baseball

My god, this is stupid:

The Showalter Plan realigns as follows, with four divisions of seven teams each, arranged geographically to keep all divisions as much within the same time zone as possible -- another simple, common-sense idea. Gee, how novel. Here it is:

Buck Showalter Realignment Plan
Babe Ruth Division	Jackie Robinson Division	Roberto Clemente Division	Hank Aaron Division
Yankees	Dodgers	Cubs	Royals
Mets	Angels	White Sox	Cardinals
Red Sox	Padres	Indians	Rangers
Blue Jays	Mariners	Reds	Astros
Orioles	Giants	Twins	Tigers
Nationals	Diamondbacks	Brewers	Braves
Phillies	Athletics	Pirates	Rockies

[From ESPN.com - Baseball needs to consider the Buck Showalter Relocation Plan ]

I saw Showalter selling this on Baseball Tonight. What a fool he made of himself. First, he kept talking about how his plan decreases travel because the divisions are regional. Hello? He wants a balanced schedule, so everyone travels everywhere.

Second, how do you say you're emphasizing regional rivalries and have the Cards & Cubs in separate divisions? And again, his plan has a balanced schedule. How does that emphasize rivalries? His plan also has the Yankees play the Mariners as often as they play the Red Sox. Good luck selling that MLB, Fox & your bosses at ESPN, Buck my boy.

He also suggested the Rays would be a good candidate for contraction the year after they were in the World Series? What is he smoking?

There's a good reason I usually fast forward through both the commercials and the talking heads on BT.

If you're not reading Fire Joe Morgan, you should if you care about the sorry state of baseball media. As a good start, try this fisking of an article that displays several of the standard "mediot" (as we called them on rec.sports.baseball back in the '90s) tendencies. Among these are the strange compulsion of the sports media to blame team failure on individuals. "Ken Tremendous" states what should be obvious to the mediots, but unfortunately is not:

There are eight position players, five starting pitchers (usually) and several relievers on a baseball team. They play 162 games per year, then between one and three playoff series in an attempt to win the World Series. Teams have vastly different payroll thresholds, and every year they contend with injuries, fluctuations in performance, and the relative strength of the other teams in their division. One man, no matter how good, cannot single-handedly win a championship in a team sport.

Dean Barnett, taking off from a Bill James comment(in which he is skeptical about attributing the late-90s HR binge to steroid use), says:

I’ve spent a lot of time in the gym over the past three decades, and have been around steroid use. Steroids don’t take a guy who can’t bench press 200 pounds and suddenly have him putting up 300. They help the user become stronger, but only at the margins. This marginal benefit is of most use to athletes in sports like track and field where improving your performance by 2% is the difference between being the world’s greatest and just another guy.

But an improvement of a few percentage points in baseball? You don’t go from hitting 30 homers to hitting 70 because of steroid use. Maybe 30 to 35. Possibly. The actual impact of steroid use in baseball would be much greater for pitchers who could get an extra foot on their fastball than it could ever be for hitters. I’m not mentioning any names, but real baseball fans know exactly who I’m talking about.

But equipment changes? Now there’s your Holy Grail. In the past two decades, the handles of baseball bats have shrunk down to almost nothing. That means hitters generate more bat-head speed at impact. A lot more. So the ball goes farther.

Let's assume that Dean's estimate of a 2% improvement is correct. So a juiced hitter hits a ball 357 feet instead of 350, 408 feet instead of 400. That will itself produce a large increase in home runs as warning track flyballs clear the wall instead. Marginal improvements in bat speed also probably cause balls to be pulled towards the line, where the fences are closer.

What does all that mean? HR rates are still a lot higher now than the late '80s. Since none of the equipment, ballpark or technique changes have been reversed, I think it's safe to consider that the 10-20% dropoff in HRs since 2000 is due to a dropoff steroid use.

In general, I think Dean's way off by assuming 2% is not a significant difference. It's probably the difference between a replacement level player and a solid contributor, or viewed from the other direction, the difference between a replacement level player and a career minor leaguer.

As for Dean's comment about pitchers, I've also always thought that steroids were probably being used more by pitchers. The 2% improvement (from 92 mph to 99 mph) in pitch speed would be huge and steroids would also help the pitcher recover between starts (recovery from injury was the original therapeutic purpose for anabolic steroids, anyway).

Brian Gunn gives a good analysis at The Hardball Times:

After all, the Cardinals were nobody’s idea of a great team. They won but 83 games in the regular season. They had three losing streaks of seven or more games. They had a worse record than the Pirates—the Pirates!—after the All-Star break. And they barely outlasted a so-so Astros team to limp across the finish line in the worst division in baseball. In fact, I know more than one Cardinals fan who was openly rooting for their team to lose the division so that it would expose a few roster flaws and encourage more aggressive rebuilding from the team brass.

…And yet the St. Louis Cardinals are the champions of the world.

Again: how did this happen?

I've heard some complaining on sports radio here in Seattle and on ESPN (unhappy that the Yankees and Red Sox weren't playing, no doubt) about the Series. Gunn notes:

Instead, the Series was kind of a dud. Not for me personally—I’m a huge Cardinals fan, so I had the time of my life—but objectively speaking, it wasn’t exactly a repeat of ’86 or ’75 or ’91. There was incredibly sloppy play, the depressing controversy surrounding Kenny Rogers' sticky hands, two teams who were perceived as mediocrities, dismal ratings, a rainout, mental errors galore, and it was all over in five games. After Game 4, Jim Rome declared it the worst World Series ever. Come to think of it, maybe most people were glad it was over in five games.

Worst Series ever? Please. I (and many other people) would be relieved if Jim Rome was over soon.

The talking heads on ESPN seemed incapable of understanding the reappearance of the MV3 lineup that had been missing much of the season and the addition-by-subtraction of a pitching staff without this season's disappointments of Isringhousen, Mulder, Ponson and Marquis. They overwhelmingly picked the Padres, Mets and finally the Tigers in turn to dispatch the Redbirds (perhaps allowing for Carpenter to win a game in each series). After the NLDS, they should have realized something was different.

Whatever. Let them cry about their Red Sox, Yankees and Mets. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy this one; it might have to last 24 years, you know.

You will hear the mediots put out any figure between 75-90%. That's ridiculous, of course; it seems obvious that offense and defense are each half of the game. I would guess that pitching is about 30-40% of the game.

That analysis is correct to first order, but it doesn't answer the question that the typical 75-90% figure is addressing. The "half this game is 90% mental" crowd is claiming that good pitching is the rarest commodity. They are saying that how much better your pitcher is than average is most of of your chance to win the game.

Cyril Morong at Beyond the Box Score takes an interesting look at the problem here and the answer is nowhere near 75%. Sorry, Joe Morgan.

Back in the early days of baseball, there were folks that claimed that a curve ball didn't really curve, that it was an optical illusion. In reality, they were partially correct in that what you are seeing is the deviation of the flight of the ball from the pure parabolic path your mind expects. So, for instance, a "rising" fast ball is quite impossible; it's really just that it doesn't fall as quickly as your mind expects.

If all the major news outlets are heavily tilted to the left and favor the Democrats and its been this way for so long, everyone intuitively expects it to be the case and one cable news channel appears that is actually quite "fair and balanced," then you can be sure that it will appear, to the untrained observer, to tilt strongly to the right.

I usually really enjoy Jon Miller's infectious love of baseball. Joe Morgan's analysis of techniques can be very interesting, too, if his analysis of statistics and strategy are seldom insightful. The PowerLine guys take note of what was taken to be pro-Cuba talk from them during the World Baseball Classic semifinals.

Having read this, while I watched almost the entire championship game last night (BTW, if the WBC is such a major event, why was its coverage delayed for the end of an NIT — a glorified loser's bracket —game?), I paid close attention to what they said about Cuba. It turned out to be, more or less, nothing. I don't know how you can spend 3 hours talking about the Cuban baseball team without mentioning the politics at all. As far as ESPN's coverage went, they might as well have been a team from any other Latin American country. I think it would be at least worth mentioning that these guys were basically on a work-release program from prison.

I got to wondering about why totalitarian regimes often have success in sports that can be disproportionate to their populations and resources. It is true that these regimes see success in international sports competitions as useful for propaganda and therefore expend extra resources to pursue it.

But where do the athletes come from? I would expect that, in a free society, a person with both non-marketable athletic talent (say, a water polo player) and other, marketable, talents would be more likely to pursue the latter than someone that lives in a society that has no markets. In addition, competitive sports is probably the closest to a real meritocracy available in a country with no markets.

By the way, Japan won. I went to sleep during the top of the 9th after they took a 9-5 lead. Ichiro was right in the middle of the rally. Earlier in the game, Joe Morgan remarked that Ichiro, as the first position player from Japan to play in the Majors, was carrying the "hopes of a nation" and was probably under more pressure to play well than any player ever had been. I guess he forgot Jackie Robinson.

As you bend over and look for the catcher's signal, should you have to wonder what the umpire's opinion of what the strike zone should be? If you watch much major league baseball, you will see that this is in fact what goes on. One guy calls more low strikes, one guy calls more high strikes, another seems to have added an extra six inches to the outside of the plate, it's a truly nauseating display of personal opinion being inserted in place of the rules. What's even worse, is the apparently justified assertion by broadcasters that batters with a good eye and pitchers with great control get the benefit of the doubt on close calls.

In reality, there is only one strike zone, clearly spelled out in the rules. MLB supposedly enforces this upon umpires, but I can't see any result of this. It's unfair that a sinkerball pitcher has a disadvantage when he enters a game called by a high-strike umpire or that a flamethrower has to bring his pitches down too far because of an umpire that prefers the shin-high zone. Giving Tom Glavine an extra 4-6" on the outside of the plate pretty much takes the bat out of a batter's hands.

In baseball, at least at the major league level where money is no object, all of this could easily be fixed. The technology for calling balls and strikes perfectly has existed for many years. It's pretty easy, since the strike zone is well-defined in the rules and not really subjective at all. A machine can easily determine if a pitch passes through a specified volume of space.

Should a Supreme Court Justice's politics matter? No, it shouldn't. I'd be all for Larry Tribe himself sitting on the Court, if he'd honestly judge cases without respect to his opinion of what the proper outcome should be. Justice Breyer has publicly admitted that his opinion of the outcome is his primary standard. He deserves applause for his honesty and scorn, if not impeachment, for his misfeasance.

We can't make a machine that will apply the law, but that doesn't mean that judges should get to decide cases on their opinion of what the correct outcome should be. If judges have the humility to leave their personal opinions aside, it won't matter what their politics are. I'd be happy to let a learned, honest, liberal judge go where the law leads him, but this is not the mainstream of liberal jurisprudence so for now, we must insist on conservative judges.

If GWB can get a stable, long-lived 6-3 vote for judicial humility, perhaps over time we can extract the politics from the confirmation process and remove the judiciary from the unconstitutional legislative role in which it has placed itself (it would help if Congress would more strongly assert its legislative role and not pass vague laws so that the difficult choices would have to be made in the courts). W has an historic chance to restore balance to our government. I think he knows this and wants to do the right thing. The Roberts appointment was a big step in the right direction.

Maybe if the courts show the way, baseball will follow.

UPDATE:

Justice Ginsburg doesn't understand, either:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an audience Wednesday that she doesn't like the idea of being the only female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But in choosing to fill one of the two open positions on the court, "any woman will not do," she said.

There are "some women who might be appointed who would not advance human rights or women's rights," Ginsburg told those gathered at the New York City Bar Association.

So, it's up to the Court to "advance" the "rights" of certain groups? Where does it say that in the Constitution?

UPDATE 2:

Neither does the World's Smartest Woman™:

. . . [B]ecause I think [Roberts] is far more likely to vote the views he expressed in his legal writings, I cannot give my consent to his confirmation and will, therefore, vote against his confirmation.

Via Orin Kerr at Volokh