Posted 10:19 PM by Floyd

Random weird baseball box score verbiage, from tonight's Giants-Dodgers game:

b-J Hernandez PH

...

b-struck out looking for A Cora in the 9th

Uh ... did Hernandez ever find him?

Posted 10:47 PM by Floyd

Last night I was driving home from a bridge game and turned radio to KFRC, 610-AM, so I could catch the end of the A's-Seattle game. The game was over, so I flipped back and forth between the postgame show and the Giants postgame show on KNBR-680.

The A's had just won, were 9-6, and led their division. The Giants had just lost and were 6-9. So as you can imagine, the A's fans were happy and the Giants fans were not. But the emotional gap between the two was much greater than the three-game difference in the standings would warrant. The A's fans were mellow and satisfied. The Giants fans were bitter and depressed.

They do have a lot to be depressed about. No one except for Barry Bonds is hitting. Jason Schmidt, the Giants' best pitcher, had pitched his second game -- and was shelled, giving up six runs in four innings. This may not be a single bad outing either; Schmidt injured his elbow last season and it's not clear whether he's recovered fully. The rest of the rotation is mediocre at best. Meanwhile closer Rob Nen is on the DL, with no return in sight.

Last fall, when many good players were available on the free agent market, many Giants fans had a fantasy that former Expos star Vladimir Guerrero would wear a Giants uniform. (And not a clean, healthy, wouldn't-it-be-nice-to-have-this-guy fantasy either, but a seedy, desperate wish. Think Judge Reinhold in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.)

The Giants did not sign Guerrero. Or Gary Sheffield, or any other big-name player. Instead they announced that payroll would be cut from around 85 million to 75 million. Now the fans are furious because there is no big bat to "protect" Bonds -- to make the opponents pay when they walk him.

I think these fans are focussing on the wrong issues. Sure, 75 million is less than 85 million, but it's still more than the payroll of the Athletics and many other teams. The team has pervasive problems that cannot be addressed by a single player. The Giants will probably win 70 games this year. Even if a big name free agent is responsible for 10 wins -- and I think that's a considerable overestimate -- that doesn't get the orange and black over 0.500.

Many Giants fans, including the guys who work in my office, have extolled the genius of Brian Sabean. But it seems to me as though Sabean's strategies are about the worst possible:

First, the Giants do not develop position players. There has been no decent position player to come up from the minors since the 1980's. I don't know if this is by choice, or through poor management, but in either case it is criminal neglect. A minor league player is a serf; he must work for practically nothing his first three years, and far less than his true value the next three years. If you don't develop minor leaguers you are depriving yourself of cheap talent.

This leads to the next problem: The Giants have to get their position players from the pool of veterans, and appear to overpay them. Consider: Kirk Rueter and Mark Redman are two pitchers with very similar WHIP (walks + hits per innings pitched) and earned run numbers. The Giants will pay Rueter over $6 million this year; the A's will pay Redman less than $4 million. Neifi Perez, a good fielder who hits 0.270 (which is a little above the league average), has 0.301 on-base (way below average), and little power, is being paid $2.75 million. There has got to be a AAA player that you could pry out of some other team's farm system with similar numbers, and he won't cost you anywhere near that much.

Even though the Giants have Barry Bonds -- who gets on base more than half the time and worships doing so as much as any stat geek -- the management has no interest in the value of on-base percentage. They employ a first baseman, Pedro Feliz, who has a 0.276 OBP. Marquis Grissom: 0.320. Guess what: Giants aren't getting on base and the team isn't scoring runs.

As far as I can tell, Sabean has never gone against baseball's conventional wisdom -- which may explain why he was named Baseball Executive of the Year by the Sporting News in 2003. (Oakland GM Billy Beane, who has won more games than all teams except the Mariners over the last four years while operating on a tiny budget, has never won this award.) Veterans are better than young players in some intangible way. On-base percentage doesn't matter. If a player looks good for one year, sign him to a multi-year deal. A closer who pitches 70 innings a year is worth $9.5 million dollars.

The 2004 season figures to be the Giants' own Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Posted 5:04 PM by Floyd

Steven Den Beste is not the person I would have in mind to smack Paris Match around for their glorification of Iraqi Baathists who shot down a DHL plane. But he does a damn good job:

Last November, I posted this article where I roundly condemned the magazine Paris Match for having reporters observe attempts by Iraqi insurgents to shoot down an American jet using SAMs. Somehow or other, I have no idea how, one of their reporters just stumbled on that post. He was inspired to write the following email to me:

I don't know who you are but what I just found on your web-site is really unfair and disgusting. You probably picked up the fact that our reporters were with the Iraki insurgents on the mainstream news. That is right. The fact that we were a French magazine was enough for you to spread the usual French bashing bullshit.

Now let me tell you one thing. If only you had taken the time to get a copy of the magazine, you would have found that in the same issue, we ran a eight page story + interview of Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. That alone tells that contrarily to what you think we don't present one aspect of the story. We do journalism. Hey guys, we are not Fox News !

...

I'm rather appalled, but not in the least bit surprised, that you see complete moral equivalence between an interview with an official of an allied government, and observation/glorification of a direct attempt by hostiles to kill people who are from an allied nation, or at least a nation the French pretend is an ally.

I'm appalled, but not surprised, that you think that having both in the same issue of your magazine represents balance and that the presence of one excuses the presence of the other.

Even if I had known about that interview with Rumsfeld, it would not have affected my opinion, or my condemnation of the direct coverage of the attempt to shoot down an American jet. But that's just my American simplisme, I guess. I dislike people who try to kill Americans, and I despise "allies" who help them in those attempts, such as by providing publicity for their agitprop.

Your magazine has the ethical standards of a pimp.

Posted 11:12 PM by Floyd

Let's suppose that Attorney General John Ashcroft implemented a program whereby Americans would tip off Homeland Security whenever they saw someone suspicious. If you saw someone who looked like a fanatic, you would be encouraged to report them to an anonymous hotline. What would a big-city newspaper like the San Jose Mercury News think of that? You could probably hear the cries of outrage from your home with the windows shut.

Or let's suppose the recording industry encouraged people to report on their friends and neighbors who might be downloading music illegally. See a guy at the computer store with a hundred blank CD's? Call a tip line! I don't think the Merc would think much of that either.

But when citizens are asked to snitch on tax scofflaws -- thus benefitting not national security or corporations but rather the coffers of the Western hemisphere's third-largest welfare state -- then the Merc twirls its hair and applies fresh lipstick:

SACRAMENTO - The California Highway Patrol has started a major crackdown on state residents illegally driving vehicles with out-of-state plates.

The agency officially kicks off its license plate sting Tuesday, asking motorists to jot down suspicious tags and enter them into an anonymous CHP Web site. Commissioner D.O. "Spike" Helmick estimated the state could bring in up to $10 million in additional revenue if the project succeeds.

...

An earlier enforcement crackdown at CHP's South Sacramento office netted nearly $575,000, said Officer David Costantini. Six officers searched parking lots at shopping centers, apartment complexes and college campuses for out-of-state plates.

"Everybody got excited about it. Even the secretaries are writing down plates," said Helmick, who said he typically jots down three or four suspicious plates during his morning commute.

Six officers searched parking lots at college campuses. If the FBI were to poke and pry at college students' cars, the Mercury News would call for California to secede from the union. Repeat after me: There is no liberal media bias.

Posted 11:02 PM by Floyd

"Headlines that are perhaps of more interest to the people who write them than those who read them" department:

Journalism jobs for minorities inch up amid industry decline - 04:16 PM PDT

Posted 10:58 PM by Floyd

For so many people the United Nations is the best institution that mankind has too offer. The UN's incompetence, corruption, and tolerance for evil has been demonstrated time and time again, yet the internationalist will always insist that only through the United Nations can we achieve peace. I imagine the same forces are at work that led people in the Middle Ages to respect an obviously corrupt and vile Papacy.

Here is an example of a political observer who cannot, will not, consider even the possibility that the UN might be in error. I bring you Daniel Sneider, foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News:

President Bush has been accused of not having a clear plan for the transfer of power to a sovereign Iraqi government. Instead, critics say, Bush offers little more than a determination to ``stay the course'' in Iraq.

That is unfair and untrue. The president does have a plan. He is just too proud to tell the American people what it is.

The reality is that the White House has now ceded authority in Iraq to the United Nations -- and, to a lesser but significant extent, to Iran. Why? Because both the United Nations and the Islamic leadership of Iran have the legitimacy and the ability to provide political stability that the United States so obviously lacks.

That's a good one. The UN aided and abetted Saddam Hussein's vile regime by allowing him to sell oil and pocket the proceeds to run his secret police and his army. This was dignified under the rubric of "Oil for Food." Iran has so much authority and legitimacy that they're shooting student protestors in the street.

(But the UN said Oil for Food was a charity program, and that's all the evidence that Sneider needs to cite the UN's "legitimacy" -- much like a devout medieval Christian accepted that donating money to the local bishop would absolve him of all sin.)

Sure, the United States still has the guns. But stability in Iraq cannot be established by military means anymore. Force is necessary, especially when American troops are under constant attack. Ultimately, however, this is a political problem that needs political answers.

For those answers, the place to go these days is U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

A rather recent development, considering that the UN's first presence in post-war Baghdad was evacuated the minute it came under attack.

...

Only elections in January 2005 will create a truly legitimate, representative Iraqi government, Brahimi concluded.

This is my favorite line. Why specifically January 2005 and not earlier or later? No explanation is needed; the UN is infallible.

The United States retains responsibility for security in this plan, although implicitly the security role could be broadened after June 30 to include troops from a much wider range of nations. But Brahimi sharply condemned the harsh use of military force in recent weeks against Sunni insurgents in Falluja and Shiite radicals.

``The excessive use of force makes matters worse and does not solve the problem,'' he said.

It was some very excessive use of force that led to Brahimi being able to strut around Iraq in the first place. And let's be honest here: The only way you can talk about "excessive use of force" is when you hold the West to a higher standard than Arab countries. If some rebels had hung four of Saddam's functionaries and burned the bodies, would there be anything left of their town when he got done with it?

Which brings us to the curious acceptance of Iran to broker a deal with the radical Shiite militia. The occupation authority continues to threaten to use troops to capture radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and dismantle his militia now defiantly occupying the holy city of Najaf. But according to reports in the Arab press, a face-saving agreement is in the works for Sadr to accept a clerical fatwa dissolving his militia and head into temporary exile in Iran until the new Iraqi government is formed.

Well that makes a lot of sense: The threat of American military action is empty, so hollow in fact that al-Sadr has to dissolve his militia and scamper out of the country.

The administration deserves credit for recognizing reality and backing this path to political stability. Unfortunately this was precisely what the administration rejected last summer when many nations urged it to hand over real authority to the U.N. At that time countries such as India were prepared to provide significant numbers of troops if the U.N.'s role had been expanded. ...

Uh huh. And countries like India, and Spain, and Portugal, are prepared to haul significants amount of ass if occupation duty in Iraq proves any tougher than directing traffic.

Posted 10:13 PM by Floyd

Here's one more hand from the District 21 Flight B GNT's of two weekends past.

At none vulnerable, second seat, you hold Axxx x Axxx Kxxx.

Your right hand opponent opens a 10-12 notrump. You pass and LHO signs off with 2. This is passed to you, and you double. Now LHO redoubles, and again there are two passes to you. What do you call?

When my right-hand-opponent held this hand in our first round GNT match, he ran to 2. We started doubling and he finally played in 3 doubled. This went for 300, and if he had passed he would have scored 600 or 1000, as his partner was 5332 with KQJxx.

Many players don't know this -- including Larry Cohen and David Berkowitz, who lost the 1998 World Championships due to a similar mixup. Passing a redouble is penalty when it is behind the trump length or above the one level, and this auction qualifies on both counts. (Back in the Culbertson days ALL passes of redoubles were penalty, even after one of a suit - double - redouble, because people psyched a lot.)

Our teammates were -120 so we gained 5 imps. Had we been -500 we would have lost 12 imps; this 17-imp swing was more than our eventual margin of victory.

Posted 9:49 PM by Floyd

The A's just won their first series against the Anaheim Angels, two games to one, and I have to say: This is it? This is the new all-conquering Angels team that came out of Arte Moreno's checkbook?

My impression of the 2004 Angels was formed by two very similar at-bats from the first two games of the series. On Friday Tim Hudson was superb until the eighth inning, when he loaded the bases. In came Ricardo Rincon, left-handed reliever, who got Darin Erstad out on three pitches. Erstad flailed at the last pitch even though it was low and about a foot and a half off the plate.

Then the next night there was a similar at-bat by A's DH Erubiel Durazo (which I mispronounce as dur - RAHT - zo for bridge geek related reasons). Durazo faced Jarrod Washburn with two out and the bases loaded. He swung at a bad pitch, swung at a bad pitch, and then chased a ball low and way outside for strike three.

Now my point is that this is scarcely an even exchange; it's one that bodes very poorly for Anaheim. Erstad is the #2 hitter and an Angel star. Durazo is somebody that Billy Beane likes because he has a high on-base percentage and is fairly cheap. Washburn is a member of the Angels' rotation, Rincon just a left-handed setup man.

Durazo and Rincon combined salaries: $3.85 million
Erstad and Washburn combined salaries: $13.2 million

Angels fans are living in a dream world where their 0.500-caliber team will always perform as well as it did when it got hot and won the 2002 World Series. Now that Moreno splurged for pitcher Bartolo Colon and slugger Vladimir Guerrero, they think that the Angels will run the table in the American League West. But Anaheim is still way behind in pitching. Mulder, Hudson, and Zito are all better pitchers than Colon, who had a 3.87 ERA with Chicago last year. Washburn, the Angels' #2 starter, looked horrible on Saturday and was lucky to escape with a win.