Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of March 29, 2021
The Lead
Randy Johnson threw a fastball, and a bird disappeared: 20 years since baseball’s wildest moment
Oral history? Randy Johnson hitting the bird?
Lotta good tidbits too:
Calvin Murray, Giants outfielder: My initial reaction was the ball had exploded. I thought it was a practical joke or something, that he threw some tricked-up exploding baseball. It just took a minute for it to process.
Currigan: Oh my god, that’s outstanding that he thinks the same thing. That’s exactly what I thought. I thought we threw an exploding-ball trick into the game to lighten the mood. It sounds so stupid but it is the truth.
And we get an answer to whether that was a ball or a strike:
Schulman: I called it a one-in-a-trillion shot in the paper, but it’s actually two in a trillion. Dave Winfield killed that bird by throwing a ball at it once in Toronto, but there’s always been this speculation that maybe he was aiming for it. The funny thing was that I actually put in my story that the umpire called it “no pitch.” Like, no kidding.
Murray: I turned around to the umpire to see if I could get ball one right there.
Barajas: It’s not Randy’s fault the bird got in the way. It should have been called a strike. The projection of the pitch was definitely in the strike zone. It was probably about 98 miles an hour. Calvin wouldn’t have had a chance to put the bat on it.
And some more fun tidbits about Randy Johnson:
Kata: I remember thinking, “This is going to be on ESPN.” I was just a minor-leaguer at the time, so I decided to go stand by Randy so I could be on TV. As I was approaching him, I said, “Man, that’s crazy.” What he said back wasn’t words. It was just a grunt. He’s still dialed in.
Kata: I got another glimpse of it a few years later when I was in the big leagues. It was right when iPods first came out. Somebody gave it to him as a gift and he pulled me over to his locker and said, “Hey, do you know how to figure this thing out?” I basically set up his iPod for him. As I loaded it up, I was like, “Let me just see what Randy listens to.” I started scrolling through and I was like, “Is this German?” Clicking on it and listening to it, it was like, “Whoof.” I don’t know what they said, but it was intense. [The Athletic]
Good journalism/Cool shit
For once, the ranting isn’t coming from me:
I always think back to something I heard when researching my story on Barcelona’s urban transformation a few years ago. I was touring the city’s new “superblocks” with Salvador Rueda, the visionary behind them and much of Barcelona’s transformation over the past few decades. His theme that day was that residences and businesses and roads will get you urbanity, but to make a city requires public spaces — “the public’s living room,” he called it.
Think of the vast area around Atlanta composed of highways, chain store strips, and suburbs. Virtually nowhere in that sea are there non-commercial public spaces for people to stroll or gather. There is no center in any of it. It is what we have in huge swathes of America: urbanity without cities.
Rueda said that, in the dominant American suburban model, wherein everyone lives in their own separate dwelling, there’s no way to maintain vibrant public spaces — everyone’s too spread out — so everyone basically has to recreate the benefits of public spaces in their own private estate.
On the history of it:
The suburban dream of post-war America was that every white man could join the middle class and afford his own mini feudal estate, complete with its own stable (garage), its own compliant staff (wife and kids), and its own ornamental lawn.
Best of all, moving out to a suburban mini estate would free white families from being forced to share public resources with … those people.
And on what we’re losing:
To me, the lawn, especially the front lawn, is a symbol of all this. It was meant to be a signal of wealth and security, to show that in America, every (white male) citizen is a feudal lord of his own estate. But like so many other such signifiers in US life, it has become an anchor, just another private responsibility piled atop others. And to what end? Who is looking at the lawns anymore? What does that swathe of monocrop green signify other than conformity and habit?
No matter how much we try to replicate the benefits of public spaces and public life in our private estates, it is futile, because the one thing you can’t replicate is people. You can nurture your lawn until it’s a perfect simulacrum of a well-tended public park, but there’s still no one on it. (And before you say it, do your kids really play on your front lawn? Do you see a lot of kids on front lawns when you drive through your neighborhood?) [Volts]
She Left QAnon. Now She Doesn’t Know What To Believe.
Really enjoyed this one on QAnon. Some of this stuff is hilarious:
Mark’s wife, for instance, has effortlessly moved on to new conspiracy theories, largely focused on tech and pharmaceutical companies. “Because everything’s falling apart, they’re turning everywhere: Bill Gates is trying to be like Thanos and kill half the population,” Mark said. “They can regrow limbs and there’s all this stuff that big tech has kept from us.” Mark hasn’t gotten the COVID shot — he said he doesn’t get vaccines for “stuff that you can get better from”; his wife is completely unwilling to get it, believing that the shot may hurt her.
Do we think she recognizes that Thanos was a fictional character? No? [Buzzfeed News]
Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes
Like this from Noah, with the subtext that we’re all paternalistic pricks. Using free trade as an example:
Now, there was nothing dishonest about this agreement itself; economists really did think free trade was good (and most probably still do). What was dishonest — and knowingly dishonest — was the justification given for why it’s good.
In his article, Mankiw claims that letting countries trade with each other is no different than letting individuals trade with each other. But it’s clearly not the same. A country is made up of many individuals. And even the classical economists recognized that trade can hurt some of the people in a country. When America opens up trade with China, for example, workers in occupations that compete directly with China may lose out.
On the reasoning why:
In other words, economists believed that if they told the public the complex truth, they’d be activating deep-seated irrationalities among the hoi polloi. Instead of revealing what econ really says about free trade — that it offers huge opportunities but also real dangers and drawbacks — they decided to push a simplified fable in order to push back against what they saw as society’s innate tendency toward protectionism. They decided America couldn’t handle the truth.
And to be fair to the economists here…were they wrong? When the free trade consensus among policymaking elites finally collapsed, it came not in the form of subtle nuanced thinking; it came in the form of Donald Trump. Trump did all the dumb and dangerous stuff that economists were so afraid of — he railed against foreigners, he started fights with allies, he resorted to tariffs that ended up hurting U.S. consumers, and he failed to bring jobs back to America or save American manufacturing. It was exactly what Mankiw feared.
And on why we continue to do so:
And if you’re a member of the public, you should realize that yes, experts will sometimes lie to you. But (with a few exceptions) they usually don’t do this out of lack of concern for your own welfare. Instead, they do it out of lack of regard for your truth-handling abilities. You’re probably not being punked; you’re being babied. So if and when you go fact-checking the experts’ recommendations, remember that they probably do have their assessment of your own best interests in mind. Think of them as an overprotective parent, not as an enemy.
Or you could go the other direction and go so deep into the weeds that people think you’re purposefully taking unpopular positions (I want everyone to be covered by health insurance, just don’t think M4A is the best approach, in case anyone is reading this! CC: Alison) [Noahpinion]
Sports hot takes
Deshaun Watson's 'good guy' label means nothing
Liked this a lot on Watson:
"To say this is out of character for Watson is an understatement," King wrote. "I spoke to someone close to Watson over the weekend, and this person was stunned at the charges and had never seen him treat women with anything but respect. So let’s wait for all the evidence to surface. It’s smart in such cases to keep an open mind until we see complete details and stories."
This narrative has played out so many times that you could set your f—king watch to it. That’s just not the guy I know! In Watson’s case, the narrative is only too convenient to deploy, because Watson himself began this NFL offseason as a perceived victim.
On Kobe, which has always made me uncomfortable:
And the sad part is that such optical maneuvers could help Watson get away with what he’s accused of, whether he and his people stick to their current approach or shift to a different one. The NBA literally changed its All-Star Game rules to honor the legacy of Kobe Bryant, who was not only credibly accused of raping a woman but then worked with Nike — the sponsor that stood by him — to build a brand persona out of those accusations once Kobe’s lawyer had savaged the victim’s reputation. Kobe has essentially been beatified since his death. Watson could try using that same playbook. Or, like Antonio Brown, he could go into temporary career purgatory and still come out the other side with a Super Bowl ring. There’s no one way to be a s—tbag.
And the conclusion:
You don’t REALLY know if Deshaun Watson is a nice guy. S—t, his teammates may not even know. The only avenue I have for judging Watson’s character is from snippets of him expertly laying out defensive schemes to the press and slapping helmets with his buddies on the field. That’s ALL I have. How the f—k can I know what the man is capable of? I can’t. No other fan, no matter how much they hate the Texans organization, can.
And yet, Watson still has sympathizers out there. The tragic subtext to this story, no matter how it plays out, is that Watson and other men ALWAYS have plenty of sympathizers on hand. The women who credibly accuse powerful men of abuse are rarely afforded such luxuries, and they face the risk of potentially being doxxed, harassed and shamed for the rest of their days regardless of how the story ends up playing out in court.
It doesn’t matter who Deshaun Watson is to you. You don't get to ignore the #believewomen rallying cry if you happen to find the accused a believable fella. The whole point of the MeToo movement is to understand that “good guys” aren't always good, so that sports fans (and media) don't fall for that line of defense again and again and again, same way they always have. [SF Gate]
Health, politics, and academia
The Real Reason Republicans Couldn’t Kill Obamacare
I think this is really interesting stuff:
Yes, Republicans had already voted to repeal “Obamacare” several times. But, she knew, they had never done so with real-world consequences, because Obama’s veto had always stood in the way. They’d never had to think through what it would really mean to take insurance away from a hotel housekeeper or an office security guard on Medicaid—or to tell a working mom or dad that, yes, an insurance company could deny coverage for their son’s or daughter’s congenital heart defect.
A repeal bill would likely have all of those effects. And although Republicans could try to soften the impact, every adjustment to legislation would force them to sacrifice other priorities, creating angry constituents or interest groups and, eventually, anxious lawmakers. GOP leaders wouldn’t be able to hold the different camps within their caucuses together, Lambrew believed, and the effort would fail.
And a little bit of catnip and reassurance to myself that I took a cool job:
“Obviously, it is the case that there were not enough conversations about ‘replace,’” Brian Blase, a conservative health-policy expert who was a top domestic-policy adviser in the Trump White House, told me. Dean Rosen, a GOP leadership aide from the early 2000s who went on to become one of Washington’s most influential health-care strategists, said, “There was an intellectual simplicity or an intellectual laziness that, for Republicans in health care, passed for policy development. That bit us in the ass when it came to repeal and replace.”
One reason for this laziness was a simple lack of interest. For decades, Republicans had seemed interested in health-care policy only when responding to Democratic policies required it. “Republicans do taxes and national security,” Brendan Buck, a former GOP leadership aide, quipped in an interview. “They don’t do health care.”
That ambivalence extended to the GOP’s networks of advisers and advocates. The cadre of Republican intellectuals who worked on health policy would frequently observe that they had very little company, talking about a “wonk gap” with their more liberal counterparts. “There are about 30 times more people on the left that do health policy than on the right,” Blase said…
Upon releasing legislation, Ryan and McConnell each found himself in the predicament Jeanne Lambrew had foreseen: whipsawed between more moderate Republicans who thought the legislation tore down too much of the Affordable Care Act and more conservative Republicans who thought it left too much in place. Members hadn’t expected devastating Congressional Budget Office reports projecting that more than 20 million would lose insurance. They hadn’t worked out how to justify those results after so many years of promising better, cheaper health care—something their policies quite plainly did not deliver—and they had no answers for the nearly unanimous condemnations by industry and patient-advocacy groups, with whom Republicans hadn’t negotiated in advance. [The Atlantic]
The filibuster’s racist history, explained
The racial history of the filibuster shows the flaw in McLaughlin’s logic. While it’s true that the filibuster protects the power of the minority in the Senate, those senators may not actually represent “unpopular minority groups that require protection from oppression.”
When political theorists talk about minority rights protections, the general purpose of these legal guarantees is to protect against human rights abuses and guarantee equal access to the political system. Hence, free speech protections like the First Amendment and the equal protection guarantee in the 14th Amendment — both are designed to create legal protections that directly vindicate the rights of demographic minorities with limited political power.
The filibuster is qualitatively different. It doesn’t ban the government from engaging in some kind of persecution against unpopular groups or even give those groups outsized political power. There’s never been a case when actual minorities like African Americans or Jews control 41 seats in the Senate, for obvious demographic reasons.
Instead, the filibuster allows people who already have power to prevent changes to the political system. On civil rights issues, this effect almost always tends to redound to the benefit of people who want to preserve the racial status quo. There’s a reason why late 20th century liberals and groups like the NAACP repeatedly called for filibuster reform or abolition: They knew it would always stand in the way of fundamental system reforms. [Vox]
The County Where Cops Call the Shots
The story doesn’t amount to much (no real conclusion) but the details are if not shocking, eye-opening:
But what really stands out about Suffolk County is the compensation that police officers receive and the money their unions spend on local elections.
In 2019, more than 1,200 officers — nearly half the force — took home over $200,000 a year. Even an officer who was criminally charged for falsifying time sheets walked away with a payout of $291,868. Eye-popping a sum as that might seem, it’s par for the course in Suffolk County. Another superior officer left with $624,082, including unpaid vacation days and sick time.
With so much money at stake, the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association doesn’t leave elections to chance. It has not only a PAC, but also a super PAC that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on local elections. That super PAC is generally funded by contributions from law enforcement. Last September, it also collected tens of thousands of dollars from Long Island businesses, including two $10,000 checks from construction and maintenance companies, which super PACs are allowed to do. State law forbids the police from soliciting political donations from the public. Thus far, police benevolent associations have operated outside those restrictions.
With those generous salaries, the citizens of Suffolk County have paid for what should be world-class law enforcement. Instead, it got a police chief, James Burke, who went to prison in 2016 for running the department like a mafia boss. That scandal, which led to the conviction of the powerful district attorney, Thomas Spota, who was scheduled to be sentenced this month, and the head of his anti-corruption unit underscored how easy it can be for cops and politicians to get in bed together and turn law enforcement into a system of political favors and personal vengeance. Police officers testified that they feared for their families’ safety or that they’d be framed for crimes if they blew the whistle on their boss. It’s hard to imagine a starker illustration of the need to reinvent policing.
Unions: not so black and white. [New York Times]
Medicaid for Kids could pay for itself
On long-term effects and why we don’t think about them enough (the answer seems to mostly be present bias and politics). Lots of early childhood interventions have the potential to me cost-saving (let’s invest in early childhood education, pre-K, and child care!):
Minneapolis Fed economist Andrew Goodman-Bacon recently dropped a stone-cold classic of the genre, examining how the rollout of Medicaid in the late 1960s affected people who were children at the time.
If you got health insurance through the program as a child, he found, you were less likely to die young; you were likelier to be employed and less likely to have a disability as an adult; and all these benefits actually wound up saving the government money.
And these reasons seem to be most convincing to me:
A third is short-term political incentives. Wilbur Mills’s career famously ended after he and an exotic dancer named Fanne Foxe were stopped by police as he was driving drunk in Washington, DC, and Foxe tried to escape by jumping into the Tidal Basin. That happened in 1974, and Mills lost his chair position shortly thereafter. His tenure did not last long enough for him to benefit politically from the long-term effects of Medicaid…
A fourth reason is splits within the government. Goodman-Bacon looks at government expenses as a whole, but policymakers focused on Medicaid may not consider that money they spend there could reduce spending on something like the Social Security Disability Insurance program, since that’s a distinct program with its own trust fund.
A more complex version of that problem would arise in situations where different levels of government are involved: If Medicaid saved local governments money, say, by reducing imprisonment, that probably wouldn’t make the federal government or state governments likelier to fund it. They’re not getting the benefit. [Vox]