Category: Networks

Baseball Prospectus – Preseason Predictions are probably as good as anybody’s:

BP Author       World Series Winner
Will Carroll                Red Sox
Steven Goldman                 Cubs
Gary Huckabay             Athletics
Rany Jazayerli              Red Sox
Chris Kahrl                 Red Sox
Jonah Keri                Athletics
Doug Pappas                  Astros
Dayn Perry                  Yankees
Joe Sheehan                 Red Sox
Nate Silver                 Red Sox
Ryan Wilkins                Red Sox
Derek Zumsteg             Athletics

My pick would be the Athletics, naturally.

I finally got around to reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, the story of how the Oakland A’s consistently field one of the best teams in Major League Baseball with one of the lowest budgets. Their secret is rational use of appropriate data:

Beane and DePodesta played major roles in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Michael Lewis’ engaging and controversial best-selling book of last year that detailed how the two men used Oakland’s financial desperation to ram through organizational changes emphasizing the scientific approach and research tools developed by a thriving subculture of mostly amateur “performance analysts.”

These “stat-heads,” building from the fertile intellectual groundwork laid by the incomparable baseball writer/analyst Bill James, operated almost entirely off the radar screen of Major League Baseball until Beane and DePodesta came along.

The book’s extremely well written, with great pacing, atmosphere, and even some suspense, so I’d recommend it even to those who aren’t fortunate enough to be baseball fans.

The controversy around the book is whether it fairly assesses the role that pitching plays in the A’s success, and whether it adequately addresses their post-season problems. There’s no better group of starting pitchers in baseball than Mulder, Zito, and Hudson, and it’s not clear how general manager Billy Beane found them, even if is clear that the rest of baseball ignored them because their physiques don’t appeal to the latent homoerotic fantasy lives of traditional baseball scouts.

The playoff question is a tough one, because the A’s definitely have an extraordinary problem closing the deal even when they’ve got the opposing team on the mat like Boston was after the first two games in Oakland last year. The traditional analysis is that the A’s don’t know how to play “smallball”, the traditional combination of sacrifices, stolen bases, and trick plays that are such a central part of the received wisdom of baseball. But it’s the nature of received wisdom to be faulty, and it’s the nature of front office management not to be able to direct action on the field day-by-day, and I’m inclined to believe that the A’s post-season blowups are the fault of dugout managers Art Howe and Ken Macha who aren’t on-board with Beane’s program.

Just to check this theory, I watched a replay of Game 5 between the A’s and the Red Sox last year on ESPN Classic just after finishing the book, and there was nothing to the game that casts any doubt on Beane. Quite the contrary, the announcers went into a soupy spiel about how teams can’t win in the playoffs without playing small ball, quoting Joe Morgan’s moronic charge that Beane “just waits for the three-run homer” and how you can’t do that. This was in the top of the sixth with the score tied 1-1. About ten minutes after they tried to impress the fans with this erudition, Manny Ramirez hit a 3-run homer and put the Sox up 4-1. The idiot announcers didn’t notice, let alone explain how you close a 3-run lead by stealing bases.

In the bottom of the ninth, A’s manager Ken Macha sealed the deal for me, killing a rally with a meaningless sacrifice bunt. The score was 4-3, the A’s had men on first and second and nobody out. So Macha has his hitter lay down a sacrifice to get the runners over to second and third, on the theory that any ball hit out of the infield will score the runner from third and tie the game.

The thing is, though, that the out he gave up in this situation happened to be more harmful than the slight advantage he gained from moving the guy in scoring position to third, because the next guy walked and loaded the bases anyhow, putting a double play in order that would have ended the game and causing the A’s to lay off the low pitches. With that shrunken strike zone, the last two A’s struck out looking.

The A’s need a manager who understands the system Beane uses to build the team, and who’s smart enough to use the talents his players actually have instead of the ones he wishes they had. Art Howe wasn’t that guy, and Ken Macha isn’t either, but with all the baseball writers sucking up to him for playing traditional baseball with a non-traditional team I don’t see anything changing for the A’s.

UPDATE: See Matt Welch for a coherent explanation of Moneyball.

This is bad:

A coup d’etat is taking place in Iraq a the moment. Al-Shu’la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi’ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi’ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.

Damn.

UPDATE: On reflection, maybe this is nothing much. See Instapundit for some surrounding news stories and stuff; it seems that the dentist has overstated things a wee bit.

Tim Blair posts Christopher Hitchens’ list of questions for anti-liberationists:

1. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein?s regime was inevitable or not?

2. Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better?

3. Do you know that Saddam?s envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March?

4. Why do you think Saddam offered “succor” (Mr. Clarke?s word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York?

5. Would you have been in favor of lifting the “no fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original “Gulf War”?

6. Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us?

7. Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?

To this I would add:

Do you think Saddam’s treatment of the Iraqi people was acceptable and should have been allowed to continue until the UN broke with precendent and acted, for the first time in its history, to overthrow a tyrant?

Fareed Zakaria points out that the Pentagon didn’t see Al Qaeda as a serious threat before 9/11 because they were still focused on states:

In due course, some senior officials in the Clinton administration awakened to the threat: CIA Director George Tenet, national-security adviser Sandy Berger and Clinton himself. But they never proposed a full-fledged assault on it. Their one dramatic attack — bombing the Afghan terror camps and Sudanese factory in 1998 — proved unsuccessful and led to domestic criticism, and they did not think they could do something more ambitious. The Pentagon, which comes off poorly in the commission reports, was stubbornly unwilling to provide aggressive and creative options.

So why the blindness? For one thing, the Pentagon is notoriously slow to react to changing conditions — the “still fighting the last war” syndrome, but for another, the attack on the Sudanese aspirin factory and the lame Patriot attack on an Al Qaeda camp minutes after bin Laden had left the tent were soundly criticized by the Right as “Wag the Dog” responses to the Lewinsky deal. So they do deserve a lot of blame for making such a huge deal out of Clinton’s penis problems, and a little bit of blame for the failure to see 9/11 coming.

The Sudanese aspirin factory is particularly important, because it was a nexus of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda – bin Laden was an investor in it, and there is documentation of meetings between aspirin factory officials and Saddam’s chem/bio weapons people. For some reason, the Right doesn’t want to talk about these connections, presumably because it makes them look bad for the “Wag the Dog” charges, and the Left doesn’t want to talk about them because they’re so caught up in the firewall rhetoric that can’t afford to admit the connections existed. The Right has a lot less to lose from this, so they should open up a bit, even if to do so might make Clinton look better in hindsight.

That being said, Clinton’s timing in these attacks was as bad as his taste in women, so the bulk of the blame for the public’s bad reaction rests on his greasy shoulders. And that being said, the blame for 9/11 doesn’t rest on any branch of the US government, it’s 99% on Al Qaeda itself, so let’s not lose perspective here, OK?

I’ve been known to say that the opponents of the liberation of Iraq were “objectively pro-Saddam” on account of the fact that their policy choices would have left the Big Turd in power. Now we have evidence that one of their most vocal members, Daily Kos editor Markos Zuniga, is explicitly anti-American in his response to the murder of civilian contractors in Fallujah:

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

OK, it’s one thing to vigorously argue a position based on your twisted concepts of sovereignty and international law, but cheering the murder of innocent civilians making life better for ordinary Iraqis at great personal peril crosses the line.

Scum like Zuniga are free to hide behind their screens whipping their demented fans up into a lynch-mob frenzy only because they’re protected by this country’s Armed Forces, including their contractors and their Commander-in-Chief.

Anyone who takes the anti-liberation crowd seriously now is a fool.

Link via Roger L. Simon.

UPDATE: the scum Zuniga has deleted his comments and replaced them with a lame attempt to justify his cheering; now that’s a compassionate man for you. See the original post here.

Bush-haters’ criticisms of the liberation of Iraq tend to follow scripts. One common complaint was first voiced by Wesley Clark at the beginning of his ill-fated but highly amusing run for the nomination, to the effect that Iraq was a “distraction” from the war on terror that actually emboldened the terrorists at the same time that it pissed them off. We should never irritate the terrorists though express action, because if we ignore them they’ll go away.

Another script is making the rounds of the more extreme (explicitly) anti-capitalist wing: that Saddam wasn’t really such a bad ruler, because the sanctions regime was the real villain in pre-liberation Iraq. This script is put out by the same people – Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore – who say that invasion was unnecessary because “containment was working.”

Excuse me, but “containment” and “sanctions” are two names for the same thing. So how can this thing be bad when the Bush-haters need to answer the human rights dimension of the liberation, but good when they need to slam the death and destruction coincident to the liberation?

In Chomsky’s fantasy, lifting the sanctions would have ensured that the Iraqis themselves could have otherthrown Saddam, which means that he at least sees the contradiction and tries to address it, while Moore doesn’t see it at all (at least according to his appearance on the lame Air America “O’Franken Factor” today).

If elimination of the sanctions was the key to the overthrow of Saddam by Iraqis, why didn’t they get around to it before the sanctions were put in place?

The Epicurious web site has spawned a TV show, arguably the worst cooking show ever. In this week’s episode the bone-head chef made a so-called Philly cheese steak with Provolone instead of Cheez-Whiz and so-called Texas chili with water insead of beer.

The FCC should fine this program for indecent content.

This just in from Ananova:

Picking your nose and eating it is one of the best ways to stay healthy, according to a top Austrian doctor.

So there.

Tme Magazine’s not exactly a part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, but they’re not at all impressed with Richard Clarke’s increasingly shrill shilling for his book:

While Clarke claims that he is “an independent” not driven by partisan motives, it’s hard not to read some passages in his book as anything but shrill broadsides. In his descriptions of Bush aides, he discerns their true ideological beliefs not in their words but in their body language: “As I briefed Rice on al-Qaeda, her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term before.” When the cabinet met to discuss al-Qaeda on Sept. 4, Rumsfeld “looked distracted throughout the session.” As for the President, Clarke doesn’t even try to read Bush’s body language; he just makes the encounters up. “I have a disturbing image of him sitting by a warm White House fireplace drawing a dozen red Xs on the faces of the former al-Qaeda corporate board…..while the new clones of al-Qaeda….are recruiting thousands whose names we will never know, whose faces will never be on President Bush’s little charts, not until it is again too late.” Clarke conjured up this chilling scene again on 60 Minutes. Only in this version he also manages to read Bush’s mind, and “he’s thinking that he’s got most of them and therefore he’s taken care of the problem.” The only things missing are the black winged chair and white cat.

Leaving aside the fact that Bush never fails to insist that the terror threat is as great today as it was on 9/11, these passages reveal the polemical, partisan mean-spiritedness that lies at the heart of Clarke’s book, and to an even greater degree, his television appearances flacking it.

The man obviously has an axe to grind, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that his main beef isn’t that the Admistration failed to take Osama seriously as much as they failed to take him — and his quirky obsession with cyber-terrorism — seriously and to treat him with the respect that he alone thought he deserved.

The Administration didn’t need yes-men after Sept. 11th, they needed serious policy advisers, and that’s the reason Clarke had to go.