Lincoln Mitchell

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This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Patterns of Greatness-George Brett, Willie McCovey and Eddie Murray

George Brett, Willie McCovey and Eddie Murray were three of the game’s all-time greats. Bill James ranked Brett as the 30th greatest player ever, followed by Murray as the 61st and McCovey in the 68th spot. James awards Murray 437 career win shares, followed by Brett at 432 and McCovey at 408. James’ ranking makes sense and recognizes Brett’s additional value as a third baseman, rather than a first baseman like the other two. If, however, we just focus on offensive production, the debate raises some interesting questions not only about peak versus career figures, but about how valuable different kinds of peaks are.

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What the Georgia-Russia War Did and Didn't Change

The Russia Georgia war in a paradoxical way changed everything and changed nothing. Accordingly, determining the real impact of the war can be a puzzling task. The initial fears articulated in Tbilisi and Washington last August have proven false. The dominoes did not tumble throughout the former Soviet Union; a new Cold War did not occur, President Mikheil Saakashvili is still in power in Georgia; and Russia did not take over Georgia. Although these extreme scenarios did not come to pass, something did change.

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What We Know About the Wild Card

The introduction of the wild card in 1994, first used in 1995, changed the post-season baseball forever. Baseball within two years transformed from being a sport where the regular season was grueling and few teams made the relatively brief playoffs to one where a ticket to the post-season was now easier to get, but the playoffs were expanded to look more like other sports. The relative benefits and drawbacks of this playoff system is a subjective matter, but now that there have been 14 seasons using this format, it is possible to reflect on what we have learned about the new playoff system.

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Supporting Democracy Without Understanding It

The idea that aggregating preferences of ordinary people, treating all people equally and allowing a substantial amount of political rights to everybody is the best way to organize society is a new one for most of the world, and one which still strikes people as strange. I know this from my own experience doing political work in dozens of countries. In every one of these countries, the U.S. included, I have heard people, including people in positions of influence and power, remark that the citizens of their country are somehow not smart enough, educated enough or prepared enough for democracy.

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Talking About Recovery, Talking About Recession →

During an appearance on Face the Nation this past Sunday, Lawrence Summers, economic advisor to President Obama, remarked "Six months ago, when the president took office, we were talking about whether recession would become depression...Today we are talking about when recession is going to end." These comments only make sense if taken in the most literal sense. Summers is right. The administration is certainly speaking about the economy differently than it was six months ago. This statement, unfortunately, reveals more about what the government is saying, rather than what the economy is doing.

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Lincecum and Cain and Pray for Rain, but Don't Settle for Sanchez and Garko

The first question this raises is: what is meant, in this case, by playing for this year? Does that mean that Giants are going to try to get the wild card, or that they are going to try to build a team that can play deep into the playoffs and have a chance at winning the World Series? If the goal is the former, than these trades make some sense. Sanchez and Garko will be marginal players; not dramatic upgrades over Travis Ishikawa and Juan Uribe. But then again the wild card race could well be decided in the margins. The Giants’ reason for pursuing this strategy is not clear. Although the team has now missed the post-season for five years in a row, they have also been eliminated in the first round three of the last four times they reached the post-season. Another first round exit may not slake the thirst for a championship of a franchise that has not won the World Series since Eisenhower was in his first term as President.

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Manny, Papi, Jeter and Mo

The Yankee-Red Sox rivalry has been particularly intense over the last decade because these years, just as in the late 70s and late 40s, both teams have been contenders. The Yankee-Red Sox rivalry is based on more than just regional loyalties; it is also based on a narrative which many fans seem to believe. The narrative can be summed up, and dramatically exaggerated, by saying it is about the Evil Empire-Best Team Money Can Buy Yankees against the Underdog-Long Suffering Red Sox. This narrative is even more nonsensical than most, but it is surprisingly persistent among casual fans.

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Barack Obama: Our First Post Post-Cold War President

As our first post-Cold War president, Bill Clinton was faced with an entirely new content for international politics when he came into office in 1993. Now, sixteen years later, Barack Obama comes to office as our first post post-Cold War President. And while the end of the Cold War was a major international news story, the end of the post-Cold War period is much less clear or decisive. If the Cold War ended with a bang, the post-Cold War ended with a whimper (or perhaps a tweet). And now that the post-Cold War paradigm is no longer our frame for international relations, President Obama is operating in a vastly different foreign policy environment than either of his two predecessors were.

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The Policeman, the President, the Professor, an Apology and a Round of Beers →

The recent incident in Cambridge involving Henry Louis Gates Jr. is indicative of the way we have talked, if not always thought, about race in America, at least white America, for the past few decades. Race is rarely a topic that is explored directly, even though it remains a constant, perhaps even defining issue, in the U.S. Instead, we only discuss race when specific cases or incidents occur and become stories in the media. Thus, the Rodney King beating led to discussions of police abuse and race, O.J. Simpson to race and the judicial system and even Barack Obama's campaign to a discussion of race and politics. Similarly, the Gates incident, has brought on another discussion of race and police profiling.

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Honus Wagner and Evolving Definitions

Comparing players across generations is a confoundingly difficult task. Complete games are extremely are in today’s game; few people stole a lot of bases in the 1930s-1950s; home runs were very rare until Babe Ruth went to the Yankees. Therefore we cannot know, or even approximate well, how many bases Dom DiMaggio would have stolen, or how many complete games Randy Johnson would have thrown if they had played in different eras with different expectations and incentives.

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Did the 1981 Baseball Strike Cost Dwight Evans Election to the Hall of Fame?

On Sunday when the wrong corner outfielder from the Red Sox teams of the 1970s and 1980s will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, few baseball fans will be thinking about the 1981 strike, but perhaps they should. Dwight Evans, who was almost certainly a better player than his longtime teammate Jim Rice, never received any real Hall of Fame support from the BBWAA. Evans was overshadowed by higher profile teammates and had offensive skills that were not fully appreciated while he was playing. Nonetheless had that strike not occurred, it is possible that Evans would also be a member of the Hall of Fame, and almost certainly would have received more support.

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Kyrgyzstan: How America Gained a Base and Lost a Country

The democratic hopes–as well as the more widespread, but less focused, hopes that Akaev’s resignation would lead to a better life for the Kyrgyz people–had melted away almost entirely. Instead, government, political, and civic leaders whom I spoke to, many of whom I had last seen four years earlier when a sense of real change was possible, talked sadly of lost opportunities, the rise of a more repressive regime, and the violent nature of Kyrgyz politics. Few had much hope for the future. The presidential election, which was only a few weeks away at that time, was broadly understood as a foregone conclusion. Most people assumed that the intimidation and fraud which had already begun would only get stronger as the voting got closer. They were right–the election saw Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev reelected with about 88% of the vote in a deeply flawed election that was neither free nor fair.

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Kyrgzstan: How Trading Democracy for Stability Actually Doesn't Work

Stability is the last refuge of many non-democratic leaders, but there’s little evidence that these leaders can ensure stability in their own countries or internationally. As Rice pointed out, supporting stability over democracy in the Middle East has often led to greater instability. The Shah was supposed to bring stability to Iran and to the region at large, but many of the region’s current problems are actually linked to that regime and to U.S support. Throughout the Arab world, authoritarian regimes have also shown that they are unable to deliver stability. This isn’t only true in the Muslim world. Does anybody think that the strongman regime of Vladimir Putin has brought stability to the former Soviet Union? Stability in Russia itself is far from guaranteed, particularly given recent events in the North Caucasus.

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Bobby Jindal, Dan Quayle and Socialist Health Care →

Bobby Jindal has "seen enough" and Dan Quayle thinks President Obama needs to "tame the left wing of his party." Perhaps it is time to give the Republican Party some credit for consistency, if not exactly relevancy or accuracy. Dan Quayle, who has gracefully made the transition from boy wonder vice president to elder statesman of his party without pausing along the way to actually accomplish anything, and Bobby Jindal, who seems to have succeeded in combining the politics of Ronald Reagan with the earnestness and credibility of Ronald McDonald, seem to agree that the biggest threat to the country is that President Obama will pass health care reform and lead the country irrevocably down the road to socialism.

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Yogi Berra-A Black Swan of Baseball

Yogi Berra was a baseball black swan because before he began his career there had never been an everyday catcher who was a consistent middle of the order power hitter. Before Berra, the best catchers in baseball had either not hit much, or had hit well with little power, like Mickey Cochrane. Three possible exceptions to this were Bill Dickey, Gabby Hartnett and Ernie Lombardi but none of them hit with Berra’s power while remaining in the lineup consistently.

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The Trading Deadline, the Wild Card and the 1960s San Francisco Giants

Today roughly 26.7% of all teams make the post-season. This is a higher proportion than ever. For most of the 20th century only 12.5% of teams played in the post-season. During the first period of divisional play, 1969-1993, between 15-17% of teams appeared in the post-season. A league where more than one quarter of the teams makes the playoffs is very different than one where one out of six or eight teams do requiring teams to adjust their strategic thinking accordingly.

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Can Biden Thread the Georgian Needle?

Biden’s challenge is to thread the needle of asserting continued American support for Georgian sovereignty while taking a more sober view of the true nature of domestic politics in Georgia. Demonstrating that while the U.S. remains committed to supporting Georgia, the U.S. also understands, and is concerned about, the shortcomings of Georgian democracy, the role of the Georgian government in those shortcomings and why this is so bad for Georgia, will show Russia, and the world, that the new American administration has a more sound and less personality and ideology based understanding of the world than the Bush administration did. This is the kind of reset U.S. Russian relations needs.

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Sonia Sotomayor and the Real Meaning of Republican Talking Points →

The problem with reading Republican talking points as your questions at confirmation hearings is that sometimes the racism comes through pretty strongly. Senator Jeff Sessions' (R-AL) comment to Sonia Sotomayor "You have suggested that a judge's background and experience will impact their decision, which goes against the American ideal that a judge will be fair to every party, and every day when they put on that robe they will put aside their personal prejudices," reveals the extent to which Sessions seems to believe that the real American backgrounds do not include those of people like Judge Sotomayor.

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Foreign Policy Limbo: Can Obama Get Us Out?

The major questions Obama faces with regards to cleaning up after President Bush are tactical and strategic–how to best wind down the war in Iraq, stabilize Pakistan, and staunch the global economic bleeding. There are, of course, also specific global hot spots where conflicts have been going on for decades, such as Kashmir and the Israel-Palestine conflict, where Obama will try to succeed where his predecessors have largely failed.

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The All Star Game is Fun, but it Isn't Baseball

The problem with the All Star Game is not that it is meaningless, it is that it isn’t baseball. More accurately the All Star Game is not a baseball game. The All Star Game is a fun mid-season break. The Future’s Game, fan fests and the like can be great events. Even home run derbies have some value as pure spectacle, but the game itself isn’t really a baseball game.

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