I.

            You know, the show "Whisker Wars" really is not nearly as entertaining as you would think a show would be about a bunch of nerds who get into competitive beard-growing. 

II.

            Now that it’s been ten years since 9-11, can we go back to one patriotic anthem per sporting event?    I’m a good American, I think.   I was in the Army.   I pay my taxes.   I vote.   I put out the flag on the fourth of July and Labor Day and stuff.   I don’t know; I think two patriotic anthems a ballgame is overkill.  

III.

            Do you ever wonder how stupid you can be?

            You must all know, since this is something that I write about once a month, that my way of thinking about the world is founded on the belief that

1) the real world is vastly more complicated than the human mind is capable of understanding, but

2)  people desperately want to understand the world around them.

All manner of misunderstandings and superstitions arise from this conflict, and also, false convictions and imprisonments.   

You might also know, since I have mentioned it before, that one of the things that most irritates me is that people very often don’t see the world around them, but choose instead to accept the perceptions of the popular culture, even when those perceptions are transparently false.   The state of Kansas, for example; people say any number of absolutely stupid things about the state of Kansas that you would think that anyone who had ever been here would know were not true—but not just outsiders; people who live here and people who have lived here just say stupid, stupid stuff about the state that isn’t based on anything except the prejudices of outsiders picking up random trivial incidents and exaggerating their significance a thousand fold.

It is stuff exactly like this that keeps bigotry alive.    Blacks and women and gays were held down for thousands of years because people—including blacks and women and gays—believed the asinine stuff that people said about them, stuff that was transparently false.   Another feature of this is that even when you say something (or write something) that is totally original, these people will very often accuse you of parroting the conservative line, or the liberal line, of whatever line it is that they disagree with. Why do people do that?

Think about it.   The two facts obviously are the same, aren’t they?    People pick up the perceptions of the culture because they understand, intuitively, that their own perceptions of the world are damaged and unreliable.   They are looking to improve their perceptions by referencing the world.

Why it took me until I was 61 years old to put those two together, I’ll never know.   But now that I have, I’m confident that the common reliance on cultural images won’t irritate me nearly as much.   

I will say one more thing, though.   You all know, I think, that it has been my good fortune to know and know well hundreds of members of what is called the media elite.    The opinion makers.   People like Dan Okrent, Joe Posnanski, Rob Neyer, Alan Schwarz, Roger Angell, Stephen Jay Gould, Marvin Miller, Peter Gammons, George Will, Bob Costas, Michael Lewis, Gerald Early, Kevin Harlan. . .it has been my privilege to know people like this and interact with them all of my adult life.  

Do you know what most identifies those people, most sets them apart from the crowd?   It is exactly this:  the ability to see the world through their own eyes, rather than accepting the images of the culture.   These people somehow pick up early in life on the fact that the dominant images of the culture aren’t really based on anything other than trivia and exaggeration, and they learn early in life to pay little attention to those pre-built images.  The second-tier guys; that’s what they don’t get.   It isn’t intelligence; it isn’t hard work; it isn’t always luck.    It isn’t even creativity.  The second-level guys buy into the stock imagery of the culture, and spend their careers tricking it out with greasepaint and finery.   Speed is important in baseball because everybody knows that speed is important in baseball.   Whoever says different is wrong and should be ridiculed.  Politics are all about the money because everybody knows that politics are all about the money.  People vote their pocketbooks.  Whoever has the most money and the most mainstream beliefs has to win.   People like Ron Paul; they have to be ridiculed because their ideas are not mainstream ideas.  He can’t win because he doesn’t seem Presidential.   Barack Obama can’t be elected because America isn’t ready for a black President.   The first step in writing anything is to draw up an outline.   Good writing requires standard grammar and standard punctuation.   People who are into statistics are nerdy and un-athletic and un-attractive to the opposite sex.

If you are a young writer, the most important thing you can do is learn to hit yourself over the head with a used watermelon whenever you find yourself saying that Christians are intolerant, or that Kansans are conservative or that Massachusans are liberal, or that the obsession with the Casey Anthony trial was trashy and a waste of the public’s energy, or that the Bush administration or the Obama administration or the Clinton administration was evil and dishonest, or that the bad economy is the fault of this President or that one, or that the Tea Partiers are social conservatives, or that the Chinese economy will soon be the largest in the world. . .stop.    Look around you; look at the world as it is.   Your ability to contribute to the discussion is directly proportional to your ability to reject the pre-packaged answers.    

IV.

I was thinking about something I wrote in Popular Crime, which was this:

            In January, 2003, Andrew Luster was on trial in Ventura, California, facing 87 felony charges connected with a series of date rapes.   Luster was an heir to the multi-million dollar fortune of Max Factor, and, as he had videotaped several of the rapes, he was certain to be convicted.  

            Luster bolted in mid-trial, and was nowhere to be found.   Convicted of the crimes in absentia, Luster remained a fugitive until June, 2003.   At that point the bounty hunter Duane (Dog) Chapman entered the case, boasting that he was going to find Andrew Luster and haul his sorry ass back to Ventura to face the music.  And he did.  Very quickly.

            Unfortunately, Luster had been hiding out in Mexico, and bounty hunting is not legal in Mexico.   Chapman was charged in Mexico with deprivation of liberty, in the unlawful arrest of Andrew Luster.   While Luster has been in jail since 2003 and probably will be for the rest of his life, the battle of Chapman versus Mexico dragged on for almost four years.   The Mexican government was determined to prosecute Chapman, and the American State department was fully willing to co-operate in that prosecution.   Large numbers of American politicians, however, were appalled at the idea of prosecuting Dog for interfering with the liberty of a scumbag.   A battle raged over the issue until the Mexican statute of limitations expired.

I didn’t get into it in the book, but the "battle" referenced there was pretty colorful, with Mexican authorities making loud threats about Chapman rotting away in a Mexican prison.  I was thinking about this, and it suddenly struck me how obvious it is what should have happened here.    What should have happened is, Mexican authorities should have approached Chapman very quietly, off camera, and said to him, "Look, Dog, we know you didn’t mean to violate Mexican law and didn’t mean to disrespect Mexico, but the fact is, you did, and we can’t just walk away from it.   Why don’t you turn yourself in, we’ll give you some sort of fine that you can easily pay, we’ll hold a news conference in which you talk about your respect for Mexico and regret your ignorance of Mexican law, and you’ll be back in the US by tomorrow night and this will all be over."   Everybody is going to agree to that because:

a)  Mexico gets out of a situation in which they are forced to punish a person for an action that was actually much more worthy of praise than punishment,

b)  Mexico creates awareness of the law of which many American bounty hunters were un-aware, which is what caused the problem,

c)  Mexico gets a little positive PR spin and then gets to declare victory, and

d)  Chapman gets out of a legal snare for basically nothing except admitting that he made a mistake. 

I’m 90% sure that, in a parallel American situation, that’s what would have happened, because the American legal system is run by people who understand that the overriding object in law enforcement is not to show everybody what a big wanker you have, but to achieve the co-operation of the public in the enforcement of the law.  

Instead, the Mexican government created an international incident, annoyed Americans and America, blustered and threatened and, in the end, got nothing.    Christ, no wonder these people’s law enforcement system is such a mess. 

V.

            Did I just violate my own rule there?    I may have.  What do I really know about the Mexican justice system?   Not much.

            We all do that stuff sometimes.   It is impossible not to. 

VI.

I was doing a study, but for the study I needed some way to park-adjust Starting Pitcher Game Scores, and I didn’t have such a method so I put that aside.   But then I was doing another study, of an un-related issue, and. . .same problem; I needed a way to park-adjust Game Scores.   So then I decided I’d better do that.

Turns out to be easy.   The expected average Game score in a park in a season is

68 minus 2 times the Runs Scored per game

The runs scored by both teams, total.    In 2003 in the Oakland Coliseum there were 657 runs scored by the two teams, or 8.11 per game.    The expected average Game Score in that park in that year, then, would be 51.78 [68 minus (2 * 8.11)].   The actual average was 51.84. 

In 2005 in St. Louis there were 731 runs scored by the two teams, or 9.02 per game.   The expected average Game Score in that park in that year, then, would be 49.95.  It was actually 50.03. 

In 2003 in Milwaukee there were 812 runs scored, or 10.02 per game.  The expected average Game Score, then, would be 47.95.   It was actually 47.72.

In 2005 in Cincinnati there were 910 runs scored in 82 games, or 11.10 per game.  The expected average Game Score, then, would be 45.80.   It was actually 45.66. 

I often use 4.50 runs per team per game as the "default normal average".   That’s the same thing here.   4.50 per team is 9.00 per two teams per two games.   68 – 2 * 9.00 = 50.00.