Intricately independent

High Fructose Corn Shit-faced Lies

2009-09-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

Out of nowhere (to me at least), there's talk of a tax being levied on soft drinks to help pay for the health care bill. The NYT reported yesterday that the Obama administration is consider a bill to add a 50% tax to non-diet sodas, which has provoked outrage among... groups funded by the corn syrup lobby, it would appear. Americans Against Food Taxes is, per its mission statement on nofoodtaxes.com, "a coalition of concerned citizens opposed to the Government’s proposed tax hike on food and beverages, including soda, juice drinks, and flavored milks," which just happens to include the support of every major soda bottler in the U.S. Here's one of their ads:

Now, there's something to take immediate issue with here: that the tax "might not mean much" to "Washington," whoever that is. Actually, it would mean a whole hell of a lot, because Americans drink a lot of soda—the NYT article puts the figure at more than $14 billion per year. The flawed premise of "her" argument — that is, the argument of the soda companies — is that the cost of soda and other corn-syrup flavored beverages (despite the NYT's repeated use of the term "sugary," it's misleading) is at a fair price right now, all things considered. And, just like a large number of the foods we eat, it's not. From the number of man-hours it took to produce the corn that created the corn syrup (for which family farmers are paid piddling amounts, thanks to government intervention in the corn market) to the, ahem, back-end costs related to obesity, soda is already subsidized to a large degree. That is, it's really cheap to buy when it costs us a lot, and you can see the results of that money gap is taken out on the family farmer and, well, you, in your arteries. The proposed soda tax would merely take a step toward correcting this imbalance, and would, in effect, restore a free market balance to the equation by making the transaction better for everyone involved. The system, as it's set up now, screws some people in a decidedly un-American way so that you can pay 75 cents for soda. We can and do tax cigarettes and alcohol, so the argument that it's your God- or Consitution-given right to buy soda for below market value is false. Worse, it's plain ignorant.

Naturally, this scares the piss out of the soda bottlers, who have been launching a full-fledged defense of High Fructuse Corn Syrup since before the tax was even proposed. Here's a commercial I saw about a year ago:

Obviously this gal doesn't have the internet, where she could have read about the very real concerns over HFCS at length. But the kicker is the last line: it's fine in "moderation." Well, that's wonderful news, which puts it in the same class as everything except, oh, cyanide. How about not in moderation, which is how you would expect something priced below market price to be consumed in a free-market society? The American consumer is smart enough to find a bargain, and the corn lobby is smart enough to spend a portion of their ridiculous profits on retaining their market share. But it doesn't take a genius to know that if we're saving money and they're making money, someone is losing it. This tax wouldn't "punish" casual soda-consumers; it would help those that are already hurt by its consumption and production. To use the corn lobby's own words, those already enjoying soda in "moderation" would not be hurt by this tax—one suspects that if they were casual consumers, they could shift their purchases over to diet soda without being too affected. If they weren't enjoying soda in moderation, this would lead to healthier consumption patterns, like NYC's smoking ban did for smokers, and the tax dollars raised will go toward filling the dollar gap in the anti-free market production chain. I would argue that the net effect of a soda tax would merely counterbalance the effect that corn subsidies have wrought on the corn industry, and lead to government's having less control over what's bought and sold in the stores — as it stands now, consumers are directed to soda because it is unnaturally cheap.

It's not just soda, either, that has bottomed out in price because of corn excess. The same is true for meat and poultry. Cows are fed corn despite having stomachs that aren't naturally able to process it, and are put on a large dose of antibiotics to keep them from dying. The result is meat that contributes to heart diseaese for humans; but, of course, the meat is cheap because it's cheap to feed the cows. (Read more here). Of course, this meat would be safe in moderation, like the popsicle and soda above. Does this mean I think the price of meat should go up? Hell yes I do. I think the actual market price for meat is higher than we're paying, only the costs are hidden, and they're largely the same costs as soda production: the massacre of the family farm, health costs on the back end—plus, factory farms have the added bonus of below-minimum wage-paying, exceedingly dangerous jobs. Is someone paying that gap between the market price and what we're paying? You're damn right they are.

That's why I support the soda tax, completely independent of the $14 billion it would be estimated to earn for obesity awareness, prevention, and treatment. The things we do cost money, and we need to be aware of the actual consequences of our decisions. Right now, with HFCS-sweetened drinks, we're not. By levying a tax on things that are priced below market value, we'll make people realize what they're actually buying, and move toward making soda purchases work for everybody. Restoring market prices, and giving consumers a true view of the costs of the things they buy, isn't un-American—it's about as fundamentally American as it gets.

George W. Bush: Not Human

2008-11-25T07:11:00.000-08:00

In exactly 56 days, George W. Bush will leave the office of President of the United States. Hot damn. It’s about time we had a human being back in office. You see, I am under the impression that George W. Bush is NOT a human being, as commonly understood.

The question of what makes us human has been debated, oh, for a good many years now, from Socrates to The Big Lebowski (“What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski? Is it doing the right thing, whatever the price?” “Sure, that and a pair of testicles.”) Of course, some buttoned-up scientist could barge into this column and point to 10 toes and 10 fingers and human parents and say: “Voila! There’s your human!,” but the real distinction here is what makes us human beings, instead of merely animals, and often this is attributed to our ability to have a wide range feelings like empathy, sorrow, pathos, etc.—the ability to see, if only fleetingly, life through another’s eyes, because only then can we appreciate and assess what we have in our own lives.

Or something like that. You could completely disagree, but you probably have some idea of what ideas and feelings you think are unique to the human experience. So here’s my question: at what point, ever, do you feel like George W. Bush has acted as if he is a vessel for these feelings?

The fact is that, to me, George W. Bush seems like someone whose investment in actual human beings is shockingly low, and thus his general outlook of and experience amongst other people is horribly warped. Perhaps the most mind-bending statistic from the 2004 election was the one where more people said they’d like to “have a beer” with GWB despite the fact that:

a) George W. Bush does not drink: and
b) What on earth would you talk about?

The question was loaded from the beginning, as it was an assault on Kerry’s supposed effeteness—which may in fact be real, but not so much as to forgive the question’s false premise. But the more than 50 percent of respondents who said “W” still have some explaining to do. What would you say to this man to provoke a real conversation? Not just small talk—as getting beers usually leads to the very opposite of small talk—but actual, meaningful conversation: how would you go about it? Do you think there’s a single question you could ask Bush in which he wouldn’t give an evasive, squirrelly answer?

Think about it: at what point has George W. Bush addressed the American people and said something that was, unambiguously, straight from the heart? You might find something in the aftermath of 9/11, but given what we know now about the strategy that was set in motion in the hours following the attacks with an eye toward Iraq—a strategy that almost no one denies, as even steadfast Iraq War proponents stress its long-term benefit—it’s hard not to see his announcements as threats to Saddam. Since then, there’s been nothing. Nothing. President-elect Obama may keep an even keel, but that’s an entirely different matter altogether. There’s a difference between balancing one’s emotions and not having them.

Perhaps Bush has just shut off his emotional barometer because reading it would be too much to handle in light of his epic failures. I don’t think so. Every time I see him meet with a sworn enemy—Obama, Paul Krugman—and flash the same empty smile he reserves for world leaders and the press, I think there’s a little less “there.” Bush is not a vessel for human qualities, but he’s a vessel for other people’s qualities. He has allowed himself, as a potent symbol, to be used to their ends. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rove are human beings, and angry ones. Rove realized long ago that his future in politics rested with someone who could deliver his Christian Conservative message without belying its soul-sucking message, and Bush was his guy. For the last eight years, Rove and others have been the puppet masters, pulling the strings on a willing supplicant who seems to have no regard for his fellow man. In 56 days, with no one to pull the strings any more, we probably won’t hear from Bush any more. He doesn’t care about us; I can’t imagine what he does care about.

This is our dually-elected President, America.

Perhaps our greatest achievement in electing Barack Obama is not electing a black man, which has been so long discussed, but electing a human being at all.

Is Mad Men the next Vladimir Guerrero?

2008-11-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

(Here's something I wrote a couple weeks ago but completely forgot about. Naturally, it's Mad Men-related. I think most of the relevant facts are still true, but it should be noted this is straight-up conjecture from someone who knows little about the inner workings of TV.)

From the Things I Didn’t Know Department: while the television program Mad Men has been renewed for a third season, neither the show’s creator and driving force (Matthew Weiner) nor any of its stars (including Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm), are currently signed to return. This would seem to be a problem that is going to work itself out; as a San Francisco Chronicle article states, “If you have the best drama on television — the It Show — you pay to keep the creator. End of story.”

Now I love Mad Men and think it’s a great show, but having been a baseball fan in the modern era, I can see how it could easily float away to another network. That is to say: the television landscape isn’t all that different the baseball landscape, with respect to who can afford to spend what. There are the premium networks like HBO and Showtime, the major networks, there are mid-tiers like USA and FX, and specialty channels. AMC falls solidly into the third category, and they’re rather like the Montreal Expos used to be, or the Pittsburgh Pirates (or Minnesota Twins or Kansas City Royals) are now. They serve a niche audience and don’t have a lot of money to deal with. How do they try to get around it? By buying low. When Mad Men was created two years ago, there was no guarantee it would be a hit, and Hamm was a relative unknown. So everybody came relatively cheap, and signed through two years. Now AMC has the problem — a good problem to have — of knowing that they’re going to have to pony up some serious cash to save their flagship show or risk losing it and everything about it except the P.R. buzz it created for the network. Let’s face it, a lot more people know where AMC is on the dial now than they did back in 2005.

For AMC, that might be enough.

If AMC is far more well-known that the other channels in its class, it might be willing to cut its overhead now and ride its newfound reputation as long as it lasts. Given the extraordinary success of Mad Men, it seems quite unlikely that a show will fall past the six other networks that figure to be rewarded handsomely from it — HBO, Showtime, FX, etc. AMC got Mad Men because everyone else fucked up, and they’re not likely to fuck up that badly again. If AMC wants to move into another tier as a network, its brass could use Mad Men as a platform to do so, but that seems unlikely to me — it would probably require a sustained effort over a period of years and would be thrillingly expensive. That is to say, it seems a lot like if the Montreal Expos had, back in 2003, decided that, with their limited payroll, it was a better idea to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into player acquisition AND spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the superstar player Vladimir Guerrero — who was pretty much out the door once his low-paying rookie contract ended — and thus it seems pretty unlikely (Guerrero bolted to Los Angeles for a hefty, hefty sum). The cost structure of doing business in the sports and entertainment industries seem fairly similar: you can get unproven talent for cheaper than proven talent, but when you have to pay, you have to pay. AMC has to decide right now whether or not they’re going to pay. Knowing nothing else about it, it seems like a good idea for them to cut bait right now. If they really want to move the network into a new tier, the way to do, I think, it would be to improve steadily across the board, rather than depend on one “Superstar” show. If they don’t really want to improve, they needn’t worry about losing Mad Men. It certainly won’t have hurt the network’s reputation, or its bottom line.

The point is this: Mad Men will be on television somewhere next year. It won’t be a gutted version bearing merely the title of the show, and without its creator: it will be fully recognizable. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it waltzed away from AMC. High-profile shows rarely switch networks, but they rarely start out on fringe networks to begin with. This is a special case in almost every way, and one that might have a special resolution.

Howard vs. Pujols

2008-11-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

It’s easy to like Ryan Howard. He’s got the homers and the RBIs, stands 6’4” and has a smile wider than Broad Street. He’s got a gravity about him. This year, he’s the signature face of the World Series champions, and for that, many people feel that he should be the National League’s most valuable player.

Unfortunately for them, even more people think Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals should be this year’s NL MVP. Pujols won rather handily, and Howard finished second, a direct reversal of the 2006 vote. Pujols led Howard in virtually every stat category except home runs, RBIs and team wins, but these categories—combined with a little intellectual elbow grease—are paramount to the MVP race in the eyes of some voters.

The cases for Howard and Pujols could hardly be more emblematic of the old school versus the new school of baseball thought. Both sides have compelling cases, because the Baseball Writers of America have made this award into an annual word game: What does it mean to be “valuable?” There are two schools of thought on this issue. The first is that the best player, as measured by individual statistics, is the most valuable. The second is the best player—as measured by individual and team statistics, performance in the “clutch” (usually September), and what we like to call in these parts general schtee—is the most valuable. It is surprising how often these are at odds, or maybe it’s not surprising at all: after all, you’d think the BBWAA’s main goal, if its members were acting in their own self-interest, would be to create better opportunities for themselves as writers. That is, the second definition allows writers to expound at length on each year’s definition of “value,” the subjectivity of which inspires passion amongst readers; you want impassioned readers, because they come back whether they love you or hate you.

Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post is an old-school writer who voted for Ryan Howard and is flabbergasted that Howard did not win the award. He wrote a column to this effect, stating, “Sometimes, you have to underline the obvious; for example, a first baseman with 146 RBI is ‘more valuable,’ especially when he plays on a first-place team, than a first baseman (Pujols) with 116 RBI on a fourth-place team.” Also: “It’s said that, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a modern baseball writer, unfortunately, reality often looks like an excuse to apply statistics and then torque our opinions to fit them.”

I like how he admits he’s not a modern baseball writer, except he very much is, by his own defition: he’s “applying” statistics (Really, how do you apply statistics? They are measurements. You don’t apply measurements; they merely exist.), they just happen to be very old-fashioned ones that even Cy Young talked about in between mustache waxings. (Did Cy Young have a mustache? I don’t know.) But I could write for hours and not strike at the heart of the argument as well as the inimitable Joe Posnanski (Whom I have, actually, been imitating this entire paragraph):

The key line in Boz’s column seems to be this:

When stats WILDLY contradict common sense, always doubt the stats.

That sounds good. It really does. I read that sentence, once, twice, five times, and each time I read it I liked the rhythms of it, I liked the construction, I liked the use of all-capital letters in WILDLY. When stats WILDLY contradict common sense, always doubt the stats. Yes, this seems a solid premise.

Only, you know what? It isn’t. It is, when you think about it, a horrifying premise — I cannot believe that Tom Boswell, my hero, really believes that. Common sense says that the universe revolves around the earth. Common sense says that thunder clapping means God’s angry. Common sense says that when your car is sliding you want to turn your wheel away from the skid. Common sense says that a fast guy with no power who might or might not get on base is the perfect guy to put in the leadoff spot. Common sense that the queen of spades is the middle card. Common sense says that if you put Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg together, you will get an entertaining movie. Common sense says that the best way to hit a golf ball far is to swing harder. Common sense says a lot of incredibly stupid things and if you are going to automatically choose common sense over, you know stats and facts and results, well, that’s a good way to crash into trees and lose your shirt in a card game and get stuck with Omar Moreno.

You can imagine where it goes from there, but I’ll sum it up: for Posnanski and others, the definition of the most “valuable” player in a given year is the one you’d most like to have on your fantasy baseball team, or “fairytale” baseball team, as my brother (and apparently Adam Corrolla) call it. Something that can be measured by a stack of computer printouts, or via a few visits to baseball-reference.com.

Put it like that, and it seems less appealing. Would the award consistently go to the better individual player? Probably. But there’s that trick again: we’re measuring “value,” not “ability” or “performance.” Or, more accurately, the BBWAA is. For fun, I looked up “value” in an actual hardbound dictionary with a red cover and everything. Definition the first was “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” Egads! I don’t think we’re measuring return in relation to salary, but if we were, Dustin Pedroia would have definitely won the AL MVP (Oh wait… he did). Okay, let’s skip ahead to the most relevant definition to the present circumstances:

value: to rate or scale in usefulness, importance, or general worth

Now we’re getting closer to the second definition I outlined at the top of this article. “General worth” would get rejected by Wikipedia as a “Weasel Words” term as fast as the site’s unpaid sentinels descended upon it, but it’s the BBWAA’s major arguing point when it comes to disputes. It’s powerfully vague, but maybe not powerfully enough: Howard did lose, after all. I generally think it’s disingenuous for Boswell to claim the end of an era based on one year’s vote, regardless of the speciousness of his reasoning, but I tend to get annoyed with statisticians who think that the numbers are the be-all, end-all of the MVP discussion, or pretty much any discussion for that matter (see, for example, this).

Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus has a passionate, fairly wonderful-to-read vivisection of this year’s voting over at Baseball Prospectus; sadly, it’s subscription-only (you should buy the subscription). By sorting through the ballots, even though “his guys won,” he gets the sausage-factory effect of being disgusted with the final result, calling for an evolution toward better accounting practices of player performance. It’s a fairly airtight argument. The only problem I have with it—and I’m not sure it’s really a problem—is that it acknowledges that the award exists solely for the purpose of propping up the BBWAA, which is pretty arbitrary in who it does and does not allow into its ranks. The main criteria is being a quote-gathering, on-site reporter, which leads to all sorts of closed-mindedness and stupid individual votes, in Sheehan’s eyes, and the exclusion of otherwise intelligent baseball writers. Sheehan says he’s waiting for an “evolution” in MVP voting processes, but doesn’t sound confident that it’s happening very fast, given the latest results. He seems to be trying to tell himself to stay calm in the face of a storm he expected to be long gone by now.

While his arguments are convincing, I wonder if statistics-minded people such as Sheehan (and, to a certain degree, myself), can’t learn something from these individual ballots. What do they tell us? I’m not content to say that it tells us people are “aggressively ignorant,” as Sheehan is—I’m not really repulsed by the sausage factory of making an MVP. If the end product it tasty, so be it. If it’s less tasty, it’s still good—it’s baseball. I understand that I’m likely conditioned by the fact that the MVP voting has never been particularly scientific; I think it would be just as dangerous to start handing out the award to the top WARP-er (Wins Above Replacement Level) as it would be to continue giving it to the cognescenti’s choice.

I think the mythos of baseball is important, even in the face of evolution. We go to museums to see crazy animals like sea cows and dodos that were obliterated because of evolution, and we do it because they’re awesome. If someone can rank Prince Fielder above Albert Pujols on their MVP ballot, I’d like to hear why they did it. Baseball invites a million perspectives, and for all Sheehan’s salient points about how the BBWAA is selectively restrictive, there’s no telling what the effect of expanding the membership base would have, or whether the results would be that much different if the voters were 50 random baseball fans. For all the complaints about the process, it, like annual Hall of Fame discussions, is endlessly interesting, and not in the fleeting way like the MVPs of other major sports. People will argue Pujols vs. Howard for decades, and would have, no matter the result. There’s the wisdom of numbers and the wisdom of crowds. Let’s try to respect both sides. Hell may be other people, as No Exit suggests, but even those characters eventually threw up their hands and said, "Well, let's get on with it." This is a long-haul problem. Let's get on with it.

Mad Men's America, Part II

2008-11-06T16:45:00.000-08:00

We left off with America's pitfalls of relying too much on history. This is part of the reason why I'm not as ecstatic about the Obama election as everyone else. I cried, and I took the day off, but it's only a step. There's a long way to go.

One thing that commentators all over the TV are saying is that Obama has a chance to "restore America's place in the world." I'm not sure what I think they're proposing is possible. The moral high ground America won in World War II may have been completely ceded by George Bush. I'm not saying it is that way, but it sure feels like it might be. America's new role in the world won't look anything like it's old place, at the very least, and that simple, sad fact is reminiscent of something Peggy says to Pete (spoiler alert about as loud as you can make it) in the signature scene of the final episode of season 2:

I feel like the world's acceptance of America will forever, from Bush on out, be assessed not on the greatness of the idea of America, but on our actions. This is the correct way to judge us, but I feel that Bush's power grab has exposed some serious flaws in our democratic system that are permanent. What is to stop future Presidents, even Obama (while it's quite unlikely), from using the very legal processes meant to ensure the rights of Americans as a delaying process in order to abuse citizens? What's to stop another President from exploiting a dangerous situation for the sake of starting a war because Foreign Leader X hated his daddy? Are we really counting on the threat of low approval ratings to correct this flaw? We've seen what David Addington, Dick Cheney and those who want to abuse the power of the Presidency can do when motivated. There's a part of me that looks back to the pre-Bush years, and wants to hope that under Obama et. al, that could never happen. But, like Peggy said, that part of me is just gone.

Or is it? Mad Men makes a convincing case that, as adults, we are subject to the same capricious thought processes as children, and act according. Don Draper constantly cheats on his wife, but, until he is found out, keeps a romantic view of his life alive by refusing to grow up. In the first season's signature scene, also in the season finale, he admits as much:

As a stand-alone statement, it's pretty powerful. But this clip and the clip of Peggy above aren't all that different; in fact, they're identical. Once a part of you is gone, it's gone. Children don't realize that yet, so they think in circles rather than a straight line. The Bush years have exhausted every last American resource, tangible and intangible, domestic and internationally, in support of its own agenda. In return, all we've ever gotten was an assurance that everything will be okay in the future. That's how Don talked to Betty, before her awakening this season that he was in no way a model father. No matter what their fate as a couple, the damage has been done. You can't put it back in the box. Like Mad Men as Don Draper's marriage hangs in the balance as America enters the turbulent sixties, the question is where our America goes next.

(For part I, click here.)

Mad Men's America, Part I

2008-11-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

I've been watching exactly two kinds of television for the last few months: Mad Men and election-related coverage. There is some overlap here. The prospect of an Obama presidency represented a culmination of some of the social reforms that begin to boil in the 1960s—era show, where the elevators at the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency are operated by uniformed black people and women have just started to make their way from the secretary's desk to the agency's creative staff. Part of the show's appeal is the retro kitsch, the look back at a time that some would reflexively call "better" and show just how much different things are today, and why. The viewer watches the indulgence of the main characters as they have three-martini lunches and down oysters on the company tab and might feel a twinge of jealousy at all the hedonism, but there is, alas, no going back. There is a line to be drawn from those reforms to today, with Barack Obama as our President-elect, as the entire country continues to try and overcome the Sisyphean burden of slavery, one that no one who is alive today is responsible for creating, but, in our inability to even discuss racial issues with any sort of honestly or clarity, we are still grappling with.

Mad Men tackles the problem of memory head-on. Its main character, Don Draper, has a huge, shameful secret from his past, which he keeps at arm's length and seeks de facto therapy from by cavorting with women, drinking to excess, and keeping an astonishingly high outward self-regard. He rejects the premise that such a thing as "the past" exists, both internally and externally, as when he brainstorms for a new advertising campaign for American Airlines after one of its planes crashes near the now-Kennedy Airport. After a few lackluster campaigns that suggest to passengers that American is safer than ever, Draper walks into the middle of his office, stands on a chair, and implores his staff to look to the future for answers. "There is no such thing as American history," he says. "Only a frontier." The solution, he says, is to see what 1963 (the following year) looks like, not spend time dwelling on the past.

This is similar to advice he gives to Peggy Olson, his onetime secretary turned creative staff member, after she has an unwanted child with a co-worker. On an indefinite leave of absence, Draper finds her in the psych ward of a hospital, unable to speak and unwilling come to grips with what has happened to her. He tells her to pick herself up, come back to work and forget about the baby because "it never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened." There is no American history, only a frontier. Peggy follows his advice, returns to the office and continues her business as if nothing had happened, even under scrutiny. She keeps moving forward.

Some of the election-related coverage I've watched is not on MSNBC or CNN, but on HBO, which has been running the election-related movies Recount and Primary Colors fairly regularly for the last few months. Primary Colors is the story of a gifted young political aide in a Hollywood version of Bill Clinton's first campaign; while somewhat turned off at "Jack Stanton's" boorish behavior, he agrees to join the campaign full-time after a night-long conversation with Stanton's intelligent, patient and no-B.S. wife, who is played by Emma Thompson. During the conversation, the aide talks about how Stanton is so much different than all the other candidates, how he could be the rare candidate that's worthy of the office he seeks, noting some of the failed candidates in history. "We're all about history," Thompson's character says. "What else is there?"

What else, indeed? It turns out, however, that making history can be messy. Stanton's former affairs bubble to the surface, making his march to "history" that much more difficult. The gravitas of the campaign is undercut by the candidate's former dalliances outside of wedlock. And thus the campaign begins the actual day-to-day job of fighting the allegations and tacking back and forth to making "history" happen. It's the egg-breaking of the Presidential omelet, so to speak. There is no such thing as "history" in real time. It's about work. If you think Barack Obama's Presidential campaign proves otherwise, think again. For all the talk about the "historical" aspect of the campaign, the reason it will be something more than a footnote in history is the sheer amount of work it did. In an era where we have realized the power of correctly applying numbers to various disciplines, the Obama campaign focused on a single ratio — 1 in 12. Knock on 12 doors, and one of the people on whose door you knocked will vote for you. That's the math. It's the same type of math that baseball general managers apply to setting their lineups: have guys that get on base more often, you'll score more runs. Score more runs, you'll probably win. Don't pick the guy who looks like the traditional ballplayer; pick the ballplayer. Don't pick the guy who looks like the traditional President; pick the President.

See also: Mad Men's America, Part II

Dear Douglas MacKinnon: Don't Blame The Messenger

2008-11-03T07:36:00.001-08:00

I have an answer for your NYT "Campaign Stops" article which calls for country to do a big 'ol political auditing of the media coverage of the 2008 election once the whole thing is finished. (God willing, this will be Wednesday.) You ask, in conclusion:

My point is, regardless of whether the news media are right or wrong about an Obama win, shouldn’t they still be concerned about that “shred of credibility they have left?” Shouldn’t they be concerned with numerous studies and the observations of various journalists that the business has tilted too far to the left?

Here is my answer: NO.

The ENTIRE media bias argument is a red herring, employed by embittered conservatives to push a false narrative on the American public. Now, I'm not the type of person to make blanket partisan statements, because I believe no party has a monopoly on, well, anything (That's why in another blog I recently wrote that John McCain would have made a good President in 2000). But the "media bias" argument lacks any sort of credibility whatsoever, even from "independent" sources like Politico.com, which found that 80 percent of its coverage has tilted toward Barack Obama during this campaign. Politico should not be ashamed of this. Consumers drive the media narrative, and if consumers want to read about Barack Obama, the news organizations that write about Barack Obama are going to stay in business, while the ones that don't will go under. It turns out, actually, that conservatives love the free-market argument right up until the point that they don't. It's similar to something I just read about baseball, where MLB lobbied Minnesota back in the 1980s to build the Metrodome for the Twins because of the intangible assets baseball would bring to the community; when MLB wanted to move the Twins in 2003, and argued that normal businesses would be allowed to leave if they compensated those aggrieved by their departure, a judge threw the "intangible assets" argument back in their face. It's the same thing here: the mechanism for any "media bias" that actually exists is a fundamental part of the Republican platform.

But even disregarding the free market argument, the "media bias" argument is complete poppycock. I'm not sure I've ever used that word before, but there it is. MacKinnon talks about the media's "fascination" with Obama, but it's not the "media" that is fascinated with Obama; it is the American people. (Mr. MacKinnon will find this out tomorrow.) He writes that 80% of journalists are likely to vote for Obama and says that journalists, their editors, their management and the American people should care about this fact. Here's my question: why? Why should they care? The myth of the non-partisan journalist is along the same lines as the myth of the Vegas Sportsbook: that they want to be even on both sides, and collect the fruits that result from hanging out in the middle. The Sportsbook example is demonstrably false; they're not aiming to be "fair" in some nonsensical way; they're aiming to be right. If 90 percent of the bets come in on one side of an initial line and they think they're going to lose money if the bets keep coming in thusly, they move the line. If, however, they think they are going to win money on that proposition, they do not move the line. They are gamblers just like the gamblers, the same way journalists are human just like the voters. Journalists don't endeavor to systematically break down one candidate without either finding themselves out of a job or moving to a nakedly ideological outlet. (Think, like, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone.) But to imagine that journalists should be devoid of political opinions themselves is not only an anachronism, it never happened in the first place. Here's a story.

About four years ago, I applied for a job at a newspaper in Prescott, Arizona, which is about two hours north of Phoenix and is an old west town gone boom with California transplants. It's growing at a phenomenal rate. I had a one-hour-long writing and editing test followed by two hours of interviews, during which I was interviewed by the Editor in Chief of the paper. We got to talking politics, and I think I avoided disclosing my political affiliation, but I was a Massachusetts boy living in New York City — I don't think there was much of a secret. The question was, what is the role of partisanship in coverage, and my answer was to call them as I see them. The editor was fine with that, and said that he had never registered with any political party nor any group that was directly associated with them, which is to say, the NRA. Which, he said, he admired enough to join the completely non-partisan "Friends of the NRA." Which meant he actually had political opinions — he just didn't want to be tied to them, should, I guess, the shit go down.

From what I can gather, MacKinnon sees Obama's likely victory as the shit going down. It is not, in any way, shape or form. The freedom of the press ensures that, unless regulated, the media has the right to publish pretty much any slate of news it seems fit. Should that news be "slanted" in one direction, it will always be the media doing what's best for the media — the same way the New York Times, the GOP's bugaboo, published MacKinnon's essay itself, and features a weekly column from William Kristol, who's about as ideologically far from Barack Obama as you can get. The myth of the down-the-middle media can be divined from my would-be editor (I didn't take the job); "the media" does not exist per se; it's a bunch of people writing stories, and people have opinions, even if they try to keep them at arm's length. What's more,tThey always have had opinions. To ask the 80% of journalists to be ashamed of their votes is not only disingenuous, it's dangerous for the freedom of the press. Does MacKinnon think we should capital-R Regulate our news outlets? And if not, what's the solution? Policing from the inside? Policing what? Do you want newspapers to have an "affirmative action" program to hire Republican-leaning journalists? Do you want them to end virtual "affirmative action" programs to hire minorities, which would almost certainly lead to a cessation of coverage of certain communities? Is that okay, because you feel that John McCain has not been covered properly? I would suggest that you would say yes, and then the argument would be that newspapers should do what's in your self-interest, and not theirs, and now we're just arguing apples and oranges, but you really want oranges. Well, that's great and all, but we're still choosing between them, thanks. You can blame "the media" for Obama's win, for coverage of disparate communities, or whatever you want, but the fact is that more people have more access to different news sources now than ever before, and if you can't control the narrative, it's your fault, not that of the collected journalists. Writers act in their own self-interest, like anyone else: editors, publishers, anyone. So if you're not making a compelling enough argument to anyone, what does it matter who they're voting for, when as my old would-be editor shows, they can divorce it from their jobs should they choose to? Why not look inward, instead of looking outward? The "media bias" argument is a junk food argument: you'll never go hungry, but that doesn't mean it's good for you. Alas, you can eat junk food forever until your body can't take it any more and your heart explodes. The fact that the media has been so "pro-Obama" isn't a referendum on the media — it means your party has suffered a collective heart attack. It's a referendum on you. From a political or journalistic standpoint, you've earned it. Don't blame the messenger.

In Our Beautiful Memory

2008-10-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

In our beautiful memory
We were all handsome.
We all could sing.
We all had the heart
Of the prettiest girl in town.
And we all hit .300.

— Buck O'Neil

World Series Preview

2008-10-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

(Reprinted, with permission from myself, from Me and Pedro. This whole Roger Angell-like article popped into my head after game seven and I wrote it Monday. I wasn't going to post here but changed my mind. Here it is. If 100 people read this I'll send Angell a Hawaii quarter. Really.)

Depending on who you ask, it is either completely surprising or completely unsurprising that the Tampa Bay Rays stand on the brink of a World Series victory, having (finally!) dispatched the defending champion Boston Red Sox. Mystique and Aura have left Fenway for the dome-enclosed charm of The Trop — quite possibly the worst venue in American professional sports today. Let that not, if we can help it, detract from the greatness and beauty of this year’s Rays club. Having never really been a factor in any previous Major League season, the team was on the verge of becoming the biggest headache for statheads in the history of the game before this season: a team chock-full of young stars that somehow couldn’t win. It was like adding 10+10+10+10+10+10+10+10+10 and getting 65 over and over. You knew it had to change eventually, but I would guess even the most stubborn number crunchers took one look at the Tampa Twentysomethings and still said, when the compass pointed north of 90 wins, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” The Rays hadn’t just suffered through 12 consecutive losing seasons since entering the league in 1998, they had suffered through 12 horrible losing seasons. They finished out of last place exactly once, in the Red Sox’ miracle season of 2004. The then-“Devil Rays” won 70 games, and finished fourth. The Blue Jays looked up from below.

Now the Might Rays storm into the World Series, completing an odd, almost tragic superfecta: each of the four most recently-instituted expansion teams in Major League Baseball have reached the Fall Classic. The Florida Marlins won the whole shebang twice; the Diamondbacks claimed victory in 2001. The Colorado Rockies won 23 out of their final 24 games before being swept out of the title hunt by Boston. Cubs fans, Brewers fans and Pirates fans aren’t likely to see the joy in this little coincidence. It’s been 63 years since they played a World Series game at Wrigley. For that you can thank James Loney and Manny Ramirez.

It was Loney’s Game 1 grand slam that, for all intents and purposes, put the Cubs/Dodgers series out of reach: with their superior starting pitching and the superlative Manny Ramirez leading the way, the Dodgers sucked all the momentum from the North Siders and cruised into the National League Championship Series against the Phillies. Ramirez was the headline attraction of these playoffs. After he was traded by the Red Sox in late July due to a long-simmering feud with the team over a 2009 player option, Ramirez channeled his inner Barry Bonds, hitting an astonishing .396 for the remainder in the regular season (and over .500 in the playoffs), and inducing more than a few eye-rolls in the Fens. His replacement in Boston, Jason Bay, adequately filled Ramirez’s spot in the Sox’ lineup — not a Hurcelean task, but maybe a Mannychean one. Bay is not the hitter that Ramirez is, but Bay’s tall stroke has old-school power when he squares the ball up. The baseball world was ready for Red Sox/Dodgers the way it was for Red Sox/Cubs in 2003 or the NFL was for Patriots/Packers last year; instead, the two best teams in the game are those that play in a stadium unfit for anything but college kids and one whose fanbase is best known for throwing snowballs at Santa Claus during a football game.

•

The Rays didn’t pound their way into the Series, even if they spent the better part of games two through five sending forget-me-nots over the outfield walls in St. Petersburg and Boston. The Rays’ 15 homers in the frame set the record for a League Championship series, but it was a slicing, defensive line-drive by Evan Longoria that tied game seven at one apiece after Dustin Pedroia’s first-run homer for Boston. Longoria, a rookie who stands six-foot-three and a terrifying presence in the batter’s box, was already one of the great stories of the postseason for his tape-measure home runs, but this time he used his massive frame to deflect a ball just down the first-base line with a runner on second base. He was hopelessly late on the ball, but, like the best hitters, if you’re not hitting the ball out of the yard it doesn’t matter much where you hit it, and the important thing is to get the bat on the ball. He sliced one to right, and the game was tied. The Rays’ starter, the brilliant but mercurial Matt Garza, was able to relax a bit, and continued to dominate the Red Sox hitters. When the Rays took the lead on a single by Rocco Baldelli it was bedlam inside the dome, and curtains for the Red Sox. Willie Aybar would add a seventh-inning homer, and the Red Sox would load the bases in the eighth inning, but once Tampa regained the lead they looked like a team poised to make it to baseball’s ultimate stage. The canards about postseason experience die hard, but last night, in Tampa, the Rays did their best to kill off any old storylines. The Red Sox had come back from 3 games down to the Yankees and two games down to the Indians in their previous playoff runs; this year, the clock struck midnight on them, but Tampa’s Cinderella story continues.

•

The Rays will meet the Philadelphia Phillies, who breezed through the National League playoffs after winning the NL East’s war of attrition in familiar, ugly style. For the second straight season, the New York Mets blew a substantial division lead only to find themselves even with Philadelphia on the season’s final Friday; trailing by one game on Saturday; and even again on Sunday thanks to a brilliant pitching performance. Last year it was John Maine; this year it was the Minnesota and Venezuela important Johan Santana, who scrawled on the Mets’ lineup card “Let’s play like men today” and promptly threw a complete game, 11-strikeout shutout. Unfortunately, he was merely a spectator on the season’s final day, when the Mets were eliminated from playoff competition and the Brewers snuck past them to earn a wild card berth. As Queens sank into its annual winter depression, the Phillies were determined not to be swept out of the playoffs in the minimum number of games possible, as they were by last year’s supernova Rockies, but they were playing a Brewers club that had waited 26 years between playoff appearances and had the best pitcher on the planet scheduled to start game two in CC Sabathia. Sabathia, acquired from Cleveland earlier in the season and almost certain to land in the Bronx in 2009, spent his three months on Milwaukee racking up an 11-2 record with a 1.65 ERA and almost single-handedly restored dignity to the Milwaukee baseball franchise.

Sabathia couldn’t start in game one, though, and that job for Philadelphia fell to 24-year-old Cole Hamels, like Sabathia a tall, left-handed pitcher with occasionally dominating tendencies. Where Sabathia is hefty and unkempt in his two-sizes-too-big uniform, Hamels looks like the cardboard cutout of a pitcher. His cap is pulled tight over his had, brim unbent in the slightest, and when he delivers the ball it’s almost as if he’s reaching over to place it in Carlos Ruiz’s glove. Sabathia, on the other hand, rocks and fires, putting his obvious body mass to work and finishing each pitch with a theatrical flourish of his left arm above is head, coiling back as if he cannot wait to be finished with his motion. Hamels’ delivery is all business: smoother, more consistent, ending downward in a fielding position at a point in front of him. It was also more effective in this series. He pitched a masterpiece in game one and watched as Sabathia gave up a second-inning grand slam to the Hawaiian Shane Victorino in game two. This is the second straight year Sabathia has been roughed up in the playoffs after a brilliant regular season, possibly the result of the large number of innings he threw just getting there (His NLDS start was his fourth consecutive appearance on three days’ rest). Note to Hank: caveat emptor.

Against the Dodgers, the Phillies were faced with roughly the same quandary the Anaheim Angels were faced with in the 2002 World Series: How do you stop, with apologies to Albert Pujols (then and now), the game’s reigning best hitter at the peak of his abilities? The answer is to stop everybody else. Manny, long accused of making a mockery of the game, continued to do so with his bat, going an incomprehensible 8 for 15 with two home runs and seven walks over the course of the series, only to see his team fall, four games to one. His 28 postseason home runs are most all time, and his 74 postseason RBI are second to Bernie Williams, but it is those records — and the thought of his next $100 million contract — that will have to carry Ramirez through the long winter. Like his old friends in Boston, he couldn’t make it to the very end. In fact, it was Derek Lowe, Boston’s winning pitcher in each of 2004’s series-clinching victories, that took losses in games one and four for L.A., a team with a distinctly East Coast feel featuring Joe Torre behind the bench and Nomar Garciaparra sitting atop it. Even the Dodgers’ owner hails from Boston, but there will be no clam chowder nor wheatgrass in this year’s World Series. This one’s for all the cheesesteaks.

•

If there is one postseason story that should not be buried by Longoria’s superlative skills or BJ Upton’s mammoth playoff home run outburst (seven at latest count, one off the playoff record), it is that of Baldelli. Baldelli joined Tampa Bay in 2003 and put up good numbers through several losing seasons before struggling through something bigger: he was losing energy. After several trips to the disabled list and consultations with doctors, it was discovered that he has a severe metabolic condition that restricts his ability to engage in athletic activities for long periods of time. He’s still a good player, but a part-time one. For someone who grew up in Rhode Island (as a Red Sox fan) and was compared to Joe DiMaggio in his early days for his all-around abilities, it looked as if Baldelli’s career would be spent, for its valor, in the service of avoiding futility. Baldelli started only two games of the series, including the last one, but his go-ahead single in the sixth inning was the game’s decisive blow. At merely 27 years old, he is the heart of this both improbably and all-too-predictably good Rays team. Philadelphia’s center is probably their incredibly 26-year-old second baseman, Chase Utley, but their most recognizable player is their slugging first baseman Ryan Howard. Howard led the league in home runs for two out of the last three years, but his efficiency in producing them has dropped dramatically in that time. He strikes out in the most prodigious numbers in major league history, leading many observers to curse his approach, but there’s something magnetic about the man that is old-school baseball at its finest and delightfully simple to understand — he hits the ball a long way. Homerless through the NLCS, it would be vintage Howard to turn on the faucet when it’s needed the most (He won the 2006 NL MVP on the basis of a sizzling September, and may repeat the feat this year). The question is whether any of it will be enough to cool off the Rays. There may not be enough juice in Howard’s bat and Hamels’ arm to extinguish the thrilling young team by the bay.

Follow-up for those who care: The limits of baseball statistics

2008-10-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

Some follow-up thoughts from the previous post on the limits of baseball statistics, as emailed back-and-forth between trusty argument partner cannatar and myself (before this came out, incidentally). I think it follows logically and enhances the discussion, probably clarifies some things that were not clear in my post. This also has a nice cast of characters including Steve the old-school baseball guy, Mike the mathematician and Andrea the cook (she's a great cook). Also, there's a next-level article at Edge magazine here that discusses the general limits of statistics and has some overlap, but you're going to need a fairly advanced degree to read it.

From: cannatar
To: Bryan

"I'm also mystified at the premise that the 'better' team doesn't always win the championship, when in fact the point of the championship is to determine the best team."

When did you turn into Steve? [ed's note: very anti-sabermetrically-inclined fellow, tends to turn quite disagreeable to the point of yelling at the mention of VORP. Sometimes threatens physical violence. Am not kidding.]

Look, it depends on what you want the word "better" to mean. Does it just mean who did a better job during the 7 games?

Or does "better" mean something more - that one group of men is inherently more skilled at the game of baseball than the other? We use the word "better" all the time in life. You're better than me at stickball, Andrea is a better cook than me, Mike is better at math than both of us.

When I say you're better at tennis than me, I mean that in my opinion (based on years of observation), on any given day, you have a better than 50% chance of beating me in a game of tennis.

If I beat you 10 times in a row, I'd probably change my opinion. If I beat you in one game of tennis, I won't. Even if we call this game a "playoff game" and both agree that this match is extra-important and attempt to play with more focus and determination than we would on another day, the outcome isn't going to change my opinion that if we played again the following week in such a match, you'd be more likely to win. And that's sort of how I choose to think about what baseball team is better. I think the Rays are a better team than the White Sox (particularly since the White Sox don't have Carlos Quentin). But, I realize that baseball is a somewhat random game and that the inferior White Sox had about a 1 in 3 chance of winning the 5-game series. If they had won the series, that would've meant to me that they played better for 5 games, but it wouldn't have changed my opinion about who would win if they played another 5 game series. In other words, I would still think the Rays are "better". I assume Steve would think that if the White Sox won the series, they would win if they played it again the following week. And again, and again. In other words, I think Steve believes that the series reveals the inherent truth about which team is better.

Basically, I think the whole argument is circular. There are 30 baseball teams. The commissioner decides to come up with a construct to determine which team is the best at playing baseball in a given year. Then, whichever team wins under that construct is in fact the best. That requires us to make two assumptions: (1) it is possible to come up with a way to determine which team is better in the absolute sense (Sheehan and I don't think it is) and (2) MLB has actually come up with the best method for doing so.

Even if I presuppose that #1 is true, all I'm doing is accepting that if the White Sox beat the Rays, that means they're better at this point in time in a series made up of 5 games with two days off in between. These distincions are important - the Dodgers probably were actually a better team than the Cubs in October even though they were worse during the 162 game regular season. They were different teams at different points in time - Manny Ramirez and Rafael Furcal weren't around in June, but were in October. Carlos Zambrano and Rich Harden were healthy for most of the regular season, but not in October. The Red Sox and Angels both used a 5-man starting rotation during the regular season. The playoff structure allowed them to use 3-man rotations in the first round of the playoffs. "5-man rotation Red Sox" is essentially a different team than "3-man rotation Red Sox."

But, even if I accept that it's possible for MLB to come up with a system to determine which team is better at a given point in time, I think we'd both agree that MLB has not in fact come up with the best method to determine such a thing. They're running a business - their primary goal is to come up with a season and playoff schedule that makes the most money for MLB. I think they're concerned with fairness in determining a champion, but that's clearly secondary. Even assuming that the 162, 5, 7, 7 format is the best, it's clearly not the case that the system is designed so that the best 8 teams advance to the playoffs. If the goal was to determine who's the best, all 30 teams would play a balanced schedule and the 8 teams with the best records would advance to the playoffs. Instead, some teams play much harder schedules than others, and teams with inferior records make it to the playoffs because they happen to be grouped with other crappy teams. The 2006 Cardinals had the 13th best record in baseball. In addition, their 83-78 record was inflated by the fact that they played a disproportionate number of games against teams in their own division. Not only did their division contain only one other team with a winning record, it also contained the two teams with the worst records in the National League. They also played the vast majority of their games against other National League teams, which as a group are inferior to American League teams. I think there's a compelling argument that the Rangers (80-82), Indians and Mariners (both 78-84) played better than the Cardinals in 2006, they just had much harder schedules. So, there's at least a reasonable argument that the Cardinals were the 16th best team during the regular season, and there's not much of an argument that they were better than 13th.

From: Bryan
To: cannatar

I'm not Steve. Whatever I am, I'm not Steve. That is to say, I understand (and respect) the angle from which you approach this argument, which I did NOT understand, in all its facets, three years ago. The discussion I've started now proceeds from our previous, similar discussion. I understand the statistical undercurrent of your objection and begrudge your opinion in no way, shape or form (To that end, this is the first time I've written something stats-y without the sort of implicit knowledge that I was writing it to you; I was just writing about things that were bothering me. I appreciate your taking the time to read and respond).

That said, let's take the Andrea-as-a-cook example. Andrea is a better cook than me. What if Andrea was on Top Chef? The only goal of Top Chef is to win Top Chef, not to win Top Chef if it were played again, and again, and again. Now I agree that being the better chef coming into Top Chef will give you a better chance to win, the same way I think a team full of Albert Pujii would be better than a team full of Justin Mornii. But Top Chef exists so someone can win it, the same way Major League Baseball exists so that someone can win the championship. The same way there are hundreds of thousands of independent chefs around the country who are NOT on the show, if Major League Baseball did NOT exist, there would be a surfeit of independent leagues and teams and no real place for them to come together. MLB brings them together to determine who is best. That is the entire idea.

And so, I am taking the not-all-that-revolutionary step of saying that the team that wins the championship is the best team, given that is the sole goal of the entire season. You say that you and Sheehan do not believe that there is a way to determine who the best team is, yet in this very email you say that you think the Rays are better than the White Sox, and Sheehan argues quite forcefully that the Cardinals were not the best team in 2006. But hold on, if you do not believe there is a way to determine who the best team is, how can you determine who it's not? It seems, actually, that you have a very good idea of who you believe the best team is and are frustrated with/dismissive and ambivalent of results that do not conform thusly. Sheehan has no problem saying the Red Sox were the best team last year. So I think there's no question that what you've written is not exactly true.

Whether or not MLB has come up with the best method is up for debate, but what's not up for debate is that it is the method. Teams plan ahead at the beginning of the season because they know what the playoffs will look like. When things change during the year, like when the NBA moved to a 7-game first round series in the middle of the season, or, you know, our tennis matches, that's what I find fundmentally unfair. As you know. That ain't what we're discussing. It's just that winning short series is known to be part of winning the championship. Do I hate the 5-game series? You bet. But it's like a Supreme Court Decision — it's the law of the land until it's changed. The law of the land is that if you want to be named champion, you win a five game series. Better have some good starters.

And I don't buy the MLB-as-a-business aspect of your argument. Yes, I understand that MLB is a business and these are business decisions. But trying to separate any of this from the games seems like a fruitless and ultimately foolish pursuit.

In short, I feel like your arguments are mostly political — taking on the established law of the land, so to speak — and I actually agree with some of them. What I'm saying to Joe (and, I guess, you) is that it's fine to take on the orthodoxy but be careful about tearing to shreds people who are merely accepting the orthodoxy, mostly in light of the fact that the numbers do not describe anything in "the fog" that Bill James warned about that lies between axiom and theory. There is a point, it seems, when the numbers guys will throw up their hands and say, "Well, what happens, happens, we can't predict it all." I agree. I don't think numbers or words or observations alone or even paired can describe baseball; that's what makes it great. It takes ALL of them, and more than that. I don't want to disqualify any terms outright. And when it comes down to determining the "best" team, either we can — by the numbers OR the championship — or we can't. If we can't, I don't see the point in playing the games. Ask Herm Edwards why. If we can, I'll take what actually happens. It may not be perfect, but it DID happen, each of us only get so many of these championships in my lifetime. The champions deserve their due. The history of anything isn't perfect; we know only what we really need to know. We know the champions of baseball because it is, even in shorthand, the easy way to tell who the best team was in a given year. It's fighting for that right that makes the playoffs so dynamic, and what makes them the playoffs even if the numbers think it's just another game.

To me, at least.

From: cannatar
To: Bryan

I think most of our argument (and part of your issue with Sheehan) boils down to a definition of the word "best." I am using the word to mean something inherent about the person/team that can really only be "known" by God, but can be determined to some level of certainty by looking at data. You're using the word to mean who did the best at winning the World Series. My take on it is that we already have a word for that: "World Series Champion." Now, if you want to also call the Champion, "the best," you can, but I think you need to acknowledge that you're using the word "best" in a particular way and that other people are entitled to use it in a different way. Stephanie is the "Top Chef Season 4" champion, but I don't think we have any basis to declare her the "best" chef of the group.

"when it comes down to determining the "best" team, either we can — by the numbers OR the championship — or we can't. If we can't, I don't see the point in playing the games."

I guess part of the difference between us is that if the Mets won the World Series, I would still be just as happy even if I didn't think they were the best. It does seem that if I think it's all pretty random, I shouldn't care who wins, but I still care for some reason. I'm more puzzled by the fact that I care about the success of a random group of 25 guys who are employed by Fred Wilpon.

minor point:

"You say that you and Sheehan do not believe that there is a way to determine who the best team is, yet in this very email you say that you think the Rays are better than the White Sox,"

I don't think I contradicted myself. I THINK the Rays are better based on all the evidence, but I don't have a method to determine it with 100% certainty, and I don't believe such a method exists. They're close enough that I probably can't say it with even a very high percentage of certainty (in contrast, I think there's sufficient evidence to say that Albert Pujols is a better baseball player than Andy Phillips with at least 99% certainty, but there's a minute possibility that Pujols's career has just been random chance).

From: Bryan
To: cannatar

My main point is that it's more about the quality of ideas on any side — the numbers, observations, or words — that it is about the ideas themselves. I don't think this is a radical notion, and I don't think Joe Sheehan or anyone at BP would think so either. So if idiots use the terms "veteran leadership" wrongly, they're still idiots. If they use the term correctly, good. Same thing with determining what team is the "best." I think there's a compelling argument — obviously — that mysticism w/r/t unplayed, nonexistent sets of baseball games does not automatically outweigh the results of the actual World Series, no matter how good the numbers are w/r/t these magical unplayed series. I don't think it's a silly thing to argue about, though, and I think that many, many people do. I think this is the main problem. Of course, if you really think that the "best" team can only be known by God, maybe that supports my theory — I'm just going with what us humans have come up with. God's almost certainly smarter than me. I'm just doing the best I can here.

The limits of baseball statistics

2008-10-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

I love baseball, I love baseball writing and I love baseball statistics, so I’ve been mulling a subject that has bothered me for a long time: the assault on some baseball terminology as propagated by Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus.

Baseball Prospectus has revolutionized baseball’s record-keeping over the last few years — or at least popularized a long-simmering underground revolution. Put simply, baseball’s most cherished statistics — batting average, runs batted in, pitcher wins and losses — tell us a lot more about what happened in a game than they do make an accurate measure of a player’s contribution. It sounds tricky, but the best way to look at it is that the statistics that Baseball Prospectus compiles from games have a much better track record of predicting what will happen in the future (hence, “Prospectus”) for any given player than the “traditional” stats, which are measures of things that are often beyond a player’s control. That is, the total number of runs batted in a player will accrue during the season relies heavily on the quality of a player’s teammates, and a pitcher may win a game in which he gave up 10 runs and lose one in which he gave up 1. It doesn’t even take a baseball fan to divine the dubious value of such a statistic.

As the BP crew has grown in stature and number over the past few years — primarily since the publication of the 2002 book Moneyball, which highlighted the “newfangled” methods — it has been under nearly constant attack from baseball lifers and “purists,” who argue, basically, that the number-crunchers are a bunch of dweebs who long to make passionate love to their computers. It’s was unfair even before the BP numbers turned out, on a macro level, to help teams to such a degree that it’s pretty much accepted that they were right; the criticism from the old guard now is fairly passive/aggressive and limited to veteran announcers and writers who make claims that the “stats don’t always tell the story” and that there are intangibles involved with winning baseball games. The numbers guys don’t deal with intangibles. If it can’t be measured, it is not important.

This dichotomy rears its ugly head, as it were, every October during the baseball playoffs. Inevitably an announcer will make a comment that a team’s “veteran leadership” will prove decisive, or that their “heart” will lead them to victory. Just as inevitably, Sheehan will write a column excoriating the mouthpiece. Here is an excerpt from this year’s column:

Post-season baseball is just baseball with more media credentials and fewer games between flights. Pressure? There may be more, but is it any more than that faced when you're trying to get drafted? Make a team? Win a playoff spot? Does this week really feel more pressure-packed for the Brewers or White Sox than last week, every game a must-win game, did?

The stock storylines don't add anything to our enjoyment of the game. Whether it's "post-season experience" or "veteran leadership" or "pitching and defense" or "small ball," all these attempts to fit the postseason into boxes limit our knowledge rather than expand it. If we're going to break down these games, and figure out why players do well and poorly, why teams win and lose, let's wipe the slate clean and focus on what's happening on the field.

After years of struggling to figure out exactly what my problem is with this line of reasoning, I think I’ve finally found it: it renders words meaningless. Sheehan’s problem is not that these terms are misapplied but that they are applied at all. This gets to the heart of what Baseball Prospectus is all about: predicting the next set of numbers. There is one set of numbers, a game happens, and then there is a new set of numbers, both for the game itself and one that incorporates all previous games. The numbers do a fairly good job of predicting what the results will be on a macro level, but as Sheehan notes above in reference to the playoffs, post-season baseball is fundamentally no different than regular-season baseball; that is to say, and I’m sort of quoting from memory from hundreds of other articles that he’s written, there is nothing about post-season baseball that makes the numbers any less capricious than they are in May. That is to say, October baseball is subject to the same forces as any other game, with respect to creating new sets of data. You can predict what might happen, and be correct a good percentage of the time, but the game itself — the number of outs, the rules, etc. — is no different in the playoffs than it is in September, in that it’s damn near impossible to predict anything with certainty. The otherwise dogshit Cardinals won the World Series two years ago due to a strong October run. Here’s what Joe wrote to crown them:

Fans, and the less-critical corners of the media, are welcome to embrace the Cardinals and create storylines about raising their level of play and coming up big when it counted and grit and guts and what have you. It might ring more true if it wasn’t the standard storyline for every single team that wins a championship: they’re better people than the guys who lost.

I think he means “better baseball players,” but that’s not my point. Look at sentence fragment that talks about how writers will “create storylines about raising their level of play and coming up big when it counted and grit and guts and what have you.”

Do you notice anything wrong?

If you do, awesome.

If you don’t, let’s start from the beginning. Of baseball. Baseball is a human construct. Or at least we assume it is (ha!), not knowing its precise origins. (The Cooperstown moment is a myth, but one that will do. Like a lot of history.) But let’s just be clear: there’s nothing inherently special about baseball any more than there is anything inherently special about anything: any meaning it has is what we give it. The pre-season, 162-game schedule and post-season are completely arbitrary, save for the meaning we give it. The “championship of baseball” is a construct that, like the sport itself, has no inherent meaning whatsoever. I suspect Joe would agree with me on this, and why the numbers don’t play any different in the post-season than they do the regular season. The numbers don’t know it’s the playoffs.

But the numbers don’t play the game.

This is an incredibly important distinction that has been made many times, by many people, the only difference between them and myself being that they are usually trying to discredit BP’s stat-heavy mission. I am doing no such thing. I love the numbers. I play in a fantasy baseball league that is entirely situation-neutral numbers heavy — that is, the numbers which are BP’s bread-and-butter — and wouldn’t trade the numbers for anything. But there’s a reason that the numbers can only predict what will happen in a given game, series, or season, I dunno, 60 percent of the time (to randomly choose a fairly generous number) — the game is played by people. Or, as Billy Beane, master of the numbers, said in Moneyball, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.” People play the game, and sometimes the favorites win, and sometimes they don’t, like the Cardinals in 2006. And the people, unlike the numbers, know it’s the championship. While Joe is perfectly fine with making his own, completely subjective value judgments on how much “pressure” playing the playoffs actually brings (Despite his distaste of subjectivity, remember: “There may be more, but is it any more than that faced when you're trying to get drafted? Make a team? Win a playoff spot?”), he a) intentionally overlooks the fact that the World Series is, by acclimation if not definition, the most important baseball played each year and thus likely subject to the most pressure; and b) follows it up with, “If we're going to break down these games, and figure out why players do well and poorly, why teams win and lose, let's wipe the slate clean and focus on what's happening on the field,” which has nothing to do with his anti-“veteran leadership” et al. screed. When people are talking about “postseason experience” and “veteran leadership,” this is exactly what they are trying to do.

The numbers, with their gap in accuracy between predicted results and actual results, don’t do the trick. Observation closes the gap. In the Cardinals/Tigers series, Sheehan talks about how the Cardinals got lucky that the Tigers made so many errors, and that the Tigers lost the title more than the Tigers won it. This is likely because the Tigers made such a shockingly high number of errors (seven, I believe) in a short series, and errors are largely unpredictable, so the random sequence of events — the errors — tilted the series toward the Cardinals. All this talk of randomness and capriciousness, which creeps up every year, viz:

I keep coming back to the central theme of any baseball postseason. The champion isn’t necessarily the best team, but it is almost always the team that plays the best in the short series of October. The Rays aren’t getting "lucky" in any sense other than they’re playing well when playing well has some excellent rewards. The Red Sox aren’t getting "unlucky," other than that they’re playing poorly at the same time. The Rays are playing better baseball, and thanks to that, they’re one win away from something that would have seemed preposterous to all but one man and his trusty CPU seven months ago.

Just for a quick side-trip, let’s look up “champion” in Webster’s. It’ll be important:

2. One who by defeating all rivals, has obtained an acknowledged supremacy in any branch of athletics or game of skill, and is ready to contend with any rival; as, the champion of England.

Getting back to the Tigers/Cardinals, the question Joe posed is not how the Tigers lost but why they lost, for the how is obvious — it was the errors. Neither Joe’s statistics or observations begin to provide the why he seeks. Isn’t that something? In fact, the only two sources of why are the injury report and the work of writers, who try to use the tools at their disposal (words) to describe why what happens, you know, happens. Words like “heart” and “passion” are perfectly applicable in baseball because if they are not they would cease to exist. They would be meaningless. As a quick exercise, think about your day right now for one second. How many things are going through your mind? Now imagine a sport that takes, at the least, 18 people to complete one game. How many processes, spoken or unspoken, would contribute to the outcome? It would have to be infinite, right?

I think it’s time that Joe and the other hardcore number-crunchers realize that we have created baseball, but the numbers merely describe the numbers, and nothing else. The words we use have meaning, so when we call a team a “champion,” they are the best team because we say they are. Everyone knew what they were playing for when the season began, and only one team achieved it. It happens because of great players, veteran leadership, tactical decisions, experience, and features from across the spectrum of what it means to be human, some of which are quantifiable, some of which are not. Sometimes the words are wrong (Your best bet would be to ask for examples of veteran leadership). But sometimes the numbers are wrong, too. We’re trying to describe what makes our champions our champions. If the “champion” is merely a construct and doesn’t mean anything, you shouldn’t care. If it does mean something, then you’ve admitted defeat. The words don’t predict or describe as well as precisely as the numbers, but that doesn’t mean they’re less important. Baseball is one of the most dynamic games ever created, but it's not one-one hundredth as dynamic as the human brain and human emotion. Champions are champions for a reason; we made up the word the same way we made up the game. Let us tell the stories of why the champions became who they are. We'll use the numbers and use words. It's an imperfect exercise. But we're trying.

UPDATE: Wow. This now exists. It's all there.

Also: Follow-up emails for those that are interested.

The Office: Intellectual nonsense gone not funny

2008-10-03T07:09:00.001-07:00

Has anyone else noticed that The Office is in serious, serious, serious danger of not being funny anymore?

(And has been for awhile?)

Last week's season premiere was an embarrassment. The superclever writers of the show have decided that prodding the audience, instead of making it laugh, has become An End to the show. Not just the final scene, but in this case, yes, the final scene. Example: Toby, the sad-faced HR rep who ostensibly left the titular office last year to move to Costa Rica, makes his first appearance on the show as... a guy who may or may not have broken his neck in his first few days in Costa Rica. No punchline. That's it. Being paralyzed is funny! The Office has long explored the relationship between uneasiness and humor, and has made an art out of creating some of the least believable, most uncomfortable-to-watch scenes in television history. In the past, though, these were all in the service of eventual comedy. Comedy seems to have taken a back seat, on The Office, to the idea of being clever: it seems like one big, bad graduate school thesis for comedy writers. Where they see comedy plus romance plus uncomfortable situations plus a little bit o' pathos plus actual audience participation in the show (via the Interwebs) = a new, better breed of sitcom, I see a show that's just not all that funny anymore because the being funny is now 20 percent of the goal. While I'd, off the bat, concede that the traditional sitcom is usually cloying and plain bad, you don't need to look further than 30 Rock to see that it's not the format it's the problem, it's the individual shows themselves. If The Office is the graduate student who can't help spout/test all her zany theories in her first post-collegiate job, to the chagrin, resentment, and amazement of an identically-aged staffer who's actually been doing the job for 10 years already, Tina Fey is that staffer. Why not go for a laugh if you can go for a laugh?

Now, part of my problem with The Office is that I can no longer stand many of the main characters. If Jenna Fischer and Jon Krasinski could somehow act like they actually liked each other, instead of merely pretending to because it says they do in the script, that would be, like, super helpful (See where I'm going with that?). Also, I get that Dwight is crazy, and I don't care. It was funny the first 60 times between the British version and the American version. Can we flesh out the character a bit more? Why is it that the minor characters get their moments of development — Kevin saying, last year, that it was "good to win one" in his parking fight, which came after his breakup; Stanley's fist-raising gesture at losing 7 pounds in the season premiere — and the major characters remain stereotypes, more or less? Isn't this the exact opposite of what they should be trying to do? We know nothing more or less than we do about Jim, Pam or Dwight than we did after five episodes of the show in the first season. Jim loves Pam, and that's it. Pam gets sad and confused and wants to be an artist. Dwight is funny because he's quasi-Amish/overeager. That's it. We've seen evidence of this since then, but it's merely reinforced what we already know. There hasn't been a moment where Jim has been a complete dick, or Pam has acted supremely confident, or Dwight has acted like a normal human being. It's been one long, slow twisting of the knife.

Here's where I talk a little bit more about the British show, which, I'll admit, sounds like an elitist/overinformed tact (Though it might just be the Britishness, in the way that whenever people talk about original items from Japan and Britain they sound like snobs, while referencing art from everywhere else sounds informed) — but I assure you that it's not. Rather, the British (The) Office's main advantage was that it had a short run — two seasons and a special — that made its premise all that believable because if the characters were around each other any longer they would naturally fall into equilibrium. The American (The) Office was able, like its predecessor, to disregard this for its first two seasons because we, the viewers, were dropped straight into this situation that we knew nothing about. Dwight could be a dick, Jim could be sullen, Pam could be pathetic and the joy would be that we would get to watch this work itself out. Four years later, it hasn't, which seems like the writers' way of trying to drill into our heads that "People don't change," which is intellectual bullcrap that may be true on some fundamental level but it is not on a practical level, where people who even detest each other will find a way to work and live together in ways that could actually be funny, if the writers took the (unfathomably short) step of making them act like humans. We watch sitcoms to laugh and unlike the writers of The Office, we work in actual offices across the country and live actual lives and actually fall in love and have heartbreaking moments and we know what they look and feel like, and while these one-dimensional characters are nice for us to project our own hopes and dreams upon, they don't really look and feel like real people — looking and feeling like real people being, I would guess, being exactly what the show's writers think they look like. There are some characters who, while cartoonish, have human traits. Stanley looks like a real person because he gets angry. Kevin looks like a real person because he has an emotional side. Darryl looks like a real person because he's cleverly mischevious. But the three main supporting roles are shells of characters, and are totally unredeeming. I don't care what happens to them because they are boring and not real. Why would I watch a show where the characters aren't real?

Still, The Office is a bona fide phenomenon, one with too many dedicated webpages to count and the Water Cooler Show of record. It seems to me that the writers are taking the show's popularity for granted and pushing the show further and further into nonstandard unfunny sitcom territory, as in Toby's possible paralyzation described above, which has a negative humor quotient, a term I just made up, when they should be in fact going backward to the fundamental rule of sitcoms now that they're more popular than ever: be funny. The Simpsons warded off these demons for about a decade, but it's taken The Office only a few years to reach the point of being cloying; The Simpsons thrived because it was animated; if The Office was animated, it would be a lot funnier. In fact, a lot of their jokes may look great on paper, but they don't play well in real life. It's actually been like this for more than a year now, but I've continued watching with high expectations that have not once been rewarded mostly because I like having something to watch on Thursday night. The Office might be a lot like Barack Obama (and while I don't want to get political, I think this is a "fair and balanced" assessment): great premise at the start, pitch-perfect for its time, better than the alternatives, but with some glaring flaws that most people agree to overlook because the alternative is so bad. But just because The Office is better than According to Jim doesn't make it great, the same way after watching Bill Clinton talk for 10 minutes you realize how far Obama has yet to travel to become the best Democratic politician of the last 50 years. He'll be the signature politician, and The Office is the signature sitcom of this decade, but that's just because someone's gotta be on top at any given time. The Office gives everyone a little bit of something — a slight resemblance to their own office, the Web searcher a chance to submit a tip, a little moment of reflection, an absurdist laugh — without performing its essential function: be funny, all the time. I understand why it's so popular. But it won't be for long unless it gets back into the business of telling jokes.

Reappear to you visual

2008-09-23T11:25:00.001-07:00

I have moved my blogging operations over to this quadrant of the Internet — that is, far away from the sportsy corner where Me and Pedro sits, collecting sad dust, the memory of an experiment gone horribly wrong, sad in a profound way; it is incredibly unfortunate that I was not able to make that particular project work in any sort of meaningful way. The project was this: a dear, old friend of mine and I were to blog about the Boston Red Sox from either side of America, and it bombed spectacularly, owing to our complete inability to work together whatsoever. After a flurry of nasty, unnecessary emails — most of them, I suspect, authored by myself — the site has become sort of a living tombstone to our work. If the blog is not dead it's only because Google says it's not dead and I can't bring myself to erase it, as if that will finally end the experiment once and for all. But the truth is the experiment is long over, and I keep the blog up in the hopes that a new one can crop in that place, the brainchild of the two founders of said blog being its authors, but I cannot post there alone with any sort of authority. I feel like only half of the necessary voices are coming through there, as I never intended it to be my platform for talking about anything — I wanted it to be more a place of discussing the events of the day. I've let it slide from that, and it is my fault, and we are not starting here anew so much as we are starting something different.

This is just going to be a blog, one without a point and hopefully, without much of a readership. If I am to gain readers it will have to be by my hand alone, and they will have to follow me through what will be, inevitably, a rollercoaster of ideas and theories for which they will not likely have the patience, but if they do, it is my hope they will learn something if only, I don't know, how not to write. The editing on this site will be sparse and the prose free-flowing, as I don't intend to start reading everything over a million times, though I invite you to do so. Of course, doing so would require you to read it once, and I trust I'm already trying your patience with that.

A large part of me wants to start this blog in memory of David Foster Wallace, whose death I wrote about here and whose works seems, in the wake of his death, far more accessible than it did before. This sounds horrible, at least in my head, because I do not mean it in the sense of "He's dead, let me read his work for a month and then go on with my life." No. What I mean, and what I express somewhat in the article, is that his work was in some ways too gravitationally strong; it was hard to read without getting sucked toward the bottom of whatever pit he was, figuratively, writing from. That might sound childish, but I always felt that there was no end to Wallace, and now that he has passed, he has a complete set of works from which to work, and I can set about moving toward finishing them. It is in my nature to be this way, and I cannot apologize for it. In some ways, it is even inspiring, but enough about that.

For y'all,

BJ

ALSO: This blog will probably be a lot more playful than this opening salvo, but you had to be warned. I probably won't write very often, because when I have active blogs, all I ever do is think about things that would make good blog posts, and I get all freaked out that what I'm writing is shit. So hopefully I can do some good stuff by not thinking about it. Unless this is another spiral coming, but I'm trying to limit my own expectations on myself. This is something I'm often not very good at. It seems to me to be a contradiction of having a blog, or at least one of any literary aspiration, that all I want is people to read this, but by thinking that constantly, I produce stuff that no one wants to read. Or maybe it's all in my head. Who knows. Can you tell I've read DFW lately? Yeesh, there's probably a lot of this going around right now. It's sad. It really is. I recommend McSweeneys' memories page; it taught me more about DFW, the person, than really anything I've ever read ever. It mostly taught me that any non-contact with DFW I did not have was my fault alone, as he was as singularly reachable as he was talented, so I'm determined not to let that happen to me with my favorite authors/people again. (You know, why not try at things, at least?) My favorite tribute is by Adrienne Miller, who ends her story with:

He could also be pissy. He could also be annoying. He could be mean. He could be remote, and ruthless, and reckless. He was filled with towering rages. He said that he believed he was 85 percent sincere and 15 percent full of shit. He lied, but then he would admit that he had been lying, and would apologize for it, excessively. But he tried to tell the truth. He tried to find the truth. He tried to be good, and he was. He was good. He was better than all of us put together.
And he was—is—loved.
He is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved.

This is something you forget during depression — how very loved you are, at all times, by people you don't think have the time or effort to do so. It's so damn inspiring. It really is.