn, and then leave the main enemy weakened and alone. But defeating white supremacy, defeating the patriarchy, that's a massive undertaking. It'll take years, decades really. Maybe generations. And it's not a fight that Bernie Sanders seems to see himself as fighting. Hillary Clinton does, if in an incremental way (though her opposition to the Hyde Amendment is impressively bold).

And that, I guess, is the socialist case for voting Hillary.



*Perhaps my favorite part of that fight would be the inevitable court case arguing that covering abortion in the single-payer system violated religious freedom. Because the logic there is damn near identical to the similar claims being made about mandated private insurance in a case like Hobby Lobby, but if we move it to the context of a government program then it becomes obviously absurd. There's no right to have the government not spend its money on things you disapprove of for religious reasons; that's absurd. We can tax you, and once we tax you it's not your money anymore. (The one exception is that we can't spend it actually supporting religious institutions you don't support, per the Establishment Clause.)

The Historical Argument for Ted Cruz's Eligibility

Rafael Edward Cruz, a.k.a. Ted Cruz, the current leading actual-politician in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, was born in Canada. It is contended by some that this makes him ineligible to be President. Well, okay, the issue has been thrust into the spotlight by troll extraordinaire Donald Trump, who's managed not to actually make the argument himself, rather alluding to its existence as a potential complication should the Republicans nominate Cruz. (His subsequent argument that Cruz should seek a declaratory judgment settling the issue once and for all is (a) a truly masterful piece of trolling, and (b) the most attention the law of remedies has had since the Kim Davis saga, teehee.) Anyway the thrust of the argument is that the Constitution limits the Presidency to "natural born Citizen[s]." What does this mean? Who knows. But perhaps it means only people who were born on American soil. And Cruz wasn't.

Under this reading, the fact that his mother was from Delaware, and hence an American citizen by the Fourteenth Amendment, and that Cruz was therefore* an American citizen from birth, is immaterial. Under any other reading it probably isn't. So the question becomes, is this reading the correct one? (Spoiler alert: no, it is not.) This legal question has a funny and oft-overlooked relationship to the whole Obama birther debate, because even if Obama really was born in Kenya, so long as we don't dispute his mother's identity then he would be in the same position Cruz is in now. Birtherism, that is to say, relies not only on a flatly-wrong view of the facts, but also on a rather extreme view of the law. Nobody really brought this up back when birtherism was a thing.

And so, you see, this puts liberals in a funny situation. We all think it's hilarious that Trump is trolling Cruz this way. But it's a little awkward for us to, like, join in the fun. Because, y'know, we think this kind of thinking is repugnant. What's a poor liberal to do? Ah, the good ol' hypocrisy gambit, by which things that aren't fair game become fair game against people who think they should be fair game (e.g. homophobic Republicans who just happen to be gay). In this context it works by asserting that the narrow reading of "natural-born citizen" I described above would be correct under an originalist theory, that Cruz favors originalism, and that therefore, in Ted Cruz's own opinion, Ted Cruz is ineligible to be President. This also serves, for those among us who enjoy this sort of thing (e.g. Fordham Law professor Thomas Lee), as a convenient way to get in a few pot-shots against originalism. It's reminiscent, in that way, of Erwin Chemerinsky's argument from a few weeks ago that, under an originalist theory, women can't be President. I don't like that sort of thing. I didn't like it when Chemerinsky did it, and I don't like it now.

Because, you see, it turns out that the correct historical approach to this problem reaches the same damn result as every other kind of argument: yes, Ted Cruz can be President. I'm not gonna do exactly what I did last time, running through the modalities in turn, because the issue doesn't seem to have that kind of shape to me. Rather, I'm going to discuss two arguments, each of which weaves together several modalities. They reach the same conclusion, but one of them is pointedly anti-originalist and the other, y'know, isn't.