Life and Deatherage

The Imperfect Game

Matt Deatherage — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 08:37:07 GMT

OK, so I haven't been watching much baseball before this year, but I don't understand everyone upset about the commissioner of baseball refusing to "overturn the umpire's call," even though everyone understands Jim Joyce's call was wrong and it robbed Andrés Galaraga of a perfect game.

But it's wrong to overturn a call when other action has happened on the field. This is the same problem baseball has with broader instant replays—if you go back and find that the runner on second base was out, what do you do with the runners who advanced past third? Does a run come back? Does the play stop at the point of the officiating error? There's rarely a "dead ball" during a baseball play, so this isn't as easy as with football.

In the most-cited example of overturning an umpire's call, the "pine tar incident," the umpire's call to eject George Brett ended the game. In other words, nothing else happened afterward but arguing. Everyone who argued was ejected when the game resumed, so there was nothing else to unravel.

In Galarraga's imperfect game, there was another batter. Yes, he just grounded to first and was thrown out to end the game as a no-hitter, but the at-bat happened. To advocate that the commissioner assume God-like powers to erase at-bats, change rulings, and otherwise reverse past actions on the field is just asking for a world of trouble. It's a bad, bad idea, and the only surprise to me is that even Bud Selig had enough common sense to run far away from it.

That said, the comissioner's office is the exclusive keeper of statistics. I see no reason why Selig cannot decide that, due to extraordinary officiating error acknowledged by all parties in the game, Galarraga's game is declared to be a "perfect game" with 28 batters: 27 outs and 1 batter awarded base due to umpire error. Unlike other pitchers who lost perfect games after 26 outs, there is clear and irrefutable video evidence that the call was in error. There is no doubt the call was wrong. There is no judgment to be made in overruling the ump on something close; the error is very clear.

In addition, it should be noted that this would not work if Galarraga had not gotten the very next batter out to end the game. If you can't ignore what happened on the field, then even giving Galarraga credit for the umpire error, he couldn't have then gone on to let anyone else on base, or let the runner steal second base, or anything like that. In other words, if you remove the batter who got on base due to umpire error, it was still a perfect game.

I don't think Selig wants to set a precedent of such things, but I think his office can clearly and rationally declare that Galarraga threw baseball's 21st perfect game. The asterisk doesn't go by Galarraga's name—it goes by the "28" in "28 batters faced" to note that one batter was allowed on base due to verified umpire error.

You can't overturn the call, but you can declare—rightfully—that it was still a perfect game.

Just to be clear

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 31 May 2010 06:17:55 GMT

According to the leading "conservatives" in the nation:

It is "criminalizing politics" to investigate war crimes committed by Americans, or who ordered torture, who outed a CIA agent for political reasons, and who fired US Attorneys unless they would prosecute prominent Democrats. That's just "politics as usual."

However, when a Democrat offers another Democrat an unpaid service job if he'll run for re-election in the House and not run for election in the Senate, that's a huge scandal, requiring reviving the "independent counsel" law, and (if they're lucky) years of getting Chris Matthews to talk about how something "doesn't smell right."

Think Obama has figured out the double standard yet?

Tonight

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:39:35 GMT

…NBC premieres the most ill-conceived show in the network's history, The Tonight Show Without Conan O'Brien.

And that's saying something from the network of Supertrain, The Man from Atlantis, and Fear Factor.

The tag is the new department reserved for NBC and KFOR (Oklahoma City affiliate) exploits.

What I'm doing lately

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:15:46 GMT

Earlier in the month I had a series of scheduled doctor appointments to check on the progress of my eventual deterioration and decay. I'm pleased to report that I am not decaying at any faster rate than would normally be expected for a person my age who more or less types for a living. Heart condition is stable, everything else is stable. We made one slight medication change that I'm starting to see some benefits from and will see more over the next few weeks.

With all of those tests and appointments out of the way, some people have asked what I'm currently doing. It boils down to this:

I'm writing code in a language I don't know, to massage data that I don't have into a format that hasn't yet been determined. This data will be imported into a database that does not yet exist, so it can be very quickly and efficiently categorized and grouped using an innovative new human interface that I haven't yet invented.

Oh, and I just bit my tongue, which is only newsworthy because I wasn't eating anything at the time.

Good times.

An update on the Red Cross in Haiti

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:35:10 GMT

Last month, I encouraged you all to donate to Doctors Without Borders to help with the massive needs in Haiti, after an earthquake pretty much destroyed the impoverished nation’s capital city and killed an estimated 230,000 people, as many deaths as in the massive Asian tsunami in 2004.

I chose DWB because of long-standing reasons to avoid donating to the American Red Cross (ARC), but most specifically because in the days after the earthquake, DWB (or technically, MSF, Médicins Sans Frontières in their native French

was pledging to use donations from the linked page specifically in Haiti for relief efforts. The ARC's much-ballyhooed donation page specifically said you were donating to their general "international relief fund," not to Haiti relief, so they might spend the money in Haiti, or elsewhere, or not at all. Within a week, the situation had reversed, and I noted as much. I've removed the donation graphic from the left-hand side of the blog today because the DWB/MSF linked page no longer says anything about Haiti at all—it's just for general donations to the (quite worthy) organization.

A month has passed, and ARC has issued a "One-Month Progress Report for the American Red Cross Response." This is already more transparency than you could expect from ARC just eight years ago, but as some people are beginning to notice, there's a slight discrepancy in the numbers:

The American Red Cross has received approximately $255 million (as of February 10, 2010) for the Haiti relief and recovery efforts.

[…] To date, the American Red Cross has already spent or committed $80 million to meet the most urgent needs of earthquake survivors in Haiti. Aimed at immediate relief, approximately 69 percent of the funds committed thus far have been for food and water; 20 percent have been allocated for shelter; and the rest have been dedicated for health and family services. As the response progresses and recovery begins, the Red Cross will continue to support these priority areas and longer-term assistance initiatives.

In other words, the ARC has received $255 million for Haiti relief and recovery, but has only spent or committed to spend $80 million of that. That leaves a whopping $175 million that the ARC has received for Haiti relief that has not even been committed to projects in the country yet. That’s a metric shit-ton of money that will do a lot of good in Haiti if actually spent on recovery. As transportation infrastructure improves, it will become cheaper to get food and water into Haiti, so I’d guess $175 million is enough to provide basic food and water to tens of thousands of people for most of a year.

The $175 million question: why has ARC not “committed” this money to Haiti relief? Is it just because it’s not committed to specific projects? How long will it take to develop and fund these projects? Is this typical for other charities? Given ARC’s consistent past habits of collecting disaster relief money and spending a third or less of that money on relief for victims of that disaster, you have to wonder—and if the ARC truly is reformed and more transparent, they should answer them pre-emptively.

One more interesting note:

More than $32 million has been pledged through a record-breaking mobile giving effort in which people text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10. Thank you for enabling the American Red Cross to respond immediately and effectively as the needs on the ground evolve.

Note the verb changed: the money is not “received,” but “pledged.” That dovetails with news stories from last month noting that ARC won’t actually get the $10 from your text message until you have paid the cellphone bill for the period in which that message was billed, so anywhere from 30 to 90 days after you sent the text message. It’s possible that ARC was able to use those pledges to get no-cost credit for immediate relief efforts, or just deplete an existing fund with the assurance it would be rebuilt over a 90-day period, but it’s worth noting that ARC does not describe it as money they have. Still, 3.2 million people sending a $10 text message for help is an awesome thing that could very well change the way people around the world can individually respond to future disasters. It would be nice if the mobile carriers and credit card companies could work together to build a mechanism that would do this with much faster payment for just such emergencies. If it works out well, it could even become part of everyday commerce, provided it was secure enough.

That’s far afield from the point of people acting quickly and unselfishly to help disaster survivors, but let’s try to learn any lesson from this that we can, shall we?