The Most Important Thing Said About the Sterling/ Clippers Controversy

Bomani Jones got it right. I happened to hear this on the radio last night, and I'm glad the Huff Post picked it up.

Muslims Did Perpetrate the Attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and it's OK to say so

Islam does not cause terrorism. It did not cause the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

The people who perpetrated those attacks did claim, however, to be doing it in the name -- and for the cause -- of their warped, misinformed view of Islam. Osama bin Laden and the leaders of al Qaeda who planned the attacks declared war on the United States because it threatened their vision of what the world ought to be like: a constricted, misogynistic, brutal theocracy.

Most Muslims do not, and never did, support the policies and actions of the terrorist group. They do not recognize as their own the message that bin Laden espoused.

When we say that Muslims attacked Manhattan, and they did so out of misplaced religious zeal, we are not condemning all Muslims and we certainly are not condemning Islam. We are telling the story as it happened.

That's why the objections to a short (approximately seven-minute) video at the September 11 Museum in Manhattan are badly misplaced. People worry that visitors to the museum will mistakenly believe that all Muslims are to blame if Islam is mentioned at all. If that's true, then we have problems (and I am sure we do), but they are not ones that can be solved by excluding the information.

I suppose that the purpose of "interfaith panels" like the one lodging the complaint is to reflect sensitivities like these. But I do not understand  -- and find a bit distasteful -- the position that we should not mention the stated motives of the people who staged the attacks. It seems fundamentally dishonest, and therefore not what museums should do.

Baseball Umpires, Fairness and Justice

A couple of professors of management (of all things) wrote a piece of the New York Times Sunday Review last week explaining why the Major Leagues need to employ video replay more frequently than they do, and it bugs me. I am not always bothered by stats geeks, even when they talk about baseball -- some of my best friends are like that. But this argument reflects a serious misunderstanding of what an umpire does and why replay is not the answer to their complaints.

First of all, their last line represents a complete loss of perspective, and indicates exactly the problem with their perspective."The question is," they say "whether we, as fans, want our games to be fair and just, or whether we are compelled to watch the game because it mimics the real world, warts and all." Frankly, raising the question of "justice" in the context of baseball is absurd. Baseball is a game, and justice is too big a concept to fit inside a game. It amounts to hyperbole, and makes everything else easier to dismiss.

But every game does need fairness, and anybody has the right to expect that any contest is fundamentally fair. So, do King and Kim give us reason to believe that instant replay would make the game more fair?

They begin with this: "After analyzing more than 700,000 pitches thrown during the 2008 and 2009 seasons, we found that umpires frequently made errors behind the plate — about 14 percent of non-swinging pitches were called erroneously."* 

This claim assumes, of course, that their technology is perfect at judging balls and strikes. I am not convinced that this assumption is valid. Some of the technology I have seen on television appears, in my view, to make patently false representations of the strike zone: where the little white mark shows up in the little box does not correspond to the place the real ball crosses the plate, even on replay. For the sake of argument, though, let's grant them technological perfection.

 They go on:

We also found that the pitch count had an influence over the umpire’s perception of a pitch. When the count was 3-0, and another ball would end the at-bat, the umpires mistakenly called a strike 18.6 percent of the time, compared with a 14.7 percent error rate when the count was 0-0. But when the count was 0-2, with another strike yielding a strikeout, the umpires expanded the strike zone only 7.3 percent of the time, half the error rate for 0-0. The umpires, in other words, appeared biased against ending an at-bat.

This is an interesting thing to consider. Players and coaches have known of this bias for time immemorial. Taking a pitch on 3-0, especially in an obvious way, often will result in a called strike if the pitch is close. This fact is not generally considered unfair, because at any level below the majors, everyone involved does in fact want to avoid "ending an at-bat" in this way too often. Walks have the potential to kill a game, and even the winners of a game riddled with them sometimes regret the experience. 

In other words, the sport benefits when players swing the bat rather than watching pitches go by. You can argue, of course, that in the major leagues this kind of consideration should be taken into account, but the players even at that level understand the way the game operates. This kind of error, therefore, may not be unfair. It is expected as normal business, and does not disadvantage any group in particular, especially in the long run.

Another example from a game I saw last week comes to mind, as well. The runner on first base ran on the pitch, and successfully beat the throw and the tag into second base. His slide, however, brought him over the base, and when the runner stood up he lost contact with the base for a split second. Through the whole move, the shortstop, who had the ball, held his glove on the back of the runner, so when the runner lost contact withe the base he was technically out. The defensive manager called for a replay, and the replay booth confirmed, despite a view from the camera that showed day light between the runner's belly and the bag.

This was the right call. It was fair and -- if we are going to inflate ourselves as King and Kim do -- just. The purpose of the rule is not to catch people in this way. If we allow replay to take over in this way, we will subvert the game rather than supporting it. The same can be say of the famous "neighborhood play" on double plays, which is specifically exempted from replay because the way the game has always been played encourages second basemen turning two to avoid anchoring themselves on the base. We get more double plays -- which are fun -- and fewer injuries -- which are not fun -- as a result.

In other words, the "right" call is not always purely objective. It requires judgment. That's the "human factor" so many people denigrate.

*I would suggest, parenthetically, that if you have analyzed 700,00 baseball pitches, your boss needs to ask more of you.