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Born Suckers – The greatest Wall Street danger of all: you. By Henry Blodget

It isn’t a new thing to point out the similarities of financial markets and fantasy baseball. This story by the former genius, Henry Blodget, is as compact and lucid a litany of the mistakes we make in both spheres.

There are logical inconsistencies, mostly because there are no hard and fast rules that we can follow that will easily make us perform better picking our stocks or ballplayers, but certainly we’ll do better more of the time if we avoid the perceptual and behavioral mistakes Blodget writes about.

ESPN.com: Page 2 – How can you be sure?

I’ve started to weigh in on the steroid news a few times, but really haven’t had anything new to add. So I deleted the posts I’d written.

This references a Skip Bayless column that offers Barry Bonds some reasonable doubt. I think Bonds is the greatest ballplayer we’ve ever seen, the greatest we could ever see, but I’m nagged by his late-career rebirth. I think it’s possible he got serious about conditioning and did this, but I think it’s far more likely that, like Mark McGwire, he saw his physical reliablity in eclipse and decided to do something about it.

And so he trained hard and he got extra stuff. Stuff that was legal, at least according to MLB’s rules.

What I know for sure is that the rules that McGwire and Bonds (and perhaps Sosa and others have violated) are only going to be redefined. With each generation of nutrition, supplements and technology, we’re going to see new assaults on our notions of the integrity of records. We can pretend it’s a level playing field, but that certainly isn’t true.

For each generation what willl matter is what is happening now, and the glory of the past will be devalued as measure (without necessarily being devalued as narrative).

That’s as it should be. Bonds eclipsing Ruth or Aaron doesn’t diminish them. It’s just part of the ongoing story that amazes and intrigues us. Which is as it should be. That’s the new way.

Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Throw the book at ’em

The headline doesn’t do justice to Black Jack’s argument, which is that everyone avoided dealing with the steroid issue for their own reasons. And damage has been done.

He’s wrong though that this does more damage than Pete Rose. Gambling goes to the fundamental integrity of the results. It hinges on the possibility that someone won’t do their best to be their best, and thus contravenes the basic definition of competition.

This steroid use may shake up the competition for “best player,” but the reason to take the juice is to be a better player than you were. This is, of course, completely in accord with the basic definition of competition.

Which is why I think it is possible to make a complete rational argument that the drugs shouldn’t be banned. Because where in the continuum of performance enhancers, from spinach to multivitamins to andro to hgh, do you draw the line? As consumers we want to see athletes perform to their utmost ability. If the steroids really help, why should they be banned?

What exactly is our objection? You can say it’s because they’re dangerous, but Olympic athletes test positive for taking therapeutic levels of other drugs to cure/treat their asthma or other malady. How dangerous could that dosage be?

And if someone came up with a steroid that was proved not harmful would that be okay?

In all the hoo hah about this issue, about baseball players taking these drugs when they weren’t banned, about journalists making wild and sweeping declarations that treats the players as if they’re criminals and their union as if it is wildly irresponsible, there is little addressing what it is about these drugs that makes us take umbrage.

As sports comsumers we control the terms of play. If we don’t like the way athletes are playing the games we like to watch, we can turn them off. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say we won’t permit these (make a list) drugs in our games. But it is naive to think that athletes aren’t going to pursue every legal avenue to improve their game. Especially when years of service time are at stake, and huge amounts of money.

This is what I think we should think of when we hear Selig say how sure he is that strict rules are the answer. Maybe. But if the owners hadn’t tried to screw the players out of hundreds of millions of dollars in the collusion case, if George Steinbrenner hadn’t hired a guy to impugn Dave Winfield to try and get out of the last few years of his contract, in other words if the owners had acted honorably, maybe the players would have accepted a top-down drug policty.

But there is no reason why any player should trust the owners, at least not collectively. Which is why Selig is just speaking bluster.

I don’t really intend to let players or the union off the hook. As a health issue the union should have been out in front on this. But the larger issue is one that goes to the heart of what we define as competition and the spectacle we pay for. I’d be happy to ban all the juice, and watch natural players play, but in the back of my mind I’ll know that there are chemists and geneticists coming up with ways to beat the tests, and whenever someone extraordinary comes along the whispering will start again.

It just doesn’t seem like that much fun.

Fuck the South

Points that are well-taken, provocatively spoken. Don’t open if you can’t stand cussin’.

Mark Comolli – Baseball Cube

Off the yacht and working on capsules. It’s the section I call “Useless Pitchers,” about 300 guys who either pitched in the majors the last two years, had decent years in Double or Triple-A last year, or are seasoned vets coming off injuries. There is stuff to describe about their games, but the evaluation is unrelentingly some version of “Has a chance if he learns to throw strikes past guys.”

I cut a lot of guys from consideration because they’re not advanced enough, or are probably going to be out for the year, and then there is Mark Comolli. I wrote, “7.71 ERA in 116.1 IP in Single-A as a 25 year old,” and then entered the code that means he won’t be in the magazine. Then I noticed something.

He walked 131 guys. That’s 10.13 per 9/IP. Holy cow. I just noticed he also threw 25 wild pitches.

All of this is a new thing for him, some kind of Rick Ankiel possession. Too bad. Wow.

Baseball Info Solutions – Books

My copy of this year’s Bill James book came yesterday. This book was always a great treasure because it conveniently had career stats for all major leaguers, minor league stats for recent major leaguers, lefty righty splits and managerial tendencies and park factors. Among other things.

Recently win shares have been added and Bill James’ projections for hitters are back. This year there are also Career Projections, which show Barry Bonds finishing his career with more than 900 homers. Yikes.

There is also an attempt by Sig Mejdal to quantify injury risk. Bill James has some interesting things to say about these numbers in his projection essay.

In short, there is lots here and it’s here now. Order it from the link in the left column here and you’ll be helping support this site. While you’re at Amazon, buy all the Lord of the Rings DVDs and expensive kitchen ware you can. Ask Rotoman is commissioned on those, too.

Rotoman at work…

It’s crunch time for the magazine, so the editorial staff has convened on the Rotoman yacht, where we race when we’re not sculpting perfect player capsules.

And which is why I’ve been scarce lately.

Ellisblog

Pretty convincing post mortem from W’s cousin, the man who perhaps won him the election in 2000.

One other thing it suggests: As perhaps wrong-headed as it was to make Edwards the VP candidate, a ticket headed by Edwards (a foreign policy lightweight) would out of necessity been backed by Zinni or some other heavyweight. Would that have made it a better bet? I’m not sure.

Why Democrats Should Be Thankful – At least they don’t have to clean up the Bush fiscal catastrophe. By Daniel Gross

Gross writes:

“In decades past, increasing Republican dominance of the House and Senate would have meant more fiscal discipline. But Republicans increasingly dominate the states that are net drains on Federal taxes—the Southern and Great Plains states—while fading in the coastal states that produce a disproportionate share of federal revenue. (It’s Republicans, not Democrats, who are sucking on the federal teat.) What Amity Shlaes quaintly identified in today’s Financial Times as the “southern culture of tax cutting” has been married to the southern culture of failing to generate wealth and the southern culture of depending on federal largesse. The offspring is an unsightly deficit monster.”

I suggest that if there is something to be done, the blue states need to disengage. We need to assert our rights as states and refuse to send our cash to Washington, only to see it distributed to the red states. We need to hold onto that money and use it at home to improve our health systems, our education systems, our environmental policies.

The Bush Tax Policies, as Gross points out, aren’t cuts. They are deferrals, a free lunch eaten now that will itself come back and bite us (or our children) when those who hold our debt decide to collect.

The only way to drive this home to the Reds and change the terms of the political discussion from one of values to one that addresses real issues is to slow the flow of our money their way.

(On a baseball note: No doubt this is the way the Yankees feel about sharing the receipts of their home games, but in general baseball’s system works for them.)

Yahoo! News – Bush Pledges to Change Social Security

The funny thing is that the last Republican president to achieve gains in the house and senate while he was being elected was Calvin Coolidge, whose ruinous fiscal policies led (indirectly) to the creation of the Social Security system W is trying to unravel.