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.

Regarding the Definition of the Word 'Unscientific'

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

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

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

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

Why the Left has Criticized the New Data Journalism

Jonathan Chait has an excellent column arguing that the "data journalism" currently in vogue at sites like Vox.com, the new FiveThirtyEight, and some new site the New York Times is shortly going to open up is in fact an ideological/partisan endeavor, because commitment to empiricism as the basis for public policy is an ideological issue. It is, roughly speaking, the foundation of the original progressive movement of approximately a century ago, and it continues in the progressive movement of today. Now, it shouldn't be a partisan issue, because it seems kind of, y'know, obvious that we should base our public policy in an accurate understanding of what the world is like, but it is. This fact became blindingly obvious during the Bush Administration, with the whole "reality-based community" line and all. The modern conservative party is deeply against government use of empiricism to guide its decision-making. I might argue, analogously to how I did in this post, that this disregard for facts is another consequence of the Republican Party's commitment to an agenda which is deeply, deeply unpopular; in order to promote policies which will achieve their actual agenda without revealing what that agenda is, they need to get people to stop focusing so much on the empirical issues about the causal mechanisms. But one way or another, Chait is right: data journalism is inherently a left-wing enterprise in today's world.

This, however, leaves open a question: why has there been a substantial amount of criticism from the left, too? From, say, Paul Krugman, most famously, in his brief feud with Nate Silver over the new FiveThirtyEight. One reason is the oft-mentioned "hack gap": conservative pundits are a lot more hackish than liberal ones, and therefore one can expect them to toe the party line much better. But another, I think, is that data journalism really, really, really wants to pretend that Chait isn't right, or at least that they don't know Chait is right. The ideals of empiricism and neutrality are very deeply tied to each other in our society. If one party's ideas systemically fail all empirical testing, well, there's a limit to how much you can do about that, but you certainly, certainly can't let yourself act on the presumption that, because the Republicans have a long history of anti-empiricism, their ideas will continue to be empirically wrong going forward. So a data journalist like Nate Silver or Ezra Klein is going to have to try to frame what their doing as being completely non-partisan and non-ideological.

This, in turn, is aggravating for someone like Krugman, who occupies a position from which he can and does observe just how deeply anti-empirical the Republican Party has become. That fact is an incredibly important one about American politics, and forms a very high item on the indictment of the Republicans as being unfit to govern. It is also deeply underappreciated by the American public. To those of us within the partisan struggle, it feels remiss of anyone ever to miss an opportunity to point it out. And I think this probably explains a lot of the backlash to Vox and FiveThirtyEight. Even if all their actual analysis is completely sound, and therefore comes repeatedly to the conclusion that Republicans are wrong yet again, they feel compelled to at least pay lip service to the kind of Very Serious People-ish ideas Krugman rightly despises about how no party has a monopoly on the truth, blah blah blah. So what Krugman objects to isn't mainly the content of their analysis, although of course the whole global warming controversy at 538 was substantive. It's about the framing.

I don't say this to take a stand on whether the data journalists' framing decisions were correct; I can see the arguments both ways. If it really does enhance their credibility, and if they use that credibility to accurately portray the facts (which will reliably be detrimental to Republicans), then it would seem like a good idea. Merely an observation that I think this is what's going on, rather than (by and large) an actual substantive disagreement.

Nope, Sorry, Supreme Court Justices Aren't Staying on the Bench Longer

This is not the post I expected to write. I expected to write a post offering an alternate interpretation of the statistics in this Slate post advocating an attack on life tenure for federal judges. Basically, they present data showing that more Justices are staying on the Court at least 10, 20, and 30 years since 1900 than did so before that year. My argument was going to be that this wasn't necessarily because the Justices were living longer, but just that the Supreme Court has come to be seen as a more important institution, basically as constitutional law and individual-rights law have grown to their current prominence, and so fewer Justices were just leaving to go do something better. I was going to claim that you could see this in the massive increase of 10-year Justices, and the proportionally similar growth of 20-year ones, and the complete lack of an increase in 30-year Justices. But, as it happens, I'm not going to write that post. Because while I was writing that post I discovered that I couldn't generate their numbers for myself, by looking at the very-publicly-available and not-very-complicated data. In fact they don't state very explicitly how they're getting their numbers, and I can make one assumption that gets me numbers close to theirs, though not the very same numbers. But that's not really my point, I don't care much about whether someone writing a Slate post got slightly wrong how long the various Justices have been in office. No, my point is that my own look at the data suggests that their factual conclusion is just wrong: there has been no long-term trend toward longer terms in office among Supreme Court Justices, though there's some reason to think the current Court might be beginning to exhibit one. The data here is really tricky, but I'll go through it in some detail below the jump.

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

Context, Please

Just now I saw a headline on the Huffington Post that a Democratic Senate candidate said that his state wouldn't elect his opponent because "we're not that dumb." The article in question reveals that this was during the debate, and the line was used in a very particular context. Republican Richard Mourdock, a veeery right-wing candidate who Tea Party'd Dick Lugar in the primary, was trying to back off of statements he had made suggesting the unconstitutionality of Social Security and Medicare. Democrat Joe Donnelly said this:

"I may have been born at night, but I was not born last night. When you meet with the Madison Tea Party and you say to them, you show me where in the Constitution it allows Medicare, and you show me where in the Constitution it allows Social Security, we're not that dumb. We know what you are implying, and we know what you are driving at. You also said Medicare should be turned into a voucher system."

This is pretty standard stuff, right? It's the idea that, look, you're trying to pull a fast one on the voters of this great state, but we're not idiots, you can't fool us. Now, if Donnelly had just said, apropos of nothing in particular, "I know Indiana won't elect Richard Mourdock because we're not that dumb," it would be a serious gaffe. It would be, among other things, deeply insulting to everyone in Indiana who planned on voting for Mourdock. This line isn't anything like that, however. He's not making any accusation against anyone based on their current intentions, just saying, look, if you think that line will work, think again, we're not that dumb.

So it's misleading to put just the "we're not that dumb" line in your headline. It could either be something really insulting that would probably deserve to damage a candidate (except that nothing except partisan affiliation actually matters, blah blah blah), or something completely innocuous like this. 

Obama's Recess Appointment and Media Interpretation

Today, President Barack Obama decided to make a recess appointment of Richard Cordray to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans have been blocking this nomination for months, not because they mind Cordray as CFPB chief but because they mind the CFPB itself. This would all be the normal course of things, were it not for the fact that the Senate is not technically in recess. They've remained in pro forma session, though of course all 100 Senators are out of town and no work is getting done. The Associated Press story covering the appointment described things thusly:

He [Obama] is essentially declaring the Senate's short off-and-on legislative sessions a sham intended to block his appointments.

See, this is just false. Obama is not declaring that; he's declaring that, because those "sessions" are, as everyone knows, a sham intended to block his appointments, they are invalid and the Senate counts as being in recess anyway. (Incidentally, I think that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation: if every Senator has gone home for an extended period of time, and no Senate work is being done, it counts as a constitutional recess no matter what they decide to call it.) It's just true, and to the best of my knowledge undisputed, that these "sessions" are a sham intended to deprive Obama of his constitutional recess-appointment power. Instead of saying so, though, the AP presents this factually true statement as something Obama is "claiming." As in, implicitly, "and Republicans claim this to be false, and we can't/won't tell you who's right." C'mon, people.