Appreciate the effort.  

 Yes, there was that much market inefficiency.   Certainly.  

 Nah. . . .I remembered that.   He wrote an article for LIFE or LOOK or somebody, about 1957 maybe, in which he outlined some controversial ideas about managing, some of which were ahead of their time.  I will be disappointed if nobody in our audience remembers it more clearly than that.  

 Thanks. 

 Thanks. 

 That would have been Bobby Bragan, managing the Braves.   Bragan did a lot of forward-looking stuff.  He used Eddie Mathews as a leadoff man.  I can't call it up now, but I remember Bragan doing something else that was perceived as weird at the time, but which is now standard.  

 

He was too far ahead of his time in those things.  His ideas didn't sell, and also I think that SOME of what he tried to do may have been a little goofy.   Thanks for the reference.   

 In one of those imitiation "Glory of their Times" books, I think it was a Donald Honig book from the 1970s.. ..sportswriter interviewed players from the 1930s.  I am sure somebody can give us the details.  Anyway, Luke Sewell, who had been Cullenbine's manager during the war, talked about getting rid of Cullenbine because he said. . .I am pretty sure this is almost a direct quote. . .that Cullenbine was a lazy player who was always trying to get on base by the walk.   

 

I know that this level of ignorance about that subject is inconceivable to us now, but baseball men of that era genuinely had no understanding of the value of the walk.  Information about how often each player walked was not widely available.   On Base Percentage, as a stat, basically did not exist.   There were regular stat summaries in the Sunday newspapers every week, lists of league leaders in the papers every day, box scores every day, information about players in Who's Who in Baseball, The Baseball Register, baseball cards and other sources, but there were very few sources for batter's walks.  The SPorting News in the 1960s would print "complete" player stats every week, but those did not include walk totals; about four times a year they would print a "special" list of stats that included strikeouts and walks by each hitter.  

 

I know this is incredible, but Cullenbine's managers almost certainly did not KNOW how many times he had walked in a season, and certainly did not know what his on base percentage was.  They made decisions based on the information that was in circulation, and that information was not in circulation.  

 I'd have to study it.   In baseball, a weighted ballot such as is used for the MVP Award works vastly better than a one-vote system because it collects much more information about how the voters really feel.   I would be concerned about a system such as that used in Maine, because it eliminates information in the "extended rounds" of the process, rather than making fair use of the additional information which is collected. 

 

Politicians are geniuses are manipulating ballots.  A friend of mine ran for State Treasurer maybe 15 years ago; the man holding the office had been involved in a financial scandal.  All of the newspapers endorsed my friend for the office, but the incumbent (in the primary) got three of his friends to also run for the office.   They divided the anti-incumbent vote four ways and allowed him to "win" the primary with 38% of the vote or something like that.  Then he got crushed in the general election. 

 

I would be concerned that a ranked-vote system in a political election would lead to "straw man" candidacies and general confusion, and thus would become another tool used by the two parties to evaporate the center and inflame the passions of the extremists.   It works in baseball because you can't run a straw man candidate for MVP.   In order for it to work in politics you would have to have some sort of very solid ballot qualification procedure which did allow one side or the other to manipulate the process.  

 I don't really plan out my work that way.   I can see an argument for doing it.  

 OK.  

 I didn't know that there was a National Wrestling Hall of Fame.  

 Consider it shared.  

 I don't know enough about Football to comment, honestly.  

 Not sure that I'm following all your words there, but. . . .I did develop a parallel system to evaluate the playing time of pitchers, and thus the .500 point for Win Shares based on playing time.   I developed that system (for pitchers) a day or two after I published the previous article, but I have been working on this series of articles (starts tommorrow) and i haven't had time to write up the other method, the pitcher's method.  I'm not sure when I will get to it; I am buried in work.  

 There would be some adjustments.  Canada used to have high tax rates in the upper brackets; don't know where they are now, since I'm not in the contracts end of the business.   But it became a workaround in negotiating contracts with Canadian teams.   You had to find ways to dump the money in places where it could eventually flow to the player without going through the wrong wicket.   

 

If anybody cares. . . I'm all in favor of actions to address excessive income inequality.   I think great and obvious income inequality is corrosive of democracy and corrosive of our culture.  I am skeptical that you can fix the problem by tax brackets.   In my view there are other things you can do that have a better chance of flattening out the Lorenz Curve than creating confiscatory taxes.