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.

How Do You Poll the Platinum Coin?

According to PublicPolicyPolling's Twitter account:

"Public opinion running about 5:1 against the Trillion Dollar Coin on the first night of our Florida poll among those with an opinion on it."

I wonder how they worded this question. No, really, I wonder. Because I think it's an intrinsically difficult thing to poll. The economics are a bit involved, the legal analysis is highly involved, it sounds so extremely silly, and the case for doing it is so extremely contextual. If you just ask people whether they would favor or oppose the minting of a $1 trillion platinum coin to fund the government, even without any explicitly biased language, of course they'll be opposed: it's ridiculous, which is why we don't do it most of the time. But suppose you gave the following introductory paragraph:

Congress limits by statute the amount of debt the federal government can issue. Economists predict that if the debt limit were hit, and the government could not borrow enough money to fund all its obligations, the consequences could be disastrous for the world economy. The federal government is currently at this limit, and for the past month the Treasury Department has been executing financial maneuvers to keep the government funded, but those maneuvers will only be successful for about another month. Observers have speculated that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives might not raise the debt limit by this deadline. One option the Administration would have should the debt limit not be raised would be to exploit a loophole in the coinage laws that would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to mint a platinum coin with a $1 trillion denomination, and use that money to fund the government until Congress raises the debt ceiling. Do you think this would be an acceptable response by the Administration were Congress to fail to raise the debt limit in the next month?

That would pretty much spell out the logic of even considering the platinum coin in the first place. Note that it's not entirely biased, either; I very deliberately decided to refer to the mint-the-coin option as "exploiting a loophole," which is what it is. The key is really that I've framed it as a response to a crisis. I bet if you gave that introductory paragraph, the people still on the phone by the end (because, let's be honest, it's pretty damn long) wouldn't be so opposed anymore.

Except, of course, this really would be a messaged result, and while those can be interesting, as they suggest how much support something could get if it got its message out really well, it's certainly quite questionable to simply ask a poll with that much messaging and present it as a straight-up result. Perhaps you could do a comparison within the same poll, i.e. ask  the bare-bones question first and then give a little description of why in the world someone might think it was a good idea to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin, and see how much support for the coin increased between the two. But it's hard, I think, to meaningfully gauge public opinion on a topic like this that is just so damn esoteric—not, of course, because people are idiots or because they couldn't understand such things, but because most people haven't taken any economics courses or any law courses or even any public policy courses, and don't spend their time reading blogosphere posts about stuff like the law and economics of the platinum coin.

The problem is, we are both committed to the idea of a government that is responsive to public opinion and to having the government make a serious attempt to solve any and all public policy problems that come before it, no matter how esoteric or tricky. At times like this, when it honestly seems like the best policy might be the utterly ridiculous one that, until you dig into the details, seems with good reason completely insane, those two commitments are in genuine tension with one another.

In any event, they say they won't mint any coins, which looks like it's probably a good idea politically. I'm not sure this means they actually won't be minting the coin, though, because you'd have to say you weren't going to mint it until the very minute when it became necessary to avoid some sort of default; it does seem somewhat unlikely, though. Either way, I really would like to know exactly what they plan to do when Republicans, faced with the Administration's admirable "we're just not negotiating over this, pass the damn thing already" stance, just say no. Actually having some kind of default happen would be, well, not good. It would be nice to think they do have some scheme in mind to avoid it, coin or no.

How Streaky is Tiger Woods?

The first PGA Tour event of the year, each year, is the tournament whose ancestral name is the Tournament of Champions. (It currently sports a "Hyundai" before that phrase, having emerged from the depths of being called the "Mercedes Championships.") It's played in Hawaii, and its field consists of all and only those players who won a tournament the previous year (and who want to play in it), as you might expect from the name. This year, Dustin Johnson won the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, but he did it in slightly odd fashion. Or, well, the whole tournament happened in slightly odd fashion. For some reason, apparently, the Tour decided to shift the TOC to a Monday finish. But then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all featured ridiculously high winds that made it impossible to play any golf. (Actually they played a few holes and then cancelled play, erasing the scores that had been put up in the little half-rounds.) Eventually they were able to play on Monday, when they got in 36 holes, and on Tuesday, when they got in another 18, making a 54-hole tournament that they could call official. And Dustin Johnson won it. My dad and I had been speculating that, if Dustin were to win this week's Hawaiian Open with a nice low score, he might set an all-time record for furthest under par in a span of seven days, since he would get in an unusually high seven rounds in that span.

Except... a few minutes ago, Dustin withdrew from the Hawaiian Open with flu-like symptoms. He had been playing rather miserably anyway, and was going to miss the cut. Ah well.

It got us thinking about how likely it is for a player to win in back-to-back weeks. You could imagine that players would feel awfully drained after a win (though not as much as if they didn't get any time off, as Dustin did here), but you could also imagine that someone who was playing well in Week X would be likely still to be playing well in Week X+1. The problem in trying to analyze this is that most players scarcely win any tournaments at all. Dustin Johnson, for instance, has 7 wins in 120 events (not counting this week, which'll push the denominator to 121). That's a winning percentage of 5.83%, or .058 in baseball format. That's low. If you assume that the two weeks are purely independent of one another, and that the 7-for-120 winning percentage represents Dustin's "true talent," he would have only an 0.34% chance of winning both of any two arbitrarily-chosen tournaments, including if those tournaments are in back-to-back weeks. In other words, if a player like Dustin Johnson played his whole career and never won in back-to-back weeks, we shouldn't be too surprised, and the difference between his having 0 back-to-back wins and having 1 or 2 of them wouldn't really be that significant.

There is one player, however, for whom that concern does not apply: Tiger Woods. He has 74 career wins in just 293 events, for a winning percentage of 25.3%, or .253, which is higher than that of the 40-120 1962 New York Mets. Each of the Mets' contests was against one other opponent, so without knowing anything else we'd expect them to have won 50% of their games. Each of Tiger's contests tends to be against over 100 other players, so knowing nothing else we'd expect him to win less than 1% of his tournaments. And yet, Tiger's got a better winning ratio than those Mets. Man they were bad, and man he's good. And, in particular, he's good enough to permit meaningful analysis of his winning tendencies when playing back-to-back weeks.

If you assume independence, Tiger should be winning both tournaments about 6.4% of the time that he plays in consecutive weeks. Also, he should fail to win a tournament about 55.9% of the time that he plays in consecutive weeks, leaving an expected 37.8% of the time that he'd win one but not the other. Over the course of his long career, he has played two weeks in a row 91 times. (Note that some of those windows overlap, i.e. if Tiger played three consecutive weeks, I count that as two separate windows, both of which include the middle week.) Our expected percentages under an assumption of independence would work out to about 5.8 two-win windows, 34.3 one-win windows, and 50.8 no-win windows. Instead, Tiger has 9 two-win windows, 28 one-win windows, and 54 no-win windows, which translate to percentages of 9.9%, 30.8%, and 59.3%, respectively.

If You Want to Subtract the Steroid Guys, You Should Add Someone in Their Place

Well, that was anticlimactic. No one got voted into the Hall of Fame this afternoon. No one. From a ballot with quite a few of the greatest names in baseball history on it. Not Bonds, not Clemens, not Sosa or McGwire or Palmeiro. Not Biggio or Bagwell, or Mike Piazza. Not Jack Morris or Tim Raines or Lee Smith. Not Curt Schilling or Edgar Martinez or Alan Trammell, or Larry Walker or Fred McGriff or Dale Murphy, who was in his last year of elligibility (though he by no means deserved to get in). No one. Since I would have voted for quite a few of those players, obviously I disagree with that outcome, most emphatically when it comes to my favorite player, Mike Piazza, the best-hitting catcher of all time. At least there's always next year.

But I do have one point I want to make, which is that any voter who wants to weed out the steroid users and vote against them on the grounds that they cheated really ought to find replacement people to put in in their stead. Now, some of the voters said that they just plain refuse to vote for anyone who played in the Steroid Era at all, which strikes me as being deliberately unfair to any player who played clean and was therefore the victim of all the cheating. I am not addressing those voters; there would be no point, other to say that they're being pompous, obnoxious, and mean. No, this point concerns only those voters who believe that all and only those players who we have decent reason to believe were themselves cheating should be excluded from the Hall. Those voters should, in my opinion, couple their withholding of votes for the likes of Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, etc. (and hopefully they'll leave Piazza off that list in the future) with the awarding of votes to some guys who would have looked a whole lot better had Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, etc. not been in the league playing the way they did.

Take John Olerud, for example. Over a 17-year career spanning 2234 games, in which he had 9063 plate appearances and 7592 at-bats, Olerud had 2239 hits, of which 13 were triples, 255 were home runs, and 500 were doubles. He scored 1139 runs and drove in 1230 runs. He drew 1275 walks but only struck out 1016 times. All that is good for a .295/.398/.465 batting line, which is good all-around but in particular is an elite on-base percentage, the 31st best in the integration era (1947 onwards). Olerud was an integral part of not one but two championship teams with the Blue Jays and the nearly-championship 1999 Mets. He won a batting title, hitting .363 in 1993, and in a sense deserved to win another, hitting .354 in 1998 and finishing second behind Larry Walker's Coors Field-aided .363. In each of those years he was clearly an MVP-level player, and in quite a few other years he was an All Star-level player. And while he was a first baseman, he was a really really good defensive first baseman, winning three Gold Gloves, probably deserving quite a few more, and (according to Baseball Reference) contributing almost enough high-quality defense to cancel out the penalty for being a first baseman in the first place.

All that adds up, according to Baseball Reference, to 53.7 career wins above replacement and 27.4 wins above average. Those are borderline Hall of Fame numbers, and probably slightly on the wrong side of the border. But keep in mind, WAR is an adjusted-for-league-average stat. And Olerud was playing in a league full of cheaters, like McGwire and Palmeiro and Sosa and Bonds. They make his adjusted numbers, which are already on the borderline for Hall consideration, look worse than they should be. And he was playing in a league full of cheaters like Roger Clemens, who he faced 107 times, more than any other pitcher, and against whom he hit just .205/.335/.373. So, first, Olerud's numbers are worsened because a good chunk of the pitchers he faced were cheating, and second his numbers get worsened again in the adjustment process because he gets compared to other hitters who were cheating. What that means, I think, is that if you want to try to pretend the steroid thing never happened, i.e. to imagine that all the cheating players just hadn't been there, John Olerud has a pretty strong Hall of Fame case.

Now, you don't necessarily have to agree with me about Olerud. But I think the basic principle is sound: if you're the kind of voter who wants to go through the list of great players from the previous two decades who might look like they deserve induction and strike the names of anyone we have sufficient reason to believe used steroids, you ought also to take a second look at players like Olerud, and see whether they deserve a few bonus points for having been really really good while playing clean in a league of cheaters. Merely subtracting is not enough; you should add something back as well.

How Do You Adjust for an Environment of Cheating?

Continuing with my Hall of Fame theme from today, this post will consider how one should go about mentally adjusting the numbers put up by various different kinds of baseball player who might've been competing in an era featuring widespread cheating, like the Steroid Era of the 1990s and early 2000s that most of the new players on this year's Hall of Fame ballot hail from. Here's the simple model of the environment of cheating that I'll be using: suppose that, at a certain point, a substantial portion of the hitters in the league start using some illegal substance that makes them better hitters. Nothing else changes, so one difference between this model and the actual Steroid Era is that quite a few pitchers used steroids. So, how should we go about correcting for this cheating, if we want to try and figure out what the "true talent" landscape was like? Let's look at it from various stand-points.

The Cheating Hitter
It's more or less obvious how we should treat the numbers put up by those hitters who were cheating: we reduce them somewhat. How much, or in what way, might not be obvious, but the basic idea is that we should penalize them a bit to take back what they improperly gained. Simple enough.

The Non-Cheating Hitter
Likewise, it seems sensible that the proper approach to those hitters who didn't cheat is just to leave their numbers alone. The caveat is just that, whereas if we didn't correct for the cheating we would view most of the clean hitters as having been overshadowed by the cheaters, we should value their numbers a little more highly, because the people overshadowing them weren't coming by it honestly. And given the prevalence of adjusted-for-league-average stats, that's important: the league average for which those numbers are adjusted is itself skewed! Take John Olerud, for example, a presumptively-clean player whose career, from 1989 to 2005, coincided almost exactly with the steroid era. His .295/.398/.465 slash line, that of a truly great hitter who didn't specialize in hitting home runs, only got him a 129 OPS+ during his actual career, but players with very similar raw OPS numbers, around .863, in 2012 had more like a 140 OPS+. If we pretend that steroids never entered the league, in other words, a clean player like Olerud would look a lot better, not because his numbers got any better but because the frame of reference got uninflated. (Likewise, a defensively-gifted shortstop putting up a .246/.289/.310 line in today's game, say, Brendan Ryan, would look a lot better than it did when Rey Ordonez did it during the height of the steroid era.)

The Pitcher
The correct thing to do in analyzing pitchers from such an era is to give them a little extra credit than their basic numbers would suggest. After all, forces completely beyond their control caused them to face unfairly good hitters, which should unfairly depress their numbers, so they deserve to have those numbers reflated. All their numbers, that is, except league-adjusted ones. All the pitchers in the league had to face the same batch of cheating hitters, after all. So Pedro Martinez's 154 ERA+, the best ever for a starting pitcher, is completely legitimate and should be taken at face value (assuming we don't think he was on steroids himself, which I think we don't), despite the fact that his actual ERA is higher than that of, say, Andy Messersmith.

Part of the moral that I'm trying to get at in this post is that it's very easy to adjust for league average, but that doesn't always tell you the whole story. The 1960s, for instance, were a very low-run environment, so pitchers' numbers get adjusted downward and hitters' numbers upward. If that low-run environment was just caused by something in the air, or, more plausibly, in the baseball, then that makes sense, and giving pitchers a bit more credit and hitters a bit less after the 1969 lowering of the mound is quite proper. But if the dominance of pitching came about because there happened to be a glut of really good pitchers all at the same time, then we shouldn't really be penalizing all these great pitchers for happening to hit the league at the same time as one another. We should, however, continue to give the hitters bonus points for having had to face such tough pitching. Conversely, if the true cause was simply that all the hitters were kind of lousy, then we shouldn't be giving the hitters any credit and we are quite right to exercise skepticism regarding the pitchers' performances during this era. Simply adjusting for league average can't tease this out. (That's part of my theory on why Babe Ruth isn't the best player ever: by being the first person to figure out that it was a good idea to hit lots of home runs, he got to play quite a few years having acquired for himself the right to play in a league of mediocre hitters, which artificially inflates his adjusted stats.)

This kind of analysis, by the way, is basically why I think Ken Griffey, Jr. will be inducted into the Hall of Fame unanimously on his first ballot. He clearly deserves it on the merits, and because he's the only one of the mid-1990s sluggers who people think was squeaky clean I think they'll all just be so damn eager to have someone they can vote for that everyone will vote for him. The only problem might be the idiots who simply refuse to vote for anyone who played in the Steroid Era. (Seriously, can you believe how awful some of these arguments are?)

All-Star Plate Discipline Team

Purely on a whim, I spent a few minutes earlier today constructing an all-time All Star Plate Discipline Team. It is defined thusly: taking, at each position (with a DH spot for wiggle room), the best player from the Integration Era (1947 onwards) with more unintentional walks than strikeouts. The time limitation is chosen quasi-arbitrarily to exclude the period when strikeouts just weren't a big deal, and therefore just about all the good players would qualify. Here's the team, arranged in a rough lineup order:

     Rickey Henderson, DH
     Wade Boggs, 3B
     Joe Morgan, 2B
     Barry Bonds, LF
     Yogi Berra, C
     Al Kaline, RF
     Keith Hernandez, 1B
     Richie Ashburn, CF
     Ozzie Smith, SS

Note that, if intentional walks were included, the likes of Albert Pujols at first base, Hank Aaron in right field, and Mickey Mantle in center field would be included, and third base would be a very close three-way contest between Boggs, George Brett, and Chipper Jones. Rickey's the DH not because he's a bad defensive player, but because he's not as great a fielder as Bonds, who was pretty good at playing baseball.

Also, just for fun, the All Star Hackers Team, composed of the best players of all time with at least twice as many strikeouts as unintentional walks. (The time restriction is irrelevant, because no one from the pre-integration era comes close to qualifying.) Here it is:

     Lou Brock, LF
     Roberto Clemente, RF
     Reggie Jackson, DH
     Willie Stargell, 1B
     Ivan Rodriguez, C
     Jeff Kent, 2B
     Adrian Beltre, 3B
     Andruw Jones, CF
     Miguel Tejada, SS

Not surprisingly, the hackers are not as good as the guys with great discipline. The one that surprised me on this list was Clemente, given his reputation as a pure hitter, but apparently he wasn't really interested in drawing walks. Ichiro Suzuki also qualified, though he's got a lower career WAR than Clemente. Note that I've engaged in a bit of a positional shuffle, making Stargell the first baseman (which pushed Tony Perez off the team) to get Brock on, giving the team a genuine leadoff hitter. I suppose I could alternately replace Clemente with Ichiro, make him the leadoff hitter, put Stargell back in LF, and keep Perez on the team. Whatever. You get the point.

My All-Time Hall of Fame Ballot

The baseball Hall of Fame voting results will be announced tomorrow, and it's one of the relatively more interesting ballots in history, with a pretty massive crop of players who--purely on the numbers--would be clearly deserving of enshrinement (Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, Curt Schilling, Craig Biggio, and Sammy Sosa). Accordingly, 'tis the season for people to say who they'd vote for of this year's ballot. Just for fun, however, I thought I'd try to do something a bit larger in scope, and figure out how I would go about filling in a baseball Hall of Fame of approximately the size of the current one from scratch, i.e. not considering myself bound to include players who have already been inducted. Overall I found 216 players worthy of inclusion, compared to the 205 currently in the Hall, but the difference can be explained by my inclusion of players not yet eligible, either because they've been retired less than five years or because they're still playing. (Note that I'm not dealing with the whole Negro League thing, not obviously because I disapprove of including Negro Leaguers in the Hall but because I don't have access to the relevant evidence to make a comprehensive analysis of those players, so they're not included in that 205.) For a few of those still-active players, I'm sort of assuming that they'll have a couple more years at basically their usual level of production; I'll note those players with an asterisk as they come along. I will also note, at each position, the players in the actual Hall of Fame that I'm excluding, the already-elligible players not in the real Hall that I am including, and any player not yet elligible that I'm including. Also note that I basically took the attitude of including everyone and anyone, regardless of potential misdeeds. Thus, I present my all-time Hall of Fame ballot.