Marvin Miller RIP

Marvin Miller led Major League Baseball, kicking and screaming, from slavery into the modern era.

When Mr. Miller was named the executive director of the association in 1966, club owners ruled much as they had since the 19th century. The reserve clause bound players to their teams for as long as the owners wanted them, leaving them with little bargaining power. Come contract time, a player could expect an ultimatum but not much more. The minimum salary was $6,000 and had barely budged for two decades. The average salary was $19,000. The pension plan was feeble, and player grievances could be heard only by the commissioner, who worked for the owners.

By the time Mr. Miller retired at the end of 1982, he had secured his place on baseball’s Mount Rushmore by forging one of the strongest unions in America, creating a model for those in basketball, football and hockey.

Here’s Tommy Bennett’s characterization from earlier this year:

Marvin Miller is a throwback to a past era—maybe two or three eras ago. It’s rare these days to hear a well-dressed economist refer to himself as a lifelong “trade unionist.” It’s rare to hear someone earnestly compare the federal minimum wage to the minimum salary in baseball.

And here’s Miller himself:

 

Miller has still not been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Perfect!

Right-handed pitcher Philip Humber threw a perfect game, the twenty-first in major league baseball history, in a 4-0 White Sox victory over the Seattle Mariners.

Yesterday will also be remembered as the Boston massacre.

A perfect game and a perfect day. . .

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Buying the nomination

How much money does it take to buy the Republican nomination?

According to Ilyse Hogue [ht: ja], every vote that Romney gets costs him (and his campaign and his super PAC) $12.70 and every delegate costs more than $90,000—compared to Santorum’s bill of $3.01 per voter and close to $29,000 per delegate. (The numbers quoted by Andre Tartar are higher: $26.14 per Romney vote and $5.14 for each Santorum voter.)

So, Romney isn’t really playing moneyball, since that term refers to the Oakland Athletics’ analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite its poor revenue situation.

Romney has no such revenue problem, which is why he can spend all the money he needs to buy the nomination.

The causes of Black Swan events

 

To return to my discussion of baseball and Black Swan events, Nate Silver calculates the probability of last Wednesday’s outcome:

The following is not mathematically rigorous, since the events of yesterday evening were contingent upon one another in various ways. But just for fun, let’s put all of them together in sequence:

The Red Sox had just a 0.3 percent chance of failing to make the playoffs on Sept. 3.

The Rays had just a 0.3 percent chance of coming back after trailing 7-0 with two innings to play.

The Red Sox had only about a 2 percent chance of losing their game against Baltimore, when the Orioles were down to their last strike.

The Rays had about a 2 percent chance of winning in the bottom of the 9th, with Johnson also down to his last strike.

Multiply those four probabilities together, and you get a combined probability of about one chance in 278 million of all these events coming together in quite this way.

Silver suggests that the cause of the improbable Red Sox meltdown might have been the curse of Bill Buckner—in this case, with the airing of the episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

An alternative, as I have argued before, is that highly improbable outcomes do in fact happen, although we might not expect them to. Thus, we are subject to radical uncertainty in the sense that there are circumstances in which we—both participants and observers—simply do not and cannot know what is going to happen (or, for that matter, happened in the past or is happening in the present).

After the fact, we may make up a story about how the event was the “logical” outcome of one or another previously overlooked condition (the infamous “streak” or the fact that the team “laid down”), or we blame one of the participants for making a mistake (which presumes, of course, that all of the other events, before and after, have no effect). But that’s just a way of avoiding the consequences of uncertainty.

Black Swan baseball?

Here’s a question for those of you who have been following the debate concerning Nassim Taleb’s theory of improbable outcomes: is the result of the American League East battle for the final playoff spot (which the Boston Red Sox lost and the Tampa Bay Rays won, with the last pitch in the ninth inning) an example of a Black Swan event?

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

The result clearly fulfills the first condition (Yankees/anti-Red Sox fans’ wishing for the outcome is not the same as actually expecting it) and the third condition (the amount of nonsense by sports commentators after the fact of why the Red Sox lost simply beggars belief).

But does it carry an extreme impact? It certainly does for the members of the Red Sox Nation (and, presumably, the much-smaller Tampa Bay equivalent), and will no doubt be remembered for years to come.

Perhaps its larger impact, though, will be on reinforcing the importance of uncertainty—the significance of what we don’t know and simply cannot know.

Damn Yankees

Actually, it was the damn Steinbrenner Yankees—and now he’s gone.*

It was Steinbrenner who reneged on a deal for a lease on the old stadium, made illegal contributions to Nixon’s reelection campaign, received a lifetime ban from major league baseball (until he was reinstated in 1993), and bilked New York City out of $1 billion for a new stadium (for a team that was worth upwards of $1.6 billion).

And he continues to bilk the rest of us even in death: by dying in 2010—during a yearlong gap in the estate tax—his heirs will realize an unexpected bonanza.

Had he died last year and tried to pass his fortune on to his children or grandchildren, they would have faced a 45 percent tax. Had he lived until next year, the rate would have been 55 percent. But Steinbrenner’s death this year, like that of three other known billionaires who have died in 2010, gives his heirs a break.

Forbes estimated Steinbrenner’s personal wealth last year at $1.15 billion.

The year-long hiatus of the estate tax, which normally falls on the very rich, could cost the U.S. Treasury an estimated $14.8 billion in 2010.

George Steinbrenner is gone. Now I can go back to being a Yankees fan.

* Disclaimer: From childhood, I was a diehard fan of the Pinstripes—until 1973, when the shipping magnate Steinbrenner bought the team. Later, when I moved to Chicago, I became a fan of the Pale Hose. I will always, however, root against the Carmines of Boston.

Perfect game!

Mark Buehrle pitched a perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays on Thursday, 23 July, at Comiskey Park U.S. Cellular Field. His first perfect game (and second career no-hitter), only the 18th in Major League Baseball history.

Here’s the line score:

And the box score.

And this one’s just for the Cubs fans out there: