June 2008 Archives
I'm glad to see that someone else thinks there's a connection between baseball and politics.
A couple of years ago, when I was circulating a book-length manuscript called Bush-League America: George W. Bush and the Church of Baseball (its later subtitle was Conservatism and Cosmopolitanism in American Baseball and Politics), a couple of the agents I contacted said that they didn't see that there was any link between Bush and baseball. I found this puzzling, given that without his connection to baseball Bush wouldn't have been able run for Governor of Texas, let alone President of the United States. (You'll get the basic idea behind the book if you read this post.)
Reading Newsweek magazine this week, I was drawn to an article about Nate Silver, the man who devised the PECOTA forecasting system, which has proven incredibly accurate in predicting future performance by major league baseball players on the basis of comparisons to past performance by "comparable" players. (PECOTA stands for "Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.")
Now, Silver is bringing his methodology to political forecasting, and he created a stir with his surprisingly accurate forecast of the the results of the recent Democratic primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. According to Silver, ""Baseball and politics are data-driven. But a lot of the time, that data might be used badly. In baseball, that may mean looking at a statistic like batting average when things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far more correlated with winning ballgames. In politics, that might mean cherry-picking a certain polling result." [Click here to read the Newsweek article.]
Silver's work will no doubt find a place in the next revision of Bush-League America, which I'm hoping to complete just after this November's presidential election. From what both agents and university press editors told me, the manuscript either needs to become more scholarly or much less scholarly. I'm choosing the latter, and, inspired by a reading of Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament, I think I have a revision strategy that will work. Stay tuned.
Thirty years ago, the Rolling Stones released their landmark album Some Girls.
For me, the album is indelibly associated with the death of a beloved teacher named Paul-Philippe Bolduc, who taught me French during my high school years at Trinity School on New York's Upper West Side.
I've written about that moment in my life over at ahistoryofnewyork.com.
Click here for the Wikipedia entry on the album. And here for the anniversary material available at RollingStones.com.
You'll notice that, at the bottom of the screenshot from MSNBC that accompanied last night's post on Barack Obama, the words "Obama: I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations."
MSNBC showed these words and others from Obama speech as he was delivering it. Midway through the speech, my wife read this statement about humility and limitations and asked me, "Did he say that? I don't remember it, and I've been listening pretty closely." I suggested that they were quoting from his prepared text, following the practice, which I find profoundly annoying, that some networks have of preceding commercial breaks during mini-series with quick shots of scenes to come.
But when Obama actually uttered those words at the end of his speech, I found myself moved anyway:
The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.
What if -- what if -- it turns out to be true? What if historians a century from now can point to this fall as the moment when the United States changed its course and finally began to promise of its founding?
It sounds naive, I know, but that's why having hope is, as Obama, suggests "audacious."
Some numbers related to my three previous posts:
Total Number of Delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August: 4,234
Number of Pledged Delegates: 3,409
Number of Superdelegates: 825
Number of Delegates Needed to Clinch the Democratic Nomination: 2,118
Number of Delegates Allocated to Barack Obama: 2,156 (1,762 pledged, 394 super)
Number of Delegates Allocated to Hillary Clinton: 1,923 (1,636, 287 super)
Number of Potential Running Mates for Obama Mentioned in CNN.com's Article: 18
[Figures from CNNPolitics.com as of 9:30 a.m.]
Days Until Election Day: 153
Days Until George W. Bush Is Out of A Job: 214
Last Night's Yankees Score: Toronto 9, Yankees 3
Number of Innings Pitched by Phenom Joba Chamberlain Last Night in His First Major League Start: 2.1
Number of Joba Chamberlain's Uniform: 62
Number of Pitches Thrown By Joba Last Night: 62
Number of Runs Allowed by Joba: 2 (1 earned)
Yankees' Record: 28-30
Yankees' Place in their Division: Fifth (Last)
Games Behind the First-Place Tampa Bay Devil Rays (!): 7
Last Night's Mets Score: Mets 9, San Francisco 6
Number of Innings Pitched by Veteran Ace Pedro Martinez Last Night in His First Start Since Injuring His Hamstring on April 1: 6
Number of Pitches Thrown By Pedro Last Night: 109
Number of Runs Allowed By Pedro: 3 (all earned)
Number of Hits Made By Pedro: 2
Number of Runs Batted In By Pedro: 1
Mets' Record: 29-28
Mets' Place in their Division: Fourth
Games Behind the First-Place Philadelphia Phillies: 4.5
Number of Baby Stick Insects Currently Resident in Our House: at least 12
Watching Barack Obama become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party tonight, I am reminded of my first visit to Washington DC. It was the summer of 1974, and it was part of a family trip that had already taken us to South Carolina to visit cousins on my mother's side and to Orlando, Florida, to visit the Haunted Mansion and the Pirates of the Caribbean. As luck would have it, we arrived in Washington on August 8. That evening, in our hotel room, I watched Richard Nixon become the first U.S. president to resign his office.
I remember tears springing to my eyes. I felt bad for the guy. I was 12 years old; I knew all about Watergate. But I still felt bad for the guy.
What I remember most vividly from that trip, however, is something the cab driver said when we were being driven from the Amtrak station to the hotel. My mother, sister, and I were in the back seat. My father sat in front with the driver, and they were talking about politics. I heard the driver say something like, "We'll never have a non-white president in this country. Not in our lifetimes." And then I saw his eyes glance into the rear view mirror and notice that a Filipino woman and her two brown children were sitting there. My father, a Parsi, is fair-skinned and, the driver had taken him simply to be a white person. "I'm sorry," he said, somewhat embarrassed. "But it's true."
I wasn't offended and don't remember thinking too much about it much at the time. I realize now that this was because I didn't disagree. Though I was never really subject to much racially oriented abuse during my childhood, I had nevertheless already come to believe that I could never really hope to be President of the United States.
When President Kennedy was shot, my father's eldest sister apparently called him from Pakistan and expressed the hope that I would never run for president. She believed that in the United States of America anything was possible. Her nephew could run for president.
I knew better. And so I never considered a career in politics. I was interested in politics and government -- interested, that, is in studying them. I put down "Government" as my prospective concentration in my application to Harvard. By the time it came time to declare a concentration, I'd switched to English. The rest, as they say, is history.
So it's striking to me to watch a man who is my age (Barack Obama was born two months and five days before I was), who is a cultural hybrid and a brown person (and an African American rather than Asian American brown at that), who entered Harvard Law School (which I had elected not to attend) while I was still working on my doctorate at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences -- a man, in other words, who has made very different assumptions and choices than I have -- become the likely nominee of the Democratic Party.
And, I firmly believe, the likely 44th president of the United States.
It took me a while to come around to Barack Obama. My mother-in-law, who was living in Illinois when he was elected to the Senate, was an early convert, and the car that we inherited from her last summer has a fading "Barack Obama for President" sticker on its rear window. I was originally more drawn to John Edwards's populist message, but after spending a good deal of time during my convalescence learning about Obama, I was ready to vote for him in New York's primary. And, I think, the moment that I was really hooked, the moment that I really began to believe in him, was when Teddy Kennedy endorsed his candidacy. (I bought a DVD of the endorsement and Obama's reply from C-SPAN to show my kids one day.)
As the weeks progressed, it became clear to me that Hillary Clinton was using the old playbook in a moment when we -- the Democratic Party, the American nation -- needed a new one. Electing Obama to the presidency would be a sign to the rest of the world the United States was ready to change its course, a far surer sign that electing Hillary Clinton and the style of politics that she embraced during the campaign.
The United States led by a brown man, an African American, a cultural hybrid, a cosmopolitan being? I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. And I can't wait.
My wife would say I'm jinxing it, but if I had to put down a bet, I'd bet on Obama in a near-landslide come November.
June 3, 2008: it is, in the words of the U2 song that accompanied Obama to the stage of the Xcel Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, tonight, a "beautiful day."
As the second month of the 2008 baseball season comes to a close, it's worth noting that the Mets and the Yankees are each in fourth place in their respective divisions with nearly identical records: the Yanks are 28-27, the Mets are 27-27. Both teams have been plagued by injuries.
The Mets currently have bragging rights by virtue of their sweep of the two Subway Series games at Yankee Stadium two weeks ago, though those games hardly turned out to constitute much of a turning point for the Mets. Indeed, they went on to a humiliating four-game sweep in Atlanta, with ancient nemesis Chipper Jones once again dashing their hopes, en route to a 1-6 road trip. They've won 6 out of 14 since the series with the Yankees.They've put Willie Randolph's job in jeopardy and their inconsistent play has kept last year's collapse fresh in the minds of their fans.
The Yankees, meanwhile, have gone 8-and-4 since losing to the Mets. No one's talking about firing Joe Girardi.
The Mets are hoping that this homestand will turn things around. They took two out of three from the first-place Marlins and have taken two out of three from Joe Torre's Dodgers. And they're putting Johann Santana out on the mound tomorrow night for the final game of the series.
With luck, however, Santana will win but won't be the big story of the week. With luck, the big story will be the successful return of Pedro Martinez to the mound on Tuesday night after missing seven weeks.
But Pedro may not get the back page of the tabloids on Wednesday morning, because the Yankees also have some interesting pitching plans for Tuesday night: they're finally going to start their bullpen phenom Joba Chamberlain.
Let's hope that Tuesday serves as the start for a better brand of New York baseball than we've seen over the last two months.
