A Minor Point

Lucas Duda, currently playing right field for the Mets, is a rather popular player with the team's fanbase. He's a big, hulking guy with an amusing name. A name which, in fact, appears to fit rather neatly into a line from some movie, The Big Lebowski, that goes "the dude abides." Evidently it's a rather famous line. Anyway, people including Gary Cohen have taken to referring to Duda as "the big Lebowski," a double pun based on the line and his personal girth. And, of course, people slide his name into that quote. Except they do it wrong. People say "the Duda abides," which is flagrantly wrong, the correct version being, of course, "the Duda bides," which actually has the same phonemes in the same order. A minor point, but one I think is worth making.

Okay, so I'm bored and have nothing better to do. So sue me.

Trades, Relative Value, and Daniel Murphy

If you stipulate that all teams will evaluate the quality of all baseball players the same way as each other, and that all teams have the same needs as one another, then trades could never happen. How could they? Team A would never give up Player X for a player or players of lesser value, but Team B wouldn't offer players worth more than Player X. Therefore, the fact that trades do, in fact, happen means that different teams evaluate different players differently, or that teams have different needs from one another, or both. Really it's both, but I think the different needs of different teams is the primary motivator. There's the short-term/long-term divide between teams trying to "win now" by acquiring established players in exchange for prospects and teams looking to the future by trading their established players to acquire prospects. But sometimes teams just have different holes in their rosters. We have four outfielders but need a pitcher, you have a few young starters coming up to replace your veterans but are shaky in the outfield, let's make a trade.

Lineup Optimization

My dad and I had been discussing the concept of lineup optimization recently, so just now I did a little fooling around with an online lineup optimizer tool. I put in the players for an all-time Mets team as I conceive it (Piazza [C], Hernandez [1B], Alfonzo [2B], Reyes [SS], Wright [3B], Jones, Cleon [LF], Beltran [CF], Strawberry [RF], Johnson, Howard [DH]) with each player's stats from their Mets tenure. And it spat out the following lineup: Wright/Piazza/Alfonzo/Strawberry/Beltran/Johnson/Reyes/Jones/Hernandez. Uhhh.... what?!

Here's the thing about these online lineup optimizer tools that shocks me: all they use is on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Seriously? Is anyone seriously asserting that nothing matters in constructing a lineup except OBP and SLG? Not speed? Not contact hitting? Nothing about the difference between two doubles vs. a home run? Not keeping a nice alternation of left- and right-handed hitters? And that's conceding that we ignore the effects of who protects whom in the lineup, or of players' psychological inclinations to bat in certain spots (for instance, don't bat Jose Reyes third!). Nothing about the statistics of baseball matters except OBP and SLG? Another simulator I saw seemed a bit more nuanced, asking for percentages for all four kinds of hit, walks and hit-by-pitches combined, and then outs. Still, we're caring awfully little about anything except the exact result of an individual at-bat. I find it extremely hard to believe that nothing else matters.

Pelosi's Choice

Apparently Rep. Peter DeFazio says that Joe Biden told House Democrats that Barack Obama was willing to invoke the 14th Amendment option if "all else failed." If that's really true, why shouldn't Nancy Pelosi make all else fail? From what I've heard, she has the power to sink this deal if she wants to. Obama may not prefer a constitutional crisis to a deal, though sensibly he prefers a constitutional crisis to an economic catastrophe. But I think Nancy Pelosi might prefer the constitutional showdown, right? The vote is in the middle of being held, and it sits at 167-101 in favor as I'm writing, but there are a lot of Democratic votes that haven't come in yet. It'll be interesting to see what happens if this does indeed fail.

How Democrats Should Play Going Forward

Here's what I see as the medium-term Democratic strategy for making the world suck less than it might otherwise, given that the Republicans control Congress right now:

1. Spend every day between now and early November 2012 making sure you win the election.
2. Win the election. That means re-electing Obama, holding the Senate with as big a margin as possible, and taking back the house.
3. Let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. Mention Step 5 on this list while you do this step.
4. Abolish the effing filibuster. Seriously, guys. It's time. No way you'll have anything near 60 votes in the next Senate, and you need to be able to do something.
5. Early in the next Congress, pass a tax reform bill that a) introduces a carbon tax, b) closes assorted regressive tax loopholes and tax expenditures, and c) plows most, all, or slightly more than all of the revenues from the first two into cutting taxes for lower/middle class people, adjusting the impact of Step 3.
6. Roll back as much of the cuts from the current deficit deal or any future spending-cuts agreement made under the Republican rule, and pass a bunch of new programs that Democrats like. Go crazy, you're in charge again.

Obviously the key to this is Steps 1 and 2. The point is that as long as Republicans control any branch of the U.S. government public policy in this country is going to slowly, inexorably decay toward utter suckitude. That's bad. So rather than worrying too hard about how much the Republican House is able to mess things up (although you should still fight that as much as possible), just make sure we don't have another two years of this nightmare. The trick of Steps 3 and 5 is that they allow Democrats to get more revenues, restructure the tax code in various ways that we like, and shift tax burden off of the lower reaches of the income distribution all at once, by using the one tax situation where Democrats have the leverage. Do all of this, and the Republican Congress will not have managed to inflict too terribly much harm on the world.

I hope.

And in other news...

There's a headline on Huffington Post right now that reads "White House Orders Insurers to Cover Birth Control with No Copays." Just another one of the small but genuinely important public policy wins that happen every few days because there is a Democrat in the White House and not a Republican. Whatever you think of how Obama's handled the big stuff, the stimulus and health-care reform and the economy and now this debt deal, he's still President, he's still a Democrat, and that means that every once in a while we see a headline telling us that U.S. public policy just got a little bit better in some small but meaningful way.

The Debt Deal and Obama's Preferences

What does the fact that Barack Obama was willing to cut this deal tell us about his own, true preferences? Well, here we start with the observation that, as best I can tell, this is about as good as anything calling itself a deal was going to be. Republicans were never going to accept revenue increases in this deal, so any deal wouldn't include revenue increases. The total number here is on the small end of the numbers that had been mentioned and the cuts are relatively backloaded, the debt limit will be raised through the next election, etc. Moreover, the cuts include a whole frickin' lot of defense spending cuts, which is kind of a win-win. So conditional on there being a deal, this one is not bad.

So, if we accept that basic position about the substance of the deal, what are we left with? Obama prefers getting some deal to getting no deal. That's it. And what happens if we don't get a deal? Either economic catastrophe if the executive branch takes its least active/creative approach or constitutional crisis if the Administration decided to use some unilateral executive power. I happen to think that preferring a reasonably not-bad deal to the "economic catastrophe" option is a little more than completely reasonable. As for the constitutional crisis, while I myself would've found such a spectacle kind of fun and I reckon Obama would have won it, I don't think the President is crazy to not be thrilled at the prospects. If down the road Obama agrees to lots more spending cuts to sundry domestic programs and the big social security trio and then winds up getting all of the Bush tax cuts extended permanently, well yeah, that would suck. But that would suck in the absence of this deal, which I think you can plausibly argue was the best possible outcome once this whole debacle got started, and if Obama manages to fight hard during those future battles and then we win the 2012 elections then the whole thing won't be so bad. That's my take.

UPDATE: Re: this Paul Krugman blog post, I think I more or less agree with Krugman about what I would have done. But that's mainly because I would kind of enjoy the constitutional crisis that would ensue if, let's say, Obama minted a couple of $1 trillion platinum coins and Republicans then impeached him over it, which oh boy would they ever. Or if he just said, screw the debt limit, I have executive power. Or something. He'd get his ass impeached, and while I think there's a pretty good chance that he would win the PR battle over said impeachment I also think that I understand his desire not to put his name on a list that currently reads: Andrew Johnson, (Richard Nixon), Bill Clinton. Clinton won the PR battle over his impeachment, too, but when people discuss his Presidency they don't put the fact that he got impeached in the "pro" column. I don't blame Obama for not wanting that, even if Paul Krugman or I might've been less averse to it.