Everybody's Covered

I just heard ESPN announcer Chris Berman say something like the following in the closing stretches of today's US Open coverage: "If you look behind 16 there's both a chapel and a temple, so everybody's covered." Strikingly, to me at least, he said that while the cameras were on Y.E. Yang. Now, I don't know what Yang's religious inclinations are, but his being Asian I think it's rather possible that he's neither Christian nor Jewish. I just think it's kind of weird to make a sweeping statement like that. Over 60% of the world is neither Christian nor Jewish, and with golf increasingly becoming a global game with championship players who aren't Western European in ethnic origin there are probably a lot of non-Judeo-Christians in this field. Hell, Tiger Woods is a Buddhist if anything.

Anyway, not a big deal, but it struck me as kind of odd.

Five?!?

Apparently Major League Baseball is strongly considering changing the structure of the baseball season such that five teams would make the playoffs. This would be accomplished either by adding a second wild card or by, more radically, eliminating divisions and just letting the five teams with the best records in each league make the playoffs. I am strongly, strongly opposed. You just can't do this, it seems to me. Through history, the major league playoffs have featured two, four, and currently eight teams. There's a pattern here: these are all powers of two. This is very logical, because it is actually impossible to do a bracketed tournament with any number of competitors except a power of two without doing something Weird. I assume that in this case the particular Weirdness that they would invoke would be making the two "worst" teams in each league, either the two wild-cards or the two teams with the worst records among the five, play a head-to-head elimination match before the bracketed tournament begins. That's just awful, it strikes me. It's contrived and it's silly. It creates a whole new section of the baseball season: you'd have the regular season for about 180 days, then this new middle round for four-ish days, and then the real playoffs for a few weeks. Never mind the fact that this would push the end of the season all the way into mid-November, and it's been getting pretty silly already. It would just be inelegant.

You Can't Escape Government

Various people have been writing posts about Gurgaon, a section of India which has managed to achieve extremely rapid economic growth despite having essentially no provision of public services. The obvious lesson to draw, taking it at face value or shallower, is that libertarianism and/or a kind of quasi-anarchism works just great, and so, not surprisingly, various liberal writers have gone about deconstructing that conclusion. But ultimately I think the point here is very little about economics and more about fundamental misunderstanding of political theory. Kevin Drum writes:

Basically, Gurgaon has turned into something from a dystopian science fiction novel: an archipelago of self-contained corporate mini-cities that provide their own power, water, sewage, transit, postal service, schools, medical care, and security force.

Because of that word "corporate," we assume that this is a kind of stateless world, that there is no government. But that's simply untrue. To see why, consider the following question: what is government?

Gingrich Fallout

That's Nate Silver's graphical overview of the 2012 Republican Presidential field. I'm reminded of it because of the implosion of Newt Gingrich, and want to use a similar kind of schematic to discuss what I think the impact of that implosion might be. Basically I argue that there are three major types of Republican Presidential candidates right now (actually four, but the fourth isn't all that major), and that the shape of the Republican field depends very much on which of these three categories end up coalescing around a single candidate.

Reyes or Wright?

I recently heard a rumor that the Mets are considering trying to trade David Wright instead of Jose Reyes if, as seems likely, they are forced to get rid of someone to rather drastically cut their payroll. I don't want to see either of these players moved, but I have to say that I think this would make a lot of sense. Wright is owed $15 million next year, and if Reyes is even slightly in the mood to give the Mets a home-team discount on his free-agent deal I think it's unlikely he'd be making more than that next year. Moving Wright would give Daniel Murphy a home, since third base is his natural position and appears to be his best one. From a defensive point of view, Murphy at third might be an upgrade over Wright, and Murphy-Reyes-Tejada-Davis is pretty clearly an upgrade over Wright-Tejada-Murphy-Davis.

Then there's the offensive component: would the lineup rather have Reyes or Wright in it? Historically David Wright's been the better offensive player, hitting .302/.382/.512 with an average of 27 home runs, 42 doubles, and 23 steals per 162 games, while Reyes hits just .288/.338/.437 with an average of 12 homers, 15 triples, 35 doubles, and 58 steals per 162. But over the last three years, or, that is, since the Mets build Citi Field, Wright has hit just .286/.367/.468 while averaging just 22 home runs and 164 strikeouts per 162 games. At Shea Stadium David Wright hit .318/.403/.555 and Reyes hit .297/.343/.447, but at Citi Field Wright has managed just .288/.382/.472 while Reyes is putting up a .322/.375/.500 line at the Mets' new home. This all makes sense: Citi Field was built for Jose Reyes. The bizarre right-field wall, which removed Wright's favorite home-run spot from Shea, provides lots of acreage in which for Jose to hit his triples. This year, his first year (so far!) fully healthy at Citi Field, he's on pace to hit about 25 triples, which is very close to a 99-year record. They've all been hit at home. In fact, at Citi Field Reyes has 8 triples against just 7 doubles, so the majority of the time he gets in-play extra-base hits at home they're for three bases.

Through 2008, David Wright hit .300 and managed at least 25 home runs for all four of his full big-league seasons. He consistently hit for power and average, which made him one of the best offensive players in the game. Since 2009, he's had one year when he hit .300, barely, but managed only 10 home runs. Then he had a year when he slugged 29 home runs, but hit just .283, a new career low. Now, in 2011, he's on pace for just 18 home runs (given his injury) and hitting just .226. There's a considerable case to be made that Citi Field is slowly ruining David Wright. It's not an iron-clad case; after all, he's been dealing with the concussion from '09 and the back injury of '11 for the past few years, so who knows what's really causing it. But it makes some sense that taking away his favorite power zone might make him less able to do what he always used to do.

To reiterate, I do not want the Mets to let go of either David Wright or Jose Reyes. I think they ought to both spend their entire careers in New York and go into the Hall of Fame as the two best Mets position players ever. But if the Wilpons' financial quagmire is going to force them to let go of one of their two star players, I think the choice is clear. David Wright is a very good power hitter, historically, but there are other very good power hitters out there and Wright appears to struggle at the Mets' new ballpark. Jose Reyes, on the other hand, is clearly the best leadoff hitter in the game today, and one of the best-hitting shortstops, and simply thrives at Citi Field. Also, he's a lot more fun to watch, and since the Mets have already literally built around him, they might as well build around him, you know?

Jose Reyes, High-OBP Guy

The New York Mets are third in the National League in on-base percentage from their leadoff hitter. They trail Chicago, a mixture of Starlin Castro and Kosuke Fukudome, both of whom have kinda absurd BAbip numbers as leadoff hitters, and Pittsburgh, a combination of Andrew McCutchen and Jose Tabata. Meanwhile, they also lead the league in on-base percentage from their shortstop. Lead the league! In batting average by shortstop they trail only Chicago's Starlin Castro, whom Reyes has exactly as many hits as, and in slugging percentage by shortstop they trail only Colorado's Troy Tulowitzki. But Jose Reyes leads National League shortstops in on-base percentage. How about that?

Not Impressed

I just want to say that I've been reading cases on establishment of religion from the European Court of Human Rights as well as the U.S. Supreme Court from the past couple of years and boy am I not impressed. People will find just about any excuse they can to avoid actually enforcing the Establishment Clause, or its equivalents in the European Convention on Human Rights. Seriously, in one of the USSC cases the majority relied on the contention that tax expenditures are different from outright spending of taxpayer funds. It's like they knew they'd lose, so they wanted to invent a really silly reason not to hear the case. Boy. Justice Stevens' dissent taking apart one of their cases was fun, though.