The Freedom to Obey

Baseball stats people are generally terrible human beings, not because they're wrong about things or the way they approach what they're passionate about. It's actually the exact opposite: they're terrible human beings because they are never wrong. Sometimes they are never wrong because they are actually never wrong, couching their truths in carefully vetted, sometimes indigestible, overly prepared nuggets, presented with a mumbling indifference to whether or not you can actually hear them and a decided lack of eye contact. And sometimes they are never wrong because they've tumbled backward into a solipsist's paradise of self-referential truth, locked in a perfect, unbreakable, impermeable ring of containment formed by chasing an ourboros of objective/subjective right down its own esophagus. Or up its own ass, depending on your trajectory.

The closest I've come to understanding the shift away from the holy trinity of batting average/RBIs/home runs is that I saw Moneyball a couple of times. Brad Pitt didn't do an accent of any kind. Jonah Hill never said "cock" once. Hey, remember when he threw all those bats in the locker room? That was crazy. Or like when they made Star-Lord learn how to play first base, but he was all "I've never played that before," but then he did it anyway? And then they won all them games, but Brad Pitt couldn't watch them because nerves or something? Yeah, it was good.

So baseball people don't really care about batting average anymore, as far as I can tell because it's possible for an average human to figure out what it is. The value of a thing is best determined by its scarcity, even if it's forced scarcity based on its intellectual inaccessibility. And the beauty is, since it's statistics, you can impose it on a community, arbitrarily declare it's unassailable right-ness BECAUSE NUMBERS and carry on with your day. You can try to push back, but what's the value of "no"? It's a simple binary. You can figure the value of "no" without having to resort to a single Greek letter. Its inadequacy is self-evident.

The stats people aren't terrible people on a moral level (although I'm sure they'll tell you, statistically speaking, a percentage of them certainly will also be that), it's because you can't actually talk to them. These are the types of people worthy of your scorn and distrust. If it helps, know they're out there judging the shit out of you right this very second.

The good thing about stats is, however,* they understand everything in the broadest context. There's nothing a stats nerd hates more than a too-small sample size. For instance, you can't be the leader in batting average if you haven't met the minimum threshold of at-bats. You can't have some doughy yokel showing up for one game, getting lucky with a couple of bunts and then retiring immediately with a .750 lifetime average. If nothing else, the stats people are gatekeepers. You will meet their criteria or you will fuck all the way off, thanks very much. And that means enough attempts to judge you fairly against others trying just as hard.

Which brings me to President Trump. I think he's been in the White House long enough now that we can start seriously asking the question: is he the worst president of my lifetime? Before it wasn't fair. He sure seemed awful in the politically conventional and basic human decency kind of scales. Like, next level awful. Like he's probably eaten human flesh in his life kind of awful. Not saying he necessarily knew it was being served when he ate it, but he probably wasn't that bothered when he found out either. He definitely didn't throw up. I would have.

But to judge him on so short a sample size would not have been fair. Coming up (OK, still five months away) on two full years in office, he's had the opportunity to do enough and potentially recover in order for us to evaluate him as a leader, as a man, as a sentient fungus, whatever the hell he's supposed to be. Basically he's more of less approaching a full Palin's length of service. And we know enough to know she sucks.

Is Trump the worst of my lifetime? Well, consider I was born just over two months before Nixon resigned. Ford was a stopgap and ultimately a joke, unable to ever recover from pardoning Nixon. Carter slogged ineffectually against a downturn in overall economic and geopolitical fortunes. Reagan, for all the reverence, was either oblivious or sinister in the face of some serious abrogation of American values AND he really could not wrap his head around the idea of poor people (like I was at the time). Bush 1 was really a second Carter. Clinton oversaw probably the pinnacle of American prosperity and global sway of my lifetime and also managed to still get impeached while also in the name of political expediency dragged the left rightward to the center, where we still linger in abandonment of labor and the disenfranchised. Bush 2 was a dithering dilettante playboy president led around by kleptocrats, cynics and moral cowards who panicked in the face of terrorism and also cost us one whole major American city. And Obama was sent here by the angels to do what he could in only eight years.

If we're talking worst presidents, the runners have to be Nixon, Bush 2 and Trump. It's tough because Nixon as a basically competent political operator still managed to be driven into a ditch by his demons. Bush 2 had a long time to really dig his claws in a try to drag the whole apparatus of government down. But Trump, in just two years.. he sort of combines both aspects, doesn't he? The paranoia of Nixon with the cronyism of Bush 2.

I don't know. I'm still hesitant to say for sure yet. Let's see how long it takes him to pardon Paul Manafort. That will be a clear sign of a winner. But I still have hope he can do it with a preponderance of the evidence, and it's mounting every single day. No president in my lifetime has shown the almost admirable propensity to take any situation and make it worse for us and for himself. There's a ways to go, but this is a Barry Bonds pace. I'm starting to believe.

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*Please never tell a sabremetrician I said a good thing about them. I will deny it with my last breath.