2006 Season Preview

Ah, so Opening Day is upon us, not a moment too soon. How will things go this year? Now you’ll know! Teams listed as I think they’ll finish (*is the wild card):

AL East: NY Bos Tor TB Bal

The top two are basically a coin flip. I have to pick the Yankees because I think Johnson will have a big year, and their offense could be historically good. The Red Sox are very, very good, though, and can certainly win the division. I will be cheering for the Blue Jays like it’s 1985, but although they are improved especially with Burnett starting on the DL I don’t think they’re going to seriously challenge (compare their offense with the big 2, and there’s still a big gap.) The biggest impact of the Jays’ improvement is that I think it will stop the wild card coming from the East this year, which could produce a rare great pennant race in the post-wild card era. The Devil Rays will be a somewhat fun to watch bad team, the Orioles don’t figure to be fun to watch.

AL Central: Min Chi* Cle Det KC

I was dead wrong about the Indians last year; I thought they were being overrated, and they were in fact arguably the best team in the league although they choked down the stretch. Having not learned anything, I think they’ll need a consolidation year; their starting pitching, in particular, figures to be a lot worse, and Wickman could blow up anytime. Minnesota is pretty much a coin-flip pick; I’m guessing that Morneau and Mauer will finally take a bug step forward, and I love their rotation, but the catch is that their offense has enough holes that if some kids don’t develop they could finish fourth. Chicago weren’t as good as their record last year, but on the other hand they are better this year; Thome is a very nice pickup and Vazquez should roughly offset the likely decline from Garland. Detroit have improved a lot, especially on offense, but I don’t think they have the rotation to be competitive. I’d put the over/under on Royals losses at about 106.

AL West: Oak Tex LAAOACUSA Sea

I have to concur with most people not blinded by smoldering Billy Beane ressentiment that this division figures to be a cakewalk for Oakland. (More about Beane later this week.) The As offense if far from overwhelming, but it should be better than the Angels’, and the latter sure don’t have the A’s pitching. The Rangers are further improved; the quintessentially underrated Wilkerson for the quintessentially overrated Soriano was highway robbery, and I like the Millwood signing, but at best they’ll compete for the wildcard. There seems to be some vague optimism about the Mariners this year; they’ll certainly be better, but their grip on the cellar strikes me as firm. While partially disguised by Safeco the post-King-Felix rotation is pretty ghastly, and even if things break right the offense is mediocre.

NL East: ATL NYM(*) Phi Fla Was

Since everyone’s trend is to say this will be the year the Braves finally lose, I’ll buck it and pick them in another coin toss. Had the Mets stopped their acquisitions after Delgado I’d pick them easily, but the subsequent gutting of their rotation depth is just baffling, particularly given that you can’t exactly count on Pedro to pitch 200 innings with his toe, Glavine is 40, and Zambrano sucks. I just can’t pick a team that seems to be keeping a guy coming of a 62 ERA+ as its #6 starter to beat Cox, although they should win the wild card. This may be the year the Phillies finally get to the next level, but seeing names like “Gordon” and “Franklin [in a bandbox]” and “Manuel” sure prevents me from seeing it. I don’t think the Marlins will collapse to the same extent they did after the last fire sale–there’s a lot more young talent there–although they certainly aren’t going to win the division. The Nationals, on the other hand, I can see bottoming out completely; the only hitter with any on-base skills at all has had 400 ABs once, and beyond Hernandez the rotation isn’t impressive either. Even considering the ownership situation Bowden has done a remarkably bad job with this team.

NL Central: STL Mil Chi Hou Pit Cin

The Cardinals have dropped off more than most people realize; Pujols is the best hitter in the league, of course, and Edmonds is a tremendous hitter although he’s a 36-year old coming off an off-year, and getting Rolen back will help although you can’t exactly pencil him in for 500 ABs. That’s the sum of their plus offensive players, and while the rotation is very good I’m doubtful that Carpenter will be a Cy Young candidate again. Still, their core should carry them to the title without too much danger. The Brewers are a surprisingly impressive comer, but I think they’re like my beloved 92-93 Expos, an excellent young talent base not quite ready to get over the hump. I’d love to pick them, but especially with Sheets on the DL…I can’t quite do it. They could compete for the wild card. The Cubs, as always, have talented but injured arms and don’t get anyone on base. The Astros are the poor man’s Cards, and might end up the homeless man’s Cards–at least 3 of their regulars hit nothing, and Ensberg and Berkman ain’t Pujols and Edmonds. My pick is an average based on a Rocket/no-Rocket average; even Clemens coming back in May won’t save them, and if he doesn’t they’ll be luck to stay ahead of the Pirates. The Pirates are actually somewhat like the Astros; offense a little better, pitchers not quite as proven. The Reds will be a fun 90+ loss team to watch.

NL West–LA SF SD Ari Col

Jeebus, it’s really not much better, is it? I will certainly be rooting against the Dodgers as always, but I think they’re the best of a bad lot–even if Bonds plays 120 games the Giants are pretty patchy, and I don’t think he will. The Dodgers don’t have any major offensive holes relative to position, and the pitching is OK. That’s enough in this division. The Giants are so old that they have the potential to be just dreadful, but also enough talent to stay win 85 games, which could be enough. The Padres could win again, I suppose, but they weren’t even as good as their record last year, and while Cameron will help a bit Estes and Vinny the Castilla sure won’t. The Diamondbacks don’t have a terrible lineup, but the core is weak and Russ Ortiz is the #2 starter. The Rockies’ have young players, but apart from Holliday none are terribly interesting, and it’s of course nearly impossible for young pitchers to develop in their environment.

World Series? I’ll say…Oakland over St. Louis.

Wingnut Post-Kidnapping Etiquette Tips

Shorter J-Pod, Don Imus co-bigots, Jeff Goldstein and (natch) Jonah Goldberg: Goddammit, if I was kidnapped at gunpoint with my companion shot, I couldn’t be more sure when I was released that I would immediately start speaking purely in right-wing banalities! And if I didn’t, I’m probably secretly pro-Islamofascist kidnapping! And I would speak that way even if I was making a propaganda video as a condition of my release!

There really are certain reactionary memes so fundamentally inhuman I can’t even grasp them. This, of course, isn’t true of many consevative ideas. Consider, example, Jason Appuzo’s artistic ideal the Right Brothers, who usefully for our purposes write songs that consist entirely of lame reactionary cliches. Click the link and watch that video and you’ll hear lots of bad ideas (as well as worse aesthetics, knowledge that even right-wing guitar licks sound like Whiny Ass Titty Babies, and a low-budget video that isn’t cheesy enough–really, at least throw in some freeze-frames of the drummer hitting the cymbal, like “Workin’ For the Weekend.”) But I can understand them. But to attack a freed hostage for saying that she wasn’t beaten up (and, as far as I can tell, we have no evidence that she wasn’t), as if that would somehow make the experience less terrifying, or kidnapping less heinous? I can’t even fathom that. It’s just a different moral universe.

(Real-life Bob Roberts video courtesy of Tristement, Non!)

Bickle

Read Matt’s thoughts on loneliness and the Seattle shootings.

No, Really, Click Through

I never thought I would say this, but Colorado’s favorite combination of half-understood literary theory and run-on wingnuttery has some great posts today. Just keep scrolling!

Baseball 2006 I: Mazzone

When there was talk of Leo Mazzone leaving the Braves for the Yankees, I was torn between my social scientist side and my despise-the-Yankees-with-the-intense-heat-of-a-million-suns side. I certainly didn’t want the Yankees to benefit from him, but I was interested to see how the Braves would do without him, and whether he could turn around pitchers to the same extent elsewhere. Of course, he ended up joining the Orioles, which is sort of the best of both worlds. It’s also interesting because the Orioles have a lot of talented but erratic arms (although they play such a brutal schedule–even the Devil Rays have a pretty decent offense–it’s not entirely fair.)

My own judgment is that Cox–who was also great with pitchers in Toronto–has a lot more to do with this than is commonly assumed, and I don’t think the Braves’ pitching will suffer noticeably. But that’s why they play etc.

Friday Cat Blogging… Starbuck and Nelson

The Nino Who Said "NI!"

The rule of law? Vaffanculo!

Between Scalia’s recent civility and judicial conduct issues and attending this excellent (if depressing) conference last Friday I was reminded of my favorite assessment of Bush v. Gore, Kim Lane Scheppele’s “When the Law Doesn’t Count: The Rule of Law and Election 2000.” It does a marvelous job of analyzing all of the legal issues, as well as adding interesting comparative perspectives. It’s all worth reading if you’re into this sort of thing, but a couple of points are worth extra emphasis. One of the countless ways in which the decision was utterly lawless that I haven’t mentioned was the obvious Catch-22 the Supreme Court presented the Florida courts with. The Court ruled that the recount ordered by the FSC violated equal protection because the recount didn’t have a uniform standard; and, of course, the recount didn’t have a uniform standard because the Supreme Court told the Florida courts not to use one. As Scheppele points out, to be engaged in this kind of gamesmanship is not be meaningfully engaged in “law” at all:

The U.S. Supreme Court majority in the story of the 2000 election seems to have taken its inspiration from the Knights Who Say NI! in the Monty Python version of the Arthurian legend. Dressed in dark uniforms and towering above the petitioners who came before them, the Justices of the Supreme Court possessed the magic words that, when shouted in chorus, caused those who needed their permission to proceed to cower before them. For it was by pronouncing the magic words that the Supreme Court Justices could cause the most self-confident pretender to the throne to slink away. And, as in the standard fairytale, the Court could set a challenge for the pretender to the throne who, if he met the challenge, must be allowed to get what he sought. The majority’s reading of the fairytale requirements, however, follows Pythonesque conventions rather than the standard ones, and it deviates substantially from what the emerging comparative constitutional standard for rule of law would require.

Between Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board (the protest phase case) and Bush v. Gore (the contest phase case), the Supreme Court turned itself from the Knights Who Say NI! into the Knights Who Go Neeeow … wum … ping!, no longer “contractually bound” to be satisfied by a litigant who met the challenges that were set originally and who was therefore looking to pass. Transforming itself into the Knights Who Go Neeeow … wum … ping!, the Supreme Court had other ideas. In its new guise, instead of being satisfied by a shrubbery brought before it designed according to their initial request (a solution crafted under a literal reading of the Florida statute), the majority insisted on a new shrubbery with a totally different design (federal constitutional equal protection analysis rather than the literal wording of the Florida statute set the standard). New magic words were necessary to pass through this part of the dark forest of the law, except that the Knights had obviously tired of the game and so simply declared it over.

What is wrong with this, on a rule-of-law account? A great deal, but let me concentrate on two things in particular:

(1)The Whipsawing Problem: There was an apparent shift in the legal frameworks that were found to be important as one case followed another, leading to a sense that the applicable law was not stable and making it very difficult for anyone to orient their conduct in light of the law either before, during, or after the sequence of litigation.

(2)The Impossibility Problem: There was, in the per curiam opinion in Bush v. Gore, an announcement of two crucial legal conclusions – that an equal protection test applied to court-ordered vote-counting procedures and that 3 U.S.C. 5 combined with a “legislative wish” required that recounts not be extended past the December 12 “safe harbor” date. But these two conclusions worked at cross-purposes. Meeting one required violating the other, and vice versa. With this logic, there was simply no place left to stand to claim a remedy that the law seemed to allow and perhaps even to require. The election was declared over as it stood at the moment the Court issued its decision, and no state has ascertained whether the results as they stood on the evening of December 12, 2000 met the equal protection standards the court laid down.

From all of this, we might legitimately wonder whether the United States in fact decided its most recent presidential election according to any coherent law at all.

Between the moving goalposts and the fact that the remedy was completely indefensible given the purported constitutional violation, Bush v. Gore was wholly unprincipled even leaving aside the lack of precedent for the legal argument and the glaring contradictions with the past jurisprudence of at least three members of the majority.

Scheppele also demolishes the claim recently made by Scalia that the Court had no choice but to rule because it was dragged into the case by a politicized Florida court. This implies that the court violated the clear language of the Florida election statute to produce a desired outcome. But Scheppele points out numerous “infelicities” in the Florida election statutes, pointing out the vague language and internal contradictions that make the readings of both the majority and dissenting opinions of the FSC perfectly plausible. Particularly important are infelicity #4 (“In the “contest” phase under Florida election law, a candidate who still believes that there are serious flaws in the election tallies may challenge the certification of the election results. Unlike in the protest phase when the complaint goes to the county canvassing boards for their resolution, the contest phase sends all complaints directly to the Florida courts, which are given very broad latitude to investigate and fashion remedies to fix any complaints they find to be valid. But this great judicial power does not come with many critical constraints – the most crucial one in the presidential electors context being whether there are any deadlines in the process”) and #5 (“If a judge decides that a contest identifies a legitimate problem, then under section 102.168(8) of the Florida Statutes Annotated, the judge can “provide any relief appropriate under such circumstances.” There is no further guidance to the judge.”) The idea, then, that the FSC “usurped” the power of the Florida legislature is absurd: the legislature, in fact, delegated broad powers in resolving election disputes to the courts. And, as I mentioned yesterday, the FSC used a contestable but plausible reading, and it adhered to this reading consistently whether it helped Gore or Bush.

So the claim made by Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas that the Florida Supreme Court wasn’t engaged in jurisprudence at all couldn’t be more implausible–but it certainly is a reasonable description of their own work. A mild obscene gesture would be a polite way of responding to Scalia’s next pompous lecture about the alleged failures of other judges.

Savage Demagoguery

If you saw Atrios’ post today but you don’t read The Stranger, Seattle’s fine alt-weekly, and only know “Savage Love,” you may not be aware of how abjectly bad Dan Savage’s writings before the war were. We’re not talkng about tortured, reluctant, careful support of the war without demonizing its opponents here. Savage, a genuinely first-rate editor, when writing about politics is highly prone to shallow, self-congratulatory contrarianism, and his defense of the Iraq war was as demagogic as Reynolds, as naive as Totten, as ignorant of basic facts and counterarguments as…well, insert name of pretty much any Keyboard Kommando here. Allow us to revisit his less-than-prescient proclamations. We start with an old classic, “the left is objectively pro-Saddam, unlike that sincere liberal internationalist Dick Cheney:”

While the American left is content to see an Iraqi dictator terrorizing the Iraqi people, the Bushies in D.C. are not. “We do not intend to put American lives at risk to replace one dictator with another,” Dick Cheney recently told reporters. For those of you who were too busy making papier-mache puppets of George W. Bush last week to read the papers, you may have missed this page-one statement in last Friday’s New York Times: “The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein.”

Hopefully he’s learned by know that discussing how bad “A” is does not compel action without an analysis of what option “B” is and what opportunity cost “($*trillions and trillions)” is.

Wait, it gets worse. The American left, we’re told, consists entirely of pacifists:

Because claiming this victory means backing this war, and the American left refuses to back this or any war–which makes the left completely irrelevant in any conversation about the advisability or necessity of a particular war. (Pacifism is faith, not politics.) What’s worse, the left argues that our past support for regimes like Saddam’s prevents us from doing anything about Saddam now. We supported (and in some cases installed) tyrants, who in turn created despair, which in turn created terrorists, who came over here and blew shit up… so now what do we do? According to the left, we do nothing. It’s all our fault, so we’re just going to have to sit back and wait for New York City or D.C. or a big port city (like, say, Seattle or Portland) to disappear.

Yes, well, except for the fact that the vast majority of the American left supported not only the Kosovo intervention but the invasion of Afghanistan, and pacifism is a fringe ideology with about as much influence in American politics as the use-legalized-hemp-to-free-Mumia lobby. Which leaves us with two options: either Savage defines “the American left” as “the socialist cranks handing out fliers on John and Broadway”, or he’s entirely full of shit. Anyway, moving past a few more strawmen, we get this doozy:

But wait! Iraq isn’t in cahoots with al Qaeda, so why attack Iraq in the war on terrorism?

Because we’re not just at war with al Qaeda, stupid. We’re at war with a large and growing Islamo-fascist movement that draws its troops and funds from all over the Islamic world. Islamo-fascism is a regional problem, not just an al Qaeda problem or an Afghanistan problem. To stop Islamo-fascism, we’re going to have to roll back all of the tyrannous and dictatorial regimes in the Middle East while simultaneously waging war against a militant, deadly religious ideology.

Omitted: an explanation of how replacing a (certainly brutal) secular dictatorship with a Shiite theocracy that relies on sectarian militias for basic social control represents a blow against “Islamo-fascism.”

And, finally, we end up with this old favorite, the Domino theory:

In the meantime, invading and rebuilding Iraq will not only free the Iraqi people, it will also make the Saudis aware of the consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and democratize… or we’re going to come over there, remove you from power, free your people, and reform your societies for ourselves.

Yeah, thank heaven for the invasion of Iraq, or an increasingly reactionary Iranian government might be pursuing nuclear weapons, with the full knowledge that we can’t do anything about it because are troops are stretched to the breaking point elsewhere. Whew, feel the wind of freedom!

So, you know, it’s nice that he’s now seen the light about Bush’s war, but if I were him I would think a little modesty might be in order.

Boxing

Why has boxing become irrelevant?

Five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago I was always able to name the heavyweight champion, a few of the major heavyweight contenders, and a few of the other major titletholders. Now, I find that the heavyweight title is divided among four different contenders, none of whom I’ve ever heard of.

Boxing is not such a bad sport to watch on TV. It has clear commercial breaks, and tends to be reasonably exciting. The possibilities seem to be as follows:

1) America has outgrown boxing: The American public can no longer, on a consistent basis, deal with the violence of boxing. This seems patently absurd.

2) There are no charismatic boxers: Was Mike Tyson charismatic? Lennox Lewis? Larry Holmes? Evander Holyfield? Doesn’t make any sense.

3) Boxing lacks a central organizational body: This one make a lot of sense. MLB, the NFL, and the NBA all devote an extraordinary amount of effort to marketing their product. The major boxing organizations seem to be most interested in competing against one another, and only tangentially interested in drumming up interest in the sport as a whole.

4) Bad Marketing: I also find this one plausible. I wonder if the major promoters and organizations were too greedy, too enthusiastic about seizing the revenue available from cable and pay-per-view, while remaining oblivious to larger considerations regarding developing a future audience for the sport. The NFL is smart enough to refrain from making the Superbowl pay-per-view, if only because it helps develop a younger audience.

Thoughts?

Scalia, Hamdan and Recusal

I’m not going to pretend to be scandalized by Scalia’s apparent before-the-fact discussion of the merits of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. I certainly don’t hold the naive view that Supreme Court justices approach cases with an open mind ready to be persuaded of anything, and in particular oral arguments at the Supreme Court level mean very little (and, indeed, I have defended Justice Thomas from ignorant claims that anything can be inferred from the fact that he rarely speaks at oral argument.) Still, there is something about what seems to be a pretty clear violation of the court’s norms that’s offensive, particularly from Scalia, who attacks his colleagues frequently and pompously for alleged deviations from proper judicial practice. (As Dahlia Lithwick points out, he’s becoming more and more the Bill O’Reilly of the Supreme Court.) Particularly galling is Scalia’s claim in the interview that the Florida court in 2000 was “politicized,” when in fact it consistently applied a perfectly defensible interpretation of the Florida statutes even though this interpretation favored Bush in a majority of cases. (A “politicized” court, for example, surely would have thrown out technically illegal non-postmarked absentee military ballots that almost certainly favored Bush.) Bush v. Gore, conversely, was both completely unprincipled on its face and completely irreconcilable with any substantive legal view or theory of interpretation previously expressed by Scalia, and his stay opinion all but assumes that his preferred candidate was entitled to the Presidency. As Goldstein points out, it’s impossible to say whether Scalia is bound to recuse himself, but his comments are, at least, highly grating.

Yesterday’s oral argument, however, did seem to give some reason for optimism. Both Lyle Denniston and Linda Greenhouse think there are probably five votes to hear the case rather than using a jurisdictional dodge or accept the argument that Congress stripped the Court’s jurisdiction, and both seems to think (as does Lithwick) that it’s very possible that the government will not win on the merits. (In case you’re wondering, the government won at the previous level, so 5 votes are still necessary to curtail the government’s authority despite Roberts’ recusal; a tie would mean the upholding of the military commissions.) Scalia (and, of course, the hyper-statist Alito) were predictable, as Greenhouse reports:

Of the other members of the court, Justice Antonin Scalia appeared most supportive of the administration. He intervened several times to offer Mr. Clement a helping hand, something the solicitor general rarely needs but accepted gratefully.

For example, Justice Kennedy was questioning Mr. Clement on the government’s position that even if the court had jurisdiction, it should abstain from ruling on the validity of the military commission until after Mr. Hamdan’s trial.

Justice Kennedy said he found the argument troubling, pointing out that Mr. Hamdan was arguing that because the commissions lacked the procedures required by the Geneva Conventions, they were invalid. “The historic office of habeas corpus is to test whether or not you’re being tried by a lawful tribunal,” Justice Kennedy said. “And he says, under the Geneva Convention, as you know, that it isn’t.”

Mr. Clement replied that Mr. Hamdan could raise that argument later, before the military commission itself. He predicted that the argument would fail and said that in any event, there was no reason “why that claim has to be brought at this stage.”

Justice Scalia then jumped in to support the solicitor general. “In the normal criminal suit,” he said, “even if you claim that the forum is not properly constituted, that claim is not adjudicated immediately.”

Along with Justice Scalia, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. also appeared to support the argument that the court should allow the trial to go forward. Justice Clarence Thomas alone asked no questions.

Hopefully there will be 5 votes to reverse, so that Scalia’s failure to recuse himself won’t end up mattering.