Who are the top all-time Stros hitters and pitchers?

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stros%20logo%20022607.jpgThe Chronicle’s Brian McTaggert gets it right in naming the four best hitters in Stros history:

Jeff Bagwell: The club’s most prolific power hitter is the Astros’ all-time leader in homers (449), RBIs (1,529) and walks (1,401). He won the NL Rookie of the Year in 1991 and the Most Valuable Player in 1994.
Lance Berkman: At 31 years old, the four-time All-Star is in the prime of his career and already has 225 homers and 753 RBIs. He’s currently the club’s all-time leader in slugging percentage (.567) and average (.304).
Craig Biggio: Seven-time All-Star ranks first on many of the club’s career offensive charts, including hits (2,709), at-bats (10,359), runs (1,776), hits (2,930), doubles (637) and total bases (4,514).
Jose Cruz: Perhaps the best Astros hitter not with a last name starting with “B.” Ranks third on career club list in games (1,870), at-bats (6,629), hits (1,937), RBIs (942), steals (288) and first in triples (80).

The following are the top ten Stros hitters of all-time based on how many more runs they created during their respective careers with the Stros than an average National League hitter created during the same time frame (“RCAA,” explained here
But McTaggert does not do nearly as well in rating Stros pitchers, getting just one of the top four all-time correct:

Larry Dierker: Although his career has been over for 30 years, he still ranks first on Astros’ career charts in games started (320), complete games (106), innings pitched (2,294 1/3) and shutouts (25).
Joe Niekro: The knuckleballer who died in October is the club’s all-time leader in victories (144), ranks second in complete games (82), innings (2,270) and shutouts (21) and is third in starts (301).
Roy Oswalt: Still 29 years old, he’s on pace to become the club’s all-time winningest pitcher. With a 98-47 record (.676), he has the highest winning percentage in franchise history of pitchers with 100 or more decisions.
Nolan Ryan: The Texas legend spent one-third of his 27-year career with the Astros and was 106-94 with a 3.13 ERA and threw a no-hitter. He still ranks third in starts (282), innings (1,854 2/3) and is first in strikeouts (1,855).

Oswalt is the best pitcher in Stros history, but of the other three, only Ryan is even in the top 10 Stros pitchers of all-time. The most reliable measure for comparing pitchers is the Lee Sinins-created statistic, runs saved against average (“RSAA,” explained here). Based on how many runs they saved in comparison to an average National League pitcher during the time that they played, the following are the top ten Stros pitchers of all-time along with their RSAA score:
Best%20RSAA%20through%202006.gif
Dierker, Niekro and Ryan were all popular with Stros fans while they played for club, but popularity doesn’t make them among the top four pitchers in Stros history. Dierker was the best manager in Stros history, though.

Ben Stein’s blinders

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ben_stein.jpgThis earlier post noted that the NY Times financial columnist Ben Stein has some rather odd notions about private equity buyouts. Amidst criticizing rich folks for spending their money in a different way than Stein would if he had their money, Stein in this column continues to strap his blinders on closely regarding private equity-backed, management-led buyouts of publicly-owned companies:

“I saw an article about the chairman of Herbalife leading a private equity firmís offer to take the company private. He must be trying to underpay his shareholders for it ó otherwise thereís no built-in profit for him. Of course, heís a fiduciary for those same shareholders, obliged to put their interests ahead of his in every situation. Never mind. This is about money.”

Well, yes, it is about money and the private equity buyers could be wrong in their bet. Stein ignores that Herbalife’s stock price could go down below the price that the chairman and his private equity partners are willing to pay for it, which means that they would absorb the loss rather than the Herbalife public shareholders. Isn’t the more mature analysis here the assessment of the relative risk that Herbalife’s stock price will rise above or below the price that the private equity buyers are willing to pay for it?
But Stein isn’t finished with his blather:

Then I read an article about the head of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Isadore Sharp, taking that company private. His family owns the supervoting shares that control the Four Seasons, and Mr. Sharp says he wants to simplify succession issues with his children. (Donít we all?) Several people have been quoted as saying heís underpaying for the company. Why does he have to do the deal at all? The potential for conflicts of interest is simply overwhelming.
Four Seasons declined to comment when I called to ask, but I assume Mr. Sharp wants to buy the company on the cheap. Every buyer does. The shareholders for whom Mr. Sharp is a fiduciary want ó and by all legal history, deserve ó the highest possible price. Again, why do the deal at all? If he controls the votes of the company, canít he work out succession issues by parceling out those super shares in his will or a living will? Something does not smell quite right here. At least, not to me.
And, hey, lookie here whoís investing along with Mr. Sharp. Why, itís the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. See, heís not rich enough now. He has to get into this ethically dodgy deal to get even richer. Very nice. I guess heíll use that money to do ethical things.

Let’s assume for a moment that the risk is greater that the Four Seasons stock price will fall below the price that Mr. Sharp is willing to pay for it than it is that stock price will rise above it. However, Mr. Sharp disagrees with that risk assessment and is willing to put his money up to back up his belief. Hasn’t Mr. Sharp done precisely the ethical thing for Four Seasons shareholders? I don’t know if the foregoing risk analysis is right or wrong, but it occurs to me that it is at least as likely a scenario as the “ethically dodgy” deal that Stein suggests.
If not for Gretchen Morgenson, I would be amazed that the Times editors would allow Stein’s shallow analysis to pass as a business column in the paper.

Big Weekend Deals

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Big%20Deals.jpgO.K., so the offer of private-equity firms Texas Pacific Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. to acquire Dallas-based utility TXU Corp for about $45 billion was the big deal that was buzzing around financial circles over the weekend. As the NY Times’ Landon Thomas reports, it’s always fun when one of the original barbarians arrives at the gate.
But also catching my eye was that Houston-based Marble Slab Creamery — a longtime success story in the premium ice-cream parlor wars — announced on Friday that it was selling out New York-based NexCen Brands Inc. for $16 million. As noted earlier here, Marble Slab is well-positioned to make a run at becoming the Starbucks of premium ice-cream and NexCen — a brand acquisition and management company that is focused on assembling a portfolio of companies in the consumer branded products and franchise industries — has the capital to pull it off. Bully for the Hankamer family, the owners of Marble Slab.

Larry Ribstein’s big day

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ribstein.jpgGreat teachers are a popular topic on this blog (see here and here), so I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the University of Illinois College of Law conducted the investiture ceremony earlier this week honoring Clear Thinkers favorite Larry Ribstein as the holder of the Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Chair at the school.
The blawgosphere has undergone such explosive growth over the past several years that we are still too close to it to realize the full extent of the seismic shift that it has caused in the area of legal research and analysis. But make no mistake about it, Professor Ribstein has been at the forefront of this sea change, literally pushing legal scholarship from what had been mostly closed conversations between fellow academics into a hugely valuable resource that is now readily available to millions over the Web. Already the leading expert in the U.S. in the area of unincorporated business associations, Professor Ribstein has become one of the blawgosphere’s most insightful thinkers on corporate governance issues and the effects of regulation on markets and business. His Ideoblog blog has contributed at least as much to the understanding and appreciation of business law issues over the past three years as any Web resource of which I am aware.
The video of Larry’s investiture ceremony is here. Larry’s acceptance speech begins at about the 14 and a half minute mark of the program and is essentially a review of the impact that the study of markets has had on his marvelous career. Having the opportunity to watch a top notch academic at the top of his game is always an enjoyable experience, so pull up a chair and watch Larry’s speech. Besides, unless you watch the video, how else are you going to learn the story of how Larry’s blog is really the result of failed entrepreneurial ventures involving hamsters and an animal cemetery?

Don’t sweat the small stuff

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picture%20of%20drugs.jpgDr. Nortin M. Hadler is a professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and attending rheumatologist at the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill. He also sounds in this ABC News op-ed a lot like my father:

To be well is not the same as to feel well.
Being well requires some sense of invincibility. No one is spared symptoms for long.
It’s abnormal to go one year without upper respiratory symptoms or pain.
Lurking in our future are heartache and heartburn, shoulder and knee pain, headache, rashes and skipped heartbeats — not to mention bothersome fatigue, sore muscles, bowel irregularity, insomnia and so much else to challenge our sense of well-being.
Nearly all of these predicaments can go away as mysteriously as they come about. To be well requires the wherewithal to cope with these ailments for as long as that takes — and it can take weeks. [. . .]
We all need to get beyond the traditional complaint of “what’s wrong with me, Doc, that I have this symptom?” and move on to more rational discourse, such as “is there any important disease that is causing my symptom? If so, can it be treated? If not, can we discern why I can’t cope with this episode?”

Read the entire piece. And then get on with coping!

Fulbright’s tough week

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FJlogo.gifIt has not been a week to remember for the venerable Houston law firm, Fulbright & Jaworski.
First, the firm’s expected public relations coup in hiring Harris County Judge Robert Eckels as a lobbyist with the firm was met with more than a little grumbling locally, forcing Eckels to address the question of why on earth he didn’t resign before last November’s election so that the voters could elect his successor? Eckels proceeded to sound oddly out of sorts in his subsequent public attempts to answer that quite reasonable question.
But that letdown was peanuts compared to the potential public relations disaster reported in this AboveTheLaw post:

Breaking: Fulbright & Jaworski Partner Drops the N-Bomb During A Recruiting Interview!
The email reprinted below, from Dean Katharine T. Bartlett, just went out to everyone at Duke Law School. It was forwarded to us by a source at the school.
Yes, we know: the partner who pulled a Michael Richards used “the n word” in the context of telling a story, in which the racial epithet was uttered by a character in the story. He didn’t use “the n word” to refer to any student or interviewee.
We don’t know the nature of the story being told by the partner. But unless the story was about, say, the partner’s pro bono representation, in a civil action for damages, of a hate crime or police brutality victim who was attacked and called “the n word,” it was hugely inappropriate for the partner to use a racial slur in this context (or, for that matter, any other context).

The post goes on to quote the Duke Law Dean’s entire email about the incident in its humiliating entirety, which is now all over the blogosphere. And the extensive comments to the post are interesting, to say the least.
But wait a minute. It turns out that there is more than a little context to the story. The above post was followed by this explanation from the Fulbright executive committee:

Dear Colleagues:
Because you may hear about or be asked about a recent situation at a law school where attorneys participated in training interviews of students, we want to bring it to your attention. One of our lawyers recounted a story about Leon Jaworskiís defense of an African-American man in a murder trial in Waco, Texas in the 1920s. During the retelling, in an effort to display the depth of racial hostility that Jaworski and his client faced, the attorney used a racial term that characterized what the district attorney in the case said about the defendant. After review of the situation, all involved concluded that such terms, although recounted without ill intentions, are inappropriate for our firm, which values diversity and strives for inclusiveness.
We are addressing the situation, and Steve Pfeiffer and other senior partners are en route to meet with the students. One of the other attorneys who participated in the training session acted immediately when the incident was called to his attention and responded with an electronic letter of explanation and appropriate apology. Any inquiries should be directed to the firm’s Hiring Partner, Gerry Lowry.
Executive Committee

And to make matters even more interesting, it appears that some members of the Duke Law School Faculty were stoking the fires. AboveTheLaw.com received the following email from a current law student at Duke:

This partner was relating what another person said in the context of telling a story. Now everyone is piling on him. The student [who voiced the complaint] has been goaded on by some super liberal professors.

H’mm. I wonder if any of those Duke law professors were the same ones who also supported the lynch mob in the Duke lacrosse team case?
My sense is that this all blows over quickly for Fulbright because, in the end, the Duke Law School Dean made a mountain out of molehill. But man, what a way to end a week that I’m sure the firm expected to be a public relations bonanza. Such is life in the big city.
Update: The Texas Lawyer ($) posted this online article on the incident today.

Dan Jenkins on Darrell Royal

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darrell%20Royal%20022407.jpgThe Chronicle’s David Barron uses last night’s Texas Children’s Hospital fund-raising dinner to honor legendary former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal as a Texas Legend to pen this fun article on two Clear Thinkers favorites — Coach Royal and Dan Jenkins. Barron includes the following gem from Jenkins comparing how Longhorn fans felt about Coach Royal versus how fans of two other top programs felt about their coaches of that era:

As a writer for newspapers in Fort Worth and Dallas and later for Sports Illustrated, Dan Jenkins, got to see all of the great coaches at work. Royal, Jenkins said, had a unique relationship to Texas and Texans, especially when compared to contemporaries like Woody Hayes at Ohio State or John McKay at USC.
“Darrell’s association with the Longhorn fans was more intimate,” Jenkins wrote in a recent e-mail. “Darrell had good buddies in all the other towns. Woody was standoffish, gruff, and stayed out of the public eye. Most Buckeyes respected him but never got to know him.
“McKay once told me he wasn’t revered by USC alums. They expected him to win. When McKay won his first national championship for the Trojans in ’62, I asked him how he was rewarded, and he said some people got together and bought him a new set of tires.”

Barron also passes along the following Jenkins anecdote about the UT sports information director during the Royal era, Jones Ramsey:

Royal was particularly gifted in the care and feeding of the Fourth Estate, with a little help from the Longhorns’ sports information director ó the late Jones Ramsey, the self-styled “World’s Tallest Fat Man.”
“I fondly recall the first time Jones took two or three of us to El Rancho for lunch,” Jenkins said. “Somebody asked him if it was any good, and Jones said, ‘Is it good? You go in the front and eat the dinner and go out the back and eat the garbage.’ It was the kind of thing Darrell probably said first.”

However, for my money, the best anecdote about Coach Royal was the one that UT women’s basketball coach Jody Conradt told several years ago during another fund-raising dinner. Former Chronicle sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz was there and passed along Conradt’s story:

But the [speaker] who stole the show was Jody Conradt, the Hall of Famer who gave the Longhorns a national championship in women’s basketball.
“They built the Erwin Center 21 years ago,” she said, “and obviously it never occurred to anyone that the women would need a separate locker room. So every room in this place had urinals in it.
“Now we have one of our own. Before one of our games, coach Darrell Royal was kind enough to speak to my team. Before he left, someone asked what the biggest difference was between our locker room and all the ones he knew from all his years of coaching. Coach Royal said:

‘Offhand, I can’t remember anyone ironing anything before a game in one of our locker rooms.’ “

Update: Barron follows up his article with this blog post on the dinner.

Off to the Advanced Business Bankruptcy Conference

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Business%20Bankruptcy%20Course%20pic.gifI’m buzzing up to downtown Dallas for the day to participate in the State Bar of Texas CLE’s 25th Annual Advanced Business Bankruptcy Conference at the Adolphus Hotel. If you happen to be in downtown Dallas today and have some free time, then come on by and say hello and perhaps even take in a part of the conference. This is consistently one of the State Bar’s best prepared and most informative continuing legal education programs.
The conference brochure is here, and the updated outline for my talk — Business Bankruptcy Blogs — is here.

Observations of the Week

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comments.gifTwo observations from earlier in the week resonated with me.
First, in this post, Jane Galt made the following pithy observation about the fallacy of reliance on governmental regulation:

“The post below also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:
1) People are often stupid
2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.”

Then, during his monologue on Tuesday night’s Tonight Show, Jay Leno observed the following about the cable television news networks’ fascination (obsession?) with certain recent news events:

“Well, the big story in the news is that Britney Spears shaved her head. Can you believe this? Legitimate news organizations are actually breaking into their Anna Nicole Smith coverage to tell you this.”

Cancer Diva

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Terry%20Hayes.JPG“My name is Terry, and I’m dying of cancer. Welcome to the adventure.”
That is the welcome to the Houston Chronicle’s newest blog — CancerDiva. Terry Hayes, the author of the blog, describes herself as follows:

I’m a single, 40-year-old woman living in Houston with my sister and her two dogs. I have a kitty cat named Sasha. I love to shop, read, watch movies and listen to music. I enjoy a challenging jigsaw puzzle, “This American Life” and “Prairie Home Companion”. I like plays, traveling, and art cars. I love my job and my co-workers. I can’t get enough of “CSI,” “Law & Order,” or “The Closer,” and I’ll watch anything on BRAVO. My favorite color is pink.
Oh, and I’m dying of cancer.
No use sugarcoating it. When my oncologist told me in April 2006 that I have metastatic colon cancer, I nodded my head and said, “Okay.” When she told me I had about 24 months to live, “give or take a few,” I nodded my head and said, “Okay.”
My cancer had spread from my colon to distant sites in my body, namely my ovaries, liver and abdominal wall. Last week, I thought I might have a brain tumor. Luckily, my MRI was normal (normal for now anyway).
Only 5-8% of patients with Stage IV/Duke’s D colon cancer make it five years after diagnosis. The usual course, from diagnosis to death, takes about 24 months, “give or take a few”.
I’m not sure why I took the news quite so casually. My oncologist, a wonderful woman named Dr. Glover, said I was “eerily calm.”
I have a few theories. One of the many, many issues I’ll be discussing in this blog.

You can bet I’ll be reading this one.