Archaic baseball scoring rules

Tomight Justin Verlander gave up five runs in the first, then pitched shutout ball until the ninth, while Detroit came back to tie it up. Then Fernando Rodney got the last three outs before the Tigers won on a walk-off homer in the bottom of the inning.

How much sense does it make in this situation for Rodney to get credit for the win? Practically none, but baseball is still stuck with scoring rules that were devised when starting pitchers finished 90% of their starts.

I'm not plugged into the sabermetrics scene, so I don't know how much discussion there's been about changing the rules. And of course changing them would have some real costs in terms of record-book continuity. But the present scoring rules for wins (and to a lesser extent saves) seem quite arbitrary, given the nature of the modern game.

The Wonders of Free Market Health Insurance

Sarah Wildman on the glories of the individual insurance market:

Our six-month-old daughter cost over $22,000.

You’d think, with a number like that, we must have used fertility treatments—but she was conceived naturally. You’d think we went through an adoption agency—but she is a biological child. So surely, we were uninsured.

Nope. Birthing our daughter was so expensive precisely because we were insured, on the individual market. Our insurer, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, sold us exactly the type of flawed policy—riddled with holes and exceptions—that the health care reform bills in Congress should try to do away with.

[...]

Last fall, the National Women’s Law Center issued a report detailing exactly how women who want to bear children are derailed when searching for out-of-pocket health care. Only 14 states require maternity coverage to be included in insurance sold on the individual market, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In contrast, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 requires employers with more than 15 employees to include maternity benefits in their health insurance packages. “We looked at 3,500 individual insurance policies and only 12 percent included comprehensive maternity coverage,” said Lisa Codispoti, Senior Advisor at the National Women’s Law Center. Another 20 percent offered a rider that was astronomically expensive or skimpy or both. One charged $1,100 a month; others required a two-year waiting period.

It's definitely worth clicking through and reading in full. (Or, for those who prefer things in podcast form, she talks about it here.) This is one of the many things that an incremental reform package that keeps the private insurance system in place is going to have to regulate very, very carefully.

Birthers

I think the passive-aggressive ones -- with Tom Maguire being the supreme example -- are my favorites. Although sometimes you have to prefer the undiluted variety; i.e. "[the transparently fake alleged birth certificate from a country that didn't exist when it was issued is] from WND, but appears legit."

In, fairness, though, the birthers do have Larry Johnson on their side, which always heightens credibility!

World Defense Spending

I like the combination of percentage of GDP with percentage of world spending. Via.

Not Acceptable

A USN aircraft carrier should not, under any circumstances, be named the Barry M. Goldwater. While I'll concede that Goldwater would probably be a better choice from the perspective of US history than either Carl Vinson or John C. Stennis, the idea that any of them deserve a supercarrier is simply absurd. The next US CVN should be the William Jefferson Clinton; he was a two termer, a better President than either George H. W. Bush or Gerald Ford, and more popular than Ronald Reagan. Any wingnuts who would feel wobbly about serving on the USS William Jefferson Clinton can go fuck themselves. And no, USS Enterprise is not an acceptable alternative, at least not for CV-79. I'm open to naming a future carrier after the Enterprise, but not this one; I'm tired of the conceit that Republican Presidents get CVs, but not Democratic ones. We can talk about George W. Bush after the USS Lyndon Baines Johnson is commissioned, although I'm guessing that Bush the Younger will still be residing in Nixon's Locker when the time comes...

...this may seem trivial, but the fact that Republican one-term and half-term Presidents get major fleet units named after them (and yes, I know that Jimmy Carter has a submarine; subs are a far less visible projection of national power) perpetuates the notion that only Republicans and conservatives are serious about national security. There is no halfway; if you name aircraft carriers after a succession of mediocre Republican Presidents, you can't suddenly insist that you "want to take the politics" out of ship naming. You can name the next ship Enterprise if you go back and rename Stennis, Vinson, Reagan, Bush, and Ford...

Ashes Third Test Update

Australia 263 & 88-2.  England 376.

UPDATE:

Australia 263 & 375-5.  England 376.  End of play, draw result.  

Series stands at England 1 win, 2 draws, Australia 0 wins.

-----

With only one day remaining in the third test, this will be my final post on it.

Some vintage Flintoff and some excellent England bowling puts England in with a shout for a victory in the third test.  While I still hold that a draw is more likely, it's finely balanced.  Although an Australian victory is not mathematically impossible, that's the best I can say about the probability of this result.

England still have a slender lead at the close of play on day 4, but with one day remaining, time is England's greatest enemy now.  If I were Australia tomorrow, I'd go into immediate defensive mode.  A draw helps Australia more than England.  As the chances of an Australia victory are vanishingly small, they have to play for the draw.  While after a washed out day 3 I suspected a draw, now I have to think the odds favor an England victory.  But this is looking like a really good one.  The Times sums up the hopes and dreams of both sides thusly:

With the weather forecast to be kind tomorrow, England will be hoping to take the last eight wickets and chase a smallish target. Australia will want to bat until tea and then hope. The game is still alive.

And an England victory would put them perilously close to claiming the Ashes (two England victories and one draw with two series left to play means Australia would have to win both outright to retain the Ashes).  This may be a good time to be off that island, come to think of it, as the levels of nervous angst will be intolerable.  Mercifully for England, there are no penalty shootouts in cricket.

They're already writing the obit on the entire series over at Ashes HQ, which is perhaps premature.  But this quote captures the mentality of both sets of supporters rather well:

An unfortunate aspect of England's success is that the world seems to become an exceedingly grim place. Australian fans, not used to losing, grow hugely critical of their team, while English fans barely manage to escape their bubble of self-protective cynicism and focus on whatever bad can be found in their victories. You'd be forgiven for thinking that both teams were losing the Ashes.

Indeed.

Speicher

It's good that the family finally has a conclusion.