Daily Archives: October 17, 2007

The Chronicle’s vacuum of baseball analysis

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Chronicle logo.jpgIt may be football season, but that doesn’t stop Chronicle sports columnists from continuing to bludgeon us with their seemingly insatiable capacity to analyze the Stros and matters relating to Major League Baseball badly.
First, there is this blog post from the inimitable Jose de Jesus Ortiz, who already has quite a legacy of poor analysis of the sport that he covers for the Chroicle:

Willy Taveras, who holds the Astros franchise record for consecutive games with a hit, has been a difference maker for the Colorado Rockies heading into the third game of the National League Championship Series.
The Rockies obviously valued his speed and defense, which is why he was added to the NLCS roster even though he hadn’t played in three weeks because of an injury.
In Game 2, he was the player of the game after making an awesome game-saving catch in the seventh inning and then driving in the game-winning run with an RBI walk. Oh, he also had doubled and scored a run in a game that was 2-2 heading into extra innings. [. . .]
General manager Tim Purpura and Phil Garner weren’t fired until August, but they hurt the franchise tremendously by never understanding the true value of Willy Taveras. They valued Chris Burke out of position over Taveras at his natural position. Because of this mistake, the Astros’ pitching staff suffered.
It’s pathetic to see Taveras starring elsewhere when he should have been playing here. Cecil Cooper and Jose Cruz saw something special in Taveras and kept working with him in 2006. Unfortunately, Cooper wasn’t the manager then.
Do you miss Taveras?

In this prior post, I explained why Ortiz is simply wrong about Taveras’ value as a Major League player. But in his latest blog post, how can Ortiz overlook that Taveras had a pathetic .250 on-base average and an even worse .222 slugging percentage during the National League Championship Series? Or that the Rockies won 17 out of their last 18 games to get into the NLCS without any contribution from Taveras, who sat out those games with a hamstring injury?
What Ortiz simply does not understand is that anecdotal flashy plays do not prove that a player is a good Major Leaguer. It only proves that the player is capable of making a good play every once in awhile. To be a good Major Leaguer, a player has to be able to generate more runs consistently for his team than what the team’s alternatives would likely generate using the same number of outs as the player. Not only is it far from clear that Taveras did that this season for the Rockies (and the Rockies’ late season streak without him suggests that he did not), the fact of the matter is that the Stros’ CF-RF combination of Hunter Pence and Luke Scott was far more productive this past season than a Taveras-Pence tandem would have been.
Meanwhile, the equally foggy Chronicle columnist Richard Justice chimes in with this recent column in which he bemoans the Stros’ poor evaluation and development of minor league players (for a far more insightful analysis of how the Rockies developed their World Series team, see this Alan Schwarz NY Times article). This revelation comes from the same columnist who contends that the Stros blew this season because the club elected not to re-sign aged free agent pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, and who continues to beat the drum that Stros owner Drayton McLane made a terrible mistake in allowing former Stros General Manager Gerry Hunsicker to resign after the 2004 season. Of course, Hunsicker’s tenure as Stros GM coincided with most of the period from 1997 to date during which the Stros’ minor league system has been in decline. Apparently, in Justice’s odd world, the man in charge of the Stros’ player drafts during those years had nothing to do with the failure of those drafts to produce enough good Major League-quality players for the Stros.
My purpose is not to be overly critical of either Taveras or Hunsicker. Taveras is still a young player who, although a below-average National League player so far in his career, could develop into an above-average player. Similarly, despite his deficiencies in overseeing the Stros’ drafts during the period from 1997 to 2004, Hunsicker is still the best GM that the Stros have ever had. My point is simply this: Why do Ortiz and Justice refuse to provide a balanced analysis of them?
It’s not all that important in the big scheme of things, but are Ortiz and Justice really the best the Chronicle can do for baseball analysis?

Immune to reason

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vaccines.jpegPaul Howard is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Center for Medical Progress and the editor of the blog Medical Progress Today. In this Washington Post op-ed, Howard addresses the potential danger to public health of indulging in the current wave of trendy skepticism toward vaccinations:

Sadly, too many parents have lost faith in vaccines. Partly, this is because of a “generation gap.” In 1940, U.S. infant mortality rates stood at 40 deaths per 1,000 live births. Tens of thousands more children would go on to be killed or maimed by measles, polio and chicken pox. Today, infant mortality averages about 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, and those other diseases have been largely vanquished by vaccines. A childhood free of serious illness is now taken for granted.
When mysterious disorders like autism strike seemingly healthy children — at about the same age when childhood vaccines are typically administered — frustrated parents lash out at doctors and pharmaceutical companies. And today’s vaccine inventors must contend with a powerful force that had yet to arise when Jonas Salk created his revolutionary polio vaccine — mass litigation.
The birth of “liability without fault” in pharmaceutical litigation in 1958 — captured in Dr. Paul Offit’s riveting book The Cutter Incident — set the dangerous precedent that vaccine companies would be held liable for side effects even when their products were made using the best available science and according to government regulations. [. . .]
The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between vaccines and developmental disorders or autism is now in the double-digits (including a September 27th CDC study in the New England Journal), critics are effectively demanding that scientists prove that thimerosal does not cause illness — an impossible standard.
The very success of vaccines has become their downfall. As Dr. Offit writes in Vaccinated, “When [vaccines] work, absolutely nothing happens. Parents go on with their lives, not once thinking that their child was saved.”

The entire op-ed is here. This earlier post addresses the devastating impact that the Cutter Incident had on the production of vaccines and public health.

Dyer dissects Judge Kent’s case

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sam%20kent.jpgFolks are finding it pretty easy these days to pile on Galveston U.S. District Judge Sam Kent over the recent reprimand that he received from the Judicial Council of the Fifth Circuit (previous posts here). As regular readers of this blog know, I’m wary of the mobs and simple morality plays that tend to form around such matters, so I was pleased to learn that Bill Dyer had decided to pass along some thoughts on Judge Kent’s case.

I perceive to have been a serious campaign of distortion in other publicity about Judge Kent by people who do, or at least should, know better. They say Congress ought to commence an impeachment investigation รณ but they’re not telling you something very important that you ought to know in forming your own opinion on that subject.

Check out the entire insightful post.