Regarding Stephen Drew

Sort of at random today I happened to be reminded of this article from FanGraphs from back over the offseason, basically wondering out loud why the Mets hadn't yet signed Stephen Drew given their obvious, glaring hole at shortstop in the form of one Ruben Tejada. And I happened to skim over some of the comments (something you can actually do on FanGraphs without wanting to gouge your eyes out afterwards), all of which thought that no matter what reasons the author could come up with why the move wasn't as obvious as everyone thought, it was obvious and Sandy Alderson should just stop making excuses and get it done. So I thought I'd just point the following out:

Ruben Tejada, 2014: .241/.356/.299, 0.7 WAR
Stephen Drew, 2014: .135/.198/.258, -0.4 WAR

Now, in a lot of ways that's unfair to Drew. Since the Mets didn't sign him, and in fact no one signed him until the Red Sox did mid-way through the season, he didn't get to play a normal Spring Training. In a sense these past 27 games in the Majors have been his Spring Training. So he'll probably pick up the pace, especially given his .175 BAbip. Tejada sports a perfectly normal .304 BAbip, although given his traditionally high line drive rates there's reason to think he could go higher than that and he's been hitting really well the past month or two. Tejada does have the better plate discipline numbers, with a 13.9% BB% and a 19.1% K% (although the former is somewhat inflated by intentional walks), while Drew has walked just 7.3% of the time and has whiffed a staggering 31.3% of the time. Drew has more power than Tejada, but if he doesn't start putting the bat on the ball a bit more he'll have trouble hitting replacement level. Oh, and it's also not like this came completely out of nowhere. Here's what Drew did last year in the playoffs for the World Series Champion Red Sox:

.111/.140/.204, 3.5% BB%, 33.3% K%

That's... even worse. At the time I remember the announcers speculating about whether Drew's awful performance would tank his free agent market. It appears to have done so (among actual GMs if not among internet commenters), and, well... so far it doesn't look like that was wrong. As a matter of basic human decency I hope that at some point Drew starts looking like a competent Major Leaguer again, but I gotta say, based on everything that's happened so far this year I would must rather have Ruben Tejada for $1.1 million than Drew for something like three years and $36 million, or even for just one year and $14 million really. This kind of looks like one where Sandy Alderson did the unpopular thing and was completely right in doing so.

Chris Young Just Earned His Salary for a Long Time

Boom.

A minute or so ago, there was a curious little exchange in the Mets game against the Miami Marlins. Ruben Tejada had drawn a walk with one out, bringing up the pitcher's spot. Terry Collins sent up Chris Young to pinch-hit, and the Marlins responded by removing starting pitcher Tom Koehler and bringing in right-handed reliever Brian Morris. The Mets' announcers were speculating that this might have been a cagey move on Collins's part: by sending up Young, he got the Marlins to bring their righty reliever into the game, and he could then respond with Bobby Abreu, who is (a) left-handed, and (b) better than Chris Young. Had he just sent Abreu out initially, they would have brought in a lefty reliever instead. Apparently that wasn't what Terry was thinking, though: he left Young in there, for one pitch.

Because Young homered on that pitch. To tie the game.

I immediately commented to a friend on IM that Chris Young had just earned his salary for the month. The thing is, I'm not sure I was wrong. He's being paid $7.25 million this year, and the season is obviously about six months long, so the monthly salary is something like $1.2 million. Now, the current understanding is that the market price of one Win Above Replacement on the free agent market is something like $6 million. One WAR is approximately equivalent to ten net runs, either added on offense or saved on defense (including, obviously, pitching). If we assume that Young's home run was worth +2 runs, that's +0.2 wins, which translates to... $1.2 million. Of course, a replacement-level player wouldn't necessarily have resulted in zero runs in that spot, so we can't really think of what Young did as being worth +0.2 WAR all by itself. Actually, though, FanGraphs says that CY has been worth 0.2 WAR today, so my calculation is pretty accurate.

And if I wanted to get a bit less context-independent, I could say that I was underestimating the value of what Young just did. Right now the Mets are a team that's been struggling all year but which has been playing well of late and has dreams of sneaking onto the fringes of contention at the All-Star break. Moreover, as I said a while ago, there are reasons to think this team should get better as the year progresses. Winning this series against the Marlins is important for keeping that momentum; if they could, for instance, sweep the Marlins, they'd get to just five games under .500 at the break. That sounds a lot better than seven games under, or even nine games under if they lose both of these games. This is, in other words, a pretty important game. And Young added a lot to their chances of doing just that. His blast increased the Mets' Win Expectancy by 35.6%. To put that in context, a team that wins a game has a total Win Probability Added of +50.0% for the day, since they started out with a 50% chance of winning and end with a 100% chance of winning. So +35.6% WPA is basically like adding 70% of a win, in fully context-dependent terms. And that's a win above average, a slightly more stringent standard than mere average. If we give Young credit for adding seven-tenths of a win instead of two-tenths, then that one swing on that one pitch that Young just faced was worth somewhere around $4 million, or over half of Young's salary for the entire year.

Think about that: with one swing, Chris Young may have just justified his presence on this team for the entire first half of the season.

Of course, teams should never, ever pay for "wins" in the WPA-derived sense I'm describing. There was no sense in which anyone, in March or earlier today, could have predicted that Young would hit such a meaningful blast. You pay for what you can expect to receive, and your expectations have to be largely context-independent, except perhaps for relief pitchers and maybe for elite pinch-hitter types. Besides, of course, it's not like that swing was the only thing Young has done this half-season; he's also hit .199/.280/.354 over 233 plate appearances (including that one today), which, combined with poor outfield defense, has been worth -0.3 WAR. (It was -0.4 WAR prior to his pinch-hitting appearance, presumably because of rounding effects.) So it's not like he's actually been worth a net positive amount of money so far.

But even though you can't pay for context in advance, you might be able to use context in retrospect to feel okay about the purchases you made. No matter how much we can't let ourselves think that the home run Chris Young just hit affects his "true talent" or what he's really worth, it was still worth a lot to this team. If the baseball gods had appeared to Sandy Alderson during that pitching change and asked him how much he would be willing to pay for a home run on the next pitch, it's possible that he would've said something in the range of $4 million. Chris Young delivered that value right there, and in a certain sense nothing takes that away. Through yesterday his contract may have been like lighting money on fire, but today, for one glorious pitch, Chris Young was worth every penny.

Your 2014 All-Stars

So they're announcing the selections to the 2014 All-Star Game right now. I just thought I'd briefly say how I'd set the starting lineups if I were managing for both sides (which would, in fairness, be rather weird). First, the AL:

Mike Trout, CF (R)
Robinson Cano, 2B (L)
Miguel Cabrera, 1B (R)
Jose Bautista, RF (R)
Nelson Cruz, DH (R)
Adam Jones, LF (R)
Josh Donaldson, 3B (R)
Salvador Perez, C (R)
Derek Jeter, SS (R)

Now the NL:

Carlos Gomez, CF (R)
Andrew McCutchen, LF (R)
Troy Tulowitzki, SS (R)
Giancarlo Stanton, DH (R)
Paul Goldschmidt, 1B (R)
Yasiel Puig, RF (R)
Aramis Ramirez, 3B (R)
Chase Utley, 2B (L)
Yadier Molina, C (R)

A few notes. Good god those are some super right-handed lineups. Honestly I could basically flip-flip Gomez and McCutchen, either in the outfield or in the lineup, though I'm probably more committed to putting Gomez in center field. You could move Puig to more around the top of the batting order, which is where he's mostly been hitting for the Dodgers, but with Gomez and McCutchen it's not like they're starved for leadoff hitters so I've got him hitting sixth. It's not like he doesn't have the power for an RBI spot, heh. I'm assuming that Stanton is the DH because, well... he's Giancarlo Stanton. And as for the AL... look, I know Derek Jeter isn't going to be batting ninth. He'll probably hit second. Or first. But he should be hitting ninth. As sort of a lesser-included-case of how he shouldn't be in the game at all. He's a below-average player. He's a below-average hitter. Fangraphs has him at 0.5 WAR, but that's giving him a bizarrely large amount of credit for his defensive work, which I don't buy. For all that they're gonna be going on and on about him, he's not a good player anymore, and if they've got to start him, they should at least bury him in the 9-hole.

Also, Kershaw's gotta start for the NL, there's no question there. And King Felix looks like he's been just clearly the best pitcher in the AL, so I'd go with him as well.

Every Sperm is Sacred, Declare Five Old Catholic Dudes In Robes

So apparently in the batch of orders issued the day after the final actual day of the Supreme Court's term, they basically indicated that yesterday's Hobby Lobby decision doesn't just apply to those methods of birth control which certain religious groups choose to describe as abortion-y. Apparently closely-held companies whose owners are Catholic, and particularly the kind of Catholic who thinks contraception and the recreational sex it makes possible are sinful, can get out of giving their employees health insurance that covers any kind of contraception. Basically, this:

Oh, and did I mention that the particular five Justices constituting this majority are all Catholics? Hmmm, interesting coincidence ya got there.

UPDATE: Attempts to Limit Hobby Lobby Turn Out To Be Gibberish

So my previous post was about how the way Justice Alito distinguishes the contraceptive mandate from other potential health insurance tells us that the real point of his opinion is that he doesn't think it's that important to provide universal access to contraception. Apparently that's not entirely correct. Apparently the Court assumed that the government interest in the case was compelling, and based its decision on the whole "least restrictive means" thing. But this is a problem. RFRA violations are those laws which substantially burden religion and which are not the least restrictive means to further a compelling government interest. Thus, if one thing is a RFRA violation and another isn't, then they must differ in one of three ways: either one of them substantially burdens religion and the other doesn't, or one of them is in furtherance of a compelling interest and the other isn't, or one of them is the least restrictive means to furthering such an interest and the other isn't. It could be all of those three, but it's gotta be at least one of 'em. But if Alito was stipulating the strength of the government's interest, then that can't be the difference. The fact that, in the passage quoted in the previous post, he discussed not the question of the burden on religion but of the government's interest suggests he thinks that vaccine mandates do substantially burden religion, so that can't be the difference. So the difference must be the least-restrictive-means thing, right? Well, wrong. Because as Justice Kennedy points out, the government could just pay for this part itself. That would be less burdensome on the Green family's religion. So would establishing an all-out single payer system where the government just does all of this stuff directly and leaves the employers out of it. And both of those are gonna be there as less restrictive alternatives for all of these mandates, aren't they? Like, the logic is in fact exactly the same, Alito's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

So.... it looks like the "legal reasoning" behind limiting this to contraception is basically just bullshit. There is no reasoning. It's narrow because Alito wants it to be narrow, as do Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas. Maybe because they think Congress might actually amend RFRA or something if they issued a broader decision? I dunno. But it seems pretty likely that the only reason why they're treating contraception differently from all other kinds of potential health insurance mandates is that it's suddenly become politically controversial, and/or that they're five old Catholic dudes who have been taught from birth to believe that contraception is sinful. Whatever it is, it ain't law.

Hobby Lobby is About Sex, not Abortion

One of the questions in the Hobby Lobby litigation was whether the exemption sought by these companies could be extended to things other than contraception. Could companies whose owners held somewhat less mainstream religious beliefs decide to stop covering, say, blood transfusions, or vaccines? Could religious "freedom" become a shield for racial discrimination? Nope, says Justice Alito. The ruling is strictly limited to contraception. Other medical things like transfusions or vaccines he essentially said would have to be considered in later cases, and might or might not survive the same test that the contraception mandate failed. And he specifically said that racial discrimination in employment practices cannot find support in this decision, that the government's interest in eradicating that evil is strong enough and direct enough that "religious freedom" is no shield against it.

Kevin Drum comments that the logic behind limiting the decision to contraception seems to be about abortion:

I think it's important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he's making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you're probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.

I don't think that's quite right.

Hobby Lobby and the Sanctity of Human Life

Ugh. Not a good day for the law. Not on any dimension. The policy of these decisions is horrible. Admittedly it's not as horrible as it could have been had Alito not decided to write deliberately narrowed opinions. But the price of that narrowness was absolute legal absurdity. I mean, there was plenty legal absurdity anyway, but the narrowness created even more. I don't really think it's possible to maintain that what the Court was doing today was law. Not really. And that actually offends me pretty deeply, as someone who believes that there is such a thing as doing law, for real, in the best sense of that word.

But here's a slightly ancillary thought I have about the Hobby Lobby decision. The purported reason why providing coverage to their employees that included contraception would have violated Hobby Lobby's religious beliefs is that certain forms of contraception were, in the store's owners' view, abortifacients. And we all know that opposition to abortion is that most sincere of religious beliefs; religious people of a certain type are committed to seeing abortion as murder, because they supposedly value the sanctity of human life. And, y'know, I gotta say, I see the ethical case that late-term abortion is something seriously resembling murder, or rather homicide (the difference being that the former assumes the wrongfulness of the act). I have pretty good reasons, I think, for not thinking this means we should criminalize it, although I do think there might be ways to regulate late-term abortions in some way. But I do think we should view late-term abortions as a pretty serious moral Bad Thing, and work hard to minimize the frequency with which it's the least-bad option.

But that's not what Hobby Lobby is about. Hobby Lobby is about birth control. It's about IUDs, which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg on the uterus wall. This, like a few other forms of birth control (but unlike, say, condoms), prevents pregnancy after the moment of conception rather than before it. It operates at the post-zygotic stage. And therefore certain religious types, though apparently not the medical or legal community, consider it to cause an abortion, and to end a human life. (Apparently scientific types think life begins at implantation or something.) Here the ethics aren't so complicated: the ethical badness of destroying a pre-implantation zygote is precisely zero. It's the same thing as killing a bacterium. It has one cell. It has no computing power, no sensory apparatus. It does not have experiences. It cannot feel pain. It does not have a beating heart. It differs in this regard, of course, from later-stage fetuses, but zygotes and blastocysts are just ethical nullities.

Now, my point could be that it's ridiculous, and kind of sick, to think that destroying one of these nullities is the same thing as killing a living human being. But it isn't. Rather, my point is that it is deeply sick to think that killing a living human being is the same as destroying one of these nullities. That is to say, I don't think it's really possible that anyone at all reacts to the death of a blastocyst or a zygote the way one is supposed to react to the death of a human being. I do think it's possible that people react that way to the death of an eight-month fetus or whatever, and at some point in between it flips, but let's just say that that point is sometime after there are at least 16 cells in the organism. And so if you maintain that you view the two as equivalent, that you think IUDs are murder, well, that's gotta tell us something about how much respect you have for, like, ordinary human life, right? And it tells us nothing good. I think it's gotta tell us that the sense in which you condemn ordinary murder is somehow cheaper than it should be. If the value that you place on human life doesn't change from the moment of conception all the way through the moment of death, I don't think that value can be as high as the value that I place on human life from birth through death. There's just no way you can actually be giving that much value to a zygote, not really. Maybe you have some kind of theological sophistry telling you that killing zygotes is sinful, but you can't really believe that aborting them is murder, not the way we mean that word.

So either there's an act of dishonesty going on, at some level, when people say they think these contraceptive devices cause murders, or these religious types have just tipped that their conception of the "sanctity of human life" is awfully shallow. One or the other, and neither is exactly great.