Daily Archives: April 27, 2007

Stros 2007 Season Review, Part One

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lidge%20and%20another%20home%20run.jpegThe first 21 games of the season of the Stros’ (9-12) season has been one of streaks — they started out the season by losing 5 of their first 6 games, rebounded momentarily by winning 8 of their next 9, only to blow that comeback by losing their next 6. As a result, the excuses of the club’s spotty performance are already in full bloom:

“Berkman and Lee haven’t started hitting yet.”
“If Jennings comes back strong, the starting pitching will be fine.”
“Burke is a good athlete who will find his way in centerfield.”
“Biggio is such an inspiration.”

Well, maybe all those statements are true. But the harsh reality is that this is not a good baseball team right now.
As noted in the 2007 season preview, none of this is particularlry surprising. Despite catching lightning in a bottle in the post-season during 2004 and 2005, the Stros have been trending downward for most of this decade into the current mediocre edition of the club. During most of that time, reasonably strong pitching tended to mask the decline in the club’s overall hitting.
However, through the first eighth of this season, both the hitting and the pitching on this Stros club have serious questions. The Stros’ hitters have already generated 13 fewer runs than an average National League club would have scored using the same number of outs at this stage of the season (RCAA, explained here), which ranks 10th out of the 16 National League teams (the NL Central-leading Brewers are at +18 RCAA). The pitching staff has been about as bad, saving 7 fewer runs already than an average National League staff would have saved so far this season (RSAA, explained here), which ranks 13th among National League clubs.
The season statistics through to date are below, courtesy of Lee Sinins‘ sabermetric Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. The abbreviations for the hitting stats are defined here and the same for the pitching stats are here:

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Baker Hughes settles Kazakhstan bribery case

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bakerhughes.gifHouston-based oil field services provider Baker Hughes Inc. on Thursday announced that it has agreed to pay $44.1 million to settle the Department of Justice and the SEC’s long-standing allegations that a unit of the company had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Under the terms of deal, a subsidiary of the company pleaded guilty to violations of the FCPA regarding payments made to a commercial agent in Kazakhstan between 2001 and 2003, the company entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice that provides that federal government will not prosecute the company if it meets the conditions of the agreement for two years (including a government-approved monitor to oversee its compliance efforts), and the company agreed to a consent judgment with the SEC, which charged violations of the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA related to the Kazakhstan deal.
The company announced the govenment probes publicly almost five years ago and the probe was well-known within the Houston legal community even before that. Sometimes delay really is the best strategy.

What was Dr. Hurwitz’s motive?

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Hurwitz042707.jpgThe NY Times’ John Tierney, who has done an outstanding job of covering the sad case of Dr. William Hurwitz, provides this insightful post on the utter lack of a motive for Dr. Hurwitz to commit the crime for which he is being prosecuted — i.e., violating America’s drug prohibition policy:

Prosecutors charged that Dr. William Hurwitz was in a conspiracy with some of his patients to illegally distribute drugs, but there was no evidence that the patients had shared the profits when they resold the painkillers he prescribed. The only money he got was from the medical fees he charged. The prosecutors tried to portray his practice as a lucrative operation, and him as a doctor motivated by greed. This is a bit hard to square with what the jury heard about his background. which included stints in the Peace Corps and the Veterans Administration. And itís really hard to square with his bank account.
In 2003, before the charges in this case had even been brought against him, authorities seized Dr. Hurwitzís assets. (Thatís standard procedure in drug cases like this, and one more reason why doctors have such a hard time mounting a defense.) There wasnít much to seize. They took all his retirement savings ó which amounted to less than $250,000. He was at that point 58 years old and had been practicing medicine for decades. . . .
ìItís so ridiculous to hear the prosecutor talk about this rich doctor,î Mrs. [Nilse] Quercia [Dr. Hurwitz’s former wife] told me. ìExcept for that Keough account they seized, he had nothing but debts and a 1990 Subaru.î His subsequent legal expenses, she said, were paid by friends and relatives and by the law firms now representing him pro bono.

In my experience, when a prosecutor must fabricate a motive for the white collar criminal act that is being prosecuted, it’s a pretty darn good indication that a lack of prosecutorial discretion is behind the decision to pursue the charges in the first place.

Not your typical obituary

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boris%20yeltsin.gifBased on this Rolling Stone obituary, it’s a safe bet that the family of Boris Yeltsin will not be hiring Matt Tabbi to write the official biography of the late former Russian premier:

Boris Yeltsin was literally born in mud and raised in shit. He was descended from a long line of drunken peasants who in hundreds of years of non-trying had failed to escape the stinky-ass backwater of the Talitsky region, a barren landscape of mud and weeds whose history is so undistinguished that even the most talented Russian historians struggle to find mention of it in imperial documents. They did find Yeltsins here and there in the Czarist censuses, but until the 20th century none made any mark in history. The best of the lot turned out to be Boris’s grandfather, a legendarily mean and greedy old prick named Ignatiy Yeltsin, who achieved what was considered great wealth by village standards, owning a mill and a horse. Naturally, the flesh-devouring Soviet government, the government that would later make Boris Yeltsin one of its favored and feared vampires, liquidated Ignatiy for the crime of affluence, for the crime of having a mill and a horse. [. . .]
The communist government found its leaders among the meanest and greediest of the children who survived and thrived in places like this. Boris Yeltsin was such a child. As a teenager he only knew two things; how to drink vodka and smash people in the face. At the very first opportunity he joined up with the communists who had liquidated his grandfather and persecuted his father and became a professional thief and face-smasher, rising quickly through the communist ranks to become a boss of the Sverdlovsk region, where he was again famous for two things: his heroic drinking and his keen political sense in looting and distributing the booty from Soviet highway and construction contracts. If Boris Yeltsin ever had a soul, it was not observable in his early biography. He sold out as soon as he could and was his whole life a human appendage of a rotting, corrupt state, a crook who would emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze, concrete and sausage.

There is much more.