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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Monday, October 03, 2011Brad Pitt does not play gay Billy Bean in “Moneyball,” he plays straight Billy BeaneBy the one and only Billy Bean.. .
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Posted: October 03, 2011 at 10:23 AM | 151 comment(s)
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Naw, I kid. Did anyone read it? Any good?
The A's never win anything! Beane was just lucky in 2002! Moneyball is a sham!
Wait, did Beane vote for Bush in 2004? Oh, it's on.
Well, he's a rich guy, ain't he?
I think we've all met smart Republicans. It's just that the ones who go on TV and/or run for office tend to make you forget about the smart ones.
I can see a connection between sabermetrics and right-wing politics. The desire to rationally explain events on the baseball field and the libertarian view of the world that is rationally derived from the absolute premise of individual liberty could in some cases have a similar source.
The surprise at Beane being a Republican may come from that his team benefits from the welfare state, or that he led a revolt against conservatism in his field. Or maybe it's that he likes soccer.
On the flip side exploiting market ineffecincies sounds like awfully free-market Republican thing to do.
It may also be that in the world of BBTF, the virulent anti-Billy Beane/Moneyball people tend to be conservatives. It's kind of interesting, I guess.
It may also be that in the world of BBTF, the virulent anti-Billy Beane/Moneyball people tend to be conservatives. It's kind of interesting, I guess.
Hah! I continue to defy characterization, and maintaing my uniqueness on BBTF!
BTW, nice job against Cuban. Now I gotta face Gaelan again.
Politics in baseball are awfully contradictory, anyway. For a game run by rich old white Republicans, they sure act like a bunch of socialists when it suits them.
Likewise, many of my liberal friends who are baseball fans are very quick to ##### about the ridiculous millionaire contracts ballplayers get without giving any consideration to the history of the reserve clause, Curt Flood, and how and why free agency came to be.
If it makes you feel better, that was not the plan!
I hear this complaint from liberals about CEOs, but never about baseball players. I personally hear more conservative personalities (literally, not Rush, etc.) get down on baseball for salaries.
Rich businessmen don't like truly free markets. They like rigged markets that favor them, and Hyman Rothesque "partnerships with friendly governments."
Which is why the world doesn't need less capitalism, it needs more.
On purely fiscal issues, the reason I'm not a Republican (I'm not a Democrat, either) is that the rich old white Republicans who preach free market concepts sure act like a bunch of socialists when it comes to pulling taxpayer money to their businesses.
It's really not all that shocking: the vast majority of Americans (well, of anyone) wants their goverment to shovel money toward them and have completely rationalized why this shovelling is in the best interests of everyone while, at the same time, desperately not wanting to shovel money anywhere else, again, having rationalized why not doing so is in everyone's best interests.
MLB is simply a microcosm: small market owners demand revenue sharing "in the interest of the game"; large-market owners demand others be locked out of their markets "in the interest of the game".
If it makes you feel better, that was not the plan!
Not really, no.
I'm a little worried though. His pitching is goooood.
His lineup is vulnerable to LH's though. Wish I had another good LH RP.
As noted, politics and pro sports, for obvious reasons, mix in odd ways. Liberals often bash players for making too much money, thereby taking management's side over a union/guild and siding with superrich guys over very rich guys, ignoring that many of the latter group grew up working class and/or in poor countries. Conservatives are often pro-owner in labor disputes, in effect backing socialistic economic reasoning, restriction of employee options, and mandated control of compensation.
Everyone is a libertarian until they need something from the government. Old people are Tea Party supporters who want the Medicare and Social Security. Corporations want the government out of their hair until they need a bailout. Heck, its funny to see the Post Office debate - people in rural areas arguing that we need less federal government suddenly protesting the closure of their local post office.
Mickey Kaus wrote a book about 20 years ago whose thesis was, rather than take the rich's money from them, take away the privileges money can buy. If the rich want to squander their money on yachts and the like, fine, just don't let them buy their kids' way into college and their kids' way out of military service.
The book had effectively zero influence, but its thesis and prescriptions remain great ideas.
Or take the English route, and just call private schools "public schools".
The reverse would work much better. Privatize public schools, and give parents a check to purchase education for their kids.
Set the amount equal for all children in the state (you could adjust for cost of living). That way, you wouldn't have rich suburbs spending $25,000 per student, and rural areas $8,000.
If schools had to compete for students, or the administrators and teachers would lose their jobs, they'd get better in a hurry.
Set the amount equal for all children in the state (you could adjust for cost of living). That way, you wouldn't have rich suburbs spending $25,000 per student, and rural areas $8,000.
That would be interesting, too. The key for me is equality of opportunity for the kids.
Set the amount equal for all children in the state (you could adjust for cost of living). That way, you wouldn't have rich suburbs spending $25,000 per student, and rural areas $8,000.
If schools had to compete for students, or the administrators and teachers would lose their jobs, they'd get better in a hurry.
I've been through the Manhattan private school process; a lot/most of those schools are jokes. No report cards until 8th grade, no expectations, no distinctions among the best and the mediocre, basically a bunch of softies sitting around telling each other how great they are. The deal is simple: you pay us a bunch of money, we'll stamp your ticket with our name, enhancing your "brand."
Essentially everything people think goes on in public schools really does go on in elite private schools.
I see that the idea is to let loose the competitive instincts of administrators, and reap the benefits, but I don't know if it would actually work that way. If your school has 1,000 kids, and you get the same amount of funding whether you have the gifted kids or the crappy ones, you might have created a situation where the administrators actually have less incentive to care about their product than they do today.
How does School A (operating budget $5,000,000) distinguish itself from School B (operating budget $5,000,000)? It can't spend more money.
Also, this would have an unlimited number of unpredictable unintended consequences. (So would Shooty's idea, I think).
I tend to be pragmatic about it. I think the system is broken for the poor and am open to different ways of fixing it. I'm also sympathetic to teachers and pro-labor. I don't think they are very many teachers who don't want to do a better job, despite the rhetoric of anti-union people. I'm probably going to bow out of this thread now and I apologize if I've kick-started a 1000 post throw down.
No need for that at all. If I don't like it, I am free to bail.
FWIW, Beane played in Detroit in April, while Bean came up when the rosters expanded in September. But they both played over a hundred games in Toledo.
No "e" Bean was one of the trinity of young players (along with Scott Lusader and Jim Walewander) from that era that Sparky praised far beyond any rational assessment of his abilities.
That would be interesting, too. The key for me is equality of opportunity for the kids.
I agree with both of these points. Public schooling has miserably failed the poor in this country. Yet private and religious schools operating with the same population, on shoe-string budgets, succeed.
How does School A (operating budget $5,000,000) distinguish itself from School B (operating budget $5,000,000)? It can't spend more money.
Curriculum? Extra tutoring? Focus on specific subjects? Vocational education?
I'm not sure, that's why you want to let the market loose. All I know is inner city Catholic schools in NYC outperform the public schools with 25% of the per pupil spending.
The idea that we can't do better is silly.
It was more than a trinity, unless Torey Lovullo and Chris Pittaro are from different eras.
Doesn't that have as much to do with the Catholic schools having the built-in advantages of involved parents and the ability to boot out any kid that doesn't measure up? I've always seen vouchers as a way for good schools to choose their students rather than a way for students to choose good schools.
I know this argument has been made a million times, but when one side of the voucher debate comes up, the other side (me) responds reflexively.
That's biased though. In practically every area of the country, merely attending private or religious school is a sign of motivated and engaged parents, with sufficient time to sift through alternatives and the ability to sift effectively. Kids of those parents will generally do better in school.
Yea, I remember Lovullo being the next big thing. Also, Walt Terrell was supposed to win 20 games.
I know this argument has been made a million times, but when one side of the voucher debate comes up, the other side (me) responds reflexively.
Sure, but you act like thats a flaw, rather than a feature.
A voucher program would allow parents to get their kids out of disfunctional schools into ones that maintain order. Why should the 80% of students who want to learn be dragged down by the incorrigibles?
The ianbility of Public Schools to permanently expel anyone until they're 18 or 19 is a major problem.
If I believed it worked that way, I would support vouchers. More likely, it would allow parents to try to get their kids into better schools. For the ones that succeed, that would be great, but for the ones that fail (for reasons of numbers, lack of connections, paperwork foulups, whatever), their kids would be stuck in the rapidly decaying neighborhood school with even less motivation from administrators and politicians to improve it.
One might say "Well, those kids/parents should have made more of an effort to get into a better school." Maybe, but that platitude doesn't help the kids left behind.
One might say "Well, those kids/parents should have made more of an effort to get into a better school." Maybe, but that platitude doesn't help the kids left behind.
In my design, there is no more "neighborhood school" that relies on politicians. I'm limiting the gov't role to setting the financing level.
I'm confident that if states set the funding levels even at 2/3 of what they currently spend per student in inner cities, there will be enough school seats for every kid.
Why do you hate America?
OK, that's cheap, but all we have otherwise is snapper's confidence. I do not have the same confidence.
I don't think you could do much worse than the combination of high spending and horrible results you see in poor areas now.
What about the curriculum? You're not going to put kids -- and the country -- at the mercies of schools that teach that humans first walked the earth 6,000 years ago, that FDR was a Communist, and that science is a secular humanist fraud, are you?
Exactly right. Our current motto is "no child left behind" when maybe instead it should be "let's do what we can to let the kids that want to flourish the resources they need to excel and offer good vo-tech opportunities for the rest."
I'm pretty liberal, and while I think teacher's unions get unfairly maligned, I fully support school choice. Our current system condemns poor urban kids to terrible schools simply because of where they live. Are all charter schools great or even good? No. But almost every urban school district is terrible. Let's at least give the kids that want to do well the opportunity to do so.
There are lots of concerns such as the curriculum as SBB raises, as well as what about special ed kids, but I think a lot of that can be regulated - require any school that accepts federal voucher money to meet certain requirements.
And the ancillary effect is that urban areas no longer become completely verboten for families that are inclined to live in an urban environment but can't afford private school, thus raising property values and tax coffers for our cities.
I particularly liked this quote (beginning of page 6):
What I find devastating about this quote, especially from somebody like Lewis, who has looked at this in detail, is that unless Americans accept that no one side is immune from this rot, it can't really be fixed.
Another great two quotes (both from page 3):
Of course that's what they want; who wouldn't?
The left has conditioned the people to expect an all-powerful government capable of anything; the right has conditioned them to blame government for everything. So what we've got is a populace that expects way too much from government, and then b!tches like whiny b!tches when government -- inevitably -- fails to deliver.
The question is how to strike a balance between too much government and too little government, while also not fallling into the fallacy of the free market solving everything (it can't).
These noted right-wingers agree.
I'd let the parents decide.
Even kids that believed all that, but know how to read and write, do math, etc. at a HS level, would have a much better shot in this world than the products of most of our inner-city schools.
Hell, most of our current HS students don't know who FDR was. Believing he was a communist would at least require them to know something about him.
If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?!
EDIT: Of course there is plenty of ignorance resulting from the current system, but I guess you could distinguish this as "proactive" ignorance, which is to say an explicit belief in things that are simply not true.
I obviously don't believe most parents will choose schools that teach wack-job ideologies.
You don't think the media would feast on uncovering schools with bizarre curricula?
The media would do what it always does, which is equivocate and say there's two sides to the story.
Don't you think the parents that would want to send their kids to a school that taught the world is only 6000 years old are probably already teaching their kids that on Sundays?
Now that I find that he's actually a Republican who claims to be straight, I genuinely think that he's an in-the-closet gay man.
Thinking someone is lying doesn't make it indisputable that they are lying. Maybe he was, it obviously can't be proven.
Once you grant the "in any event", how would you know "most certainly" that it didn't or didn't come from Rove, exactly?
EDIT: Citing it as Rove is certainly questionable.
But - and this is just as true of well-off suburban repubicans and hippie liberal socialists (i.e, many of the white parents at my son's public school in SF) - when push comes to shove, people will always favor their own children over others.
I actually sometimes think PRIVATE schools should be banned - and if you don't like your kids' school options you need to get involved personally and fix the damn school. Note that this does happen a lot here in San Francisco, where we have many economically mixed public schools and the wealthier parents shoulder much of the load / funding gaps. However, there is a big free rider effect, so that the schools with wealthy, involved parents get over-enrolled, and you still get a balkanization across districts.
Probably a biological drive - but that is (IMHO) one of the reasons why we have laws and regulations - to curb biological drives that might be harmful to society or individuals as a whole.
Which again goes back to Lewis' (very telling) quotes and why many people feel that unfettered capitalism would a social disaster.
I remain wary - privatization has certainly been a mixed bag in America, there's little evidence that privatized systems in general are any more efficient/have less corruption/show better results than public systems (the private school system is NOT a good example, as it's a heavily cherry-picked population), and in the end it's not really about who goes to which school as it is a question of what people/the government prioritizes. Despite a few loud voices, we just don't really care (yet) that our K-12 schools are terrible. We've decided we have higher priorities.
Well I agree that we have a responsibility to educate everyone's kids. I just don't see why the school down the street should be the only free option, particularly when it sucks.
And this would just lead to even further suburban sprawl and greater de facto segregation as white suburban families move further away. The problem now isn't private schools. The problem is a tremendous disparity in public schools between rich districts and poor districts (and actually recent studies have shown our affluent districts don't even test well compared to other nations, so maybe those public schools aren't so hot either?).
I think its ridiculous our education is tied to where we live.
This led to me spending a few minutes searching Youtube for the Wire clip in which Carcetti's chief of staff says, "Kids don't vote." Sadly, I was unable to find it.
But... yeah. Kids don't vote.
This I agree with. The problem with the it-should-be-left-up-to-the-parents thing is that in the case of education (and most other things that determine the kid's future), the kid's rights are much, much more important than the parent's. The kid is the one that has to go out in the world and make it (or not) with whatever tools or stamps of approval they're given as a young person, and live in the world with all the rest of humanity. Fetishizing the parent's rights to disregard their children's education, or create little carbon copies of themselves, or whatever, at the expense of the kid whose life it is after all, is the absolute wrong way to go in my opinion.
Well the reason is geographical. For obvious reasons, we don't want 8-year-olds to have a full scale commute to school. The best solution isn't to give them the option to travel an hour back and forth every day to go to the good school, which most of them won't do regardless, it's to fix the school down the street.
To say "a lot" is to grossly overstate the number of such, and the case that's been made in favor of that position is hardly persuasive.
It's widely attributed to Rove - many publications report him as the anonymous source in question. For examples, see here, here, here, here, here, etc.
That's what my plan envisions. Agree 100% No reason for Scarsdale to spend $25,000 per student and some upstate rural area $6,000.
Would you find retaining the governmental ability to set educational standards and certify schools, while it abstains from actually running them, to be an acceptable compromise? Because I think that would be much better than anything-goes.
Yes, as long as the certification is reasonable, and not a back door way to reinstate bureaucratic and teachers' union control.
Would you cross state lines with your proposal? Would Kansas City, Kansas kids have the right to go to the best school they can find across the border in Missouri?
If you'd allow that, you might as well make the feds responsible for it all and you can go to school anywhere in the United States. If it's not federalized, you'll start hearing crap states complaining about "brain drain" and good states b!tching about educating the kids of other states.
Not saying that's necessarily good or bad.
What does this mean?
The primary goal of our education system should be for kids to grow up to be smarter and more rational than their idiotic parents, and to transcend the silly superstitions to which so many of their parents cling.
The parents of this nation aren't remotely qualified to develop curriculums for their childrens' study. It's incomprehensible that you'd think they are.
Michael Lewin never should have written that book.
I live in Oakland, CA, in a semi-sketchy semi-nice neighborhood. The local public schools have zero white children. I live a few blocks from the border of Piedmont, which has a good public school, and the price of a home accordingly shoots up a couple hundred thousand bucks immediately across this border, and directly into the "we cannot afford it" zone. I just moved from a really nice neighborhood in San Francisco, where we could not afford a home, but even this place, which was full of Pregnancy Pilates studios and gourmet cheese stores, had virtually zero white children in the local public schools, and most residents there were ready to move down to Palo Alto near their high paying tech jobs when their kids got older.
So as it is, we kind of figure that we're going to have to move to Iowa or northern Vermont in a few years, when our yet unborn child hits the schooling years. I realize that I'll be personally contributing to some of the nationwide problems discussed in this thread, but I'm not seeing what other options I have.
The primary goal of our education system should be for kids to grow up to be smarter and more rational than their idiotic parents, and to transcend the silly superstitions to which so many of their parents cling.
The parents of this nation aren't remotely qualified to develop curriculums for their childrens' study. It's incomprehensible that you'd think they are.
It means I don't want the certification process dictating a curriculum, or mandating only UFT or NEA teachers.
Who's talking about parents developing curriculum? The principals and teachers would.
Next is a lottery to ration the spots, and some kids lose. What happens to them?
And by the way, this scene plays out intra-district in major cities all over the country. NYC residents can get themselves in a lottery for virtually any district in the city. (**)
(**) And once you're in a public school, you can move out of the district and your kids can still go to the school.
Who chooses the principals and teachers?
What does "dictating a curriculum" mean? Everyone pretty much knows what kids should be taught -- math, mainstream science, great books, English composition, etc. It really isn't a mystery, and there's no serious doubt. I suppose things get a little tricky with human sexuality and its interaction with science/health but that's less than 1% of any serious system of study.
It sounds like you want to reserve the right for schools to teach kids, at the very least, political ideology -- if not outright bvllshit.
I think the more important question is if you are going to name your unborn son Preserved Fish.
More seriously, I haven't heard what the schools are like in this neighborhood, just that they are full of non-white kids.
"Problem" kids - and we know what that means in a dog-whistle sense - need more money, not less. And by money I mean essentially merit-based teacher salaries and smaller class sizes. If you want to work the free market into the system, make sure that the teachers with the toughest (most important!) jobs at the roughest schools are the best paid.
Not sure about state lines. I mean, why stop there? Shouldn't we - as people - want to educate the poor and downtrodden of Mexico (and Canada, eh) as well.
Pittsburgh is nice, and the housing is very affordable. You can get a three-bedroom place in good repair in a top school district for less than $200k.
Keep it in mind, anyway.
FWIW, I went to one of those schools, as did three of my siblings. That characterization could not be less consistent with what we experienced.
Our system is by no means perfect, but if these threads on the dire crisis facing the American education system are any indication I'd say thanks but no thanks.
Although perhaps class size is the answer there... as the school gets better, it gets more popular, so the class sizes get bigger, the teachers get overworked, and decided to move to the school with smaller class sizes and worse kids for more pay.
In an urban area? Catholic school. That's about it.
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