The map on the left purports to track the increase in the percentage of obese persons in the U.S. over the past 20 years. I don’t know about the methodology of the statistical analysis, but the map is pretty darn cool.
Fit Nation Map
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Monthly Archives: July 2007
Stros 2007 Season Review, Part Five
At the quarter pole of this season, I observed the following:
Stros management, for all their declarations of trying to field a playoff contender, is really biding its time this season as Biggio trudges toward his 3,000th hit. There is simply no way that this club will be much better than a .500 ballclub with its current starting pitching staff and Biggio, Everett, Ausmus and the pitcher burdening the hitting lineup on most nights. The Stros should be honest and concede that the club is attempting to compete as well as possible while supporting Biggio’s climb toward 3,000 hits and dispense with the ruse that this club, as presently configured, has any meaningful shot at the playoffs.
Well, as the Stros (44-57) have now completed 62.5% of the season (prior periodic reviews are here), Stros management has apparently embraced my suggestion. Rather than promoting the club’s competitiveness, Stros management has decided to make the remainder of the season the Craig Biggio Good-Bye Tour, beginning with Bidg’s well-orchestrated retirement announcement and game-winning, grand slam homer earlier in the week. Ah, the memories!
Unfortunately, when Biggio is retired and gone after this season, Stros management will have to figure out what to do next. As I have been pointing out for several years now, the ballclub has been in decline since 2001, although extraordinary pitching staff performances in 2004 and 2005 masked the decline during those two playoff seasons. But this season, the decline of the club has hit the club’s traditional strength — that is, pitching — and the result is that the Stros may finish this season with the worst record in the National League.
Interestingly, this club’s 44-57 record through 62.5% of the season is about the same as the club’s record last season during the middle 60% of the season (42-55). Only good performances during the first and final 20% segments of the 2006 season allowed that club to finish two games over .500 (82-80). Now, in the first five eighth segments of this season, the Stros’ record has been been consistently mediocre or worse — 9-12, 11-9, 6-14, 8-12, and 10-10 in the most recent 20 game segment. So, the accelerating downward trend that started during the middle of last season has continued this season.
Although some folks continue to be confused about what ails the Stros, a dramatic and pervasive downturn in pitching remains the big problem. The Stros’ staff — which has been among the best in the National League over the past three seasons — has given up 55 more runs than an average National League pitching staff would have allowed in the same number of innings (RSAA, explained here). That places the Stros staff 15th among the 16 National League teams with only the Cardinals’ staff being worse, and only three Stros pitchers — Roy Oswalt (5 RSAA/3.80 ERA), Chad Qualls (1 RSAA/3.83 ERA) and Brad Lidge (10 RSAA/1.94 ERA) — have saved more runs this season than an average National League pitcher would have saved in the same number of innings.
Meanwhile, the Stros’ hitters continue to be about National League-average (5 runs created against average, explained here), which is right in the middle (8th) of the 16 National League teams. Although National League-average in hitting is far better than the past two Stros squads achieved, it is not close to being good enough to make up for the Stros’ abysmal pitching. As a result, the Stros’ combined RCAA/RSAA score of -50 so far this season reflects that they continue to be a far below-average National League team.
The season statistics for the Stros 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. The Stros active roster is here with links to each individual player’s statistics:
Don’t mess with Mickelson
I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Phil Mickelson, but my sense from this episode and others that I’ve heard and read about lead me to believe that he’s a good and fun-loving guy. In addition, Philly Mick is apparently quite a practical joker.
Veteran Sports Illustrated golf correspondent Chris Lewis has just come out with an entertaining book about life on the PGA Tour entitled The Scoreboard Always Lies: A Year Behind the Scenes on the PGA Tour (Free Press 2007) and, in this interview about the book, Lewis passes along the following anecdote about Mickelson:
We were in Akron last year, and Phil was playing with Aaron Baddeley. Their group comes off on Friday (I think it was Friday), and all the sudden, these Akron cops come over, grab Aaronís caddie, Pete Bender, and drag him into a police car.
Pete, of course, has been around forever, and has seen it all ñ he used to caddie for Greg Norman, put in a bunch of years with Rocco Mediate, and so forth.
But now, after this round in Akron, the cops take him away, and he has no idea whatís going on. Turns out that years before, during a practice round in Maui (probably the last time Phil played the Mercedes), Pete had set a couple of snails down on the seat of Philís golf cart (they use carts during practice rounds there), and Phil of course sat on them. So years go by, and Phil never forgets.
Finally, last year in Akron, Pete winds up in the back of that squad car, and the cops tell him, ìMr. Bender, youíre here because of an outstanding warrant on a violation of a Hawaiian ordinance against cruelty to mollusks.î
Phil had set the whole thing up. Heís just standing there about fifty feet away, laughing his head off, while Peteís in the police car scared out of his wits.
The Kelleher legacy
Mitch Schnurman asks outgoing Southwest Airlines chairman and former CEO Herb Kelleher how he wants to be remembered:
“That I consumed more Wild Turkey and cigarettes than anybody else in the industry,” he quipped to reporters last week, after announcing that this would be his last year as chairman of Southwest Airlines.
As Schnurman notes, Kelleher’s fun-loving response dramatically underplays the revolutionary impact that this remarkable leader had on air travel, which he made affordable for millions of new air travelers. Read Schnurman’s fine column on Kelleher, which includes this beaut of an anecdote on why Kelleher agreed to the Wright Amendment:
My favorite memory of Kelleher was in late 2005, when the debate over the Wright Amendment was intensifying and moving to Washington. In the Senate hearing room, he lived up to the moment, saying that he had agreed to the 1979 Wright law in the same way the Germans accepted the end of World War I.
“In other words,” he told the senators, “with a gun to my head.”
Good news for Dr. Pou
An old saying in criminal defense circles is that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if the prosecutor is inclined to do so.
Fortunately, that was not the case in regard to former Houston area resident, Dr. Anna Pou (previous posts here). Dr. Pou served on the faculty of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston from 1997-2004, where she was the Director of the Division of Head and Neck Surgery from 1999 to 2004. Kevin, M.D. has been doing a good job of tracking developments and comments regarding the case against Dr. Pou, and here is the link to the website that has been established to help raise funds for Dr. Pou’s defense.
Following on this recent post on developments in Dr. Pou’s case, a New Orleans Parish grand jury today declined to indict Dr. Pou for second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of several elderly patients in the horrifying aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The decision ends a two-year long criminal investigation into Dr. Pou’s heroic treatment of patients at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, which was turned into a sweltering, powerless hellhole on Aug. 29, 2005 when the levees failed after the hurricane. Inasmuch as the hospital was not evacuated until several days after the storm, 24 out of 55 elderly and infirm patients died.
The case against this distinguished academic had all the earmarks of a political lynch mob from the beginning. It became quickly apparent that Dr. Pou’s arrest was the result of the highly questionable accusations of three employees of LifeCare Hospitals, the company that owned the hospital and whose top administrator and medical director didn’t even show up at the hospital during those chaotic days after Katrina. Inasmuch as the accusing LifeCare employees made no effort to evacuate the elderly and sick patients before or after the hurricane, it quickly became clear to any reasonably objective observor that they were attempting to divert attention (and perhaps prosecution) from their own appalling inaction.
But the facts didn’t matter to an elderly Louisiana attorney general named Charles Foti, who had campaigned on a plank of “cracking down on abuse of the elderly.” Foti engineered the arrest of Dr. Pou and two of her nurses while publicly referring to them as murderers, a charge that he repeated in an episode of 60 Minutes several months later. Although Dr. Pou’s lawyer had told Foti that she would surrender to authorities if an arrest warrant were issued for her, Foti had his investigators arrest Dr. Pou and haul her into Orleans Parish Prison on the evening of July 17, 2006, where she was booked on four counts of second-degree murder. Thankfully, the decision on whether to prosecute Dr. Pou was not Foti’s, but that of New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan and the local grand jury, which was undoubtedly persuaded by the New Orleans coronor’s report that earlier this year concluded that no compelling evidence of homocide existed. But that did not stop Jordan from recently granting immunity to the two nurses who were charged with Dr. Pou in an effort to induce them to testify against Dr. Pou before the grand jury. Sheesh!
So, when does the investigation of the public officials begin who were responsible for attempting to organize this lynch mob?
A bully exposed
As noted in this post from a couple of weeks ago, more than a few folks are not losing any sleep over the fact that former crusading state attorney general and current New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is having trouble getting along with with his new playmates in Albany.
But now things are getting even more interesting. According to a report issued yesterday by Andrew Cuomo, Spitzer’s successor as New York AG (and perhaps as governor sooner than we thought), Spitzer’s aides used the state police to gather information about whether Spitzerís chief political rival, Joseph Bruno, improperly used state-owned aircraft for political purposes. To make matters worse, when the improper use of state police was revealed, Spitzerís communications director, Darren Dopp, concocted a false story as to why the aides sought the information. Although the Cuomo report concluded that the aidesí conduct was ìnot unlawful,î Spitzer suspended Dopp and conceded at a press conference that his administration had ìgrossly mishandledî the situation. And all this occurred despite the fact that Cuomo’s report was not thoroughly prepared.
Spitzer has a lot of experience in the area of “grossly mishandling” situations. OpinionJounal notes the same thing.
The irony of Spitzer’s plight has generated quite a few entertaining blog post titles around the blogosphere, the best of which are Ellen Podgor’s (she of “Busted for Yoga” fame) “Spitzer Spitzered” and Nathan Koppel’s “Spitzer Schadenfreude.” Seems as if Spitzer is redefining the bully pulpit.
“Pulling a Mackey”
Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne is already a controversial character in business circles over his dubious demonization of shorting (earlier posts here and here) and his rather bizarre handling of Wall Street conference calls. But as this Gary Weiss post explains, Bryne has now outdone himself — he’s “pulled a Mackey.”
Steyn on reforming the criminal justice system
Canadian Mark Steyn’s experience in blogging the Conrad Black trial gives him an interesting perspective in proposing several common sense reforms for the federal criminal justice system, most of which have been addressed in this blog over the years:
1) An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. [. . .]
2) An end to the reliance on technical charges such as “mail fraud” and “wire fraud”, whereby you’re convicted not for the crime itself but for sending a letter or authorizing a bank transfer in the course of said crime. [. . .]
3) An end to the process advantages American prosecutors have accumulated over the years – such as the ability to seize a defendant’s funds and assets and deprive him of the means to hire good lawyers and rebut the charges. Or to take another example: Unlike the Crown in Commonwealth countries, in closing arguments to the jury the US government gets to go first and – after a response from the defence – last. This is an offence against the presumptions of English law: The prosecutor makes his accusation, the accused answers them. Every civilized legal system allows the defendant the last word.
4) An end to countless counts. In this case, Conrad Black was charged originally with 14 crimes. That tends, through sheer weight of numbers, to favour a conviction on some counts and acquittal on others as being a kind of “moderate” “considered” “judicious” “compromise” that reasonable persons can all agree on. [. . .]
5) An end to statute creep. One of the ugliest features of American justice is the way that laws designed to address very particular situations are allowed to metastasize and be applied to anything a prosecutor fancies. The RICO statute was supposed to be for mobsters and racketeers. Conrad Black is not a racketeer but he was nevertheless charged with racketeering. [. . .]
6) An end to de facto double jeopardy. Conrad Black is likely to wind up back in court to go through all the stuff he’s been acquitted of one mo’ time, this time in a Securities and Exchange Commission case. That would be a civil case, not a criminal one, and the US Attorney insists that the SEC is an entirely separate body. Oh, come on. The US Attorney and the SEC are both agencies of the US Government. They work in synchronicity. It’s not the same as Nicole Brown’s family suing OJ after the state’s murder case flopped. In this instance, two arms of the same organization are bringing separate cases on exactly the same matters. That’s double jeopardy – or, in fact, given the zealousness of the SEC, triple and quadruple jeopardy.
Steyn expands on these points, so read the entire post. And here is another proposed reform that should be added to the list.
Belly putters as Segways
For the first three days of this year’s British Open, Sergio Garcia used his new belly putter to sink seemingly every crucial putt to take a three-stroke lead into the final round. Through five holes of the final round, Garcia’s new-found putting stroke continued as he extended his lead to four strokes. But then, as Lawrence Donegan of The Guardian reports, the wheels of Garcia’s putting stroke suddenly careened into the nearest burn:
The first glimmer that the procession was heading for a few detours came on par-five 6th when he missed a four-foot putt for birdie, then barely holed the one coming back for par. The scores on the boards remained the same but the mood music had changed, from steady march to jazzy stagger. A poor approach shot to the back of the 7th green ended up costing him a shot and he dropped another at the next when he missed an eight-foot putt for par.
Which brings us to the best line that I’ve seen describing the probable result of Garcia’s fourth round putting collapse:
To [Garcia’s] credit he made a par at the next but, when he missed another short one on the 10th, shares in belly putters went the way of the Segway scooter.
By the way, my bet is that it’s just a matter of Garcia becoming comfortable with his belly putter before he wins a major tournament. He is a simply too good a ball-striker not to win at least one.
Also, did you notice how much more entertaining the British Open was in comparison to this year’s U.S. Open?
Debt really is cheaper than equity
Dealmaking in Houston is as hot as the downtown pavement these days. Last week it was the Plains-Pogo deal, and this week local offshore drilling firms Transocean Inc. and GlobalSantaFe Corp. are proposing an $18 billion merger deal that will create the largest offshore drilling contractor by a mile. The new company will have a market capitalization of $52 billion and will have a 145-rig fleet, which is more than twice as many rigs as the fleet of the next largest competitor.
The deal comes amidst an unprecedented period for deep sea drilling contractors. With crude-oil and natural gas prices maintaining at historically high levels, exploration and production companies have been willing to pay top dollar to be able to tap reserves that often are often deep under the ocean. As a result, offshore drilling contractors are enjoying intense demand for deepwater rigs, which has increased lease rentals dramatically. Not surprisingly, the stock prices of most of the publicly-owned drilling contractors have been soaring for the past year or so.
Transocean, which is the much larger company (a $32 billion market cap to GlobalSantaFe’s $17 billion), is actually the acquiring company in the merger. Transocean shareholders will end up with around 66% in the combined company, while GlobalSantaFe shareholders will end up with the other 34%. But the really interesting aspect of the deal is that the merged company is going to borrow a cool $15 billion (Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers are handling that debt vehicle) to spread among the shareholders of the two companies even as debt offerings generally are being downsized in most other markets. The merged company will use its first two years of free cash flow to reduce that debt.
Thus, the bottom line is that the companies are borrowing $15 billion, giving it to their shareholders, and then will take advantage of the hot drilling market to pay the money back quite quickly out of cash flow. Why not just use the cash flow over the next several years and give that to shareholders? Not sure, but I suspect that the structure of the deal will save the merged company a boatload of taxes over the next several years.