Here and there

Sorry about the long absence. Since I wrote last, I've been up to Boston (okay, Lexington), back down to Philadelphia (okay, Media), down to Washington (okay, Bethesda), and now I'm back home. But only until tomorrow night, when I head off to England.

As promised, my next content-ful post will tear apart Angels and Demons by Dan Brown for the misinformed crap that it is. It'll mostly just be a list, but it's a long list, so it could take a while. I hope to have it done before I head out tomorrow.

Thank you, Brian Weatherson

After "getting technical" about the Killian memos (and Matt Yglesias's take on the controversy), Brian Weatherson brought up the story that's been largely forgotten in the mess. To wit:

On the third hand, the really most interesting charge brought up against Bush in the last fortnight doesn’t rely at all on the Killian memos. That’s the charge that he was required to report for Guard duty in Massachusetts when he started at Harvard, but never managed to as much as join a unit. This is potentially worse than whatever he did or didn’t do in Alabama, where at least he seems to have put some effort into making up the time he didn’t serve. Now there’s dispute over what he was required to do in Massachusetts, but none of that dispute turns on whether folks used Times New Roman or TrippyHippyTopia on military documents in the 1970s.

In case you missed it the first time around, you can read the Boston Globe article.

Look. This isn't going to make it more likely that I'll vote for John Kerry; that was already a certainty. There are plenty of better reasons than this to vote for John Kerry come November. But George Bush needs to be called on this every time he brings up character or responsibility in this campaign.

I'll be away a few more days

I know, it seemed like I was really going to be back blogging on a regular basis for a few days there. And that's still the plan. But at the moment, I'm working on a super long post that will likely take a few more days. Okay, it's more of a ranting list than a proper post, but it'll be snarky as all hell.

To whet your appetite: I will be writing about the crapitude that is Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown. And you know how I feel about Dan Brown.

More problems with baseball's "best" announcers

Last night, Joe Morgan. Tonight, Tim McCarver.

Even more than Morgan, Tim McCarver is widely considered to have one of the best baseball minds out there. So much so, in fact, that he wrote (along with Danny Peary) a book called Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans. I got the book last year and read it pretty quickly. At the time, I took what McCarver had to say for granted... he's Tim McCarver, after all, so he's got to be right.

But I've reread bits and pieces of the book in recent weeks, and McCarver often doesn't make much sense. Superficially, he brings some interesting insights to the game, but when you look more closely, the significance of what he writes all but vanishes.

The following quotation is from chapter 18, "The Lineup," and can be found on pages 154-155.

In the National League, eighth is a very tough spot. It probably requires more patience than any spot in the lineup, and that's asking a lot from someone who doesn't get as many at-bats as the other guys. It's interesting to note that an eight-place hitter often helps an offense not by hitting and scoring but by clearing. It is imperative for an eight-place hitter to understand the value of clearing the pitcher so that the leadoff batter can open the next inning. [...]

With two outs, the eighth-place hitter must figure out how to get on base so that the pitcher will bat - if the pitcher makes an out, it's preferable that it be the third out of the current inning rather than the first out of the next inning.

Now McCarver's underlying observation is exactly right: you don't ever want a pitcher to lead off an inning; the vast majority of the time that means you'll open up the next inning with an out, and it's a whole lot harder to score runs with one out and the bases empty than with no outs and the bases empty. So the eighth guy in the lineup wants to do everything in his power to get on base, especially when there are two outs. This seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion. And it is.

The problem is that getting on base is what all hitters are trying to do. It's not as if 8-hole hitters have a special responsibility to not make outs. That's everybody's responsibility. In fact, according to the sabermetric view of baseball (check out Moneyball by Michael Lewis to see how the Oakland A's have used sabermetrics to succeed in recent years on a limited budget), avoiding outs is the key to a successful offense. Imagine an lineup that always got a hit or walked; that lineup would score an infinite number of runs. Get on base, even with walks and singles, and you'll be a successful hitter.*

In other words, a guy hitting eighth should do exactly what every other guy should do: get on base. Does Tim McCarver really believe that it's more important for 8-hole hitters to avoid outs than anyone else? Good hitters avoid outs. Period.

McCarver goes on to discuss how guys on base when the pitcher's batting need to be conservative in their baserunning. Don't try to steal second. If you get thrown out, you're back at square one and the pitcher's leading off the next inning. But baserunning is an entirely separate issue from batting. And it applies just as much to a hitter batting sixth who happens to be on base with two outs when the pitcher's batting.

On its face, McCarver seems to be making an observation that hitters should incorporate into their thinking and viewers into their, er, viewing. But when you think about it just a bit more, you realize that there's nothing to incorporate. Hitters should try to get on base. Thanks, Tim... I wasn't quite sure about that.

McCarver's writing and commentary is full of stuff like this. At first, he appears to be bringing some real insight to the game that could help players play better and viewers understand what they're watching. But on closer examination, it becomes awfully apparent that he's full of shit.

*Power is nice, too, but as any critique of On-Base Plus Slugging points out, getting on base is more important than getting lots of bases.

Does anyone in sports do any fact-checking?

Joe Morgan is full of shit. This has been clear to me for a while, but rarely has he given me so easy an opportunity to show how wrong he can be.

During the Red Sox-Athletics game I'm watching at the moment (Sox up 8-0!), Morgan just said something along these lines:

"I noticed earlier this season that Barry Bonds has been getting hit by more pitches than ever. Pitchers figure, 'Hey, I'm probably going to walk him anyway, so I may as well save a few pitches.'"

This seems like a reasonable thing to happen. Bonds does walk all the time (you don't have an on-base percentage over .600 [read that again] without walking a ton). In certain situations, everyone in the park knows that Bonds is simply not going to get a pitch to hit. So why not plunk him with a nice slow curveball?

So Morgan's making sense here. The problem is that he's wrong. Thus far this season, Barry Bonds has been hit six times. Over the course of his 19-year career, he's been hit 90 times, which averages out to 4.7 times a season. In other words, Bonds has been hit more frequently this season than over the course of his career.

But... the Barry Bonds of the late '90s and early '00s (what are we going to call this decade, anyway?) is a very different player from the Barry Bonds of the '80s and early '90s. Somewhere in the mid-'90s Barry Bonds became BARRY BONDS. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this occurred, largely because Bonds had already won three National League MVP awards before the Leap.

For the sake of making the math easy, let's say it was 1995 (feel free to pick a different cutoff year). In the past ten seasons, Barry Bonds has been hit by a pitch 62 times, that is 6.2 times a season. As mentioned above Barry Bonds has 6 HBPs this season, right on pace with the previous nine seasons.

Joe Morgan is flat-out wrong when he says that Barry Bonds has been getting plunked more frequently this year. In the past decade, Bonds has been hit roughly six times a season, and he looks to follow suit this season. If anything, Bonds is "off his game," seeing as his HBP numbers for the past three years have been 9-9-10.

Morgan would be right to point out that, as Bonds's career has progressed, he's been hit more frequently. But that's not what Morgan said. Joe Morgan claimed that Barry Bonds has been hit more frequently than ever. And he's wrong.

This is fairly typical from Joe Morgan... his schtick basically revolves around being in baseball for years and years and therefore having more knowledge of the game than anyone else. Again, this seems reasonable. But it's just not borne out in Morgan's commentary. He consistently says things that either don't make sense, lack any support, or are obviously wrong.

Joe Morgan needs to go. Get someone in the booth who actually knows what he or she is talking about.

On the absurdity of national polls

I really can't understand why so many people are so interested in the various flavors of national Kerry vs. Bush polls. Two quick examples.

Kevin Drum finds Bush's lead of 1.7% in the latest Rasmussen poll "very small" and says the campaign is "definitely a dogfight."

Ezra Klein has written three times in the past week on various national polls.

Did we really learn nothing from the 2000 election? Al Gore won the popular vote. George Bush won the electoral vote. George Bush is president.

The national popular vote simply doesn't matter. The winner of the popular vote is not guaranteed to win the election. The electoral college is all that matters. To look at Drum's point more closely, let's suppose the final popular vote turns out to be 50.1% to 49.9%. If those percentages were identical in all states, then it'd be a clean electoral sweep, hardly the dogfight Drum sees.

Now, if you want to argue that the electoral system needs a serious overhaul, go right ahead. But you just can't ignore that it's what we have right now.

I understand that national polls can be seen as indicating general trends that could have consequences on a state-by-state basis. But with 50 states, there's just too much noise to draw any firm conclusions about the election from a national poll.

I'd love to see more discussion of state-by-state polls. Maybe it's just that not many polls are currently available. But in the absence of the useful information they provide, we shouldn't look too hard at national polls just to keep up the horse race discussion.

UPDATE: Fellow Swat alum and Earthworm Collin Peng-Sue e-mailed me with a link to Electoral-Vote.com, which has the information that actually matters. It's probably not perfect, but it's far more informative than national polls.

Choosing a college is not simple as it might seem

Matthew Yglesias discusses a recent article by Gregg Easterbrook that suggests that it doesn't matter so much where you go to school. Easterbrook's article is based on research whose important conclusion is that, while graduates of elite colleges are more successful than people who went to non-elite schools, "the student, not the school, was responsible for the success." He concludes that high school students shouldn't worry too much about getting into, say, Harvard, since you can be just as successful going elsewhere.

Yglesias points out a major flaw of this argument:

The proper conclusion to draw from the Krueger and Dale data, however, is rather different. Their research indicates that there may be no good reason to attend Harvard if you can, as will usually be the case, get a more attractive financial aid package from a less selective school or else simply find a lower tuition at a public university. Their research most emphatically does not support the conclusion that whether or not you can get admitted to a highly selective college matters. On the contrary, the research indicates that the methods used by the admissions officers at these schools are rather good at identifying persons who are likely to achieve high incomes later in life.

In other words, if you can get into Harvard, you're pretty likely to be successful, and you shouldn't worry too much about actually going there.

But there's a larger point that both Yglesias and Easterbrook miss. Well, that they might be missing, depending on what they consider the purpose of college to be.

The research quoted deals exclusively (as far as I know) with the income levels of graduates of various schools. Now, if the only thing that matters to you in choosing which schools to apply to and deciding which one to attend is your future income level, follow Easterbrook's and Yglesias's advice: go to a school that will give you a solid education without sucking your (or your parents') savings account dry.

My view on what matters in college selection differs.

First, you're not just making a decision about potential future income; you're deciding where you're going to live for four (give or take) years. Urban, suburban, or rural? Big or small? Greek scene? Strong athletics? You're going to want to consider these questions (and plenty more) when you're picking a school. Yes, the decision you make could affect the course of the rest of your life. But you should also consider what you're life is going to be like for the four years you spend in college.

Second, not all people go to college with the objective of making the most money they can. If they did, everyone would be majoring in computer science or engineering, or have plans to head off to law school. There are plenty of people like that, of course, but I doubt they're a majority. College students take classes in what interests them, be it history, English literature, or biology.

Suppose a student was accepted by just two schools: Swarthmore and Haverford. They're pretty similar in a lot of ways - both are in suburban Philadelphia, both have under 1,500 students (all undergraduates), both have rather liberal student bodies. Haverford offers the student in question a financial aid package that brings the annual cost down to $30,000, while Swarthmore's offer puts the cost at $35,000. According to Yglesias, the student should go to Haverford and put the extra money in an IRA.

But wait! What if the student wants to major in engineering? You can do that at Swat and you can't at Haverford.

Now, I'm sure that Yglesias would accept that the student should go to Swarthmore and deal with the extra costs. He hints that factors besides future income should be considered when he answers whether you should go to Harvard: "Apparently not. It's not an especially fun place to spend your time and the weather's terrible."

But maybe some people do find Harvard to be a whole lot of fun, and maybe they love Boston's weather.

My point is that the college game isn't nearly as simple as either Easterbrook or Yglesias makes it out to be. All other things equal, yeah, you should choose a good, cheap school over a great, expensive one. But it's incredibly rare that all other things are, in fact, equal. If all students cared about was making the most money in the long run, choosing a college would be a whole lot easier than it actually is.

350 years and counting

Thanks to Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber for pointing out that today is Arrival Day, marking 350 years since the arrival of Jews in (North) America. Eszter has some thoughts, as does Jonathan Dresner of Cliopatra. The Head Heeb, Jonathan Edelstein, has an extensive list of links to other posts marking the milestone.

My own contributions are modest:

- First, an interesting tidbit that I only learned this summer. The first Jews to arrive in America came not from Europe, but from Brazil. Well, they weren't originally from Brazil, of course, but once the Portuguese regained control of Brazil, the Jews there feared persecution and headed elsewhere.

- Second, the only substantial work I've done that might be considered Jewish history. In 1858, officials of the Catholic Church took custody of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy of Bologna, on the grounds that he had been secretly baptized and could not, therefore, be raised by Jews. Last year, I looked into the American response to the Mortara Affair and found that Americans overwhelmingly supported Edgardo's parents' attempts to regain custody and, in the process, roundly criticized the Catholic Church. A lot of that has to do with the nativism of the period, of course, but what's fascinating here is that Jews were not subjected to the same persecution as Catholics. For more details, read the paper.

- Finally, go check out the National Museum of Jewish History, where I interned this summer. The website's new, and has lots of great content, including some great online exhibitions and information about the new museum (construction is scheduled to begin next year).

Why I believe in historians and, more importantly, history

The aforementioned post by Clayton Cramer bugged the hell out of me. I already wrote about my biggest complaint with it, namely that Cramer is just as quick to generalize as the historians he criticizes so vehemently.*

There was something else, though, that got under my skin, something far more important.

After reading this superb comment by Julie Kemp over at Cliopatra, I realized just what it was.

Clayton Cramer is wrong about the professionalism of historians because he has to be wrong. A bold statement, I know. I'll explain.

If Cramer is right, if "the vast majority of historians" consciously fail to adhere to the standards of responsible scholarship, then the entire endeavor of academic history is a sham and a failure. To go even further, if historians reject these standards, there's simply no point to "doing" history. I don't want to believe this is the case, and I don't think it is.

I'm not going to sit here and pine for an objective, disinterested history. For one thing, it's not possible. Historians all have their particular interests and prejudices that are necessarily reflected in the very questions they ask about the past. Second, I don't think we even want a bland presentation of "just the facts." Analysis and interpretation are what make history interesting, invigorating, and worthwhile.

This does not mean, however, that the writing of history is an entirely subjective endeavor either. As I've written about briefly before, historians need evidence. Without evidence, historians become mere storytellers. There's nothing wrong with telling stories, except that history strives to be something more.

The best history, then, is that which skillfully combines probing analysis with a presentation of facts gleaned from sound research.

This isn't easy. It's tough, and it takes a whole lot of time. A quick example gives some indication of the effort involved in the writing of history.

Last fall, I wrote this paper for a seminar. A fairly informal take on Hans Baron's thesis on civic humanism, it's pretty light on documentation. This spring, I revised it as part of Swarthmore's Honors Program (you can read the revised version here (pdf)). I expanded the conclusion a bit, but most of my time was spent on verifying the quotations and fleshing out the documentation. This paper dealt exclusively with secondary sources that I had worked with just months before. Yet it still took me at least four or five hours just to get all the footnotes right.

Now imagine someone reading my paper who wants to check whether I've used those sources accurately. First they'll need to find the relevant books and journals. Then they'll need to read a good portion of them to get a sense of their thesis and argumentation. Finally, they'll need to compare my presentation of the sources to their own perception of them. If all goes well, they come away thinking, "Yes, Danny Loss did a responsible bit of scholarship here." If not, well, then there's a problem.

Now imagine doing the same thing for a book based on primary sources spread out over numerous archives. The process I just described gets a whole lot harder and consumes much more time.

I hope that it's clear by now that it's just not feasible or practical for peer reviewers and editors to check every single footnote of every single book or article they read. There's just not enough time. If historians checked out every footnote, they would have no time for research of their own.

This isn't to say nobody should ever ensure that a given historian's use of their sources, just that this process needs to occur selectively.** Check out the evidence when it doesn't make sense or it challenges received wisdom. This evidently didn't occur with Arming America; it's clear that guidelines like these weren't followed.

But, on the whole, when need to take a historian's word for it when it comes to their use of the sources. If we don't, we'd spent all our time delving into footnotes and the process of new research would grind to a halt. I don't think anybody wants that to happen.

In short, we just need to have trust our fellow historians that they find and use their sources in a responsible manner. If we don't, we're either faced with the prospect of not believing anything historians have to say, or not having any new history written.

It's here that Julie Kemp's comment comes in. It's so good that I'm just going to quote a big chunk of it:

For those of us regularly engaged in an academic life, we arer constantly reminded of the importance of academic honesty. We write about it in our syllabi. We explain it to our students to make sure they understand. We discuss with our colleagues how to detect academic dishonesty and how to deal with it in a fair and ultimately productive manner. In short, it is often a central part of our daily process.

Because most of us consider academic honesty so important (and, right or wrong, there are people who consider it at least as, if not more, important than some of the Ten Commandments), it is a shock when we find that someone of otherwise good repute is accused of crossing over into the "dark side."

Yes. Yes. Yes. We place our faith in the academic honesty of other historians because that honesty helps form the foundation of the field. Without it, history can teach us nothing. To suddenly suspect all historians of dishonest scholarship would be tantamount to suspecting that history itself is a fraud.

Now, maybe Kemp and I are misguided in placing our faith in the integrity of fellow historians. But, lest anyone think this faith is akin to belief in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, I want to emphasize that it's based on my experience that the vast majority of historians do, in fact, adhere to standards of professionalism that help guarantee sound scholarship. Footnotes check out. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, I simply have no reason to believe otherwise.

Returning to my initial statement about Cramer being wrong because he has to be wrong, I'll clarify a bit in light of the above conclusions.

There's no a priori reason why Clayton Cramer is wrong; in that sense, he doesn't have to be wrong.

But if we're going to continue to view history as a legitimate scholarly endeavor, we're just going to have to trust historians to do the right thing.*** If Clayton Cramer were right, history as we know it would cease to exist. Until Cramer can show me that fradulent scholarship is indeed widespread among historians in the U.S., I'll go on believing in history, thank you very much.

__________
*Incidentally, Cramer still hasn't responded to Ralph Luker's or my request for a clarification or further evidence, instead bringing up the red herring of the controversy over Michael Belleiles's Arming America. Cramer's latest post is another prime example of misreadings and bad writing. But I promised myself that I'm going to do my best to ignore him.

**I'm a strong believer in rich documentation, just in case you have a reader who does want to follow your trail. I love footnotes.

***Tim Burke addressed this point (and others) almost a year ago in a post entitled On Ellipses and Theses and Archives. Rereading Tim's essay now, I see just how much his thinking has influenced my own.

You can't make this stuff up

It's not as if we needed any more reasons to dump on Clayton Cramer, but sometimes it's just too good to pass up.

In a recent entry about historians' reception of Michelle Malkin's latest book, Cramer had this to say:

I suppose that I could take the "professional standards" argument a bit more seriously if we didn't have the recent memory of the Bellesiles scandal, where many professional historians did their best to prevent any serious examination of massive and obvious fraud from working its way into popular newspapers and court decisions. We also have the claims of professional historians about the origins of homosexuality laws that appeared in Lawrence v. Texas (2003)--claims that are clearly incorrect, at least to the extent that they make sweeping claims that I was able to quickly demonstrate are false.

There are professional historians who take what they do seriously, regardless of the political consequences of what they find. But I no longer have any illusion that these "professional standards" are adhered to by the vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S.

You tell them, Clayton! We don't want all those crazy history professors making sweeping claims that are demonstrably false.

But wait! What about this "vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S." that Cramer is sure don't adhere to professional standards? Isn't this quite a sweeping claim he's making himself? Yes, yes it is.

Two instances do not a trend make, to say nothing of supporting Cramer's ludicrous claim about the scholarly standards about the "vast majority" of Americans historians. If Cramer wants to hold historians over the flames for unsubstantiated generalizations, he might want to light up another fire for himself.

(Incidentally, I have serious concerns about the ability of historians to draw out significant generalizations that accurately capture the past. It's not that I don't think it can be done; I just think it's a damn hard, and you need responsible scholars to do it. I have more to say on this, and I've been meaning to write about it for months. Who knows when it'll actually happen...)