Enforced Commingling

Consider the following paragraph:

"The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinity, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits and a voluntary consent of individuals.

That is, of course, from the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. And I don't just mean "worst" in a moral sense; the decision is staggeringly wrong, in a purely legal sense. It assumes that the Fourteenth Amendment cannot mean what its plain text would clearly imply, because that thing is just too inconsistent with the prejudices of many but not all people in society. It claims that segregation only "stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority" because colored people are so damn sensitive, which as Justice Hugo Black would later point out was always ridiculous to any of the actual white supremacists who were responsible for segregation laws in the first place.

And then there's this passage.

Written Constitutions as a Trap for Hypocrisy

This is the first off-shoot of my general contemplation, in the wake of attending a talk by Bruce Ackerman yesterday evening, of what it is about his constitutional and political philosophy that I find so unacceptable that I have felt worthy of being written up. It's a fairly modest point, and not really much related to Ackerman at all except in that he inspires it through his apparent distaste for the idea that the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th and 15th, really did provide a textual constitutional basis amply sufficient for the 20th century civil rights movement. I don't know for sure whether the particular factor that I am about to discuss contributes to that distaste, but it seems to me that it might in part be motivated by the fact that the framers of the 14th and 15th Amendments were, for the most part, what we would today consider racists. Most of them were also, certainly, sexists and homophobes and religious bigots. In fact, "bigot" is just a good catch-all term to describe the attitudes of nearly every member of the "good" side of the 1860s political clashes, viewed by modern standards (with the possible exception of men like Thaddeus Stevens). To depend on the legacy of these men, these hypocrites who wrote the shining text of the 14th Amendment into the Constitution but who denied the vote to women and who abandoned any efforts to help black people within a few short years of the passage of that Amendment, who may only have been looking for Negro votes in any case, to craft the sweeping societal changes of the Civil Rights Movement could well seem offensive, as tainting the achievements of true egalitarians like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and (lest we leave out the contributions of African-Americans themselves) Martin Luther King.

Now, I obviously don't find the contrast between the text of the Reconstruction Amendments and the attitudes of those who wrote and passed them particularly unsettling, but it is definitely a striking contrast. Indeed, the same can be said of the original Constitution, which many (though not all) abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, argued forcefully was an anti-slavery document, even though it certainly contained a few provisions directly supporting the slave regime and though it was universally interpreted as protecting the "domestic institutions" of the Southern states. How did this happen? How did polities whose fundamental values we would today consider so prejudiced and even hateful manage to write these documents which are so open to much more enlightened interpretations than any their framers could have envisioned, or even to demand such interpretations? I think the answer lies in the concept of hypocrisy.

The Pete Rose-ification of Derek Jeter

Derek Jeter's 2013 season is done. It was terrible. He appeared in all of 17 games for the Yankees, during which he hit .190. Yeah, .190. As in, twelve hits in 63 at-bats. Overall slash line of .190/.288/.254, and while the on-base gap is nice, it's not remotely enough to make up for the awful. As if that weren't enough, according to both Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference Jeter managed to put up impressively terrible defensive numbers in those 17 games, costing something like 4 or 5 runs below average. The result is -0.6 fWAR, plus the fact that his replacements have been named Jayson Nix, Luis Cruz, Alberto Gonzalez, Reid Brignac, and Eduardo Nunez. My god Eduardo Nunez is bad. Overall Yankee shortstops not named Derek Jeter have accrued -1.5 fWAR. That's -2.1 fWAR overall when you add Jeter to the mix. And this on a team that's a game or two away from contention. Or, to put it another way, add anything resembling Derek Jeter-as-was to the 2013 Yankees and they would be a playoff team, easily.

Tee hee.

The point here isn't exactly to gloat about how Derek Jeter is awful now, or how it's entirely his fault that the Yankees are going to miss the post-season this year. Those things are true, and they're fun. The point is to make a comparison with another player. Because Jeter, you see, has not been a league-average player in quite a few years. 2009, in fact, was his last year of being actually good. Through the end of that year he had 2747 hits over 9809 plate appearances, a career .317/.388/.459 batting line, a 121 OPS+, and 67.4 bWAR, of which 35.2 were in fact Wins Above Average, despite being a terrible, terrible, terrible defensive shortstop (-187 Defensive Runs Saved). Since then, even including his year-and-a-half resurgence after getting his 3000th hit, he has 569 hits in 2159 plate appearances and a .291/.350/.392 batting line. That's not terrible. In fact, it gives him an OPS+ of 99. Usually being a league-average hitter who plays shortstop is a really good player. But there's that pesky "plays shortstop" thing; DRS pegs Jeter at -47 fielding runs over these four years, during which time Jeter's been in slightly less than three full seasons' worth of games. Combine that with average offense and you're looking at three wins below average, and enough playing time to turn that into 4.2 WAR. The turning-point for Jeter came at age 35, his last actual good season, the last time his offensive production was enough to make up for his legendarily awful defense.

Let's consider another player, a pure hitter type of guy known for "playing the game the right way" or whatever. A guy who spent most of his career as an infielder, though unlike Jeter he moved around the three non-shortstop spots. Like Jeter, however, he wasn't a very good defensive player. Through age 38, his batting line was .312/.381/.432, which (once you account for Yankee Stadium's power boost) is almost identical to Jeter's line through age 35; in fact, his OPS+ was better, at 126. This guy played more than Jeter had, though, getting 12196 plate appearances, so he managed a whopping 3372 hits over those years. He also accrued 80.7 bWAR including 42.5 WAA, and was an above-average player every year except his first two in the big leagues. Then, however, he stopped being very good. For the rest of his career he hit .274/.354/.333, good for just a 92 OPS+ (which was, incidentally, a 99 for the first three of those years, during which he played nearly as much as Jeter has over the last four). Over the rest of his career, this guy was, well, awful. He played first base, and played it badly, so tossing in the mediocre hitting we get -1.3 bWAR. Yeah, that's wins below replacement. So, -13.6 wins above average. That changed his career totals from the sparkling numbers presented above to 79.4 WAR and just 28.9 WAA, which is a little worse than marginal for the Hall of Fame.

Of course, all that playing time means that he had another 884 hits over those seven years, giving him 4256 for his career, the most all-time. This is Pete Rose we're talking about, obviously. The parallels to Jeter are interesting. (No, I'm not saying Jeter has bet on baseball, although I did just read the Rose v. Giamatti case for my Procedure class and I do think Jeter's not the shining white knight he's often portrayed as.) They have both had long careers being genuinely very good hitters, and receiving a kind of worship disproportional to their actual production. Rose parlayed his legendary status into an extension of his career way beyond what he deserved so that he could pass Ty Cobb's hits record. In fact, for much of that time he was player-manager, giving himself those extra opportunities. Jeter has already used his legend status to get something he should have relinquished a long time ago, namely his position. In 2004 the Yankees acquired Alex Rodriguez, meaning that they had two All-Star-level shortstops on their roster. One of those guys was a pretty good fielder. One of them was not. One of them moved to third base to accommodate the other. It wasn't the guy with the good glove. Now, Rodriguez has been a relatively poor third baseman with the Yankees, so maybe he would've been even worse continuing as a shortstop, but it's not like Jeter hasn't gotten worse with age, too.

So now the question is, how much will Jeter continue to do the Pete Rose thing, and stick around long after he's lost the ability to be actually good just to pad his career stats? He's got a player option for $9.5 million for 2014, and I've got to think he'll take it. Will the Yankees play him? DH him? Whatever they do, it seems likely he'll be a drag on their team, until they can convince him to ride into the sunset. That will quite likely be the '14 off-season, but it would be nice to see him stick around longer like Pete Rose did, hemorrhaging wins from his career stat-line and letting his reputation and his ego turn into a massive problem and a barrier to competitiveness for the team he's become famous with. It should be a lot of fun, especially on top of the problems gathered around that other shortstop they got in '04.

Tee hee.

A Plan for the 2014 Mets

I have, for now at least, abandoned my in-depth series on what I think the Mets should do over the off-season to make the 2014 version of the team good. But I'm feeling inspired to just write up a quick post giving one vision of a strategy they could pursue. Note that this is not necessarily a feasible strategy; there is one trade, in particular, that I don't know could be made. But the trade isn't necessarily an absurd one, and I think it would be the best way to make the team genuinely dynamic next year, even in Matt Harvey's absence, which for the sake of argument I will be assuming in this post. If Harvey can come back for some or all of next year, so much the better. First I'll just list the players I'd want/hope to have on the 25-man roster on Opening Day next year, and then after the break I'll give commentary.

Catchers
Travis d'Arnaud, R
Juan Centeno, R
Infielders
Ike Davis, 1B, L
Wilmer Flores, 2B, R
Jose Reyes, SS, S
David Wright, 3B, R
Josh Satin, 1B, R
Ruben Tejada/Wilfredo Tovar/Omar Quintanilla, SS
Outfielders
Shin-Soo Choo, LF, L
Matt den Dekker, CF, L
Juan Lagares, RF, R
Eric Young, Jr., LF/2B, S
Andrew Brown, OF, R
Starting Pitchers
Zack Wheeler, RHP
Jon Niese, LHP

Jenrry Mejia, RHP
Rafael Montero, RHP
Relief Pitchers 
Bobby Parnell, RHP
LaTroy Hawkins, RHP
Vic Black, RHP
Jeurys Familia, RHP
Josh Edgin, LHP
Scott Rice/Darin Gorski/Jack Leathersich, LHP
Carlos Torres, RHP

Charity Is A Tax On Generosity

This has occurred to me as I've been asked several times by people on the streets of New Haven for money. If I have the right configuration of bills in my wallet to do so, I typically give a dollar or two, because I really am on board with Matt Yglesias' "just give money to poor people" program. But it strikes me that there's a big problem with relying on private charity, either on the individual level such as my recent encounters or through larger-scale organizations, as a mechanism for giving money to poor people, as opposed to having the government do it by taxing and spending, beyond just the simple fact that more transferring of wealth will happen in a public system. Compared to a public social safety net, a system of private charity that transferred the exact same amount of money to poor people would have a significant distributional impact on the class of people away from whom money was being redistributed. Specifically, in the private-charity world, the more generous you are the less well-off you'd be, financially speaking at least. Now, you'd be less well-off because you would have voluntarily given away some of your money, and maybe like Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of the play you'd discover some sort of spiritual benefit to all this giving. But the fact remains that your colleague with the same salary but more the attitude of early-play Scrooge will end up with a bigger bank account than you will. In effect, therefore, reliance on private charity as a remedy to the problems of poverty amounts to a tax on generosity, and an incentive toward selfishness. Generosity is typically considered a good thing, and while I think the world recognizes that the most virtuous people won't be the ones who do the best for themselves in terms of material standard of living, that doesn't mean it's a good thing to set up a system that actively discriminates against possessors of a certain kind of virtue. Adopting public policies that use progressive income taxes to fund aggressive anti-poverty and anti-homelessness efforts would not only help poor people (which is, of course, by far the primary reason to do them), they would also remove from those of us with an inclination toward generosity, perhaps even what some might consider excessive generosity, the burden of addressing those problems on a penny-ante private basis.

Of course, under the Republican doctrine that all poor people are bums and moochers who, having been judged worthless by The Market, deserve their fate of destitution, the generosity I'm describing as a virtue being unfairly taxed by inadequate anti-poverty policies is really the whole problem, the thing on which these evil "takers" prey, so this argument probably isn't really going to get very far, is it?

Partisanship as the Dissolver of Institutional Solidarity

Republicans, including Republicans in Congress, are mad that President Barack Obama has requested Congressional authorization for a military strike against Syria. They claim to wish he had just gone ahead and done it himself, unilaterally. This is weird, in a way. They're in Congress. It's their permission he's asking! People don't usually mind it when you ask their permission for things! You are literally giving them power over you while at the same time suggesting that you value their advice. Maybe you don't like being forced to take a stand over an issue and would prefer that someone else did your job for you, but actually coming out and saying "I think it shows weakness that he asked me for permission" is weird. Among other things it feels like it implies that you just accept your own incompetence, or something. Like, "Obama wants to ask the Congress of which I am a member for permission to attack Syria? He might as well ask the cat!"

But in another sense, of course, it's not weird at all. These are Republicans we're talking about. And I don't specifically mean that they're ideologically in favor of unilateral executive war-making power, although they are, because not a one of them would ever have criticized a Republican President who asked for authorization from Congress before conducting a military strike. The point is that Obama's a Democrat, and in particular one that they all hate with an abiding passion, so literally anything he wants Congress to do they will refuse to do. Literally anything. Including things they like. Like going to war. (Seriously, they love going to war.) Or cutting taxes. (Remember that time when Obama was proposing a tax cut and Republicans wouldn't pass it?)

Now, I'm not even really making a point here about how deranged Republicans are now. They are, but that goes without saying. The point is that in this case, a partisan motive is overriding an institutional motive. This happens a lot, and always in the same direction: Congress declines to forcefully assert its constitutional authority because approximately half of its members see themselves first and foremost as members of the President's political coalition rather than as members of the body charged with checking his power. If everyone in Congress signed on to a "let's maximize Congressional power all the time" platform, they could pretty much reduce the President to the equivalent of a ceremonial head of state. They could override every veto, choose every judge and executive appointment by themselves (by refusing to confirm anyone else's nomination), etc. In the end that would make Congress, and therefore being a member of Congress, much more important. But they don't do that, because at any given moment it goes against the partisan agenda of half or nearly half its members. The simple fact of partisanship, therefore, has an enormous transformational effect on the practical constitutional structure of our government.

The 2014 Mets, Part e: Starting Pitching

This is out of order. Also I think the series as a whole is on hold, both because I'm dealing with a nagging shoulder injury and because stuff is just happening too rapidly that's changing the landscape. But I wanted to respond to a thing Sandy Alderson said in a recent interview on WFAN, namely that the injury to Matt Harvey means that he'll try to acquire a veteran free agent starting pitcher over the offseason. I think that's a mistake. The Mets' projected 2014 rotation prior to the Harvey injury was Harvey/Wheeler/Niese/Gee/Mejia/Montero, which is too many pitchers already all of whom deserve a spot, and then throw in Noah Syndergaard at mid-season. You were already going to have to squeeze Gee/Mejia/Montero into two rotation spots, unless someone got injured, which they did. Even though Mejia just underwent surgery, it was of a rather routine variety, so there's no reason to think any of those pitchers other than Harvey won't be ready for Opening Day. And although I don't think the Mets should just punt on 2014, I do think that it would be a mistake to commit every fifth start to a veteran pitcher and take those innings from the team's promising youngsters.

That's not just because the resources could be better allocated somewhere else, because they could. It's because Wheeler/Niese/Gee/Mejia/Montero is a very good rotation. For the season the first four of those guys have pitched 387.1 innings, which is obviously not enough innings for four starters but that's because Wheeler came up mid-season, Mejia had only a few starts between coming off an injury and needing further surgery to complete coming off that injury, and Niese had anomalous issues related to having pitched in the vicious cold early in the year. Over those 387.1 IP they've allowed a combined 150 earned runs, for an ERA of 3.49, which is very very good. It's not good enough for an ace pitcher, but it forms a deeply solid rotation overall, and note that that includes significant stretches of mediocrity or worse from Niese and Gee and Wheeler. Oh, and Rafael Montero's put up a 2.78 ERA over 155.1 minor-league innings, including a 3.05 ERA with AAA Las Vegas in a terrible pitching environment.

If these guys stayed healthy, you'd have the kind of rotation that doesn't (unless Wheeler progresses significantly) have a single dominant ace but it also doesn't have a single bad pitcher in it. That's important. It's how, I think, teams like the Braves and the Reds end up with great team pitching numbers without feeling like they have any dominant starting pitchers. Aces are nice but a "full house" rotation of two #2 pitchers and three 3# pitchers is pretty good as well. It's those #4 or #5 pitchers, guys who might just blow up on any given day or at best will labor through five or six innings of three-run baseball or whatever, who really kill a team's rotation over a full season, and even without Harvey the Mets aren't currently projected to have any bad pitchers in their rotation. And also, as I noted, if something goes wrong or even if it doesn't they've got the guy with the career minor league ERA of 2.64 who's got three more career strikeouts than walks and hits combined to come in sometime in the middle of the season.

Now, I'm obviously putting a lot on "if these guys stay healthy" here, and that's an issue. None of them exactly have a big history of staying healthy. So a fair question is what happens if things go wrong. One answer is "well, contending in 2014 is a stretch anyway without Harvey so if something goes wrong they'll just wait until 2015." I'm okay with that, honestly. This team has the opportunity to be very good for a very long time by building around a foundation of young pitching. They should definitely work to add useful pieces over the off-season, say by signing a reasonably big-name outfielder to a multi-year deal or something, but I think it would be a mistake to do anything that would impede the development of the team's young pitching even if it would be necessary to make the 2014 team more competitive. So I'd try pretty hard to avoid signing any veteran pitchers to any guaranteed Major League contracts.

But if Alderson can find someone who a) would be willing to take a Minor League deal, and pitch in Vegas until needed, and b) would be better as a fall-back option than the likes of Jacob deGrom or Matt Fox or Chris Schwinden (that one's not hard) or Darin Gorski, who might either be a backup starter option or a lefty reliever option, then he should sign them as a way of raising the team's performance floor. Actually, though, now that I think about it Carlos Torres has done a pretty good job as a swing-man/spot starter this year, so really you'd need someone who'd seem like a better option than conscripting Torres into the rotation should someone get hurt. And that's already, really, if two starters get hurt; if only one goes down, you can bring up Syndergaard mid-season to take his place. So we're talking about an eighth starter, really, even with Harvey injured. That's the only place I think a veteran starting pitcher would fit in on the 2014 Mets. Sandy Alderson should, if he wanted for some strange reason to take my advice, shy away from any big-name or even middle-name free agent starters, and should indeed spend the money instead on an outfielder, like Shin-Soo Choo.

And with that I'll conclude this series until at least the end of the Mets' regular season. I might resume it in October, when only the non-terrible teams keep playing and therefore less stuff will be happening to change the Mets' prospects (in the non-baseball term, heh).