Daily Archives: October 1, 2004

Stros get closer; Giants keep pace

Posted on by
Reply

Jeff Bagwell hit a massive two-run Crawford Street yak and the Stros overcame some jittery fielding with solid relief pitching as they remained on top of the NL Wild Card standings with a 4-2 victory over the Rockies on Friday night at a rocking Juice Box. The Stros have now won a team record 16 straight games in the increasingly friendly confines of the Juice Box, have won seven of their last eight games, 11 out of their last 14, and are an incredible 34-10 since August 15.
The Stros entered the game tied for the Wild Card lead with the Giants, and they remained tied as the Giants won their game against the Dodgers late Friday night. However, with their wins, the Stros and Giants moved two games ahead of the fading Cubs, who have lost four straight, six of their last seven, and have been reduced to bitching at their television color man. I maintain that they should be blaming Michael Barrett.
During this final weekend of the season, the Stros are trying to avoid a repeat of last season when they needed to win three of their final four games against last-place Brew Crew to force a division tiebreaker with the Cubs. The Stros went 2-2 against the Brewers, which allowed the Cubs to win the NL Central title.
Mike Gallo (2-0) earned the win on Friday night against the Rockies by getting the last out of the third inning, and Brad Lidge nailed down the last three outs for his 28th save. They were two of seven Stros pitchers to scatter 12 Rockies’ hits. The Rockies’ starter Joe Kennedy (9-7) actually pitched very well, allowing four runs on eight hits in eight innings.
In addition to Bags’ heroics, Jason Lane again contributed mightily to the Stros’ win. Pinch hitting in the seventh, Lane first knocked in pinch running Adam Everett with an insurance run. Then, the following inning, Lane played the rebound of a line drive adroitly off of the Crawford Box wall and then made a perfect throw to nail Brad Hawpe trying to stretch a single into a double.
Finally, with the capacity Juice Box crowd tonight, the Stros have now drawn 3,001,511 fans through 80 games this season, which is the second time that the club has drawn over 3 million in attendance. The other time was in 2000, the Stros first season at Enron Field, er, I mean, Minute Maid Park a/ka/ the Juice Box.
The hottest ticket in Major League Baseball will be tomorrow night at the Juice Box as Roy O goes for his 20th win while attempting to put the Stros in even a better position in the Wild Card race. Still no decision on the Sunday starter, but rest assured that the Rocket is getting ready to return on three days rest.

It’s Texas Renaissance Festival time!

Posted on by
4

The Texas Renaissance Festival outside of Magnolia northwest of Houston begins its annual month and a half long run this weekend for the 30th straight year (has it really been that long?). Even if interacting with Renaissance characters is not your thing, a trip to the festival is worth it just to admire the festival location, which is a huge city from several centuries ago that has been built gradually over the past 30 years in the middle of a huge Texas pasture. Moreover, the food at the festival is exquisite and also well worth the trip — where else can you enjoy a lunch of a turkey leg polished off with a dessert of fried ice cream?

The hypocrisy of the Feds suing Big Tobacco

Posted on by
Reply

In his WSJ ($) Business World column this week, Holman Jenkins, Jr. addresses the Justice Department’s latest lawsuit against the big tobacco companies, and notes that the public relations benefit of such lawsuits far outweighs any meaningful public benefit:

Were there a single element of human or policy interest in the trial launched by the Justice Department last week, it would be the department’s conspicuous pride in admitting that it had spent an unprecedented $139 million preparing the case. To what end? In its dubious interpretation of racketeering law, the government seeks “disgorgement” of profits earned over half a century from selling cigarettes to smokers who started before age 21 — a newly identified demographic category that Justice calls the “youth addicted population.”
But those 50 years of profits were long ago distributed to shareholders. They won’t be found around the premises in a vault at Philip Morris, er, Altria.

Indeed, just who is the real owner of the big tobacco companies? It might surprise you to find out:

[G]overnment already gets the lion’s share of the proceeds of their continued smoking. Consider: A pack costs about $2.15 at the factory gate, of which the industry’s after-tax profit is about 17 cents. Federal excise tax takes 39 cents, while state taxes range from Virginia’s 37 cents to New Jersey’s $2.73.
Then there’s the additional, and novel, new “tax” imposed by the 1998 settlement with 46 states, which comes to about 50 cents a pack, though no legislator was ever obliged to cast a vote to impose this price hike on smokers.
Bottom line: The industry’s shareholders long ago were reduced to the role of cutouts, allowed to keep collecting a small piece of the pie so politicians can go on posing as scourges of “Big Tobacco” even as government has become, effectively, the “beneficial owner” of the major tobacco companies.

And the public relations benefit to the federal government from these lawsuits also has a rather stark cost:

Revenuers, after all, have imbibed a great deal of free-lunchism from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which shouts in one of its press releases: “Raising State Tobacco Taxes Always Increases State Revenues.” Ditto the World Bank, which officially estimates that a 10% tax hike causes only a 4% decline in consumption. The bank goes out of its way to applaud governments like Greece’s and Turkey’s, which get upwards of 10% of their revenue from cigarette taxes.
Of course, a less decorous way of saying the same thing is that governments have learned to be calculating exploiters of the “inelastic” demand of addicted cigarette smokers.

But Mr. Jenkins points out that this ruse likely will not on much longer, but for economic reasons, not good public policy ones:

What might torpedo it politically, if not legally, however, is evidence that the lines are crossing and higher prices are leading to lower revenues.
We’re already there: Revenues under the state settlement have lately begun declining at 4.5% a year, twice as fast as predicted and faster than can be explained by smuggling or smokers switching to renegade brands or roll-your-own.
If this keeps up, we may find out whether the government is really interested in curbing smoking — or in profiting from it.

Read the entire piece. This reminds me a bit of the Texas Republicans’ proposal earlier this year to subsidize state public school finance through an increase in notoriously volatile taxes on gambling within the state. Republicans should be wary that independent voters will figure out that something is terribly skewed about government raising money from activities such as gambling and smoking that it really ought not to be promoting.

Cubs lose, Giants win, Rockies arrive

Posted on by
Reply

The Cubs lost Thursday afternoon again (that’s five out of the last six, folks) and the Giants won their late game, so the Stros enter the final weekend of the regular season tied with the Giants for the Wild Card playoff lead and the Cubs are a game behind the Stros and the Giants.
The Stros’ Pete Munro starts the biggest game of his career in the Friday night game against the Rockies, while Roy O starts the Saturday night game and goes for his 20th win. Developments over those two games will dictate who starts the Sunday afternoon finale as the Rocket looms in the shadows to start on three days rest, if necessary.
The Rockies come in finishing up another woeful season (68-91) and are 4-6 in their last ten games. But they will be “loose as a goose in a bucket of juice,” so the Stros likely will not have it easy. The best approach for the Stros is to take early leads in each game so that the Rockie players become distracted with dinner plans rather than baseball. The Rockies have one great hitter (Todd Helton, who is comparable to Berkman), one decent hitter (Jeremy Burnitz, who has similar stats to Bags), and then a bunch of average and below average hitters, including ex-Stro, Vinnie Castilla, who Milo will describe as having a great season despite an Ensberg-like -10 RCAA (RCAA explained here).
The Giants play three with the Dodgers in L.A. and the Cubs play the Braves at Wrigley over the weekend, so neither of those clubs will have it easy, either. It’s going to be a wild weekend, so hold on tight.