Play it Again, Joe West

Humans watching humans playing a human sport.

I am a baseball conservative and a baseball purist. My positions are two-dimensional and trivial to guess. I hate the designated hitter and I do not think Barry Bonds deserves to go to the Hall of Fame.

I do not apologize for my simplicity, for the baseball diamond is two-dimensional as well. Unlike any other sport in America we look to baseball for the simplicity, naivete, and innocence elsewhere celebrated only in childhood. Therefore I believe my perspective is warranted.

There is another issue against which I am predictably knee-jerk. This issue is that of instant replay. In recent years baseball has started to follow football, tennis, and others in admitting the use of instant replay to determine "what really happened." So far it has only been admitted in one limited, high-leverage situation: the question of whether a home run was really a home run or not. But starting next year the use of replay will likely expand, and one assumes in the future it will expand some more.

I hate instant replay. I hate it even more than I hate blown calls by umpires. But its advent is hardly surprising given the zeitgeist.

How often have I heard the complaint that ours is an overly litigious society. Well, a challenge by a team's manager to a call is effectively a lawsuit. This is a qualitative difference from the old state of affairs in which the manager could come out and kick up a cloud of dust shouting his face Phillies red, but the call as called would stand immutable. With every challenge we bring the weariness of the courtroom onto the ballfield.

Second, ours is an age that highly prizes empirically-determined objectivity. The subjectivity housed in an umpire arbitrarily bestowed with authority does not withstand for one second the scrutiny of our sensibilities. Cameras are supposedly objective, despite the fact that multiple cameras positioned at different angles frequently imply contradictory conclusions and the fact that video must be interpreted by an observer subject to the same quandaries of authority and subjectivity. At any rate, replay certainly gives us collectively more confidence that we all know "what really happened," and that the ruling in the game reflects that consensus. That confidence is what we are looking for.

Finally, ours is an age that ironically verges on the misanthropic. Previous generations may have had a low view of humanity because of the Doctrine of Sin. This idea was tempered by the idea that humanity was made in the Image of God, and God so loved the World, and so forth. Current generations have a low view of humanity because of computers, and this lowness is not tempered but rather reinforced by a materialistic understanding of evolution. Gary Kasparov's defeat at the no-hands of Deep Blue was only the tip of the iceberg. We refer to "humans" not as noble dust animated by the spark of Divinity, but as a shorthand for members of the species homo sapiens.

Just look at Wikipedia. The entire thing is written to be species-neutral, a ridiculous charade given that all of its readers are human. The page for "Human" ought not begin with, "Humans (variously Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens) are primates of the family Hominidae, and the only extant species of the genus Homo..." but rather with, "You are a human, stupid!"

Without intending to the encyclopedia literally addresses the superior machine intelligence we expect will succeed us in our office as King of Terra Firma. We see no reason why it shouldn't! We agree that evolution has left us with all kinds of quirks that just aren't rational and all kinds of weaknesses that we can engineer a better solution to. We pave the way for our own obsolescence, not just in the realm of engineering but also in the realm of philosophy.

Let the machines officiate over machine sports. I will take the ignorant, loud, biased, ornery, and overweight umpire over them any day. I come to baseball to acknowledge, experience, and celebrate my humanity. I do not need it to kick me back into the dust.

Great Plain Drain

Meritocratic winners debate whether the world is getting better and better,
or whether it is getting worse and worse.

Tomorrow's anticipated World Series opener between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees carries an interesting twist. The starting pitchers, C.C. Sabathia for the Yankees and Cliff Lee for the Phillies, each won Cy Young awards* in 2007 and 2008, respectively, while playing for the Cleveland Indians.

In other words, if you're a Cleveland baseball fan, you probably want to kill yourself.

I'm struck by how similar this situation is to a more widespread and more consequential phenomenon in our country. I witnessed it as a student at Penn, a university which boasts an acceptance pool from all fifty states and many countries besides.

People entering Penn may come from all over, but graduates are not nearly so far-flung. They tend to congregate in the major metropolitan areas of the Northeast and of the West Coast. My dear friend Ben, who returned to his native Minnesota for law school in Minneapolis, is by far the exception.

The result is what some have called the "Problem of Meritocracy:" the nation's smartest are drawn from all over to the coasts, leaving the "flyover states" desolate of leaders and thinkers with perhaps the highest potential. This article puts it aptly, likening the SAT to strip mining:

For the meritocratic system is a method that uses impersonal technology (e.g., the SAT) to help us identify valuable natural resources (bright kids), and then pitilessly removes them from their ecological contexts (local communities), never to return them, thus creating cultural landscapes just as ravaged as the denuded mountainsides of Kentucky coal country.

I am not sure what I think about this issue. If you ask me, the principal advantage in going to the University of Pennsylvania compared to the much-cheaper Penn State University, where one could ostensibly learn the same facts and study the same subjects, is in being surrounded by brilliant friends and classmates. This grouping would not have been possible had we not been brought from hither and yon to the same twelve square city blocks.

In addition, my primitive understanding is that the "knowledge-based economy" into which the United States continues to develop requires collections of really smart people. Take a company like Google for example, whose achievements have made significant improvements in daily life for just about everyone who uses the Internet. Those achievements were all developed by groups of very smart people who likely came from all over.

Yet I also know that a great deal of this coastal congregation amounts to selfish gain rather than the greater good, as a large stack of currency trading books I saw today reminds me. The University instills certain values, but duty and responsibility are not among them, nor anything that acknowledges anyone is responsible for students' success but themselves.

Perhaps the great danger in meritocracy lies here, in the easy bridge it offers to entitlement. Those who have conquered meritocratic establishments do so by definition according to their own achievements. That is probably a better system than the old standby of heredity, but it hides the many factors that students have no control over yet which play crucial roles in their successes.

Since students are led to feel entitled to their standing, nothing inhibits them from adding to that privilege rather than sacrificing for others' benefit. Notable losers in this exchange may be the communities which poured their resources into raising these children to begin with, or anyone not blessed with the same kind of golden ticket.

I have pride in my hometown of Phoenixville, which is doing just fine without me, but to which I would love to contribute meaningfully someday. I know there are countless other locales which are not so lucky, and which could be enlivened greatly by the devoted attention of their native sons and daughters.

Make no mistake. I will be rooting for Cliff Lee to absolutely topple the Yankees hitters, while I hope C.C. Sabathia is himself toppled by the Phillies' bats. But lurking in the back of my mind, as I watch the game with many friends who are lucky in the same way I am, will be a feeling of loss for the Cleveland fans and the large swaths of America which they represent.

*The Cy Young award is given annually to the American League pitcher and the National League pitcher deemed to be the best in his respective league.

First Ever (Only Ever?) Fashion Post

Coming to Korea this summer, I didn't have any idea what to expect with regard to fashion. I figured with my Phillies hat, polo shirts, and khaki shorts my clothes would broadcast "American" even more loudly than my skin.

In this I was somewhat mistaken. Korean fashion is a lot more complicated than I'm capable of understanding, but I see lots of polo shirts and not a few pairs of cargo shorts.

The big surprise comes with regard to the Phillies hat. In Korea, Major League Baseball hats are in style big time, especially among men but also among women.

The most popular teams are (expectedly) the Red Sox and the Yankees, followed by (unexpectedly) the Detroit Tigers and maybe the Pittsburgh Pirates. I don't think the people wearing the hats generally know anything about the teams, and so I suspect that the cool script "D" on the Tigers hat explains its prevalence.

I have only seen a Phillies hat twice. Perhaps when they win the World Series again this year, I will be able to welcome many Korean friends onto the bandwagon.

Foul Ball!

If Connie Mack never heard of it, I don't want to hear about it.

Lee Huang pointed me to an op-ed in the New York Times coauthored by unlikely colleagues Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry. They advocate the creation of a federal institute for "evidence-based" medicine, as opposed to what they call the "experience-based" approach that most of our care is based on now. Basically, that means introducing a lot of hard statistical analysis into practice.

That may well be a fantastic idea,* but I reject the analogy with which they drive their argument: sabermetrics.**

As their story goes, sabermetrics is transforming baseball, propelling to success teams like the Oakland A's of earlier this decade and the Tampa Bay Rays of today. Furthermore, dinosaurs clinging to the old ways, like the Yankees, Mets, and Red Sox, are sitting at home.

I dispute every step of this narrative. Yes, the A's had a good run from 2000 to 2003, but they never even made it to the World Series. And where are they today? They've finished ten games under .500 the past two seasons.

And the Rays? It's true they're in the World Series with baseball's second lowest payroll. But they haven't done so predominantly by getting hidden gems for a steal off of the trade market. Rather, finishing in last place every year continually presented them with favorable positions in the draft. This standing definitely required deft choices in said drafts, which many other teams failed to do, but they certainly had a leg up by being awful year after year.

In short, if the A's' success earlier in the decade and the Rays' success this year is evidence in favor of sabermetrics, why aren't these teams' failures since and before evidence against it?

Now, how about the "dinosaurs" (my word, not theirs). The article implies that the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, et. al have gotten where they are by following the "old ways." Quite the opposite. My understanding is that the strategy of building a team out of the most expensive free agents year after year is a relatively new one, pioneered by the Yankees in the 90's.

Again, it's true the hazards of such a strategy have been made manifest, in no team more clearly than the Mets. The result is a team full of players past their prime who all want to be stars - in short, a whole equal to less than the sum of its parts. But these hazards are by no means the result of following tradition and intuition.

If you want to look at a truly traditional approach to baseball, look no farther than Charlie Manuel and Pat Gillick, the Phillies' manager and general manager, respectfully. They have 135 years between them. Charlie's following of his gut frustrated Philly fans for years until they realized our team was winning. And Gillick has done the same miracle work here as he did in the early 90's with the (cursed) Toronto Blue Jays and later on with the Seattle Mariners.

And we're about to win the World Series.

So, I cry foul on Beane, Gingrich, and Kerry. They spun a story about baseball to make an analogy with healthcare seem pleasing, when in fact it is a false one. Not surprising, coming from politicians, but not true.

Now, the fact that the analogy is a false one may be irrelevant. But to the extent that it rings true, I would be very cautious about undervaluing a doctor's intuition.

*It probably says something about me that I was far more incensed about the baseball aspect of this article than the healthcare aspect. Sorry, Health and Societies friends.
**Sabermetrics refers to the statistical approach taken by the Oakland A's (under Beane) late in the 90's. They evaluate players using a lot of new-fangled statistics in addition to traditional indicators like batting average, ERA, and intuition.
*** Though unrelated to baseball, I find hard to swallow their statement that the United States has worse health quality than most industrialized nations. There's no question we need to do a lot better, but my (flawed) understanding is that if you're insured here (a big if, I know), you're a whole lot better off than in most other places.

Now there's a news outlet with its priorities straight.

Hats off to The Philadelphia Inquirer: