The Deserving 2013 MLB Award Winners

Yesterday I wrote a post giving my opinion on the 2013 Silver Slugger Awards. (Spoiler: J.J. Hardy should not have been in the conversation, let alone won his.) Today I'll do the same thing for the six main end-of-year MLB awards: the MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year Awards in each league, which have not yet been announced, though the identities of the top 3 vote-getters for each award have been made public in a totally lame attempt to build hype. As for Manager of the Year, well, there's no actual objective way to assess it, so who cares? Analysis below the fold.

The Deserving Silver Sluggers

It's baseball awards season again, which means it's time for some blog posts by this random baseball fan about who should've won various awards. Comeback Player of the Year doesn't really merit its own post, though. Rivera was obvious, and for the NL, well, I thought Marlon Byrd was a really good candidate but part of what he was coming back from was a PED suspension, so I can't really complain about the Liriano pick. (Fun fact, though, this was Liriano's second win!) No, this post is about the Silver Sluggers, which are being announced as I start typing but will be done getting announced by the time I'm done. So I'll say both who did win and who should've won. Note that the award doesn't distinguish between the different outfield positions, just giving three awards to "outfielders" generally, but I'll try to give one to a center fielder in each league unless that's just implausible. The stats I'll be referring to generally are the basic average/on-base/slugging line, home runs, doubles, triples for relevant players, runs scored and driven in, weighted on-base average (wOBA), weighted runs created (wRC), adjuted wRC (or wRC+), and batting runs above average. Those last few are Fangraphs creations that use linear weights to determine the offensive value of each plate appearance. I've never really worked with unadjusted wRC before, but it seems like it might be a decent way of measuring just pure aggregate production. We'll see!

Republican Denial of Tactical Reality, An Example

I recently wrote a post arguing that the shutdown is simply the clearest yet manifestation of what we liberal types have known for a long time, namely that Republicans are unfit to govern, and that their unfitness is largely due to the takeover of their entire mentalities by the "reality-based community" thing, including the strategic parts of those mentalities. Well here's a nice Dave Weigel post about how Republicans simply do not believe that the shutdown is hurting them politically. Which it is. You cannot look at the bulk of the polling data and claim otherwise. Hell, there aren't very many individual polls you can look at and claim otherwise. And this is a big problem: if Republicans really believed that they're doing damage to their party, and maybe that it's long-term damage that won't be easily undone, they'd have an incentive to back the hell off before it gets any worse. But they don't believe that, so there's no incentive. A blind man driving toward a cliff doesn't know to stop, and if he won't even listen to his sighted passenger that there's a goddamn cliff half a mile in front of them, well... you're in trouble.

Wait, What? John Boehner Edition

So I saw the headlines with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) saying that not threatening to blow up the government's finances by failing to raise the debt limit would be "surrender." But I didn't appreciate the context. Apparently the point is that Obama suggested that, if Republicans really wanted to negotiate about stuff, they should fund the government long enough and extend the debt limit far enough to cover the negotiation period. Boehner said that this would be "unconditional surrender" for the Republicans, and that our government doesn't work like that. (I.e., with unconditional surrender by one side the precondition to have negotiations.) Never mind that, you know, if there were no statutory debt ceiling and even if the appropriations process were such that government shutdowns didn't happen, the House Republicans control a crucial veto point of the U.S. government and would therefore have plenty in their arsenal going forward. Nuclear disarmament is not the same thing as unconditional surrender if you maintain your fleet of fighter jets and big ol' conventional bombs, after all.

No, what flabergasts me about this quote is that what Obama is proposing would be completely pointless from the good-guy point of view, which is to say, it wouldn't actually involve disarming the Republicans at all. It's like the broader point about how you can't, you can't, you can't negotiate over the debt limit because if you do you cement a pattern of brinksmanship over it that will inevitably end in financial armageddon, only in fast-motion. The threat would go from "we'll blow up the world tomorrow!" to "we'll blow up the world next week!" Great. That's real unconditional surrender, guys. You're not surrendering anything. You're surrendering one week of world-non-blown-up, and presumably if you win the battle then in the end it won't matter exactly how many weeks it took before you did so. I might be missing something here, although honestly between myself and John Boehner I trust the analytical abilities of the former a whole hell of a lot more, but if I'm not missing anything, John Boehner is saying that holstering his nuclear gun, in the full knowledge that, unless his adversary does what he wants, he'll be able to take it out again in an hour or whatever, constitutes unconditional surrender. Holstering might even be the wrong analogy because it suggests that the other guys could overpower him or something; it's like lowering the gun to where it's pointing at the other guy's feet instead of his chest. And the other guy doesn't have a gun. Surrender! Surrender, I say!

Seriously, you can't make this shit up.

Nope, Sorry, That's Not What That Is

Here's a headline from Huffington Post. I choose them not because I think they're worse than any other more-or-less conventional media types, but because I read them a lot. Anyway the headline is "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling 'Stalemate'." Curious whether that was actually true, I clicked on it and read the first, I dunno, sentence or so of the article. It's not true. His proposed 'solution' is "for the president to come to the table." That's not a solution. It's not a solution in part because the Republicans have spent literally the entire past calendar year refusing, as a matter of principle more than of strategy, to hold budget negotiations with the Democrats. It's not a solution in part because it so reeks of the highwayman in Lincoln's great anecdote, who tells the person he's robbing at gunpoint, "stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer." But it's mostly not a solution because it doesn't acknowledge the fundamental long-term game theory of this situation. If Obama comes to the table and negotiates, and the negotiations are successful, on their own terms at least, he has all but ensured that the debt limit breach will eventually occur, whatever exactly it will entail. Once debt limit hostage-brinksmanship becomes the normal way that divided governments do their budget negotiations, it becomes a matter of statistical certainty that eventually one of those showdowns will lead to the fuse running out and the bomb going off. Negotiating is not a way to end the problem. There could've been things Paul Ryan could have said, without making us suspicious about supernatural possession or something, that would have been proposed solutions to the problem. I'm thinking of some kind of budget deal that included a provision repealing the existence of the statutory debt limit, i.e. giving Treasury unlimited borrowing authority as needed to full the budget deficit. Making a deal under those circumstances would genuinely be better than hitting the limit now, because though it would be capitulation to threat it would be capitulation in exchange for melting down the weapon, thereby ensuring no analogous future threats.

But let's consider it proven that what Paul Ryan is "proposing" here is not a solution to the crisis. Not even a potential solution. This makes the Huffington Post headline wrong. Factually, objectively wrong. A correct headline would've been something like "Paul Ryan Proposes Something He Claims Would Solve the Debt Ceiling Stalemate." Okay, that's overly wordy, but someone more experienced writing news headlines than I could probably improve it. The point is that the only sense in which "the President should come to the table" is a solution is the sense in which Paul Ryan claims it to be one. That it is entirely his assertion that this would work is integral to conveying what he was saying. Or to put it another way, if the headline as written were true it would be huge news. What actually happened is the epitome of non-news. That's not even a matter of, like, subjective ideological/partisan interpretation, it's just true, and the Huffington Post is acknowledging it to be true by placing this story way below their monster mega-story at the top about the debt ceiling. "Paul Ryan Reiterates Silly GOP Talking Point" is barely worth telling anyone. "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling Stalemate" could be the story that heralds the end of the constitutional crisis of 2013, as well as signal the bizarre transformation of the most problematic member of the House of Representatives. That the headline as written also implies a certain level of reasonableness on Ryan's part is also a problem, no doubt, but if Ryan were actually being as reasonable as the headline suggests that wouldn't be problematic. But he isn't, and it's just plain factually true that he isn't, and it's irresponsible to write headlines that say, not just imply or suggest but say otherwise

We Told You So

If you ask people whether the Iraq War was a mistake, most of them will say that it was. Like, two-thirds or more of them will say that. If you ask in 2013, at least. But if you asked people in 2003 whether they supported the war while it was starting up, most of them said they did. Only a few radical liberal types opposed it. You'd think that the fact that most people now agree with the substantive position they were advancing ten years ago would have had some sort of vindicating effect. Nope. As Paul Krugman likes to say, "it remains true ... that for the most part you’re not considered serious about national security unless you were wrong about Iraq." Apparently having been right is not a sufficient defense to the charge of having been a liberal dissident from a mainstream center-right consensus.

Well, it looks like the liberal dissidents might get proven right again. As Krugman himself notes, not surprisingly, the supposedly neutral political establishment has long just sort of assumed that Republicans were highly competent at governing, that they were the party of hard-nosed pragmatists to the Democrats' well-meaning but ineffectual idealists. But now the Republicans have shut down the government. In what they practically admit is a temper tantrum. Competence! No, what we're seeing this week is a party that is fundamentally unfit to be even a small part of the business of governance. And this is not even one tiny bit of a surprise to those of us who've been paying attention the last decade-plus. By which I mean, of course, liberal dissidents. We've been saying that the Republicans were unfit to govern since, well, since forever, but especially since the events of the Bush Administration.

The key, I think, lies in two realizations. First, that Republicans honestly don't care about doing government well. They may even be ideologically hostile to it. After all, according to Saint Ronald, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Government is never the solution, just the problem when it tries to be the solution. So why bother trying? Or more to the point, governing competently provides strong empirical evidence rebutting the central claim of Republican ideology, namely that there's no such thing as competent government. Much better to bungle things, or even better, not to deliberately bungle things but to put people in positions of power who are woefully unsuited for them, with bungling the inevitable result, and then talk about how the government always bungles everything!

That's the substantive reason why Republicans are unfit to govern; the other is tactical. Among the virtues of democratic politics is supposed to be that it provides incentives to the greedy, unprincipled politician nevertheless to do the right thing, because doing the right thing keeps you in power. It's sort of like the way capitalism claims to harness private self-interest to create common good, and about as successful, namely, somewhat in general but with gaping exceptions. But that requires, well, rational self-interest on the part of our greedy, unprincipled politicians. Republicans, however, have bought their own hype, specifically the "reality-based community" hype. Here's that passage again, from the original Ron Suskind article:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

I don't really have cause to analyze this quote afresh. For my purposes the point is that this kind of thinking has crept from the substantive areas of Republican thinking, and in particular the foreign policy substantive areas, to the strategic and tactical areas. The far-right flank of the Congressional Republican Party, in making its demands of leadership as to how they conduct themselves in dealing with the rest of the government, does not draw on, you know, reality. There's not even an attempt to understand what actions will lead to what consequences. It's government by slogan, except it's not just government by slogan, it's maneuvering by slogan. And the thing about detaching yourself from reality is that you don't actually escape it, and sooner or later reality comes back to bite you in the ass. Hard.

For the "are Republicans fit to govern?" purpose, though, the crucial thing is that you won't see it coming. If you truly escape the reality-based community, you lose the ability to know when you're about to make a huge mistake. Hell, you sort of commit in advance to not knowing when you're about to make a huge mistake. That would be listening to the evidence, after all, which is apparently a sign of weakness. So you make huge mistakes, which is to say, you don't avoid the kinds of behavior that will be even a predictable disaster. The combination of these two features is that Republicans have no inherent interest in governing well and lack even the capacity to understand their supposed incentives to do so anyway. That's a dangerous combination, and it all adds up to being deeply and fundamentally unfit to govern. And people like me have known about this since, well, since the reality-based community thing, and since Hurricane Katrina at least. And we've been saying it. Finally, finally the Republicans have misbehaved badly enough that some mainstream types are noticing their fundamental unsoundness, perhaps on the same scale as what happened during Katrina.

So on behalf of we liberal dissidents, who have seen through the Republican Party all these years and whose positions reality has almost inexorably born out over time, and who never ever get credit for having been right, and who are never ever considered to maybe, just maybe, be right the next time too, I just want to say, we told you so.

The Shutdown, Presidentialism, and the Constitutional Crisis This Time

There have been three great political and constitutional transformations in our nation's history. The first covered the period from 1776 to 1789, during which the country declared and then won its independence and eventually settled on a particular form of government, a federal constitution. The next covered the period from, let's say, 1857 (though the starting-point is kind of arbitrary since it had been building for a long time; 1861 would be perhaps a more conventional answer) through 1870. This was, obviously, the slavery crisis, during which the country fought a whole bloody war to answer the question of whether it would keep having slavery. The third was the Great Depression, with the true constitutional crisis period lasting roughly from 1929 through 1937, though the economic difficulties lasted a while longer. The first two were separated by approximately seventy years; the latter two were separated by approximately sixty or seventy years. Projecting forward seventy years from the last one gets you... a few years ago. Or, to put it another way, if you buy this rough extrapolation (which you probably shouldn't, it's incredibly crude), we're about due for a constitutional crisis. Maybe overdue.

Notice anything that could be called a constitutional crisis?

If so, you're not the only one. The federal government is currently shut down. In a couple of weeks it will, unless something happens to change this, hit the statutory debt limit, after which it will not be allowed to sell government bonds to raise revenue to cover the gap between tax revenues and spending obligations. No one knows what happens if that happens. Maybe worldwide financial chaos and depression. Maybe President Obama just ignores the debt limit, which might avert the former and would definitely trigger a full-blown constitutional crisis in its place. One way or another, it won't be pretty. All of this is, of course, happening because the party which controls one of two Houses of Congress, and does not control the White House, has decided that it will refuse to participate in averting these catastrophes until and unless the President basically enacts the entire policy platform of the man he just convincingly beat to secure his re-election. Or maybe even until he enacts something even more ideologically extreme than that, i.e. more extreme than this party's own primary process could endorse. This is, uh, a constitutional crisis. Right on schedule.

It's been building for a while, although fairly few of us have seen it coming particularly long in advance. Some, however, say it could've been foreseen a very long time in advance. Say, two-hundred years or more. As Matt Yglesias details in this post, eminent political scientist Juan Linz spent his life crafting a persuasive argument that presidential democracies are inherently unstable. Essentially this is because, in a parliamentary system, there is only one Government. That is to say, the party with the majority in Parliament just plain governs, with all the powers and responsibilities that entails. If they screw it up, they lose the next election, and the other party (or maybe a new one) gets a chance at the whole "governing" thing. In a presidential system, on the other hand, there are two independent political powers within the government, each with a claim to democratic legitimacy: the President and the legislature. What happens if they don't get along? What happens if they really, really don't get along, such that they cannot between the two of them govern? Linz says there's just no way to resolve that dispute consistent with the principles of democracy, so something else, typically the whims of the military, has to choose a winner. Steve Calabresi, my former professor and perhaps the foremost champion of presidential government, makes a number of good points about the weaknesses of Linz's case, for instance that most of the examples he cites are Latin American countries without a strong judiciary that can act as a potential dispute-settler between the political branches. Still, the current crisis in Washington looks an awful lot like a Linz-style collapse of presidential government, right?

What I'd Like to See

Republicans are, as we all know, currently refusing to pass an appropriations bill keeping the government funded. "Why are they doing this?" you might ask, if you were from another planet or something. Here on earth we know they're doing it because they want to repeal/defund/delay/whatever "Obamacare," also known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In normal-person speak, one translation of that sentence would be that they are inflicting this suffering upon the world in service of the cause of denying health care coverage to poor people, and protecting rich people from marginally higher marginal taxes. To most of us, that sounds bad! But Republicans, to their, I dunno, credit, don't put it that way. They say they're doing this because Obamacare is destroying the economy. So here's what I'd like to see:

Will somebody, anybody, please just ask them how Obamacare is ruining the country?

Like, literally, go up to John Boehner or Ted Cruz or Mike Lee or Paul Ryan or whoever and just say, "how is the Affordable Care Act hurting the economy?" And when they say something like "it's destroying jobs" or whatever, keep asking, how? And don't stop until you've got an answer at least as concrete as, say, the standard Democratic explanation for how austerity is destructive in a depressed economy.

Oh wait, you won't get that. Because there isn't one. So maybe I should specify an alternate termination condition, lest this hypothetical reporter be stuck saying "but how?" forever. Let's say, until you get that kind of answer, or, more realistically, they a) tell you to fuck off, or go fuck yourself, or whatever; or b) some non-profane version of (a). In other words, until they implicitly concede that they haven't got an answer. I can't think of any other end-point. Behind all the nonsense about "job-killing regulations" or whatever, there just isn't any specific causal mechanism in mind. And that's stunning. Republicans have shut down the United States government and are prepared to create a situation in which the government has no legal way to pay its legal obligations, with the possible result of massive and irreversible global financial calamity, on the grounds that all of that is worth it to stop one terrible law that's destroying the country. And they cannot tell you how the law is destroying the country. They can only assert that it is. It's staggering.

You've Got It Backwards, Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan (R-WI) is right about something. No, really! Well, he's kind of right about it. Let's say he's right about the magnitude, but wrong about the direction. Or something.

Here's what he's right about: the ongoing government shutdown should, in its resolution, be connected to the upcoming debt ceiling we-can't-cope-with-the-fact-that-we've-breached-this-months-ago problem. Here's what he's got backwards: he thinks the debt ceiling should resolve the shutdown. That is, his expectation is that the crisis of the shutdown all by itself won't be enough to force an agreement, and that a resolution will only come as part of the negotiations around the debt ceiling in a couple of weeks. Or, to put it another way, he as a leader of the Republican Party doesn't plan to stop being so insane about everything just because of a little ol' shutdown, and he plans on stringing things out long enough for the threat of an imminent debt ceiling calamity to make Obama back down. One manufactured crisis isn't getting it done, so he's gonna try for two of 'em piled on top of each other.

What should happen, of course, is that sometime in the next few days pressure from constituents should force Republicans to back down. Apparently there's polling showing a nine-point lead in the generic Congressional ballot for the Democrats; if that were to happen in November 2014, say hello (again) to Speaker Pelosi. And probably a ton of Democratic state legislatures who would hopefully mid-decade redistrict the shit out of things. Republicans, in other words, ought to start getting scared. And when they're sufficiently scared, Obama and the Democrats must say to them, we're not letting you out of this until you take the other ticking time bomb off the table. In other words, when they pass a continuing resolution to end the shutdown, it had bloody well better raise or eliminate or suspend the statutory debt limit. And no, that isn't unreasonable; if a "clean" CR passes, without dealing with the debt limit, then the whole shutdown won't have settled anything, and the whole "Republicans threaten to blow up the world in a revolutionary attempt to upend the entire constitutional order" thing will still be very much alive. And that's the problem, not the shutdown. I mean, it's a problem too. Tells you something about the times we live in that a government shutdown is not the problem right now. But it really isn't, and if it causes Republicans to get scared enough that they have to surrender, that surrender had better deal with the actual problem.

So yes, Paul Ryan, the debt limit and the shutdown should get resolved together. But that's not because the shutdown should keep going until it gets reinforcements from the debt ceiling crisis, forcing Obama to enact the Romney agenda once and for all. It's because once your side is forced to concede, and to put down the gun, it should have to hand over both of its guns, especially the bigger one. There's no point half-disarming a hostage taker.

Why I Voted For Rush Holt

Earlier today I voted in the New Jersey Democratic Party primary election for the upcoming special election to the Senate seat vacated by the death of best-New-Jersey-politician-ever Frank Lautenberg. I voted for Rush Holt, who is currently my Congressman. Rush Holt is not going to win; the latest poll had him at 15%, competitive for second place with Rep. Frank Pallone (17%) but miles behind Newark Mayor Cory Booker who's at 54%. In a couple of months Booker will face Republican Steve Lonegan (who was Tea Party before it was cool) in the general election, and I will happily vote for him. I like Cory Booker. But I didn't vote for him, and I wish he weren't going to win. Here's why.

Thoughts on the Mets Opening Day Roster

So, there's quite a bit of time left for things to shake out on this front, but I thought I'd look over the Mets' Spring Training so far and see how I would construct a 25-man roster if a) I were the GM, and b) camp were ending right now. In part this is inspired by the really, really good inning Pedro Feliciano just pitched. I'll say who I'd take north with the big-league club, and also what changes I'd be expecting to make or try to make over the course of the season. Note that I'm assuming that the injuries to Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Johan Santana, and Frank Francisco will keep them off the field on Opening Day, but that the injury to Daniel Murphy will not.

The U.S. World Baseball Classic Roster

Here was the United States team's lineup from tonight's World Baseball Classic game against Puerto Rico:

Jimmy Rollins, SS, Switch
Brandon Phillips, 2B, Right
Ryan Braun, LF, Right
Joe Mauer, C, Left
David Wright, 3B, Right
Eric Hosmer, 1B, Left
Adam Jones, CF, Right
Giancarlo Stanton, RF, Right
Ben Zobrist, DH, Switch

Here's how the lineup should've looked, with these same nine players:

Rollins
Mauer
Braun
Stanton
Wright
Jones
Zobrist
Hosmer
Phillips

Giancarlo Stanton hit 37 home runs last year, in 123 games; he led the majors in slugging percentage at .608; he'll almost certainly get to 100 career home runs by Memorial Day of this year, at the ripe old age of 23-and-a-half. Not quite the youngest ever to 100 HR's, but if he puts up, say, 47 of them this year, and gets to 140, it'd be the fourth-most ever by a player though their age-23 season. Ahead of him? Eddie Mathews, Mel Ott, and Alex Rodriguez. If Stanton only hits another 37, he'll also be behind Frank Robinson and Ken Griffey, Jr. If he gets hurt, or something, and only hits 27, he'll still be ahead of everyone except those guys and Ted Williams, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Gonzalez, and Mickey Mantle. Oh, and Stanton started in his age 20 season, along with only Mathews, Robinson, Williams, and Cepeda from that list. Point is, the dude's good. And he was hitting eighth. Behind a guy who slugged, yeah, slugged .359 last year, and .411 on his career. This was an insane lineup. I cannot conceive any rational reason to order these nine players as Torre did.

Now, they won, because these are eight very good hitters and Eric Hosmer. Actually they won because David Wright, apparently a.k.a. Captain America, kicked some serious ass. But they did it with some seriously weird lineup ordering. I suppose he put Mauer clean-up because he's a lefty, to break up Braun and Wright. But that stuff doesn't matter as much as the fact that Mauer doesn't hit for much power, while, say, Stanton does.

By the way, I ran these players' career numbers through a lineup analysis tool that only considers OBP and SLG. It spat out the following as the best lineup: Mauer/Braun/Rollins/Stanton/Wright/Jones/Phillips/Hosmer/Zobrist. Now, it doesn't consider stuff about speed, which is why I'd put Rollins lead-off and shift Mauer and Braun down one. Also, apparently the #3 spot in the lineup isn't as important as people think, according to highly advanced statistics? Other than that, the only difference is flipping Zobrist and Phillips, which I'm not committed to. The top 12 lineups all had Stanton hitting clean-up, and Mauer leading off (due to his awesome OBP). Wright and Braun flip-flip between 2 and 5. Hosmer's almost always #8; Zobrist is almost always #9. The rest of it is pretty much tossed around from one to the next. Note that the "best" lineup is projected for 5.758 runs per game, Joe Torre's actual lineup is projected for 5.517 runs per game, and my desired lineup is projected for 5.636 runs per game. Over a 162-game season, that's the difference between 933 runs, 894 runs, and 913 runs. Between best and worst, that's four wins, which is non-trivial (though this lineup would kick some serious ass in the real league, of course).

Just for fun I thought I'd see what happens if I replace Hosmer with, say, Prince Fielder. My inclination in that case would be to go with a lineup of Rollins/Mauer/Braun/Fielder/Stanton/Wright/Jones/Phillips/Zobrist, which they project for 5.886 runs per game, a.k.a. 953 runs per 162. Their favorite lineup would project for 6.034 runs per game, i.e. 977 runs per season. So, with an optimal lineup (according to them), Fielder is a 3.4-win upgrade over Hosmer on offense alone. With my sense of a sensible lineup, he's a 4-win upgrade. Hosmer's an enormous problem on this team, is the basic idea.

Anyway, just some fun with Joe Torre's horrible lineup management skillz on display at the WBC. I'm not the world's biggest opponent of traditionalist lineup-setting philosophies, particularly the idea that you want a speedy leadoff hitter, but I think it's interesting just how bad that lineup was.

2013 MLB All-Star Speculation

So, as baseball season gradually ramps up, I thought I'd indulge in some rampant speculation about who'll be the starting position players for the All-Star Game. Obviously there's a pretty high margin of error on these predictions, but I think for the starting lineups there's a fair degree that can be said well in advance.

Citizen Obama

So, that was a pretty good speech. Not one of his entries in the annals of great American rhetoric, but a very solid group of policy proposals with some very nice philosophical defense of liberalism sprinkled in. Of course, none of the stuff will happen, but it's nice to see him advocating good stuff nonetheless.

The thing I noticed in particular, though, was the continuation of Obama's "citizen" theme. I don't remember whether it was in the Inaugural or some slightly previous speech, but there was a nice long passage about citizenship at some point over the past couple of months. (Possibly his election victory speech, actually.) I like this because it's more than a mere ideological philosophy (though those are good too), it's an actual political philosophy. And it's an important one. I don't have a lot of original stuff to say on the subject, but I've been thinking over the course of the past couple of days about how categorically different democratic government and non-democratic government are. In fact, I think that describing them that way is misleading. It makes it sound like they're two somewhat different ways of doing the same thing, "government." That's wrong. Democratic governance is, ultimately, the process by which the peoples of a nation come together to make decisions about the direction of their society. Non-democratic "governance" is when some completely random person, or group of persons, who happens to have a lot of dudes with guns loyal to and/or paid by him (it's usually, but not always, a him), sets up in the middle of some country and tells everyone in said country that, if they don't do exactly what this "sovereign" says, they'll be killed. Those aren't the same thing at all.

Phil's Dominant Week

Okay, the week isn't officially over yet, but the bookmakers at Ladbrokes are giving Phil Mickelson 1/14 odds, i.e. predicting that he'd win the Waste Management Phoenix Open 14 out of 15 times from this position. It's about as close to being over before it's over as a golf tournament can be. That, not surprisingly, is a bit of a testament to how good Phil Mickelson has been playing this week. He's at -24, and holds a six-shot lead over Brandt Snedeker. He's led the tournament wire-to-wire thus far, opening with a 60 that could've easily been a 59, following it up with a 65 that could've been a whole lot better had he not driven the ball into the water on 18, and adding a 64 today to effectively put this thing away. In fact, it's felt like every single day Phil's had one of the best rounds of the entire field. And he has! In fact, it's kind of impressive how well he's been doing compared to the best round anyone else has had.

Perhaps the 2013 Mets Won't Utterly Suck?

Lots of baseball news today! Much, but not all, of it is sort of bad from a Mets fan's perspective. Scott Hairston signed with the Chicago Cubs, on a very reasonable deal covering 2 years for $6 million. He'd've been a very nice addition to our outfield as a platoon player/pinch-hitter, since we have no right-handed outfielders. The Atlanta Braves, meanwhile, have pulled off a trade for Justin Upton, giving them an outfield consisting of J. Upton, B.J. Upton, and Jason Heyward. J's all around! Now, it was probably a bad trade, i.e. they gave up too much (namely Martin Prado, their presumptive third baseman, who'll be replaced by a platoon of bad hitters, and Randall Delgado, a top pitching prospect, among others). Still, it will probably make the 2013 Braves marginally tougher.

However, the Mets have made a couple of interesting moves and/or rumblings today that make me think they're not giving up on this season. First, they signed Shaun Marcum. This is a move that, in my opinion, makes zero sense if the front office isn't trying to put together a contender this year. The Mets have half a dozen young pitchers, any one of whom might turn out to be a good Major League starter. If they're playing 2013 for the future, let Mejia and Hefner and McHugh and the like spend the season revolving through that fifth starter's spot. Eventually Zack Wheeler will come up, and either replace an injured/traded Santana or solidify the fifth rotation spot. If, on the other hand, the Mets have ambitions of not sucking this year, getting Marcum makes perfect sense: it gives the Mets someone they know is a pretty solid pitcher at all five spots, and makes all of their young unproven types into pure injury depth for this season. Plus, if things don't go well it gives them an extra piece to be flipped mid-season. So, signing Marcum says to me, albeit not that definitively, that Sandy thinks this team might not suck.

The other intriguing thing about the Mets is that they are said to be asking for protection for their first-round draft pick. The top 10 picks are protected, and the Mets had the 10th-worst record in baseball last year, so they should have protection, but because the Pirates didn't sign their top pick last year, they're getting a compensation pick a few turns ahead of the Mets. That seems to mean that if the Mets sign one of the free agents who's tied to draft compensation, i.e. who was made and declined a qualifying offer, they'll lose that 11th pick, which would be bad. They're asking the league to rule, essentially, that they don't lose their protection just because the Pirates get their extra pick. Now, why bother asking if you don't plan on signing one of those compensation-linked free agents? And the only such person who even remotely makes sense to think about is center fielder Michael Bourn.

Signing Bourn, on top of signing Marcum, could go an awfully long way toward making this a competitive team. Bourn would provide Gold Glove defense in center field, which would be really useful given the presence of first-baseman-if-he's-lucky Lucas Duda in left field. It would allow Kirk Nieuwenhuis to shift over to right field, probably in a platoon with the likes of Collin Cowgill, and keep Mike Baxter firmly on the bench where he belongs (replacing Lucas Duda late in every game the Mets are leading). It would give the Mets a bona-fide leadoff hitter, one who's averaged a .348 on-base percentage and 54 stolen bases over the last four seasons. It would let Ruben Tejada stop leading off, which he's not suited for, and become a second/eighth guy. What it wouldn't do would be give the Mets a right-handed outfielder, which is why signing Hairston would have been nice. Still, the Mets could probably have a lineup that would look like Bourn/Murphy/Wright/Davis/Duda/Nieuwenhuis/d'Arnaud/Tejada, maybe swapping Cowgill in for Nieuwenhuis against lefties and hopefully with d'Arnaud moving up as the season progressed.

 That's not a bad lineup, and would have the potential to be above-average at every spot in the order (with 5 and 6 presenting the biggest problem). The defense would only be a concern at one or two spots, LF and 2B. Combine that with a rotation of Santana/Niese/Harvey/Gee/Marcum, and enough live arms floating around to cobble together a not-horrible bullpen, and you've got a team that could very easily Not Suck. It will, therefore, be very interesting indeed to see whether the league grants Alderson his desired protection for that 11th pick, and then what Sandy does in the wake of that decision. Signing Bourn could instantly add five or six wins to the 2013 Mets, and that's a big enough difference that it just might make a difference.

Odd Racial Gaps Regarding MLK's Dream

From the recent CNN/ORC poll:

"Martin Luther King gave his famous 'I Have a Dream Speech' at a civil rights march in Washington in 1963. In your view, do you think the U.S. has fulfilled the vision King outlined in that speech, or don't you think so?"

                     All adults      Whites    Non-Whites
Has fulfilled:       50%          51%          49%
Don't think so:    47%          46%          50%

If that looks like a surprisingly small racial gap, that's because it is. Shockingly so. I've scarcely ever seen a poll on a racial issue with that small a split. Admittedly the "non-white" group isn't just the "black" group, and I'd like to see the split among African-Americans per se, but I'd be surprised if it looks too radically different. (For instance, if you assume that non-white non-blacks responded the same as whites, and that blacks are 50% of non-whites, that would double the tiny gap from 6% to roughly 12%, still not too impressive.)

This isn't the really interesting thing, though. The poll also asked those who thought we have not achieved the Dream yet whether they think we can eventually do so, or not. Overall, 27% said we could get there eventually and 22% said we couldn't, along with the original 50% who said we're there yet. Among white "no" voters, however, the breakdown was 25%-23%. Among non-white "no" voters, the figures were 31%-19%. So whites had a 51%/25%/23% line overall, while non-whites were at 49%/31%/19%. That's slightly less "yes," noticeably less "not ever," and substantially more "not yet, but eventually" response among non-whites. It's an interesting combination: more long-term optimism, but also more present-tense skepticism. I suppose that makes a lot of sense, for a group that has suffered so long and has come so far, and still has so far to go to reach full equality.

Policy and Philosophy

The Second Inaugural Address of President Barack Obama contained a surprising amount of discussion of specific policy issues. Tax reform. Immigration. Gay rights. Climate change. (Yay!) The welfare state. Election reform. Etc. This was a lot more discussion of policy than is typical in these contexts. But one thing I noticed was that Obama talked about these things like a philosopher rather than like a public policy expert. There were no details; rather, each issue was tied into the deep underlying issues of American political theory. That, I felt, made it entirely appropriate for an Inaugural, in a way that specific details wouldn't have been. He didn't propose any solutions; rather, he identified problems and suggested an approach we should take to solving them. Now, not everyone agrees with those approaches, of course, but in a way that's the point. If you start discussing details, you're in the area where reasonable people can disagree, or at least where people who share the same goals can naturally be expected to quibble at the margins. That's insufficiently dignified for an Inaugural Address. The level at which Obama discussed policy, on the other hand, was the level of goals and values and priorities, where disagreements will not be within his own political coalition but between his coalition and its opponents. It's also the level at which you can frame your side's views as being obviously implied by fundamental American values, and therefore (without even mentioning them) frame the other side as being equally obviously in the wrong. It was, in other words, a very skilled incorporation of policy into a grand ceremonial speech like this one. The details of the Obama agenda for 2013 will come at the State of the Union, but the broad philosophical approach of the Second Obama Administration was outlined today. And it was a damn good speech.

The Technology of Tax Reform

So, I thought President Barack Obama's Second Inaugural Address was pretty awesome. The dude sure knows how to orate and rhetoric, and does a great job tying his speeches into the American rhetorical tradition. The actual political substance of the speech, meanwhile, was pretty unabashedly left-wing, including several sentences each devoted in wholly explicit terms to climate change and gay rights. This post, however, is about a curious little turn in the speech where the President listed a few policy challenges, including tax reform, and said that we must use new technologies to solve these problems. My first instinct was, huh? Tax reform doesn't need technology! It's just numbers, and those have existed for a mighty long time. A second's further thought brought to my mind the fact that there is a certain kind of technology that could be deployed in reforming the tax code, but has yet to be so used, namely calculus. In principle there's no reason why a tax code needs to be broken into discrete "brackets," rather than having some smooth curve describing the marginal rates as a function of income, which can then be integrated into the total tax bill for each income level. From a mathematician's perspective, that would be simpler than the current approach, which is an annoying piecewise-defined function.

Still, calculus is hardly new technology. But as my dad points out, its utility in reforming the tax code is dependent on the main new technology, the computer. Mathematically speaking, a smooth marginal tax curve would be simpler than discrete brackets, but especially since it probably wouldn't be a very pleasant function to integrate, actually calculating the tax burden on an individual given the tax curve would be a bit of a nightmare. Unless, that is, we have computers! Computers know how to integrate stuff really really easily. If the way it worked were just that a person's total income got adjusted with various deductions &c. to get the "adjusted gross income" and then those dollars were hit with the marginal rates from the tax curve, it would be absurdly easy for an ordinary person to type a certain AGI level into a computer and have it spit out a tax bill. What could be easier than that? This would not have been so easy in the pre-computer age, so yes, new technology is relevant for tax reform.

Of course, this was probably just an inadvertent juxtaposition of two things that don't really relate to one another. But I wonder: is Obama planning to smooth the tax code? If so, sounds good to me!

Perhaps John Boehner Would Like To Try Governing?

I am very much in agreement with Jonathan Chait's argument in this post, where he suggests that "[l]ast night’s House vote to approach disaster aid for communities hit by Hurricane Sandy may turn out to be one of the signal moments of President Obama’s second term." The key point is that the relief bill passed despite the opposition of a pretty overwhelming majority of Republicans; specifically, 179 Republicans voted Nay, with just 49 voting Aye. With all but one Democrat voting for the bill, that was enough for passage. But the remarkable thing is that the bill even got brought to the floor in the first place, given the Republicans' long-time tradition of the so-called "Hastert Rule," a.k.a. the Majority of the Majority rule. The idea is that only those pieces of legislation which command majority support among the Republican caucus get brought to a vote on the floor of the House, even if there are 218 Representatives who support some other bill. From what I've heard, in fact, during the previous Congress Boehner tried out an even more hard-line version of that rule, only bringing to a vote those bills which commanded a full 218 Republican votes. Bills for which, that is, zero Democratic support was needed for passage. That's, well, pretty extreme, as it gives the roughly 25 most extreme members of the Republican caucus a veto over all legislation. (Any other group of 25 Republicans also have a veto, but given that Democrats control the Senate and Presidency, it's the hardest-right 25 whose veto matters the most.)

The hurricane relief bill, in other words, passed in rather flagrant defiance of the Hastert Rule. I've heard that it was the second-largest majority of the majority caucus ever voting against a bill that passed. The fiscal cliff deal also passed with minority support among Republicans. That's two violations of the Hastert Rule in January 2013, though they happened in different Congresses. If this trend continues, it could get very interesting. John Boehner has often seemed to show signs of interest in governing. He keeps trying to reach these Grand Bargain-ish agreements with Obama, who keeps wanting to play along, almost like a Grand Coalition except without any diminution of the public antagonism. Then his caucus refuses to cooperate even a tiny little bit, and everything goes all to hell. Well, now he's got a smaller caucus. This means that the hypothetical Obama + Senate Democrats + House Democrats + Moderate fringe of House Republicans coalition is a lot more plausible, because you need a lot fewer of those moderate House Republicans. And they don't even need to be real moderates, so long as they're pragmatists who are willing to do what John Boehner tells them.

The problem for Boehner is, basically, Nancy Pelosi. This screw-the-Hastert-Rule coalition is entirely dependent on massive support from Democrats to keep the number of Republican votes needed to a minimum, and Nancy Pelosi is a lot more left-wing than either the Senate Democratic caucus or President Obama. So there's a limit on how much Boehner can get center-right governance through this strategy, as opposed to centrist governance. And I also wonder whether Obama might not be so willing to be willing to give so much if he can no longer be confident that the bulk of the House GOP will scuttle any proposed deal, no matter how capitulated. Then again, we are talking about a plan that requires a couple dozen Republicans to vote for anything, so there's a limit on how far to the center any legislation can be and get passed. The hope is, however, that the overlap between "far enough left to get the support of Obama/Reid/Pelosi" and "far enough right to get the support of Boehner and ~18 of his caucus" is non-zero, unlike the overlap between things the Democratic leadership could support and things the median House Republican could support.