Ike Davis and First Base

Last year Ike Davis posted a .264/.351/.440 slash line, good enough to be a little bit above league average as a hitter. This year he's at .345/.424/.595, which is a wee bit better, and which he's almost certain not to keep up all year, but let's say he turns out to be a little bit better than his rookie campaign. Maybe he ends up having an overall batting average around .275 or .280 instead of the .265 region, raising OBP to around .365 or .370, and gets his slugging percentage up around .500. That's a pretty good hitter; in fact, it's a very good hitter. But it is not, we are told, good for a first baseman. I have two problems with that assumption. One relates to Ike Davis himself, and the other relates to the idea of defensive positions having certain levels of offensive prowess required of them.

As for Ike, here's what I'd say. The idea that first base should be a plus-plus-plus offensive position is that it is the least demanding and/or least important position on the field defensively. All you have to do to be a competent first baseman is stand there and catch the ball. Therefore, it's a perfectly natural place to put big, hulking sluggers who couldn't very well be a shortstop or a center fielder. All true enough. But it's also true that, at first base just as at any other position, better defense is better. Having a first baseman who moves well, has decent range, is really really sure-handed on the catching side of things, and will make lots of smart aggressive plays and make them well really does improve your team. And Ike Davis looks to be a pretty fine defensive first baseman. Keith Hernandez hit a career-high eighteen home runs for the Mets in 1987. He was a first baseman, and he never hit twenty home runs. Sure, he had a .384 OBP and averaged thirty doubles a year, but he still wasn't a slugger in the mold of Albert Pujols or Mark Teixeira or Adrian Gonzalez or Prince Fielder. Or Ike Davis, for that matter, who's got more power than Keith though probably less hitting-for-average skills. But he won eleven Gold Gloves, and that made a difference for his teams. First base needs to be a strong offensive position because we assume it will be a weak defensive one, but a strong defensive first baseman has that much less need to be Albert Pujols at the plate (and note, Ike isn't a bad hitter).

More to the point, though. You have a team consisting of nine players, eight of whom aren't pitchers (I'm assuming no DH, because that ruins things). Those eight position players need to play the eight positions, and you'd like for them to play those eight positions well. They also each need to bat, in some order, and you'd like both for them to each bat well and for them to form a nice cohesive lineup. Fundamentally those are different things. Now, since first base is a much easier position than shortstop we expect more people to be able to play first than short and therefore to find more sluggers at first; perhaps there's also an idea that spending more effort becoming an offensive player means you should be playing a position that requires less effort. But from the team's perspective, it doesn't matter. You want your lineup to produce X hits, and Y home runs and Z doubles and score ABC runs. It doesn't matter if your shortstop hits 15 home runs and your first baseman 25 or it your shortstop doesn't hit any and your first baseman hits 40. (Well, it might matter in that there might be a difference between having two players 40/0 and two players 25/15, but which positions they play doesn't matter.) One thing the New York Mets have on their current lineup is a shortstop who can easily hit fifteen home runs, while also providing at least that many triples. That's way the hell above-average power for a shortstop. And to a certain extent it takes some pressure off the positions that are "supposed" to produce sluggers to do so. (It's one of the things Jose Reyes brings to the table that doesn't get mentioned very often.) So Ike Davis is a good defensive first baseman and he's also a good power hitter (how good, exactly, remains to be seen). He's also, for the time being, dirt-cheap. That's a good player to have on your team, especially if it is a team with a power-hitting shortstop and a power-hitting third baseman. That other people who play first base, many of them not as well, are even better hitters does not really change that.

Statute of Limitations

Donald Trump is currently arguing that Barack Obama would never have gotten where he is today without affirmative action. He was a lousy student at Occidental, Trump says, and then he got into Harvard. How could that be, asks Trump? Now, set aside for a moment the fact that that would be an argument in favor of affirmative action. But anyway, the current leader in polls to oppose the incumbent President in his re-election bid is arguing more or less that his opponent is unqualified to become President, because he only got his elite education because of affirmative action.

There's something wrong with this argument. It should've been made four years ago. Back then, it was a distinctly open question whether or not Mr. Barack H. Obama was qualified to be President. You could argue that two years in the Senate wasn't enough to prepare him, or that we had no evidence of his executive judgment. Or that he had somehow managed to present himself as intelligent etc. to the voters of Chicago and then won an election against, uh, Alan Keyes, and so we had no particular reason to think there's anything remarkable about him. On the other side, people could've argued that his policy ideas were good, or his speeches revealed an intelligent thinker, or whatever. But that was four years ago.

Today, I think it's pretty obvious what makes Barack Obama qualified to be President: he won a Presidential election. Hell, he got the highest percentage of the population to vote for him of anyone who wasn't already President in history. And then he's spent four years actually being President. So it is no longer a matter of qualifications. It is a matter of performance. Setting aside for the moment the question of the quality of the Republican nominee, the basic question facing people in 2012 is "do you want Barack Obama to continue being U.S. President?" For obvious reasons, the kinds of arguments you make in answering that question should be almost entirely based on his record as U.S. President. It's not an insubstantial record. He's done lots of stuff. He's handled foreign policy crises, he's cut legislative deals, he's made judicial appointments. He's done the things Presidents do. So if you want to argue he'd be a bad President, argue that he's been a bad President. And I'll argue that he's been a good President (and also that you are Donald Trump, so it really doesn't matter what kind of a President Obama is...)

Bayesian statistical thinking basically follows a principle where you start with a certain a priori assumption about the state of affairs, and then as you accumulate more data your idea of what the universe is like becomes less and less based on the a priori assumptions and more and more based on the data. Trump is making arguments about what our a priori assumptions about Obama's competence should have been, back when they were important. But there's so massively much data about Obama's competence to be President by this point that it scarcely matters at all what those assumptions were. They've been swamped, overridden by the things we know about Obama as President. So okay, Mr. Trump, maybe Barack Obama was an affirmative-action baby. But that just means we should expect him to be a lousy President; if he is actually a good President, it's certainly not a reason to vote against him regardless.

Unless you're just being racist for racism's sake, which, of course, you are, but that's sort of beside the point.

"It's not a peripheral issue for them."

That's what former Congressman Patrick Murphy said about Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the talk he just gave while accepting the Brown Democrats' JFK Jr. Award. He talked about how his local newspaper editorialized against his focus on repealing DADT, arguing that it was a "peripheral issue," and about how he had seen people he described as having been better leaders than him kicked out of the military just because they had "a boyfriend or a girlfriend back home." And for those people, it wasn't a peripheral issue, it was their life. This is one really important thing about civil rights issues: for the people they affect, they tend to be life-destroyers. And for me, a life-destroyer is a pretty big deal. One person whose life you ruin is one person too many; it's incredibly hard to find that balance on the other side of the ledger. Ending someone's career because of who they happen to fall in love with just plain inflicts more suffering on that person than taking an extra three percent of a rich person's income in taxes ever could. It's not a peripheral issue for them.

Side note: he also referred to Osama bin Laden as having "murdered" thousands of Americans. I think that's a really interesting way to talk about it, given that the Administration around 9/11 made the very conscious decision not to talk about it as an act of crime but rather as an act of war. Just sayin'.

Government Jobs

This is kind of random, but I just read a little write-up about a poll YouGov did in Britain about a variety of issues relating to poverty. One subject they asked about was unemployment benefits, and here's the line I found interesting:

80% agree with the idea that people who have been out of work for 12 months should be required to do community work in return for their benefits.

So, these people should be given the opportunity to do a form of work in the public interest determined by the government, and in return receive money from the government? To me, see, that sounds a whole lot like the government giving these people jobs. Maybe jobs with a fairly explicit agreement that the workers in question are hoping to get other jobs soon, but you have the basic wages-for-labor exchange going on here. I'm curious if 80% of Britons would agree that the government should offer jobs to people who've been out of work for a year, if you put it that way. Come to think of it, I wonder how these questions would play in this country.

Who Darvish?

Wow. Apparently this guy named Yu Darvish, a Persian-Japanese pitcher of age twenty-four, is one of the best pitchers in the world. As in, four consecutive seasons with an ERA under 2. Admittedly that's in the Japanese leagues which are not quite the Major Leagues, but a) I've always thought that it was hitting stats that are inflated in Japan, and b) Sandy Koufax never ran up four consecutive years of sub-2.00 ERA, so one way or another I think this guy's pretty good. And there's some thought that the Mets might be in the conversation to sign him, at least if they aren't going to become a shriveled husk of a team. Boy would that be awesome. Santana/Darvish/Dickey/Mejia/Niese-or-Pelfrey looks pretty good to me for a 2012 rotation. I still think their top priority if they're going to reinvest some of the 70 million coming off the books this year should be resigning Reyes, but I might also be willing to say that their second priority ought to be trying to get Darvish. That would just be amazing.

The Mets' Problem

I'm just perusing the advanced batting and pitching statistics for the Mets and a few things are jumping out at me at what they, as a team, are doing wrong. First, here's what the hitters are doing wrong. They're striking out too much, 21.3% of the time compared to a league average of 19%. They're not hitting enough line drives, 16% of balls in play compared to 18% for the league, and their fly balls are weak, with just 4.8% going for home runs compared to 7% as the league average (though you can chalk that up to CitiField in part, at least). They're not making productive outs, succeeding at that category just 28% of the time, well below league-average 35%, and they're not getting runners home from third with less than two outs. This is egregious: league average is 53%, and they're managing just 38%.

As for the pitchers, they're walking too many people (10.7% against 8.6% average) and they're giving up too many home runs, 9.4% of fly balls versus 7% on average. They're allowing opposing baserunners to run wild, allowing an 86% steal success rate compared to 75% average. Honestly, that's all I see from these advanced stats.

But the biggest thing that jumps out at me is that the Mets hitters have just a .286 batting average on balls in play, while the pitchers are sporting a nasty .338 BAbip. League average is .300. I have a feeling that if on both sides of the ball the Mets were doing average at this, it'd seem like a whole different season. Here's hoping the people who say that all BAbip numbers trend toward the mean rather aggressively as the season wears along are correct.

Atheistic Ethics and Discrete Categorization

Matt Yglesias has a really interesting post about the way that thinking about hell influences secular views of morality. The traditional view of hell in the Christian tradition was that a) it was a really awful place to wind up, and b) being sent there was the act of a just and moral god. One consequence of this view, he writes, is that the standards for being good enough to not go to hell had to be low enough that most people could meet them. Otherwise you've got a just and moral god sending 99% of humanity to the fiery pits where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, which doesn't seem very just and moral. The standard for how wicked you need to be before our supposedly benevolent god is willing to condemn you to an eternity of fiery torture should be reasonably high. But for we atheists, Yglesias argues, "there’s no reason to think of good and bad, right and wrong as a question of getting over some hurdle of minimum standard of conduct." Well, that's kind of true. But there's another feature of hell-less morality that changes the dynamic: you don't need to label people.

In the traditional Christian judgment story, some people die and go to heaven, some people die and go to hell. Maybe, if you're Catholic and haven't been around for the last few years, some of them go to purgatory. But in any event, there are at most three distinct outcomes for what happens when you die, and these are the categories of goodness. There are the Good People, who go to heaven, and the Bad People, who go to hell, and possibly also the In-Between People, who go to purgatory for some time at least. You need to draw lines. But when we take the judgment out of the equation, we don't need to draw any lines. A given act is somewhat good or somewhat bad or very good or very bad. Someone who does a lot of very good acts and very few bad acts is very good indeed. Someone who does a few fewer very good acts, maybe trading some of them in for mildly good acts and maybe the occasionally slightly bad act, is somewhat less good. Someone who does a whole lot of very bad acts and very few good acts, conversely, would be quite bad indeed. And the thing is, because we don't have to judge people (except vis-a-vis the question of sending some of them to secular prisons), we can say just that. If you have a person who does 23% Very Good Things, 56% Somewhat Good Things, 16% Somewhat Bad Things, and 5% Very Bad Things, well, okay, you've just described them. Is this a "good" person? Well, that both depends on how you define goodness and doesn't really matter. It's all a matter of semantics; nothing is riding on how we define the word "good" except what word we use to describe this person. Very good is better than somewhat good, which is better than bad. There's just no need to involve what Richard Dawkins calls the tyranny of the discontinuous mind. Morality is a continuum running from Hitler to MLK, or thereabouts, and we atheists get to just admit it.