Is Buster Posey for Real?

A baseball post.  As fans know, Buster Posey has been on a tear for the San Francisco Giants, with an 18 game hitting streak.  Is he really that good?

Checking his stats for the last ten days, you get the following:  (your stats may differ if you check a different day than today)

41 at bats, 18 hits, 1 HR, 3 walks and 6 Ks.  Walks don't count as "at bats".  In 41 at-bats, he struck out 6 times, and hit 1 home-run.  Which means that he put the ball "in play" 34 times.

Of his 18 hits, 1 was a home run, so that means that, on his "in play" balls, he got 17 hits.

  There's a stat for that of course, BABIP.  (note - the stat also involves sac flies, of which I don't have the numbers)  Posey's BABIP is a cool .500.  A typical BABIP is .300.

Some BABIP can be attributed to great speed on ground balls, which doesn't apply to Posey, or to a greater ability to hit line-drives.  He showed a bit of the later in the minors.  However, seems like he's also been very lucky to have a BABIP 66% higher than league average.

Why International Law is silly

The World Court recently ruled that Kossovo's declaration of independence did not violate international law.  Well, sort of.

Legal experts said that while the International Court of Justice  had ruled that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was legal, it had avoided saying that the state of Kosovo was legal under international law, a narrow and carefully calibrated compromise that they said could allow both sides to declare victory in a dispute that remains raw even 11 years after the war there.

After 11 years, they decide nothing.  A major "purpose" of International Law is to resolve disputes short of war, and here they failed.

And the whole this is just absurd.  If only the World Court had been a bit quicker with their decision, and released it on July 4th.  Or maybe delayed more until September 28th. Or April 19th.  You get the idea.  Independence is settled between peoples and nations, not in court rooms.

Paul Krugman Fails to prove his point

In a recent editorial, Paul Krugman writes about Voodoo Economics.  He states categorically that cutting taxes does not raise revenues.

But the real news here is the confirmation that Republicans remain committed to deep voodoo, the claim that cutting taxes actually increases revenues. It’s not true, of course.

One would think that a Nobel Prize winner would follow this claim up with some facts, comparing revenues, adjusted for inflation and population increases and whatever, before and after the Reagan tax cuts.  Should be simple to do.

But he doesn't.

Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash.

While all three of these sentences are true (at least, arguably true), not a single one talks about revenues. The first two correlations are strongly confounded by the spending policies of the era.   In any case, they do nothing to support his claim that lower taxes means lower revenues.  I can spend 10 minutes on Google and find numerous web sites supporting Krugman (and many that don't).  What intelligent Americans really need from our Nobel Prize winning columnists is adult facts and teaching how things work.  Instead, we get political claims that deliberately skirt the hard choices and hinder an informed public.