MLB (Weakly) Acknowledges Injustice in Venezuela

Last night was opening night for Major League Baseball, a huge thing for all of us baseball fans. The issue of social justice was apparent, down to the highly visible "BLM" stenciled on the pitching mound. Before the game, the players knelt and held a long, black tapestry, the brainchild of Phillies star Andrew McCutchen. This sort of display is radical for baseball.

What I didn't know is that McCutchen meant it as a general statement about injustice, and specifically included Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.

"This is a moment for us to honor each other, to honor the things that we're going through," he said. "With the social injustices we're going through in this country, with the things that exist outside our nation -- places like Venezuela, the Dominican Republic. To honor that and show that we honor each other, that we have each other's back, that we're going to fight for each other. And the way we do that is by collectively being together as one. This is a representation of that."

I can't find anything to suggest that McCutchen has talked about Venezuela before, or even what exactly he's referring to in the DR. It might be as simple as the fact that he has teammates from there. In terms of injustice, he certainly needs to add Cuba (I don't think there are any Cubans on the 40 man roster for the Phillies, which might account for the omission).

The acknowledgment, therefore, is pretty weak, to the point that hardly anyone is aware. I wish players, announcers, and writers would give it some more attention. Baseball is an international game, and players from other countries face problems that are different but sometimes no less dire.

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Review of Rob Neyer's Power Ball

Rob Neyer's Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game (2018) is ostensibly about a game between the A's and Astros on September 8, 2017. That is just a vehicle for discussing the state of baseball itself and how much it has changed and continues to change. With chapters organized by half inning, Neyer follows tangents related to what's happening in the game (Baseball versus baseball) as this single real one goes along, and it's a fun and wandering journey.

So, for example, pitcher Jharel Cotton gets some ground balls hit back at him, which leads to a discussion of injury and headgear. Marwin Gonzalez coming up leads to analysis of utility players. Mention of Win Expectancy shifts to how broadcasters mention new stats without contextualizing them. Khris Davis coming up starts with his power and then moves to his writing about having the throwing yips and then on to players using social media. You get the idea.

And I love this quote toward the end about what might change in baseball.

All we know is that Baseball will do something, in response to something, and that whatever Baseball does, there will be unintended consequences. Because Baseball is inherently a human enterprise, and humans don't know any other way" (p. 272).

Baseball and U.S. foreign policy!

His conclusion is also a bit wandering, and comes down to the fact that everyone should think of ways to bring in more fans. But, I think, those ways will create new controversies that will require new tinkering. And that's not a bad thing. I loved reading his thoughts on them.

Just a few quibbles. There is a lot in italics. A lot. A noticeable large number of sentences start with "Hell" for emphasis. And ouch, he mentions Yuli Gurriel pitching for over a decade in Cuba yet having "essentially zero professional experience" (p. 80).

As an aside, there is an interesting Latin America question--the game has globalized a lot but why aren't there more Mexicans in MLB (p. 179)?

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Decay of the Venezuelan League

Alfonso Tusa writes at The Hardball Times about the Venezuelan League. He starts with the fact that MLB cut ties to the league because of sanctions, but just yesterday the U.S. government exempted the Venezuelan League.

But that doesn't detract from the story, which is about a league in decay, with or without U.S. players. He starts with a description of its storied past, with Luis Aparicio, Bob Gibson, Dave Parker, Rollie Fingers, and so many more. And then now:

Going to the ballpark is not an option for many people anymore. Public transportation is almost not available, and the few vehicles still working are extremely expensive. The league has tried to help by setting 6 p.m. as the new starting time for weekday games, earlier during weekends. The other reason for playing earlier is the rampant insecurity in the streets, which forces people to go home much earlier than they used to. The cost of the tickets is about the cost of a single meal, so many fans cannot even think about going to the stadium because they first have to try to eat. They can’t think about buying beverages and food at the stadium, which is as expensive as the tickets, or even more.

They don't even have enough balls and players cannot throw them into the stands. The play is sub-par and the stands emptier. Even many Venezuelan players prefer to play elsewhere in Latin America during the winter.

How many more times there will be a season like this? The optimistic expect this will be the only time this happens, but that implies the end of the political regime, and that needs much more than simple optimism. But perhaps it is healthier being a dreamer, expecting to leave behind all of the depressing and unhappy images of the totalitarian reality. Better than staying anchored to this dark reality that consumes all of us little by little, every day, like a frog being boiled over a slow fire.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the players killed in Venezuela after being attacked on the road. I have to imagine many players will stay away even if they have the option of going. The collapse of the Venezuelan state touches everything.

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Review of The MVP Machine

Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik's The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players is an excellent, if slightly too long, baseball book. They argue that lots of people have noted the shift toward more granular ways of evaluating players, but few have looked into how data is used to development them, to actually change and shape them.

With the ever-annoying but driven Trevor Bauer as a major case study, they dive into the world of high speed cameras, pitching grips, throwing regimens, launch angles, arm slots, swing planes, and the like, all of which challenge conventional wisdom. As Bauer reasonably notes, he doesn't want any advice that is not based on data (unfortunately, he is a jerk to people who give him advice he believes it bad and in general seems unable to be nice to anyone).

In abundant detail, they make a convincing case for why players who use data improve, while those that don't will be at a disadvantage. Often, the people who can help interpret data aren't former players at all, which is transforming both dugouts and front offices. Scouts are becoming a thing of the past--the human eye just doesn't have the ability that technology does. People who can use and interpret data effectively also get MLB jobs--the website Fangraphs seems to always need writers because their best are continuously snapped up.

In the conclusion, they make two particularly important points. First, baseball is unlike other sports where data-driven improvements make the game more exciting (e.g. longer gold drives or three-point shots). Data decreases the action in a baseball game--fewer ground balls, less base running, more strikeouts. Second, getting data takes money, so kids with poor parents cannot benefit from it and therefore will likely fall behind. This is troubling in our era of year-long sports and club teams. Data has created real problems.

In a book full of examples of how players used data to improve, there is one glaring problem. All of those examples are success stories. In other words, the cases are selected on the dependent variable, thus proving it by definition. They note in passing players that only briefly benefited, but to flesh out this story they need a more detailed discussion of someone who did not benefit. My hunch is that it would bolster their case.

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Alva Noé's Infinite Baseball

Alva Noe's Infinite Baseball: Notes From a Philosopher at the Ballpark sounds so intriguing. What you get, though, is a hodgepodge of previously published pieces with a tacked on introduction. By the time I got through the introduction, I was already getting disappointed. One theme he comes back to is that baseball is a game of responsibility--we're always trying to assign credit or blame for what happens. Such credit or blame ultimately takes the form of numbers, but baseball is in his eyes not a numbers game. It is this last argument that he has the most difficulty explaining and defending. In the intro, I kept stopping and thinking, "This isn't accurate." Some of the assertions in the intro:

--Baseball is an infinite game. Finite games, like chess, "can be simulated with computers" (6). This would come as some surprise to the many enthusiasts of Out of the Park Baseball, a hugely popular baseball simulation.

--Baseball is considered slow because "only explosive hits and big plays count as action" (22). No, baseball is considered slow because the length of time it takes to do the same things has risen quite a lot over time, 40 or so minutes on average during my lifetime.

--he argues that data should not be used to think about medical issues, such as breastfeeding, and so should also not be used to judge baseball. My own opinion is that this is terrible advice. He caps it off with the factually incorrect statement that with a pitcher, "the manager's decision to leave him in, or call on a relief pitcher, is not one that can be decided with the numbers" (25). Yes, human judgment is in there, but those decisions are fundamentally based on numbers.

--Baseball is different because kids model the stances of their favorite hitters (he puts pose in italics (27). Youth games are "rituals." How is this different from other sports? You know kids try to shoot like Steph Curry or do touchdown dances like their favorite receiver.

The intro lays out no framework, philosophical or otherwise, so my advice is to read the chapters, or better yet find the chapters in their original form online. He has some interesting insights into why steroids shouldn't be considered a problem for the Hall of Fame  Well, actually, that's the main interesting thing. He asks whether any variety of medical assistance (even Tommy John surgery) should be considered unfair advantage. Fair questions, and worth asking. That would actually be a better basis for a philosophical discussion.

But for me, this book boiled down to a lot of unhappiness about sabermetrics. He mentions and criticizes Keith Law's book Smart Baseball but really just reinforces Law's main argument. I agree that Law's own take is too intentionally insulting, but his arguments are solid. Numbers don't tell us everything, but they are being used in creative and productive ways to understand current and future performance. Noé says you cannot use numbers to determine value, period (67). He ends with his own shot that underlines his lack of sabermetric understanding: "Want to know what happened on the field? You'd better take a look, and give it some thought" (67). Guess what: Law and everyone else who judges baseball players go to endless minor league games to scout, while using the numbers. If you ignore the data, you will lose.

My advice to Noé is to accept the fact that numbers are more important than he wants to believe, but that they do not mess with the beauty of baseball. And a 2.5 hour game is no less enjoyable and fulfilling than a 3.5 hour one. As someone who lives on the east coast and follows a west cost team, infinite baseball with games that start at 10:10 pm are awful.

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Travis Sawchik's Big Data Baseball

Travis Sawchik's Big Data Baseball is easily seen as a sequel to Michael Lewis' classic Moneyball, which showed how a General Manager (Billy Beane) found a metric (getting on base, especially with walks) that other teams undervalued. With less money, Lewis wrote about how Beane built a winning team (the 2002 A's). Fast forward to 2013, and Pirates' GM Neal Huntington hires people with strong data analytics skills who use new technology (especially PITCHf/x) to find new strategies such as pitch framing and shifts that other teams undervalue. Free agent catcher Russell Martin plays a key role as the diamond in the rough.

But there are important differences between the two books. Unlike Lewis, Sawchik focuses on harmony--Manager Clint Hurdle overcomes skepticism and players see how well the unorthodox strategies work. He shows how important the manager is because he's the gatekeeper to what happens on the field (A's Manager Art Howe was often portrayed as a puppet with no power). Perhaps that just shows how much changed between 2002 and 2013. The baseball traditionalists were strong but minds were opening up everywhere. Nowadays all teams have plenty of data scientists and the best baseball bloggers get snapped up. (In this sense, the tone is far different from Keith Law's Smart Baseball, which tends to be insulting toward skeptics).

Sawchik tells a good story. He also points out some important issues. One is that when a team finds a winning strategy, everyone will copy it and the advantage will disappear quickly. Especially when you can't afford lots of big salaries, you have to keep innovating on a constant basis, and that includes players. That's not easy. Further, one of the critical things we don't know is how to use data to prevent injury. With pitchers throwing harder than ever, arms get blown out easily. Tommy John surgeries are routine, even more than one. How can we use data to avoid that? He suggests the Pirates had some proprietary data, but there's nothing public.

The book was published in 2015 and it's amazing to think about how fast things move now. He mentions the initial development of Statcast, which is now everywhere. Launch angle is all the rage (Like *cough* the Padres' Eric Hosmer). These rapid changes make the game even more fun to watch and read about.

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Jane Leavy's The Big Fella

I read Jane Leavy's new biography The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, which takes the perspective of how the Babe changed professional athletes. More to the point, his personal manager Christy Walsh did so for him. The book focuses far more on the barnstorming he did (often with Lou Gehrig) and the many endorsements he did than on his regular play and salary. Walsh managed his money well, forcing him to save, and organizing all the barnstorming. Importantly, Walsh did not negotiate with the teams, which meant he was not quite the modern agent, but a precursor. The Babe made so much of his money outside the regular season.

Ruth's well known larger-than-life life comes out plainly. It's hard not to given how much he craved the spotlight, a product of his youth as one of many in a Catholic boarding school, where his parents dumped him. He didn't know how to be alone. He did just about everything to excess, which included both meanness (cheating all the time) and kindness (he loved children and spent tons of time with them). His inner thoughts are unknown to everyone. Certainly he didn't write them down, and it was not an era for introspection. Leavy was thorough in criss crossing the country to find everyone and every archive that offered clues.

Of particular interest are the rumors about how he might be partially African American because of his facial features and darker complexion (opposing players would even scream the N-word at him, which I didn't know). Leavy suggests this is doubtful, but clearly he went out of his way to play Negro League teams when barnstorming, and the African American community loved him.

If you like baseball, you will like this book. For the sabermetric minded, she even has an appendix discussing how people have worked to translate his performance into modern statistics.

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Trump and Cuban Baseball

The trafficking of Cuban baseball players is a criminal, abusive, miserable, and degrading practice. Many in the Trump administration want it to stay that way. Major League Baseball negotiated an agreement with the Cuban government to regularize it.

Under the plan, the Cuban baseball federation would release players to M.L.B. in return for a percentage of their contracts, an approach similar to the posting system used by Japanese and South Korean teams. The purpose of the agreement is to end the human trafficking of Cuban players to the United States and Canada.

You should be able to see the problem. The Cuban government will start making a profit, paid directly from MLB.*

On Wednesday, a White House statement criticized baseball’s agreement with Cuba, saying the administration would continue to restrict Cuba’s ability to profit from American businesses.

I can't find the statement itself (which does not seem to be on the White House statement page) but this was to be expected. MLB's stance will be that it was negotiating the deal at the time the administration changed rules regarding Cuba, and that Trump grandfathered those existing relationships. Trump will be pressed hard, very hard, by his hardline advisers, not to mention Marco Rubio, who does not like it.

Trump has courted the Cuban hardliners, to the point of seeming to consider them part of the base. His first inclination will be to block this. Offhand I can't actually think of any reason he would let it go through. If he's distracted, maybe? Or perhaps a billionaire friend has his ear. Politically he has every reason to block it.

*On the ownership of Cuban teams and how it all fits with Trump-era restrictions, check out this really interesting post by a lawyer from last year.

One of the primary changes signaled by the presidential memorandum is its prohibition on any transactions with the Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA, or GAESA. Through this company, the military regime under Castro built an investment network that controls major aspects of the Cuban tourism industry, particularly hotels. 

This clearly restricts Cuba tourism and may also complicate the proposal made by MLB to the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the spring of 2016. MLB proposed lifting the ban on signing of Cuban players and paying compensation to a newly-created organization devoted to Cuban youth baseball development instead of to the government-owned Cuban teams themselves. 

The trouble is that GAESA has been described as “una especie de muñeca rusa” – a sort of Russian doll, each thing hiding something else inside that no one knows about. According to the Miami Herald, GAESA controls about 60 percent of the Cuban economy. With such an extended web of ownership involving GAESA in Cuba, it may be difficult to verify that GAESA holds no ownership interest in whatever entity MLB proposes to pay in exchange for Cuban ballplayers. Without such assurances, OFAC is highly unlikely to entertain MLB’s proposal.

Update (12/29/18): yep, the administration intends to nix the deal.

The administration did not respond to specific questions about plans to scuttle the deal, but officials have been clear they feel the agreement would “institutionalize a system by which a Cuban body garnishes the wages of hard-working athletes who simply seek to live and compete in a free society.” 

“Parties seeking to benefit from business opportunities in Cuba are on notice that the administration will continue to take actions to support human rights and restrict the Cuban regime’s ability to profit from U.S. business,” a senior administration official said.

MLB claimed it had been talking to supportive officials in the White House and State Department. Are they clueless? The State Department doesn't matter and the only people that matter in the White House are the hard-liners, who are the line to the base. This is not a situation where Jared Kushner will step in and solve the problem.

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Baseball and Politics in Venezuela

I am an avid listener of baseball podcasts, which I listen to while exercising and while in the car. A great one is Effectively Wild, which focuses on baseball analytics. For the very first time, a recent episode actually touched both on Latin American politics and U.S.-Latin American relations. It is about the tragedy of Venezuela, focusing on deaths of MLB baseball players (huge stars in Venezuela) José Castillo and Luis Valbuena, who were just killed in a car crash because of an attack on a Venezuelan highway.

The hosts Jeff Sullivan and Ben Lindbergh talk to Octavio Hernández, a Venezuelan journalist and baseball executive who fled the country and now works for a baseball team in Mexico (you can go to 38:38 in the podcast for just his part, though the discussion about Harold Baines in the Hall of Fame is well worth your time!). He gives a passionate and emotional account of how far Venezuela has fallen. These attacks are just what happens. The normalcy framing is heartbreaking. When asked if there was hope for change, Hernández just said no. As I've written so many times, there are few options as long as the opposition remains divided and unpopular, and the military remains loyal.

The part that caught my attention the most was his mention of sanctions. He wondered whether the U.S. government might prohibit MLB from functioning anymore in Venezuela--sending players, scouts, or otherwise participating in Venezuelan baseball. I had never thought of this but in fact it would be perversely effective. There is a lot of money in baseball, even in Venezuela. Players keep going, as Hernández says, in part because of habit but also because they're paid well and they live in a bubble (though more and more are too afraid to return). Castillo and Valbuena got out of the bubble by driving their own car rather than the team bus. Cut off some the MLB money and the MLB players and you reduce revenue more, while embarrassing the government. Up to this point, the U.S. government has focused on financial transactions and individuals in the Venezuelan government. This would be a new angle.

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The Horrors of MLB and Cuba

Take a listen to this NPR story on MLB and Cuba, which anticipates an article in Sports Illustrated about the deep corruption involved in getting Cuban players to the United States. The basics have been well known for a long time. I wrote a post about it in 2014. The difference here is apparently that there are documents, which the FBI also has, that will implicate MLB teams specifically, and that could lead to legal action. That's all to the good.

The situation could hardly be worse. Repressive Marxism meets voracious capitalism, which then gets together with bad U.S. policy (the embargo is the center of the problem). Getting out of Cuba is difficult and by necessity includes corruption--especially in terms of granting large percentages of your future salary to buscones, whose sole goal in life is to suck you dry.

As the journalist notes in the interview, when you watch the playoffs now and see Cuban players, you have to realize they are in a different position from everyone else, not just in terms of background but also how much of their salary they actually will ever receive. But as always we need to remember the vast majority who will never make an MLB team, who will risk their lives, leave their families, get taken advantage of, and then wash out.

There should be a reckoning by MLB. The more concrete charges, the better, at least to clean up the process a bit since it is not likely the U.S. and Cuba will find a way to deal with this bilaterally. During the Obama administration, Raúl Castro suggested renting players to the U.S., which has its own problems. The point here is ideological. MLB embodies capitalism, and the Cuban government will not just let it in. Now, the Cuban government is not averse to reaping the benefits of capitalism, even at the expense of people, but the U.S. government won't allow that to happen.

In short, don't expect this to get a whole lot better too soon.

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Review of Holway's Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues

John Holway was smart enough to get oral histories of Negro League stars in the early 1970s before they were gone. What a wonderful collection, just as The Glory of Their Times did for white players. I enjoyed it immensely. Each chapter is one player telling his story.

There is a lot of talk these days about the "right" way to play, and grumbling about how baseball used to be better before analytics. As you might guess, same as with general griping about how terrible youngsters are, this is an eternal lament. These ballplayers repeated similar complaints about how there was no "trickeration" any more, less skill, more coddling. And they were talking almost 50 years ago.

One of the "right" ways to play is bunting. They complained that by the early 1970s no one was bunting anymore. In other words, the old guys who whine now that the bunt has disappeared were themselves criticized for not doing it enough and not doing it well. Incidentally, the way the Negro League players talked, they must have bunted a lot. They all talked about it in some detail.

Just as I read in the Satchel Paige biography, these players were unanimous that Jackie Robinson was far from the best player and that the Negro Leagues should get more credit for showing white players and executives for so long that their players could beat anyone.

The players show a lot of nostalgia but amazingly little bitterness. They had the bad luck of being excellent baseball players at a time when they were not allowed to get the kinds of salaries, fame, and comforts they deserved. They felt proud that their hard work proved that they were just as good or better than white players, who they routinely defeated in all star games. As Othello "Chico" Renfroe said, "I can really say baseball's the great American game, although it did discriminate against us for many years."

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Electoral Systems and Padres Uniforms

I listened to Padres owner Ron Fowler's interview with Jesse Agler on his Beyond the Booth podcast. Toward the end, Jesse asked him about uniforms. If you are not a Padres fan or at least a baseball fan, you may not know that the Padres had brown in their uniforms through 1990, and diehard fans have been calling for their return ever since. The current uniforms are blue and so the Padres are just some bland copy of the Brewers. Fowler said they did focus group research. To get a sense of how this worked, see Kevin Acee's article.

There were four uniforms: current, 1998 version, and two different brown uniforms.* OK, so we have four options going head to head. He continues to say that the "largest minority" likes brown. I assume he means one or the other brown option. We have to pause here to point out that the more accurate way to say "largest minority" is "plurality." In other words, the most but not a majority. In many elections, including most in the United States, plurality wins. Referring to plurality as minority is essentially pejorative. He says that the "second largest minority" is the current uniform. In plurality voting, another way to say "second largest minority" is "loser."

But we're not done yet. Many countries--and most Latin American presidential elections--use runoff elections to determine the winner when no one receives a majority. Runoffs are only between the two candidates who received the most votes. In our case, the top two are "some kind of brown" and "current uniforms." The 1998 version is clearly eliminated. Fowler confirms that he believes brown would win in "side by side" (meaning head to head) as opposed to four options and that they might actually be used starting in 2020. (According to Acee, you need to finalize uniforms with MLB in the spring for the following year.) Jesse interjects accurately that this sounds like a presidential campaign poll. In short, brown won.

But we're still not done. Fowler concludes by saying that "as the evening progressed" (was there beer involved here? That was my immediate thought) blue became more preferred than brown. It's hard to comment much on this without knowing their polling techniques, but I couldn't help wonder if they kept changing the questions, hoping for more blue support. Fowler started by saying that brown was the plurality, then ended by saying it wasn't. FWIW, people in the focus groups signed NDAs but talked privately and according to the Gwynntelligence podcast the sentiment was overwhelmingly pro-brown.

In sum, in plurality systems brown would win. In systems with runoffs, brown would also win. Brown won.

* He notes that these are not "baby poop" uniforms. He's used this phrase before and it refers to the 1970s look, I think meaning a lot of yellow. I remember vividly that a friend of mine who had a baby before me mentioned that infant poop is like wiping up Gray Poupon and I found that to be true. Fowler has now attributed the phrase "baby poop" to Tony Gwynn but I can't find any mention of him ever saying that (he said he loved brown and particularly the 1985 version). This is all confusing because Acee's article specifically says people did not like orange and brown and loved yellow and brown. Maybe I am missing something.

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Tim Wendel's Summer of '68

Reading Tim Wendel's Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever is a reminder that our current era has parallels for awfulness. The book is the story of a year, but it tends to focus a lot on the Tigers and on the World Series they played (and won) against the Cardinals. Wendel doesn't really come to any particular conclusions--he weaves some different sports in though they don't form part of a broader narrative.

The Tigers are an appropriate subject because their run for the championship helped unite the city to an extent, which has experienced riots the year prior. Baseball didn't fix or heal racial divides, but even the players themselves--black or white--felt like they were truly playing for their city. They were misfits, not smooth and athletic like the Cardinals.

If there is any theme, it's that the "real world" touches on and draws from baseball whether the players know it or not. Politicians from both parties wanted to comment on or attend games. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a sports fan per se but of course understood how race relations in major sports impacted public policy. Football was only just taking off at that point, and it's interested how it has overtaken baseball in terms of political importance. Donald Trump is whining about the NFL and to an extent the NBA, but not MLB.

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Minor League Migrants and Remittances

I've written about migrants and remittances more times than I can count.* But we don't tend to think of remittances when it comes to baseball. You hear about the players from Latin America who sign big contracts but not so much about the guys in the minor leagues. In this vein, Patrick Cusick has a good post at East Village Times, a site focusing on San Diego sports, especially baseball (East Village is the area where Petco Park is). He writes about Latin American players on the Lake Elsinore Storm, the Padres' A-level minor league team.

What caught my eye in particular was a former player who now works with the team say that since players don't know English and want to send money home, sometimes you might eat less. It's such an ordeal to order in an unfamiliar language.

“You can go to a city, and not be familiar with what they have. So sometimes, you don’t eat because it’s easier,” Pagan revealed. “I wouldn’t eat very well, so I would send that money to my family because it would help them much more.” Pagan would continue, “We would wait for the meal money and send it to our families because it was like an advance and it was easier than having those conversations.”
 Pagan estimates that nearly 80 percent of most Latin American player’s paychecks are going back to their families. Granted, some players have been fortunate enough to see big bonuses on signing day, but that is not the norm. For every big bonus given out by a team, there are many other players signed for much less. That stress can take a toll on a person, let alone a player outside of their comfort zone that is expected to save a franchise.

The vast majority of players will not hit the big contract. Players in the minors earn very little and Latin American immigrants are scraping by to send remittances back, just the same as immigrants in other occupations. Baseball seems glamorous but the money is bad in the minors. Add culture shock and language barriers and it's rough.

*This is not true. I could actually count if I wanted to.

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Larry Tye's Satchel

For a long time I had meant to read a biography of Satchel Paige, who I didn't know much of substance about. Larry Tye's Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend did not disappoint. It showed what a heroic and tragic figure he was, and how important for the game.

Of course, the book is framed by the Jim Crow South and how Satchel navigated it. Spurned later by Jackie Robinson, Satchel felt he should get more credit for being at the forefront of integration, actually playing with whites in games and getting the respect of fellow barnstormers Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller, both white baseball legends. He played everywhere and for anyone who would pay him, pitching constantly and often drawing white crowds. At the same time, like all African American players he had to find safe houses to sleep in and black restaurants to eat in. In many respects, he and other Negro League stars paved the way for Jackie.

He chased money constantly and Tye is careful to show how that sometimes was unethical (like skipping contracts) but that most often it was Satchel showing that he was worth money and therefore wasn't going to be pushed around because of his skin color. He made tons of money in his career, though he squandered most of it. Later in life the chasing became sad, as he was invited to hotels and ordered room service and liquor to bring home because he was out of cash.

His family life was complicated and also sometimes terrible--he was married to two women at one time at one point and one of them eventually committed suicide. He left a trail of women and at least one child he never knew. He had a lot of children and tended to be uneven in raising them. His third wife stayed with him until the end, when his health and spirits failed him.

The baseball part is incredible. He pitched as an old man in the majors and did pretty well. As an MLB rookie in his 40s he still threw bullets. We have few records because no one recorded the vast majority of his games, but he was one of the best pitchers ever. Tye captures him well.

BTW, you can listen to Tye talk about the book on the excellent Baseball by the Book podcast.

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Baseball Uniforms and U.S.-Mexican Relations

Regular readers know I am a big baseball fan and particularly a fan of the San Diego Padres, which I've followed since I was tiny. This past weekend they played a series in Monterrey, Mexico. I was listening to the radio broadcast of the game yesterday and heard a quick but interesting exchange between announcers Jesse Agler and Ted Leitner about the Padres uniforms. On home Sundays the Padres normally wear camouflage-style jerseys as a way to honor the large military presence in San Diego. I am not a fan of this practice, because while I am happy to honor that presence in some manner, the militaristic tone mixed with baseball bothers me. But we can set that aside for now.

Jesse Agler had gotten a question about why the Padres didn't have on those uniforms since it was a Sunday and they were considered the home team (even though they were in Mexico). The answer, which he also posted on Twitter, was smart and true--it is a bad idea to have such a militaristic uniform in a foreign country. Kudos to both announcers for emphasizing that it's even worse right now because U.S.-Mexican relations are strained, and kudos to Ted for taking that a step further and lamenting how we've alienated our close ally. He let that one drop and then said he should stop with the politics.

These were smart answers and I would've loved it had they just quickly added that the United States has invaded Mexico multiple times and even taken a large chunk of it, which makes the military emphasis exponentially more problematic.

Lastly, MLB is consciously trying to market the game globally. The U.S. use of force abroad is not popular and the militaristic uniforms do MLB no favors as it tries to encourage more foreign interest.

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Review of David Maraniss Clemente

I read David Maraniss' Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, which I liked quite a bit. Clemente was larger than life even while alive.

Clemente was peevish and tended toward whiny. But that wasn't without reason because he had suffered segregation and discrimination. He didn't get endorsements the way white players did. He didn't get the same accolades (though in part that's because the Pirates were not a big market team). Even worse, and Maraniss comes back to it numerous times with quotes, the press routinely quoted him in phonetics. English was his second language and it became caricatured ("Eef I can geet better...") and justifiably made him mad.

Maraniss depicts the extreme and disgusting corruption of the Somoza government when it sucked up all the aid it could for profit and let people go hungry after the 1972 earthquake. Clemente was angry and that compelled him even more to take the trip to Nicaragua so that he could force the aid where it needed to go. Roberto Clemente could (and would) stand up to a dictator. He was a real role model, on and off the field. He was an elite player who was idolized by both African American and Latino teammates. He was a fan favorite and a devoted family man.

Maraniss gives substantial attention to the history of the DC-7 that took him into the Caribbean shortly after takeoff. I had no idea about any of it, and I felt impotent and useless anger at the owner, who was both stupid and negligent. Many people knew that plane shouldn't be flown. I don't know about being baseball's "last" heroes but Clemente was one of its greatest.

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Podcast Episode 46: Latin American Baseball

In Episode 46 of Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast I talk to Isabelle Minasian, who is an editor at Lookout Landing (a Seattle Mariners site) and a contributor for La Vida Baseball and The Hardball Times. She wrote an article about the Caribbean Winter Leagues for the 2018 Hardball Times Annual, which is the topic of our conversation. Since we're getting close to spring training, it seemed an opportune time to have my first podcast on baseball. It's not focused just on politics, though immigration and the Venezuelan conflict are in there.

I should also note that The Hardball Times has really been focusing more on previously excluded voices, especially women, which is really refreshing in such a male-dominated field. Their podcast is great.

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Baseball and Politics in Venezuela

ESPN has a great story that brings politics and baseball together. Octavio Hernandez taught himself some sabermetric skills in Venezuela, where data wasn't really used at all to analyze baseball. He also marches against the government.

"A couple weeks ago I was on a march, a demonstration, breathing tear gas, because we have a political system that is crumbling the whole state," Hernandez says. "To think about baseball makes me a little guilty at night. 

"But what I remember is, no, baseball is not necessary to humanity, but we can add to the analysis of humankind, to humanity's way of thinking, with the way we analyze baseball. If we analyzed politics here the way we analyze baseball, we maybe wouldn't be like this right now. If we were more focused on facts we could be a greater society."

This might be a stretch--just look at all the data analysis in the U.S. and our political system is in terrible shape--but the basic argument is that politics should be based on facts rather than false assumptions. Hernandez sees data as a foundation:

"We're not an organized country," he says. "Data is a form of organization, of order, and we don't have that here. We don't keep records. In the U.S. you can know, 'Oh, my grandpa was from Scotland.' You have long records. We don't know where our grandfather is from. You guys always have, 'Oh, 70 percent of people eat bananas in the morning.' We don't have that. It's not that we don't find it 'cool.' It's not part of us.

Meanwhile, he has to stop working periodically because of power outages when it rains and he has no way of bringing players to Venezuela because they're understandably afraid.

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Keith Law's Smart Baseball

Keith Law's new book Smart Baseball is a great primer on the fast rise of advanced metrics in baseball. He starts by picking apart the old measures, especially wins, saves, and RBIs, given how arbitrary they are and how they do not tell you what they purport to. He then moves to newer measures with their pluses and minuses, showing how they do a better job of telling us what we need to know--what players. He ends with what I thought was the most interesting part of the book, which is an insider's view of scouting and analytics.

If you follow baseball, then the discussion about statistics shouldn't be new, but you'll learn (or at least I did) from the logic he lays out about the relative usefulness of different measures. The book raised questions I hadn't really thought about. In particular, he notes that all teams now use advanced statistics, yet lauds the Cubs for how analytics helped lead them to the World Series, which helped them especially with defense. Yet this year the Cubs, including defense, are mediocre. So how we statistically measure the importance of statistics?

Further, what (if any) is the relationship between advanced metrics and baseball injuries, which have been increasing over time? Are players doing things differently or teams demanding different things as a result of knowing more? Law notes toward the end that one of the next advances could be finding ways t to identify characteristics of players that would decrease injury risk.

The only downside is that I tired of the insults hurled at those who focused too much on the old statistics. It was sort of funny at the beginning but never stopped. The save is like the Alien & Sedition Act (p. 5); "dumber than a sack of hair" (p. 19); "canonical tale told by an idiot" (p. 29); "swamped by all the bullshit" (p. 81); "strong Luddite streak" (p. 110); "sheer stupidity" (p. 114); "typical codswallop" (p. 157); "fetid anachronisms" (p. 208); and even using the word "clowns" twice on the page (p. 218) to refer to sportswriters. The Twitter-like zingers were a distraction for me.

So gloss over those, and focus on the argument, which is thought provoking.

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