Dan Lewis

The Case for Jack Morris, Hall of Famer

A few weeks ago, I took an hour and a half and watched 12 Angry Men. The whole move — all one hour, 36 minutes, and 14 seconds of it — is up on YouTube, and having seen it a few times before, I wanted to experience it again.

The movie is fiction but that doesn’t make it untrue. Of particular note is how bad the eyewitness testimony is — not one but two eyewitnesses, under penalty of perjury, recite memories which are closer to fantasy than reality. Reality echoes this, and that shouldn’t be terribly surprising. Our minds of a way of fitting our memories to a narrative all while convincing us that we’ve actually fit the narrative to our memories.

The strange debate over Jack Morris’s Hall of Fame credential is, to a large degree, this type of battle. (Sure, there are many other factors in play, some perhaps more nefarious than Morris’ supporters would otherwise admit.) Guys like Jon Heyman — who I’m assuming have supported Morris’ candidacy from the first time he could vote for him — believe that their memories of Morris’s career trump any further analysis, and if the stats say otherwise, the stats are flawed.

I disagree with Heyman et al, but that’s besides the point. Let’s look at their memories.

First, some context. Morris’ career began in 1977 and ended in 1994. The media landscape during the majority, if not all, of Morris’s career is foreign to what is available today. (To put that in perspective, ESPN debuted in 1979 and didn’t have Major League Baseball games until 1990; New York’s flagship sports radio station WFAN first broadcast in 1987; and Google didn’t incorporate until 1998.) Most of Morris’s games were on local broadcast television, with highlights few and far between — and, even then, just that: highlights. On the other hand, Morris, unlike most pitchers of his era, had a lot of national TV exposure. He was selected to five All-Star Games. He pitched in four post-seasons, including in the World Series three times. He threw a no-hitter on live, national TV.

By and large — the 1993 World Series aside — his appearances before the nation as a whole reflected positively on his abilities and fame. Of the five All-Star Games he played in, he started three and was the second pitcher out of the gate the other two times. He was the MVP of the 1991 World Series, having pitched one of the greatest games in Major League history, and threw two complete games in the 1984 Series. (He won the Baseball Writers’ Association’s version of the World Series MVP, the Babe Ruth Award, in both 1984 and 1991.)

And when he appeared in headlines or highlight shows, those, too, were by and large positive. All those Opening Day starts bandied about suggest that he was looked at by his team as the ace of the staff, whether it be in Detroit, Minnesota, or Toronto. Similarly his two 20-win seasons and his status as the highest-paid AL pitcher in four different seasons certainly made headlines.

Taken together and it’s easy to see why guys like Heyman believe Morris is a no-brainer Hall of Famer. The writers had lots of exposure to his league-leading 14 wins in the strike-shortened 1981 season, his league-leading 293 strikeouts in 1983, his no-hitter and World Series title in 1984, his second All-Star start in 1985, his 21-win season in 1986, and his 18-win season leading the Tigers to the AL East pennant in 1987. Many memories of his greatness — or very-good-plus-ness — were formed during that period in the minds of BBWAA members near and far.

Memories also have a habit of ignoring the bad stuff. Morris was mediocre at best for the next three years, sure. But 1991 and 1992 allow our minds to pave over that.

And then comes the peculiarity of the ballot. When Morris first became eligible in 2000, he only received 22.2% of the vote, and stayed in the 20s (dipping into the teens even) until 2005, when he hit 33.3%. Since then, he’s been mostly climbing, breaking 50% in 2010 and two-thirds in 2012.

I think a major cause of this is, again, our memory’s fragile grasp of reality, and inability to confess to that flaw.

Ask most current BBWAA voters about Jim Kaat, Tommy John, and Jack Morris, and by and large, they’ll tell you that Morris had something special, even though it’s hard to see in the stats. But they finished 11th through 13th, respectively, on the 2003 ballot. Kaat, in his final year of eligibility, received 130 votes; John 116, Morris 113. (The only starting pitcher above them was Bert Blyleven, which I’ll get to in a second.) The 2004 season took care of that narrative issue — Morris picked up 20 votes while John actually lost five, and Kaat was off the ballot. In 2005, John rebounded slightly, picking up 11 votes. But Morris separated from him, and for good. Morris had established himself to be the best of the three.

Emerging from this triumvirate of very good pitchers isn’t immaterial, either.  From 2000 — Morris’ first eligible year — until 2011, no other starting pitcher made it to the third year on the ballot. Morris had established himself, somehow, as the clear second-best pitcher of these Hall of Fame ballot classes. (The fact that that group is, in and of itself, not cohesive really doesn’t matter, because it lends itself to the narrative created by selective memories.) Not a single starting pitcher was inducted from 2000 to 2010, inclusive. And the only starting pitcher thus far inducted to the Hall during Morris’ 14 years on the ballot is Blyleven, who doesn’t have the Camelot-esque career highlights that Morris does. The end result is that each of these four pitchers helps further Morris’ case, because it’s easy for our faulty memories to insist that Morris was simply better — much better — than John or Kaat or Blyleven.

And, unfortunately, that’s how guys like Jon Heyman define “fame.” A decade and a half full of memories of triumphs, with failures unseen or ignored. Another decade compared to guys who simply weren’t as triumphant, with objective measures unimportant. It’s not hard to see how this happened.

But it’s very hard to see how it could be avoided. We’re human, all of us, and we have tendencies to favor our guts even in spite of evidence to the contrary. We let our biases override reason and create legends which defy reality. We testify against teenage Hispanic kids on trial for murder because somehow, we become convinced that’s what happened, and 11 of us assume that we’re telling the truth even when Henry Fonda suggests otherwise — at least at first.

The problem is that the voting rules and, more importantly, the voting pool, are constructed in such a way that this outcome is too likely. The voters, by and large, share the same experiences, same backgrounds, and same biases. They all define “fame” in a very similar way — by relying on their memories even though memories are unreliable.  So long as the Hall of Fame gives the BBWAA dominion over that definition, Jack Morris is a border-line Hall of Famer. Even though he shouldn’t be.

Thinking about Paywalls and Writing

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andrew Sullivan’s new venture (still) and wanted to get some thoughts down. These may be disjointed — I’m using this post as a scrapbook of sorts.

In general, writers probably want to spread their ideas as much as they want to make money.

Books do both, but online, the expected cost for the reader is $0. If you charge, you lost the vast majority of that audience — like the penny gap, but for content.

The default rule should, therefore, be that you don’t want to charge people to read. Forget the business model for a moment — if your goal is to influence or something similar, it makes a lot more sense to keep (most of?) the content free.

This isn’t absolute, even if the given is true. Gated content at a top publication (e.g. ESPN’s Insider) is probably better than ungated content at a much smaller one, but that’s an ever-thinning exception outside of sports (where ESPN is the clear market leader). Part of the value comes from the size of the publication, as your reach is larger even with the paywall; part comes from the reputational value of the larger pub (which is probably why books are still awesome for spreading ideas).

Reader-experience aside, where the money comes from shouldn’t really matter much.

This isn’t an observation about ads. Let’s assume you solicit donations to support your writing. $100,000 from one person is the same as $10 from 10,000 people each. Assuming that there’s no expectations on behalf of the donor, the two should be identical to the writer.

There are some exceptions to this, too. Some people believe that if you don’t pay for content, you shouldn’t be entitled to it; or, perhaps, that if some people pay, others shouldn’t be entitled to it.

There may be more money in ex post donations than ex ante purchases.

This is rank speculation on my part. But: are people buying access to future Andrew Sullivan content, or donating in thanks of past content? I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s more the latter than the former:

I’m eyeballing this, and, treating the $20 buyers as the same as $19.99 buyers, it looks like about 60% of his day-one buyers spent the minimum. I think it’s fair to say that the other 40% are as much donors as they are purchasers — and obviously, some (I’d say the 10% who paid $50 or more) are clearly donors over purchasers.

In Defense of Murray Chass

In the summer of 1989, I think — give or take a year — my sleepaway camp bunkmates and I got to do something special: watch the All-Star Game.

On tape. A few days after the game.

My camp experience was one low on media usage. We had radios, but you couldn’t use them in the bunk at night (when most baseball games were played) as it’d disturb others, and there were few TVs available to campers, and certainly not on a regular basis. In order to watch the All-Star Game, a bunkmate’s family had to literally mail us a VHS of it, and even then, it wasn’t clear that we’d get to watch it. The camp wasn’t anti-TV as much as it was just scheduled and set up for other stuff — you know, like swimming and boating and actually playing sports — and the counselors had to find a time for us to watch, as well as find a time that a VCR was free.

But my friends and I were still huge baseball fans, and we were set on following the Mets. One of the buildings on camp — the name and purpose escape me — had newspapers, and we made a point of checking the box scores each day and reading the various game reports. It still amazes me how one can get a pretty vivid picture of what happened in a baseball just by perusing a box score, but that’s a story for another day.

I’m pretty sure the counselors had access to more media than we did. In my four summers at camp, I don’t think I made it to the staff lounge more than once, if that; I have absolutely not recollection of what the staff lounge looked like, and only a vague one of where it even is on the campus. I know they had movies available and the movies weren’t terribly old (unless they were classics), and I’m pretty sure they had broadcast TV if not cable. But it was 1988 or so, and while cable TV was pretty common then, it was probably only in about 50-65% of US households.

I don’t know how summer camp is nowadays but I can’t imagine it’s as light on media use. It just can’t be — there’s no way a staff made up of 18- to 30-year-olds is going to give up email, Facebook, etc. — and I’m betting that the campers therefore have a similar increase in allowed media use. They’re probably not allowed to have phones on them, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re allowed tablets (in bunk?), some wifi time, and maybe even a data plan for them. But that’s not why I’m telling the camp story.

One year in middle school — maybe the same one as that camp summer, maybe not, but it doesn’t matter — and two friends had put out a “zine” — Wikipedia defines it as “a small circulation self-published work of original and/or appropriated texts and images usually reproduced via photocopier” — about the upcoming baseball season. They drew pictures of Will Clark, Wally Joyner, and others, and talked about their predictions for the year. I think they sold the zine for a quarter or a dollar or maybe five. It was a great idea and another friend of mine and I copied it and made our own.

Back in 1989, a die-hard baseball fan could have the experiences I just did. But think about how incongruent they are. In the summer — the summer! baseball season! — I happily went away and had virtually no access to baseball for four or eight weeks. (We did go to a game at Fenway once, which was awesome.) And then, a few months later, I was waxing poetic about how David Cone would win a Cy Young and selling that to my friends. It’s crazy…

… for 2013.

For 1989 — especially a pre-teen then — it actually makes a ton of sense. My access to information was in books like the Baseball Encyclopedia (which was the best present my father ever received; it was a gag gift that he had no interested in but I ended up reading probably cover to cover) and the Elias Baseball Analysts I picked up from the used book cart for a dollar. There were no advanced stats available (I hadn’t heard of Bill James, nor had my friends) and it’d be until 1990 before “WAR” got a baseball context — and it was this, not the stat. The truth is that most fans didn’t have a great amount of insight into how good a player was other than what we saw on TV, and we only got to see the players who played for and against our hometown team. For a New York-area kid like me, that was pretty cool, because I got all the Mets games, all the Yankee games, all the Braves games (TBS!), and some of the Red Sox games (at times, our cable carrier had their channel). With that, This Week in Baseball!, and whatever the national games of the week were, I had a chance to watch everyone from Mike Schmidt and George Brett to Nolan Ryan and yes, Wally Joyner.

But really, we got our news from the newspaper. And because of that, we got our opinions from the newspaper. Guys like Murray Chass were the gatekeepers of what we thought about guys like Jack Morris, Bert Blyleven, Dale Murphy, Jim Rice, and Dave Concepcion. Sure, I could look up their batting averages and W-L totals, but the story behind the numbers was the newspapers’ for the telling.

When the Hall of Fame decided to let baseball writers decide who should be added to the Hall of Fame, it relied on writers because it had little other choice. No one else really had their pulse on the game — except players, managers, etc., and they were clearly too biased — and no one else was creating memories which, five to 20 years after a player’s retirement, could be used to determine if that player should be forevermore enshrined in the hallowed halls of Cooperstown. And by and large, they were already determining what our collective memories were anyway. Case in point: I have almost no memory of Bobby Grich, whose career ended just a few years before my life as a baseball fan began. But I know who Rod Carew, Don Sutton, and Reggie Jackson are — even though all of them retired around the same time and, not coincidentally, all were teammates of Grich in 1985. The latter three are in the Hall of Fame. Grich didn’t even receive 5% of the vote in his first (and therefore only) year on the ballot. (And he should be in the Hall.)

It’s these memories that determine whether a guy like Chass gets your vote. Our brains form a narrative that we just can’t shake, and honestly, why should we? Why should a 50-year veteran of baseball writing, who, for decades, has been charged with trusting his memory and years-formed impressions in casing a Hall of Fame vote, change? It would take an incredibly open-minded and self-confident person to reconsider his vote against Bobby Grich 20 years ago, especially considering Grich hasn’t taken to the field in over 25. Or to doubt his contemporaneously formed belief, however baseless, that Mike Piazza used steroids. Or that Jack Morris was a sure-fire Hall of Famer. The truth is that few of us could decide that the 50 year of our life spent mentally developing a grand theory of everything baseball could be, well, wrong.

Make no mistake about it: Chass is wrong. He’s relying on something terribly faulty — his memory of events from fifteen to twenty years ago. In 1989, Jack Morris went 6-14 with an ERA over 4.86, which isn’t the line one would expect from a 34 year-old pitcher who, now, is on the cusp of entry into the Hall of Fame. Memories have a habit of selecting some things and discarding others. In 1989, my bunkmates and I were going to watch the All-Star Game, on tape, a few days after the game was actually played. But I don’t remember if we watched it. I don’t think we did, and I think it had something to do with rain, a broken VCR, and … actually, I have no idea.

But that doesn’t make my impressions of camp and middle school baseball zines any less valid. Or, at least, I don’t want them to be.

The problem with Murray Chass’ Hall of Fame vote isn’t that it’s wrong — it is — or that it’s based on the romanticized baseball universe he’s created in his own mind. We’re all guilty of that.  Jack Morris wasn’t nearly as good as Chass remembers; the so-called evidence of Piazza’s PED use wasn’t nearly as great as Chass claims.

The problem is that Murray Chass has a vote for the Hall of Fame. He does so because in 1989 — and for that matter, for decades before and years after — that made the utmost sense. But today? It’s not even close.

Blame Murray Chass for violating Wheaton’s Law — he does so in spades, and at seemingly every opportunity. Blame him for publishing a defamatory screed simply because he has a Hall of Fame vote. Blame him for his ad hominem attacks on the newer members of his hallowed group of baseball writers. Blame him for his faux elitism and insistence that he doesn’t write a blog. I agree wholeheartedly, on all counts.

But don’t blame him for casting a Hall of Fame vote the way he does. Blame the Hall for that.

A Reverse-Kickstarter Content Platform

I’d gladly pay $20 a month for thoughtful, insightful technology news & opinion that wasn’t forced to drive traffic & clicks.

— Michael Gartenberg (@Gartenberg) January 2, 2013

Today, Andrew Sullivan announced that he’s going to create his own, ad-free, reader-supported publication. Readers will get a metered amount of free content, but for all-you-can-eat access, it’ll cost you $19.99 per year. This sparked a lot of conversations and thoughts, and a few of them seem to be in the same vein: much like we paid for great content in when it was in magazines and newspapers, we’d do so digitally. I generally think that’s correct, and there’s plenty of examples to that point. I subscribe to Joe Sheehan’s baseball newsletter, for example, at the cost of $24.95/year. That’s just one case and it’s on the edges at that.

But for the content creator, the risk to take this step is enormous. Why give up the (ad-driven) revenue, the audience, and the (low barrier to entry-driven) growth of the free offering?

There are a few ways to hedge this risk. The most obvious one is a Kickstarter — ask the audience to fund it to $x amount, and, if it hits that, flip the switch. But that requires the content creator to take the initiative, and, even then, Kickstarter suffers from being a one-size-fits-all platform.

So what if we reversed it and made it specialized? Specifically:

1) Make it so readers initiated the fundraising.

I’m going to focus here on writing, but it obviously applies to a bunch of other things — anything where fans can come together and create a market opportunity for the product. (Like, say, TV shows.) But in part because of specialization point, and because Andrew Sullivan’s move to go indy sparked this, I’m focusing on the written word.

There are plenty of writers who I’d love to read more of. Malcolm Gladwell springs to mind. I’ve read all four of his books, watched his TED Talk on spaghetti sauce a few times, read many of his New Yorker columns, etc. But he hasn’t written much lately. His last book came out in late 2009. His gladwell.com blog hasn’t been updated in two years. He contributed only four pieces to the New Yorker last year.

The list price of his most recent book was $16.99 and had roughly 24 articles. They’re magazine-length ones, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect one of those every two to three weeks. But I’d be happy with shorter articles that came regularly and were, perhaps, more contemporary with what’s going on in the world. Say $20 for a 24 articles — one every two weeks with a couple of breaks here or there, over the course of the year.

Obviously, he’s not going to write that for me — not for $20. But what if a group of Gladwell fans got together and pooled their money? At some point (obvious joke omitted) he’d give in.

But there’s no good platform to do this.

2) The platform needs to be the entire product experience.

I’ve been playing with Medium on and off — here’s one piece I wrote about the Mets — and it’s a clean page with a great WYSIWYG. As a writer, it was a pleasure to use, and as a reader, it’s a great reading experience. I have high hopes for what they’re building because of that.

So what if Medium created the reverse-Kickstarter aspect?

We want writers to focus on writing, not the business operations and technical stuff. (Click on Gladwell’s blog in Chrome — which in his defense didn’t exist when he last wrote there — and you’ll see it’s a mess.) By and large, to have that happen, it means there’s a publisher, and the publisher (typically) monetizes via ads — but in any event, looks to maximize profits over aesthetics and, as Mr. Gartenberg alludes to, quality. Gladwell shouldn’t be expected to write things which necessarily are designed to attract clicks or ad dollars. He should be expected to write things which, like his books, are things people will gladly pay to read.

So the “publisher” here has to be a platform which profits off this model and is agnostic to the rest. Medium seems like a good starting point because it emphasizes the aesthetic and the quality of the content (see, e.g., the hiring of Kate Lee). Imagine if Medium allowed for fans of writers to do this reverse-Kickstarter thing as described in point 1, and, if the writer met some quantitative and perhaps qualitative benchmarks, released the money (minus 5%) to the author along the way.

I’d love to see this combo happen.

Two-Tiered Fantasy Baseball: Let’s Build This Thing

Short version:

• Take a regular fantasy baseball league — 5×5, fantasy points, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Has to be an auction draft and a keeper league though. Determine the winner however you want. The competitors are the owners/GMs of the teams. You know, standard fare.
• Add a second league next to it. The competitors are agents. Winner is the agent who makes the most money in any given season.

Longer version:

Let’s start with step 2, because it’ll make it easier to understand if we momentarily skip step 1.  Oh, and all the numbers — salary cap and stuff — they’re just for explanation’s sake. I didn’t try and balance them to make sense.

Step 2: It’s the first year of the league. The GMs have their auction. Each GM has a $120 million budget for this year. Players are auction off as you would in a regular league auction.

Straightforward, right?

Before we get to Step 1, let me explain how agents make money, at least in this fictional world for the game.

Agents:

1) Take paid a percentage of their players’ contracts and

2) Maybe get some money if a player does well and/or if his team does well.  Think of this as a proxy for endorsement deals — if an agent represents the guy who lead the league in homers and his team won the World Series, the player would probably get some big deal from Gatorade or Nike or someone, and the agent would probably get a cut. I don’t know if this one is workable, though. It’d be cool, but may be too hard to pull off.

So anyway, Step one.

Step 1: Agents have their auction. I don’t know how it’d work exactly, but here’s what I’m thinking:

• Each agent gets $5m or $10m, not sure. Let’s use $5m for example. It’s not a salary cap because remember, they’re being measured by who makes the most money, and whatever they spend, they lose, so keep that in mind.
• Agents bid on players in a bid-or-pass style auction, with two numbers in play: dollars and percentage points. Dollars go in $10k increments, starting at $10k and going up. Percentage points go in 1% increments, starting at 25% and going down.
• Basically, agents spend $$$ to wine and dine players, so that’s the dollar stuff. They also negotiate with players by taking a smaller and smaller percentage of the contract.
• An agent can outbid another agent by upping the ante in either tranche during their turn.  So if Albert Pujols is up, and the current bid is $100,000 and 8%, you can go to $110,000 and 8% or $100,000 and 7%.

So taking Step 1 and Step 2 together, let’s say you’re Albert Pujols’ agent — and to make it simply (and stupid), he’s your only client — and you spent $1m entertaining him and agreed to take only 3% of his contract.  The GM who won him at auction bid $20 million. You’d end up with 3% of that, or $600k.  So you have $5m – $1m + $600k = $4.6m in your war chest… if it ended there. (And you’d clearly suck as an agent.)

But wait, there’s more.

Step 3: GMs and agents negotiate long term contracts.

Consider the auction bid an offer sheet, and one which either side can unilaterally impose upon the other at any given point in the negotiations, ending it right then and there.  It’s not a floor, necessarily, although practically I guess it would be.

What’s up for negotiation? I’d keep it mostly simple:

• Years
• Salary per year
• No trade clause
• Options and buyouts

But you can get creative if the league allows. Imaginations can come up with really neat things.

After that, it’s mostly a regular league, except that agents are involved in transactions.

***

For regular player salaries, players — and therefore agents — get paid in quarter increments, one each on Opening Day, June 1, August 1, and October 1.  This has an effect on both GMs and agents. For GMs, it means that if you have $20m left in your budget on August 2, you can take on effectively $80m in player salaries, because 75% of those salaries have already been paid out.

Agents get paid when the player gets paid. However, that gets locked in once the deal is signed. So as long as the deal isn’t renegotiated, the agent gets paid even if he no longer represents the player, up to one year after he or she lost representation of that player. (So long as what?? We’ll get there.)

The implication here is that agents have to manage their cash flow a bit — and of course, they’ll prefer signing bonuses to buyouts.  (Whether the league allows the agents and GMs to put in other $$$-laden clauses is up to them; again, your imagination is the limit.)

***

Agents can try and steal players from other agents. I have no real good way to do this, but here’s what I’m thinking: a morale check, followed by an offer and option to match (maybe?).

Each player has a morale number. It’s calculated — and I’m doing this off the top of my head — by:

• Start with 10.
• Subtract one if the player’s team (in the league, not in real life) is currently in the bottom half of the standings.
• Subtract one more if the player’s team is in the cellar.
• Subtract one the player is not one of the three highest played players on his team, by both current year salary *and* average annual value (excluding performance bonuses and options and buyouts?).
• Subtract one more if the player is not one of the eight highest played players on his team, using the same formula as above.
• Subtract one if the player is not one of the five highest played players at his position, same math.
• Subtract one more if he’s not one of the 10 highest played players at his position, ditto.
• Subtract one for every *other* agent who has tried to steal the player away from his current agent.
• Add three if the current agent represent three or more other players on the player’s current team.
• Subtract three if the above bullet isn’t true *and* the stealing agent has three or more other players on the player’s current team.

(Note that the last two bullets encourage agents to try and manipulate rosters.)

The morale check: If the player’s morale is 7+, he can’t be stolen.

After that, the terms of the steal attempt are up to the stealing agent. He spends some dollar amount on a steal, and if the current agent matches (with morale notes below), the current agent keeps the player and the stealing agent can’t try again for six months. If the current agent doesn’t match, the player switches agents and gets a +4 morale boost which wears off, 1 point per payday (as above) until it hits 0 in a year.

The terms of the agreement between the new agent and player — as well as what it takes for the current/old agent to stop the steal — are determined by the morale check described above:

• 4+, he can be, but the stealing agent has to match the percentage the player negotiated with the current agent *and* the current agent only has to spend half as much to match.
• 0+, the stealing agent can offer a worse percentage to the player by 2% (which he would) *and* the current agent has to match the full money offered.
• Under zero, the stealing agent can offer 2% worse *and* the current agent has to double the money the offered by the current agent.

Too complicated maybe. Too D&D, for sure. Maybe it needs a few d20s, dunno.

***

I think this could be fun. Stuff like no-trade clauses would be awesome, where you basically have to buy out the agent, and the agent may really really not want a player traded because of the morale hit other players would take, etc.

I don’t know how the second year would work. Part of me thinks free agents should negotiate contracts via their agents; part of me thinks it should be done via auction, just like the initial year. I also don’t know how unrepresented players would enter the league. None whatsoever.

But that’s the basics. What do you think?

Barone v. Silver, the Tally

Before the election, I wrote this, treating Michael Barone’s state-by-state picks as bets against Nate Silver’s system. To recap, Barone picked 15 states as battleground states, calling 10 for Romney and 5 for Obama. He “wagered” $3,634 on the Romney picks and $4,950 on the Obama ones. Each correct pick pays out $1,000 to Barone.

The five states Barone picked for Obama all paid out for him, so he grossed $5,000 on those bets, netting fifty bucks. That’s about a 1% return on investment, which is positive but tiny. If there were a vig, Barone would have lost.

With Florida not yet decided, Barone’s picks for Romney are a trainwreck for his bank account. Only two, Indiana (which he bought for $998, making two bucks) and North Carolina (bought at $796) paid out. That’s $2,000 recouped from his $3,634 investment. If Florida ends up going to Romney, too (and it looks unlikely), Barone will be $634 in the hole.  That’s pretty terrible.

This is Why People Don’t Vote

My voting experience today:

7:20 AM: Dropped off one son at the bus. Went back to the apartment to pick up my other son. He had to be at preschool at 9:00. The plan is to go vote, go back home to make/pick up his lunch, and then go to his school, which is four blocks from our place.

7:25 AM: Arrived at polling station, PS 290 in Manhattan, two and a half blocks away.

7:30 AM: Arrived at the end of the line at the polling station. Line extended roughly half a city block, avenue to avenue. It was cold, but not very cold, at roughly 37 degrees.

7:50 AM:  Entered the PS 290 cafeteria/gymnasium. It wasn’t clear where I should go. Some people already knew their electoral district, but I didn’t, so after a minute or two, I was directed to a table where a poll worker helped me out. The person before me, though, kept giving his last name, and the poll worker wanted to know his street address; that’s what the book had. But there was no sign telling us that. There was, literally, nothing.  The poll worker kept saying “I don’t need that” but it wasn’t clear that he was talking to the guy in front of me (who kept saying his last name). He could have been talking to anyone.  I’m sure it only took about a minute or two to shake this all out, but it felt like forever. I’m finally instructed to go to Electoral District 54.

7:57 AM: Found the line for Electoral District 54. (Yes, it took seven minutes to find the right line.)

8:00 AM: Still in line — and, in fact, the line isn’t even moving. We notice that three of the six ballot scanning machines are broken. A poll worker tells someone else that a technician has been called in, but who knows when he or she will reply. The end of the line for ED 54 is probably ten or fifteen people behind me, but it snakes around the lines for EDs 61, 75, and 76. At one point, I’m standing next to the last person in the line for 61, who is facing the person who is at the back of the line for 76, but thinks he’s the last person in line for 75 because those two lines momentarily merged.

I tweeted out the words my son and I had been hearing: “‘chaos’ ‘disorganized’ ‘ confusing’ are the words of the day at the voting location. Broken scanners, impossibly shaped lines.

8:05 AM: The line still isn’t moving. There are three people in front of me, all of whom, like me, went to the table described above to find out which ED they were in. All three were directed to ED 54, like me. All three had voted in the past and, therefore, should still be registered. All three were told that their names weren’t on the voting rolls. (One of the three had even gone to another polling location first, and directed to PS 290.)

Of the three, two were older. One lady had been voting at PS 290 for 35 years, as she said over and over, and was insistent that she be able to vote. Good for her, but there wasn’t much the poll workers could do — they had no idea what was happening, either. They offered to give her an absentee ballot (their words) and an affidavit (again, their words) but she wanted to vote right then, right there.  The other two people also had similar objections but she was leading the argument. I’m not sure what ended up happening with them.

8:10 AM:  I finally get my ballot (and thank you to the poll worker who pretended to look for my son’s name in the rolls; nice touch!) and walk across the room to the little voting stations. Distance: five feet. But I’m going across the flow of (heavy) foot traffic, so getting their was tough, and I was pulling my four year old along, too. I fill out my ballot, explain it to my son, and go to get in line for the scanners. At this point, the line is so long that I actually have to walk past the scanning stations because the line is snaking back and forth.

8:20 AM: We haven’t moved more than a few feet yet. My wife texts me to ask if I’ll be on time for my son’s preschool; 50/50. She decides to meet me there with his lunch.  (Good call.)

8:28 AM: Line is still moving very slowly. We’re less than half way to the scanners. But now I know why it’s going so slowly: five of the six scanning machines are now broken.

8:37 AM: The line starts moving, and quickly. Why? Because all six scanners are now broken, so our ballots are now being put into “emergency ballot boxes” to be scanned later.  The poll worker takes my voting card, circles the scanner I used (“E”), but doesn’t check off the box that says “This is an Emergency Ballot.” I point that out, and she says that it isn’t an emergency ballot. I point to the box I just put my ballot into, which reads “emergency ballot box” and she looks at me, says “oops, yeah…” and then flips through all the cards where she didn’t check off the box. She checks my box off and then says “that won’t matter,” confidently.  The next person’s box is checked off without any conversation.

8:40 AM: We’re out of there, having (probably) voted.

8:45 AM: We arrive at my son’s preschool.

The total trip took about an hour and fifteen minutes, which is long but isn’t terrible. But factor these three things in as well:

1) This is my ballot (blank). The Presidential election (as far as NY’s electoral votes are concerned) is a lock for Obama. Gillenbrand is a 40 point (!) favorite for Senate. The Maloney/Wight House race is considered non-competitive with Maloney to win. The same goes for both the State House and State Senate races. And the ten people running for judge are unopposed.

2) Upon arrival, there was no way to know how long the process would take. At 8:28, I had been waiting in the scanning line for about 20 minutes and was less than half way there. And I had been waiting, in total, for an hour. A person who arrived next to me at 7:25 could have reasonably expected a two hour wait, if not longer. But they also could have expected a wait of 10 to 20 minutes — that’s how long it took to get in the building, and there were rumors of things moving quickly inside. (That’s potentially true; for all I know, all six scanners may have been operational at 7:30.)

3) There are too many points where people can rationally drop out. When building a web product, you try and minimize the number of steps. The reason: each time you add a step, you add a place for someone to drop out.  There were five times a person could rationally dropped out here: (1) getting in the line outside; (2) getting into the building and figuring out where to go next; (3) waiting in the ED54 line while the three lost people were tended to; (4) waiting in the incredibly long scanning line; and (5) turning in my ballot without it being scanned.  I know of at least one person who left at step 1, two who turned around at step 2, and I saw one person leave at step 3. I almost left in step 4 — I had to get my son to school at 9:oo, and would have had to carry my ballot with me until I could get back to the voting booth. (Update: Others did the same.)  And if I were in a swing state and/or a cynic, I may have left in step 5, and only returned when the scanners were working.

Voting turnout numbers aren’t just low because of apathy. It’s way too difficult. This is why people don’t vote.

Barone v. Silver

Political analyst Michael Barone has a column out predicting that Governor Mitt Romney will defeat President Barack Obama rather handily. Meanwhile, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, as of this writing, has Obama as better than a 4:1 favorite. Only one of them can be correct, of course, and that’s nothing new. But Barone calls the winner of 15 individual states — most analysts don’t bother to do that.

Let’s turn Barone’s picks into wagers, instead, with the odds set by Silver. Or, for sake of clarity, what if Silver sold $1,000 payout wagers on the outcomes of each of the 15 states Barone listed, with the price of each such wager being $10 per percentage point that Silver’s model predicts? For example, let’s say Barone wanted to bet that Romney would win Indiana. (That’s one of his 15 picks.) Silver says that Romney is a 99.8% chance to win it, so Barone pays $998. If Romney wins Indiana, he’d get $1,000; otherwise, Silver would keep Barone’s money.

Barone made the following picks. In the parentheses after each pick is Silver’s odds, at $1 per .1%, that the person Barone chose will win the state. That’s how much it’d cost Barone to make that $1,000 payout wager.

Barone’s picks, Romney to win:

* Indiana ($998)

* North Carolina ($796)

* Florida ($548)

* Ohio ($162)

* Virginia ($330)

* Colorado ($321)

* Iowa ($193)

* New Hampshire ($196)

* Pennsylvania ($34)

* Wisconsin ($56)

In total, Barone is paying $3,634 for a combined chance at winning $10,000. Most of that upside comes from longshot bets (according to Silver, at least) in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire. But that’s how odds work.

Barone’s picks, Obama to win:

* Minnesota ($990)

* Oregon ($987)

* New Mexico ($989)

* New Jersey ($998)

* Michigan ($986)

Not a lot of upside here, but also, not a lot of risk. (Again, that’s how odds should work.) Barone’s risking $4,950 to win $5,000, which means he can make $50 here. Consider it a hedge against his Wisconsin wager, I guess.

I’ll revisit this post on Tuesday/Wednesday to see how well Barone did against Silver’s odds. It may not be worth it to bother with his Obama-to-win bets (or, for that matter, Indiana) as there’s no meaningful disagreement between the two, and a miss by both would skew the numbers dramatically.

My Jon Stewart Guests Number

Nate Silver, a baseball blogger who is now a much bigger deal, was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart a week or so ago.

Bill from The Platoon Advantage has met Nate and made a neat (Nate?) observation:

So I was wondering:

How many of Jon Stewart’s guests have I met and chatted with?

Here’s my list, using Wikipedia’s list of guests as my guide. Some people were on more than once; I’m only putting up their first appearance date.

1) Richard Perle, January 27, 2004. I know a family member of his and met him via that person. Short conversation, nothing about national security came up. But definitely a “chat.”

2) Katie Couric, December 16, 2004. Met her at the When Families Grieve launch event. Someone introduced me to her and we spoke for about a minute or two about the program.

3) Marci Hamilton, July 11, 2005. She is a professor at Cardozo, where I went to law school, and we’ve spoken here and there.

4) Craig Newmark, February 26, 2007. I’ve met him a few times. Gotten coffee and everything. Good guy.

5) Jimmy Wales, January 5, 2011. I used to work for him and know him well. Strangely, I’ve been offered Daily Show tickets once in my life. That date? January 5, 2011. That’d have been weird.

6) Kevin Clash, October 24, 2011. I work for him, kind of.

7) Lawrence Lessig, December 13, 2004. Jimmy (#5) brought him in to speak to us at Wikia once. I spoke with him afterward about copyright and federal financing of campaigns.

So my Jon Stewart Number is 7. For now. If you only count those who know who I am, it’d be three — Craig, Jimmy, and Kevin.

Honorable Mention:

1) Miss Piggy, July 13, 1999. I don’t know Miss Piggy but I know her performer — probably. It’s not clear who performed her that day. But I’ve never met Piggy so this doesn’t count either way. (Kermit was on the show on February 13, 2001, but to date, I haven’t met his performer.)

2) Al Roker, July 20, 2000. He lives/lived in my neighborhood, and I see him around every so often. He once stood in front of me at checkout at the grocery store and I said hi. We didn’t really “chat” so it doesn’t count.

3) Joe Lieberman, September 14, 2000. His step-son (?) went to the same camp I did, and on visiting day, I apparently had a conversation with him about something, but it was only afterward that someone told me I was speaking with Joe Lieberman. And I may not have been, actually, because his step-son (or whomever) wasn’t in my age group, so it’s unlikely that it was me that Senator Lieberman was speaking with. But at least one person said I did.

4) Paul Reubens, better known as Pee Wee Herman, April 9, 2001. We’ve never met, but of February 18, 2012, he tweeted a link to Now I Know. That has to count for something, right?

5) John McCain, July 26, 2001. Met him at a book signing. We chatted for about three seconds, if you include the two seconds it took for him to sign a copy of his book for me. Doesn’t count.

6) Rich Eisen, August 15, 2002. We’ve spoken on the phone, via Twitter, and via email a number of times — although he probably doesn’t recall most of them — but have never met.

7) Joe Scarborough, September 30, 2003. I heard him speak once and am about 50% sure I went up to speak with him after, albeit briefly, and, apparently, inconsequentially if I did.

8) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, May 5, 2004. Met him, said hi, no conversation. I took a lot of pictures, but there was no “chat” there. I didn’t even introduce myself.

9) Floyd Abrams, April 25, 2005. Went to my old synagogue. Met him at a kiddush club once but it was just a “hi, nice to meet you” thing, if that, until one of his friends came by. Spoke with his wife a bit (it was their anniversary), though.