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Disclaimers & Terms of Use	John Kerry's Positions on Iraq

Rany Jazayerli has a good point about the Royals' acquisition of Matt Kinney:

I don’t know why on earth the Brewers would waive Matt Kinney.

Start with the reasons why they did. He’s now on his fourth organization; the Red Sox traded him to Minnesota for Greg Swindell back in 1998, and the Twins dealt him to Milwaukee two years ago when they ran out of room on their 40-man roster. He’s got a 5.18 career ERA, which isn’t good. Like far too many Royals’ pitchers, he’s a little too prone to flyballs (0.83 G/F ratio, 55 HR in 361 career IP).

Now here are all the reasons why they shouldn’t have. He’s not that old (27). He’s cheap ($400,000), although I think he’ll be arbitration-eligible this winter. He can miss bats, and he’s getting better at it. His K/9 ratio is 6.80 for his career, and consider this progression: 5.10, 6.14, 7.18, 7.51. Last season, he struck out 152 batters in 190 innings. Do you know how long it’s been since a Royals pitcher struck out 152 batters? Try 1997, by a pre-injury Kevin Appier.

And most importantly, he appears to have taken a big leap forward this season. His strikeout rate is the best of his career…and so is his walk rate (3.32 per 9). His ERA this season is 5.78, but most of that damage was done in the season’s first six weeks. His ERA on May 15th was 8.61; since then, this is his line:

31.2 IP, 35 H, 4 HR, 7 BB, 30 K, 3.13 ERA.

Plus, it’s worth noting that he’s been awfully hit-unlucky this year, surrendering 8 hits more than expected, which is a pretty margin in just 62 innings.

And we’re not talking about a soft-tosser; Kinney throws in the mid-90s, and was considered a top prospect in the minor leagues.

So why did the Brewers flat-out release him? Damned if I know. He was definitely getting torched by lefties (.379/.443/.543). While his platoon splits have never been as dramatic as they were this year, that may always be a problem for him. And the turnaround to his season corresponds to the time he was demoted to the bullpen. He had a 9.72 ERA as a starter this season, and even though he’s been pitching well in relief, I suppose the Brewers may be disappointed by what Kinney hasn’t become, as opposed to what he has.

What he has become is a pretty damn good reliever, with the stuff and sudden breakout in his K/BB ratio to suggest continued upside. The Royals plan to use him in middle relief, and maybe that’s all he’ll ever be good for. But it’s sure as hell worth giving him the roster spot to find out.

Point, Allard Baird.

Judge Richard Conway Casey of the Southern District of New York has joined judges in San Francisco and Nebraska in enjoining the partial-birth abortion ban, despite his own convictions on the issue:

While Casey concluded that such abortions are "gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized,'' he said the law banning them is unconstitutional because it doesn't contain an exception to protect the health of the mother. A previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling held that the procedure can be outlawed "only if there exists a medical consensus that there is no circumstance in which any women could potentially benefit from it,'' Casey said.

Casey - an alum of both my college and my law firm, I should add - is a sort-of Clinton appointee; he was originally nominated by George H.W. Bush at the recommendation of Al D'Amato but had his nomination blocked by Senate Democrats. President Clinton renominated him in 1997, making him the first blind man appointed to the federal bench. I haven't seen the opinion and I am, of course, disappointed with the result, but I have to respect the fact that Judge Casey went against his own expressed policy preferences in following what appears to be the Supreme Court's lead on this issue. It's unfortunate that that sort of judicial restraint tends to be a one-way street.

The miserable showing by the US Olympic basketball team has people talking about the decline of shooting in the NBA. It's certainly true that this team can't shoot. But is offensive efficiency and skill really in decline around the league? It's an appropriate time to unveil another of my long-standing research projects: a statistical history of offensive efficiency and tempo in the NBA. My apologies if someone else has done this stuff before, but I got tired of trying to find it somewhere; tip of the hat to Basketball-Reference.com for the numbers.

I'll run these in table form, decade by decade. The first four columns of the chart should be familiar enough: the leaguewide averages for team points per game (P/G), shooting percentage on two-point shots (2%), on three-point shots (3%), and on free throws (FT%). A key stat I use here is Points Per Field Goal Attempt (PPFGA), developed by John Hollinger of the Basketball Prospectus; the formula is (P/(FGA+.44(FTA))). Basically, Holinger started by assuming that a free throw is worth 1/2 of a field goal attempt (e.g., you get two shots for two points instead of a single field goal attempt), then cut the ratio from .5 to .44 based on an analysis of how often guys shoot an extra free throw after hitting a bucket, for a technical foul, etc. I use the denominator of this formula to estimate the number of team shot attempts per game (FGA/G). The last three columns seek to break down the components that go into offensive efficiency above and beyond the shooting percentages: the percentage of the league's points that were scored at the line (FT/P), the frequency of free throw attempts per field goal attempt (FGA/FTA; a higher number means less free throws), and (since 1979-80) the percentage of shots that were three-point attempts (%3).

I've listed league expansion and contraction under "Major Rules Changes," but I'm sure I've missed some actual changes in the rules that had some significant effects. Also, I haven't set out the blow-by-blow extension of the schedule; the NBA schedule rose gradually to 72 games in 1953-54, then went up to 75 in 1959-60, 79 the following year and wound up at its present 82 in 1967-68. I also haven't done a similar table for the ABA, for a variety of reasons; maybe another day. Let's begin:

The 1940s

Major Rules Changes: 1947-48, league contracts from 11 teams to 8; zone defenses outlawed

Season	P/G	2%	3%	FT%	PPFGA	FGA/G	FT/P	FGA/FTA	%3
1946-47	67.8	.279	N/A	.641	0.693	103.9	23.4	3.75	N/A
1947-48	72.7	.284	N/A	.675	0.674	107.9	25.1	3.56	N/A
1948-49	80.0	.327	N/A	.703	0.781	102.4	27.5	2.83	N/A

The NBA traces its official records back to 1946-47, although the league was known as the BAA (Basketball Association of America) for the first three years prior to a merger with another professional league. To the modern eye, a league-wide field goal percentage around .280 is almost inconceivable, although to the novice basketball fan at the time it may have seemed to make it easier to grasp basketball statistics (see! they're just like batting averages!). As you can see from the above and the seasons of the early 1950s, however, the offensive skill level of the league was improving rapidly as the league gathered the nation's best basketball players; look at the 60-point increase in the league's free throw percentage in a two-year span. Free throw percentage is a good barometer of basic shooting skill, since free throw shooting is basically just man vs. basket, with no adjustment for the level of competition. The pace of play reached a pre-shot-clock high of 107.9 shot attempts per game in the league's second season, when teams played just a 48-game schedule.

The 1950s

Major Rules Changes: 1951-52, size of foul lane doubled from 6 to 12 feet; 1954-55, shot clock introduced; 1957-58, ban on offensive goaltending

Season	P/G	2%	3%	FT%	PPFGA	FGA/G	FT/P	FGA/FTA	%3
1949-50	80.0	.340	N/A	.715	0.820	97.6	29.5	2.52	N/A
1950-51	84.1	.357	N/A	.732	0.855	98.3	29.1	2.50	N/A
1951-52	83.7	.367	N/A	.735	0.877	95.5	29.2	2.43	N/A
1952-53	82.4	.370	N/A	.716	0.887	92.9	31.2	2.15	N/A
1953-54	79.5	.372	N/A	.709	0.885	89.9	29.4	2.28	N/A
1954-55	93.1	.385	N/A	.738	0.911	102.2	28.5	2.41	N/A
1955-56	99.0	.387	N/A	.745	0.916	108.1	28.6	2.40	N/A
1956-57	99.6	.380	N/A	.751	0.899	110.8	27.9	2.56	N/A
1957-58	106.6	.383	N/A	.746	0.898	118.7	26.8	2.66	N/A
1958-59	108.2	.395	N/A	.756	0.915	118.3	25.4	2.82	N/A

Basketball in the Fifties, especially early in the decade, was a bruising business, as earthbound forwards and centers dominated the game. The level of violence in the game reached a pinnacle in the 1952-53 season, with one foul shot for every 2.15 field goal attempts and a record 31.2% of all points being scored at the line. Perhaps the archetypical player was Dolph Schayes, who shot 40% in a season just once (.401 in 1959-60), but averaged nearly 8 free throw attempts per game for his career while shooting .849 from the line, and averaged 12 or more rebounds a game 11 years in a row. Bob Cousy debuted in 1950-51, and revolutionized the game by being the first true point guard, but took some time to foster imitators; Bill Russell arrived in 1956-57, although black players would not become a common fixture for several more seasons. You can see the immediate and dramatic impact on tempo of the shot clock, as well as the fact that it was introduced to arrest a decline in the pace of the game.

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OK, rant time. It's 1 in the morning, and I just got off the phone after two hours (most of it spent on hold) trying to get assistance from Dell with our wireless connection. I should have been in bed a long time ago, I've got to work in the morning, and for good measure I'd hoped to work on a long blog entry I've been working over. All out the window.

Here's the deal: my wife and I got a Dell laptop about two months ago. Although there were other uses for the laptop, we paid a lot of extra money to ensure that the laptop would have wireless service so that, among other things, I could blog without having to hibernate in the basement, where the desktop and cable modem are located. We paid for the wireless card, we paid for the router. I spent upwards of 90 minutes on the phone with tech support in early July to hook the ^%!^@! thing up.

Result: we can now use the internet . . . in our bedroom. It's the only place on the ground floor of the house where the wireless signal comes through (it's directly above the room in the basement where the desktop and router are located). To keep the connection, you need to walk very slowly out of the bedroom, and then it's a weak connection that can be lost at a moment's notice, which among other things means frequent saving or risk of losing lots of work on the blog.

So, tonight I got fed up and called Dell for help. 25 minutes on hold, get the call center in India on the line, get a few hugely time-consuming but ineffective pieces of advice. Get switched to the wireless specialist; almost an hour on hold ensues. Wireless specialist walks me througn a few items and then announces that (1) the problem may be that the wireless connection can't work in the presence of cordless phones (both our phones are cordless, and without one I could not call him from in front of the computer) or microwave ovens; (2) the router could be interfered with by walls, ceilings, etc., and (3) if we want it to work we have to buy yet another router. None of which cautions were mentioned anywhere by Dell or any of the other sources I looked at before plunking down the money for this thing. And I'll be damned if I'm going to buy another router only to be told I need to replace my telephone and unplug the microwave to use the computer.

Is wireless access really a mirage? Is it just Dell? Or did I just talk to an idiot in tech support? I don't know. I just know I'm unlikely to ever get what I paid for. And I'll be blogging in the basement for the foreseeable future. Grrrrr.

Red-hot man mountain Calvin Pickering - now batting .364/1.364/.417 in three games since his Sunday callup to replace the injured Mike Sweeney - hit a bases-clearing triple last night in Anaheim. Pickering looks like he may finally be living up to his long-ago promise, having had a huge year in AAA.

One of the lingering debates on the Swift Boat story is whether the incident in which John Kerry pulled James Rassman out of the water - and won the Bronze Star - occurred under enemy fire or not; the Swifties say that there was no fire and that several boats (the captains of which have lined up against Kerry on this point) were at the scene for some time fishing the crew of PCF 3 (Kerry's boat was PCF 94) out of the water after it hit a mine and was disabled.

McQ over at QandO explains why the NY Times has (unsurprisingly) misread the Navy documents on Kerry's website to mistakenly claim that several Viet Cong were killed during the incident; McQ contends that the documents actually show that they were killed on land by soldiers the swift boats had been carrying earlier in their mission.

UPDATE: Don't forget to follow McQ's links; this and this present sober, clear-headed assessments of the available evidence regarding the March 13, 1969 engagement, with more supporting links. Frankly, this is getting to be an interesting "whodunit"-type story, even apart from its (tenuous) relevance to the presidential race.

Watching Kerry on Jon Stewart - Stewart is totally in the tank for Kerry. Maybe that's not surprising; you don't expect tough questions on a comedy show. But Stewart makes it clear whose side he's on.

One interesting note: Kerry is starting to play the expectations game by noting that Bush has won every debate he's been in.

While we're in the pre-convention lull - and I assure you, faithful readers, that by next week I'll be back on the issues as far as political coverage goes - it's worth remembering what a fraud many of the attacks on President Bush's National Guard service have been. The Donovan pointed recently to an essay on Aerospaceweb.org (with useful, and let's face it, really cool pictures) on the F-102, Bush's aircraft, and on his service record. A few key excerpts (but make sure to go there and read the whole thing) [UPDATE: Seems the essay is no longer publicly available]:

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CrushKerry.com - not an impartial source, obviously - claims that the decision to threaten legal action against the Swift Boaters came from Kerry himself against the better judgment of his advisors. Here's what's interesting about Kerry wanting to use the courts to squelch criticism: remember the FOX lawsuit against Al Franken, which was widely reported to have been instigated by Bill O'Reilly? Remember the hue and cry on the left at O'Reilly over this?

*Matt Yglesias: "If this sort of thing is going to be typical of rightwing tactical thinking in the near future, then Bush is definitely going down in 2004."

*Kevin Drum endorsed attempts to shame the lawyers who filed the suit.

*Jack Balkin called it "A Fair and Balanced Attempt at Censorship" and added:

The most troubling aspect of the lawsuit politically is its attempt to harass a political opponent through the use of intellectual property laws. . . . We can only hope that Fox receives the bad publicity it deserves for filing this lawsuit; first, for being on the wrong side of this free speech controversy, and second, for trying to suppress people who disagree with its coverage of the news. It is particularly upsetting for a news organization to try to use the courts to suppress the speech of its political critics.

(See also Oliver Willis and Mark Kleiman)

Now, it turns out that the Democrats' presidential candidate is the same sort of glass-jawed bully that O'Reilly is. Oh, the irony.

I just noticed a new feature at Baseball-Reference.com: lists of baseball players by the colleges they attended. My alma mater, Holy Cross, is well represented with 77 major league players, albeit the great bulk of them real old-timers, and the last guy (former Twins pitcher Mike Pazik) retiring in 1977. Notables include 19th century star Cubs outfielder Jimmy Ryan; Lou Sockalexis, the Native American supposed namesake of the Cleveland Indians (who was kicked out of HC for drinking - I guess the place was rather different then); Andy Coakley, a successful pitcher for Connie Mack's pennant-winning 1905 A's; Jack Barry, the shortstop in Mack's "$100,000 Infield," who later coached baseball at the Cross for decades; "Jumpin' Joe" Dugan, the third baseman for the 1927 Yankees; Rosy Ryan, a starting pitcher for the Giants when they won four pennants and two World Series between 1921 and 1924; and Mike Hegan, a journeyman catcher who played for the 1964 Yankees, 1969 Seattle Pilots, and 1972-73 A's.

Not a bad crew. Barry or Jimmy Ryan was probably the best player of the bunch.

Captain Ed, who's been one of the blogosphere's All-Stars lately, notes a Washington Post article that puts the final nail in John Kerry's claims to have a "memory . . . seared -- seared -- in me" of making an illegal border crossing into Cambodia on a swift boat during his tour in Vietnam.

UPDATE: But one of Kerry's "Band of Brothers," Del Sandusky, is sticking by the Cambodia story.

Avkash has more on David Wright's patience at the plate, and why we shouldn't be too concerned at his lack of walks thus far.

Those five scoreless innings from Scott Kazmir last night are sure tough to read about.

You can read a blow-by-blow account here.

Senator Tom Harkin appears to be taking some well-deserved heat in his home state for his latest foolish remarks. (Via InstaPundit).

*Reuters doesn't know the difference between documents and evidence

*Joe Klein:

George W. Bush announced last Monday in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) that he wanted to bring around 70,000 troops home from Germany and North Korea over the next 10 years. In principle, that is not very controversial. The military and foreign policy priesthoods have favored that sort of restructuring since the end of the cold war. And yet, when Kerry spoke to the VFW two days later, he attacked Bush's position, using an argument with some merit but of microscopic import in the midst of a presidential campaign: he said it was a "hasty" and "political" plan and certainly not a good negotiating tactic to withdraw troops from Korea while we are trying to get the North Koreans to drop their nuclear program.

But oops. Some two weeks earlier, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Kerry had taken a different position: "I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just [in Iraq] but ... in the Korean peninsula, perhaps, in Europe, perhaps." As you might imagine, the Bush campaign quickly pointed out the inconsistency.

The stumble raises two basic questions about Kerry's campaign. First, is he a latter-day Ron Burgundy—the idiot 1970s anchorman of Will Ferrell's recent film who would read anything that appeared on his TelePrompTer? Did Kerry not remember what he had said to Stephanopoulos?

*This is unbelievable, and a good example of why Tad Devine is such a tool: blaming Bush for the Democrats' over-the-top rhetoric:

Now listen, I think we can understand Senator Harkin said something very tough today and I think I know why. Because this president and this vice president have so polarized this country, have so polarized this campaign, they‘re bringing out the absolute toughest things on both sides.

Link via Hanks.

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John Kerry is in a box. He's been calling on President Bush to denounce the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad, although Bush's more generalized blast at independent "527" groups yesterday makes it harder to press that point. But what are Kerry's possible arguments for dismissing the Swift Boat ads?

1. It's Ancient History. This is the easy and logical response to attacks on something a politician did 30+ years ago under factual circumstances that have grown hazy: dismiss it as old news. Heck, Bill Clinton routinely called for people to "move on" from things he'd done while he was President. Indeed, even the Vietnamese think that the Vietnam War should be a non-issue in this campaign. But Kerry torched that bridge a long time ago; a man who introduced himself to the general electorate in July and made his Vietnam service literally the first thing out of his mouth, surrounded by his "band of brothers," can't plausibly argue that what happened in Vietnam means nothing to his campaign.

2. Independent Ads Are Bad. Given the vast array of anti-Bush spending over the past year - including Michael Moore pushing his movie's video release up to October - Kerry can't well denounce 527 groups and other independent actors in principle.

3. It's Wrong To Attack A Man's Service Record. Here's the biggest problem: if Kerry wants to stand on principle as saying you shouldn't attack a man's service record, he has a three-pronged problem: (a) he himself is attacking over 200 of his own comrades who are involved in the Swift Boat campaign; (b) he has to deal with his own past history of making false charges of widespread atrocities against American troops in Vietnam; and (c) he has personally attacked Bush's service record with the Texas Air National Guard. From Kerry's own mouth:

I think a lot of veterans are going to be very angry at a president who can't account for his own service in the National Guard, and a vice president who got every deferment in the world and decided he had better things to do, criticizing somebody who fought for their country and served

That was accompanied by this Kerry campaign press release entitled "Key Unanswered Questions on Bush's Record In National Guard." And, from Kerry's campaign spokesman, Chad Clanton:

Voters are going to have to decide: someone who volunteered to service their country when their country needed them or someone else who, you know, it speaks for itself. It is a contrast, it is a difference. … There is no better test than whether someone is committed to defending their country than whether they've put their life on the line on the battlefield.

Were Kerry to take the same stand he demands from Bush, he'd have to denounce himself and his own campaign. Oops.

4. Attack The Financing. This has been Kerry's main tactic: focus on the Republican financiers of these ads rather than the men in the ads. Of course, Charles Krauthammer had the best response to this:

The Democrats have reacted to the Swift boat vets with anguished and selective indignation. This assault was bankrolled by rich Bush supporters, they charge. No kidding. Where else would Swift boat vets get the money? With the exception of the romantic few who serially marry millionaire heiresses, Swift boaters are generally of modest means. Where are they going to get the cash to be heard? Harold Ickes?

Anyway, unlike Paula Jones - about whom the charge may have had some credibility - people can't seriously believe that the 200+ Swift Boat Veterans, each one a man who served his country in wartime, have been bought off; they may or may not be the most credible individuals, but most of them seem to be gainfully employed, and some quite successful.

5. They're Lying. Of course, this is the bottom line, but it's a place Kerry doesn't want to go, because it means engaging the Swift vets on their terms: disputing whether the accusations are true. But it's all he has left, and now - with the campaign focusing on Kerry's anti-war activities, about which the only dispute is how clear it should have been to Kerry that his charges were untrue - even that is not a defense.

How on Earth did something this heartfelt and sensible end up in The New York Times?

Meanwhile, a good way to help support the families of those who are risking their lives to protect America is this message-exchanging charity, apparently set up by alumni of my alma mater. Check it out.

David Wright hasn't missed a game yet since arriving at Shea; here are his numbers projected to a full season:

G	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BB	K	SB-CS	AVG	SLG	OBP	HPB	GIDP
162	671	203	58	0	29	110	87	23	104	6-0	.303	.519	.331	6	23

Well, we Mets fans need something to dream on. Wright's flyball/groundball ratio of 0.78 bodes particularly well for him as a power hitter, although it hasn't stopped him from hitting into double plays. Ironically, Wright has been missing the two elements - steady defense and patience at the plate - that were his predecessor Ty Wigginton's two most conspicuous weaknesses. But Wright is 21 and showed both in the minors, so there's hope for the future.

Now, if we can ever get Jose Reyes healthy . . .

I gotta say, on reading this transcript, Larry Thurlow - one of the Swift Boat vets - doesn't sound very credible to me, although it's hard to tell with Chris Matthews browbeating the guy.

UPDATE: The bottom line: even leaving aside the issue of the relevance of microanalysis of Kerry's war record to the campaign - I continue to think that Kerry's actual record is of little relevance, although if he's been lying about his record all these years that is something, whereas I also continue to think that Kerry's early-70s anti-war activities when he was preparing a run for Congress are much more relevant - it seems over-the-top for the Swift Boaters to be attacking every one of Kerry's medals. The attack on Kerry's Bronze Star (the rescue of Jim Rassman), of which Thurlow is a part, is especially central to this controversy; while the attack on Kerry's Silver Star seems mostly to involve a difference of opinion, there's a direct factual contradiction between Kerry and the other swift boat captains over (1) how many boats were present when Kerry pulled Rassman out of the water and (2) whether there was enemy fire at the time. Rassman seems like a sincere and truthful witness in support of Kerry on this point, but his vantage point may not have been that great - by his own testimony, he was under water for most of the incident and (correct me if I'm misreading this) may not have been able to tell the difference between enemy fire and fire from the swift boats at the shore - and John O'Neill has cited physical evidence supporting the Swift Vets' version of the event.

At the end of the day, it may be that some of the Swift Boaters are not being honest or don't remember things real well, although (1) that doesn't necessarily call into question the whole enterprise, since we've seen examples already of Kerry, to put it charitably, having inaccurate recollections of those events, and (2) I don't for a second think these guys have been bought off or that they are all partisan Republicans; it's much more likely that their primary motivation is bitterness at Kerry's anti-war speeches.

Bob Dole became the first major Republican to directly attack John Kerry's war record on Wolf Blitzer's show today, lighting into Kerry with startling ferocity:

BLITZER: First of all, Senator, what's your bottom line on this whole ad campaign?

DOLE: I think this can hurt Kerry more than all the medal controversy. I mean, one day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he's standing there, "I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran."

And I think he's -- I said months ago, "John, don't go too far." And I think he's got himself into this wicket now where he can't extricate himself because not every one of these people can be Republican liars. There's got to be some truth to the charges. But this is on tape. This is on television. This is before the Senate committee.

BLITZER: Just to remind our viewers, this is when he came back from Vietnam. He testified in 1971...

DOLE: Ran for Congress.

BLITZER: Right. And he was quoting a whole bunch of other Vietnam veterans who opposed the war and making these allegations of atrocities, if you will, war crimes committed by U.S. troops. And a lot of people have always suggested that what's really angered these Vietnam veterans, the other side, is, not so much what he did or didn't do when he served in Vietnam, but what he did when he came back.

DOLE: I think that's true. And I think this ad's going to take -- it's going to be tough on Kerry because -- and he says, "Well, this is all hearsay," what he picked up from other veterans. But he said it. He said it before a Senate committee. It had worldwide attention.

BLITZER: The fact that he said on Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" a few months ago he probably went too far. He was a young man just back from Vietnam, and he probably shouldn't have said some of those things during those statements when he came home from Vietnam. Does that ease the responsibility that he has?

DOLE: Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn't the only one in Vietnam. And here's, you know, a good guy, good friend. I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out. I think Senator Kerry needs to talk about his Senate record, which is pretty thin. That's probably why he's talking about his war record, which is pretty confused.

BLITZER: You know, the American public seems to be paying attention to these Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. There's a CBS poll that came out. I think this is the right poll. Here it is. Presidential choice among veterans, 37 percent support Kerry-Edwards, 55 percent Bush-Cheney. But after the convention it was at 46 percent. He seems to be losing support among veterans, which is an influential bloc of voters out there.

DOLE: You know, I think it's too early to tell what -- nobody maybe in six -- how many days left? Not many. There are eight weeks. Maybe this will be forgotten. Maybe there will be something else. But I think this has certainly damaged Senator Kerry. And I think it's partly his own doing. He can't lay out -- I remember in '96, I was the veteran in the race. Bill Clinton avoided the draft. And we didn't have all this trouble over my service versus his non-service. There wasn't much written about it. People accepted the fact that I had a record. Now there's all the talk about Bush's National Guard service. Has he told the truth? Has he released the records? And one way, I think, for John Kerry, who I consider to be a friend, is to maybe apologize to all these people for something he may have said at a very early age, and let us have those records he's given to the author...

BLITZER: Douglas Brinkley.

DOLE: Douglas Brinkley, the records and the journals...

BLITZER: Who wrote a book about his experience.

DOLE: Yes. But somebody ought to find out the facts. I think this is going to be -- could be the sleeper issue.

[Snip]

DOLE: . . . John McCain is absolutely correct. But as I recall, it was Terry McAuliffe who made reference to President Bush as being AWOL. They dragged up all the stuff. I think there were 80 stories in the media about the National Guard. There's only been about eight or 10 on the so-called Kerry flap.

So it seems to me they've initiated it, and now they've got into some rather murky area. But I don't -- I wish they'd forget it. It's not about whether or not you're...

[Snip]

DOLE: . . . . [T]hese same people now are going after Bush. I didn't see them going after Clinton in '96 because he didn't serve at all. They were going after me on my record. That's why I say we ought to get back to the issues. Let's talk about the issues.

[Snip]

DOLE: I don't quarrel with that. I said John Kerry's a hero. But what I will always quarrel about are the Purple Hearts. I mean, the first one, whether he ought to have a Purple Heart -- he got two in one day, I think. And he was out of there in less than four months, because three Purple Hearts and you're out. And as far as I know, he's never spent one day in the hospital. I don't think he draws any disability pay. He doesn't have any disability. And boasting about three Purple Hearts when you think of some of the people who really got shot up in Vietnam...

BLITZER: And speaking about people getting shot up in Vietnam, the Democrats, at least some Democrats, are now going after the president and the vice president for avoiding service in Vietnam. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, Democrat...

DOLE: He's not a very good one to complain because he was hiding out in Japan, claiming he was a Vietnam veteran.

(via SpinSwimming). Some of this smacks of bitterness, of course, but Dole is plainly disgusted with Kerry's overuse of his Vietnam record, and it's not hard to see why the stress on the three Purple Hearts are particularly galling to Dole, given Kerry's obvious robust health compared to the severity of Dole's wounds. You can also hear the former infantry officer in Dole when he's asked about John McCain's comments and he remarks, "Yes, but, John wasn't there. He was up in the air."

I await the usual suspects calling Dole a "chickenhawk" because he didn't serve in Vietnam. At any rate, we're getting another object lesson in the ugliness of campaigns based on my-war-record-can-beat-up-your-war-record.

UPDATE: Captain Ed suggests that Dole may have been provoked into this outburst by a Boston Globe editorial that denigrated one of Dole's own Purple Hearts. Idiots.

I was contacted recently by the proprietors of the new site Basketball-Reference.com . . . a little background: Sean Forman for years has done great work with Baseball-Reference.com, the premier baseball stats page on the web and one I support with several page sponsorships, and after some stumbles introduced Pro-Football-Reference.com. But for some time, a need was unmet in basketball, and a competitor set up (an extremely useful) knockoff site, Basketballreference.com. I had been using the site for many months and permalinked it here, but an affiliate of Forman has finally established the new site. Check it out; it seems to run a little faster and better than the imitation site.

I’m very happy to hear that Jason Read and the rest of the U.S. Olympic rowing team won a gold medal in an event America hadn’t won since 1964. Read, who previously served as a rescue worker at the World Trade Center site, was earlier profiled here.

Congratulations to a deserving and admirable champion.

Instapundit (just keep scrollin') and the Minute Man have moved in for the kill on the Swift Boat story. Blood in the water! This is getting nasty, and of course it's all feuled by the fact that there's a bunch of veterans out there who have been nursing a very well-deserved grudge against Kerry for 33 years now. This, from the Swift vets' ad (watch it yourself), is just devastating - following an explanation of how the North Vietnamese often tried to get POWs to falsely confess to war crimes:

"John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in the North Vietnam prison camps took torture to avoid saying,'' says Paul Galanti, identified on screen as a prisoner of war from January 1966 to February, 1973.

Welcome to 21st century political campaigns.

Joe Piscopo says he may abandon his lucrative career as . . . uh . . . well, anyway, he may run for governor of New Jersey as a Democrat.

Piscopo, of course, stopped being funny when he started lifting weights, which makes him the prime example of what I might term Picsopo's Laws of Thermodynamics for Comedians:

*The talent of a small-to-average-size comedian decreases in direct proportion to the increase in the mass of the comedian.

*The talent of an average-size-to-large comedian decreases in direct proportion to the decrease in the mass of the comedian.

Not sure why exactly this is. Partly it's because fat comedians who make jokes about being fat and sloppy get less funny when they get in shape, skinny comedians who do a lot of pratfalls and physical comedy lose some of that if they get fat (think: Dan Aykroyd), and comedians generally get less funny if they start working out and taking themselves seriously. Which is another way of saying that growing up is bad for comics.

John McCain on John Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony charging American soldiers with widespread and systematic war crimes in Vietnam:

In piece he wrote for the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report, the POW-turned-senator charged that testimony by Kerry and others before J. William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee was "the most effective propaganda [my North Vietnamese captors] had to use against us."

"They used Senator Fulbright a great deal," McCain wrote - a reference to Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony that U.S. soldiers were committing war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course.

He said Kerry political ally Sen. Ted Kennedy was "quoted again and again" by his jailers at the Hanoi Hilton.

"Clark Clifford was another [North Vietnamese] favorite," McCain told U.S. News, "right after he had been Secretary of Defense under President Johnson."

"When Ramsey Clark came over [my jailers] thought that was a great coup for their cause," he recalled. Months earlier, Sen. Kerry had appeared with Clark at the April 1971 Washington, D.C., anti-war protest that showcased his testimony before the Fulbright Committee.

"All through this period," McCain told U.S. News, his captors were "bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us."

Via Henry Hanks. It's stories like this that make ads like this one so devastating.

Sometimes, in war, soldiers - even in the best of armies - commit horrible atrocities; such is human nature and the opportunity war affords for the exercise of its most brutal impulses. And nobody really disputes that some American soldiers committed such atrocities in Vietnam, probably - given the nature of the war - with greater frequency than other wars.

But Kerry has sold himself - and won the hearts of some veterans - on the theory that service in Vietnam was, whatever the merits of the war itself, no different than any other service; that American soldiers who served there did so with the same honor, and deserve the same recognition, as veterans of other wars. I have no quarrel with that argument, which seems quite right to me; but hardly anybody did more at the time to argue the contrary position - that American soldiers had acted barbarously as a matter of course - than Kerry. No wonder his words (while he was still a member of the Navy Reserve) were such effective propaganda for the enemy.

Bryon Scott over at Blogs for Bush takes a hard look at "independent" 527 groups and finds that, for all the fuss about "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," such groups are overwhelmingly Democratic.

UPDATE: Jay Caruso has done a good deal more digging, and looks at individual Democrats with close ties to both the Kerry campaign and the "independent" 527s. If the Bush people are savvy, they will counterclaim with such a bill of particulars against Kerry's complaint to the FEC (which I gather is based on the work of Kerry's investigators at the NY Times) regarding the independence of the Swifties.

If the season ended today, the AL division winners would be the Yankees, Twins and A's, and the Red Sox would take the Wild Card. Ichiro is hitting .428 against those four teams (68/159). Wow. (The overall scalding hot streak continues: .394 since May 1 (163/414), .483 since the All-Star Break (70/145)).

Ricky West has the details.

How bad are the Diamondbacks? You probably know that they're on pace for more than 110 losses and that, entering last night's action, they'd lost 46 of their last 55 games. Mike's Baseball Rants has some historical perspective; even the 1962 Mets and last year's Tigers never lost more than 44 of 55 games (the 1916 A's, however managed a 4-56 slide).

How about this: before last night's victory over Pittsburgh, the D-Backs were 0-14 against the Tigers, Expos, Devil Rays and Pirates.

Opposing lefthanded batters are hitting .299/.486/.395 - against a team that sends Randy Johnson to the hill every fifth day. Take out Johnson (.171/.261/.244) and that goes to .309/.503/.405. With men on base, opposing teams are hitting .289/.495/.385 against Arizona.

The 1994 Montreal Expos are one of baseball's great "what-if" stories - what if they'd played out a full season? What if they'd won the World Series? Would they have been able to hold together such a talented team? Would they have saved baseball in Montreal?

Well, we can't answer those questions precisely . . . although we can approximate an answer to the first question, and without resort to "what-ifs." I was playing around with the Streak Reports on Baseball-Reference.com some time ago, and noticed that from August 19, 1993 through May 5, 1995 - a full 162-game schedule including the entire 1994 regular season - the Expos won 110 games and lost just 52. (The Expos finished the 1993 season on a 31-10 tear in a futile attempt to catch the Phillies, went 74-40 to post the best record in baseball in 1994, and opened 1995 with a 5-2 spurt before slumping to a last-place finish with a depleted lineup. For that stretch, they were, in plain sight, a great team for one full season's worth of games, similar to, say, the 1975 Reds (108 wins), the 1986 Mets (108 wins), or the 1984 Tigers (104 wins). And now, thanks to the magic of Retrosheet, we can not only see that 110-win record; we can flesh out the picture by reconstructing the individual stats of the players who made up a great team. Let's take a look:

Batting Stats

PLAYER	G	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BB	K	SB-CS	Avg	Slg	OBP	DP	HB
Darrin Fletcher	132	419	110	27	2	15	46	79	31	35	0-0	.263	.444	.314	7	7
Cliff Floyd	117	387	105	19	4	5	47	44	27	79	12-3	.271	.380	.321	4	3
Mike Lansing	145	532	145	29	2	5	59	49	42	55	19-10	.273	.363	.334	15	8
Wil Cordero	149	555	161	40	4	20	83	90	50	79	17-5	.290	.485	.356	10	8
Sean Berry	139	427	121	27	3	18	69	60	51	72	19-1	.283	.487	.361	11	3
Larry Walker	140	524	160	50	4	26	101	112	73	91	23-8	.305	.565	.390	10	5
Marquis Grissom	151	648	198	30	4	18	130	72	54	82	60-7	.306	.448	.356	14	1
Moises Alou	129	497	166	37	6	26	93	90	46	75	7-7	.334	.590	.393	7	6
Lou Frazier	103	188	48	3	2	0	29	18	19	33	22-5	.255	.293	.325	1	1
Rondell White	69	185	50	14	2	6	28	30	17	36	2-3	.270	.465	.340	3	3
Lenny Webster	57	143	39	10	0	5	13	23	16	24	0-0	.273	.448	.370	7	6
Randy Ready	32	105	27	6	1	1	17	10	18	6	2-1	.257	.362	.371	4	1
Juan Bell	38	97	27	4	0	2	12	10	15	21	4-0	.278	.381	.372	1	0
Randy Milligan	47	82	19	2	0	2	10	12	14	21	0-0	.232	.329	.337	1	0
Freddie Benavides	47	85	16	5	1	0	8	6	3	15	0-0	.188	.271	.222	2	1
Oreste Marrero	27	66	15	4	1	1	9	3	14	12	1-3	.227	.364	.363	0	0
Tim Spehr	76	72	24	7	1	1	16	9	6	19	3-0	.333	.500	.385	0	0
Delino DeShields	17	61	15	2	1	0	9	4	13	10	9-0	.246	.311	.362	0	1
John Vander Wal	24	49	10	4	1	0	8	3	8	3	0-1	.204	.327	.316	1	0
Jeff Gardner	18	32	7	0	1	0	4	1	3	5	0-0	.219	.281	.286	1	0
Roberto Kelly	7	29	7	2	0	1	5	3	0	4	1-1	.241	.414	.241	3	0
Tony Tarasco	6	20	9	3	0	0	3	2	1	4	0-0	.450	.600	.476	0	0
Shane Andrews	6	16	5	2	0	2	3	5	2	5	0-0	.313	.813	.389	0	0

Team Totals

PLAYER	G	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BB	K	SB-CS	Avg	Slg	OBP	GDP	HPB
NON-PITCHERS	162	5265	1497	330	41	155	808	746	523	798	203-57	.284	.451	.352	103	54
PITCHERS	162	343	46	5	2	0	18	16	21	134	0-0	.134	.160	.184	4	0
TOTAL	162	5608	1543	335	43	155	826	762	544	932	203-57	.275	.433	.342	107	54

One thing that really jumps out at you about the Expos' offense is its incredible balance. The team leader in homers hit 26, but they managed 209 155 home runs - an average of 26 19 per non-pitching lineup slot. [NOTE: Yes, my arithmetic goofed there somehow, as Travis Nelson has pointed out to me. I'll fix any other arithmetical errors as they come to my attention.] Nobody on this team walked a whole lot - besides Walker with 73, nobody drew more than 54 walks - but everybody drew at least a halfway respectable number of walks and hit for a good enough average to not have a horrid OBP, and nobody struck out 100 times. Everybody could steal a few bases. And everyone hit gobs of doubles. It doesn't look like a terrifying offense, but it was solid all the way through.

Walker and Alou, of course, were the offensive stars, and would go on to distinguished careers elsewhere. The hidden big year here was Grissom, who was dazzling - playing by far the best baseball of his long, erratic career - down the stretch in 1993, batting .353, scoring 34 runs and stealing 24 bases in 25 attempts in 41 games. And, of course, all the way down the depth chart (see more below) you see guys who have had long, productive major league careers.

As you can see, the Expos had an unusually poor-hitting pitching staff; if you break the numbers down (see below), the mainstays of the rotation were especially awful, while guys like Butch Henry, Denis Boucher and the relievers did OK in limited action.

Pitching Stats

Pitcher	W-L	SV	ERA	G	GS	CG	IP	H	HR	BB	K	R	ER
Jeff Fassero	15-8	0	3.00	32	31	2	207.1	176	17	58	189	79	69
Ken Hill	18-8	0	3.66	30	30	2	196.2	192	15	61	107	92	80
Pedro Martinez	13-5	1	3.20	26	25	1	157.1	121	12	50	156	59	56
Kirk Rueter	12-4	0	4.53	27	27	0	135	144	15	31	66	75	68
Butch Henry	9-5	1	2.82	34	17	0	127.2	120	12	24	78	42	40
Mel Rojas	4-3	22	3.09	79	0	0	110.2	96	13	27	103	46	38
Gil Heredia	9-3	1	3.28	48	7	0	107	117	10	20	89	45	39
Jeff Shaw	6-2	1	3.95	63	0	0	86.2	88	11	21	56	42	38
John Wetteland	5-6	42	2.31	72	0	0	85.2	55	5	25	101	24	22
Tim Scott	8-2	2	3.12	56	0	0	69.1	64	3	25	57	25	24
Dennis Martinez	5-1	0	2.53	8	8	0	57	46	5	16	43	21	16
Denis Boucher	3-2	0	3.83	15	7	0	47	48	7	10	31	23	20
Gabe White	1-1	1	6.08	7	5	0	23.2	24	4	11	17	16	16
Chris Nabholz	2-0	0	0.59	6	2	0	15.1	7	0	8	14	1	1
Brian Barnes	0-1	0	6.00	11	0	0	12	17	0	8	7	9	8
TOTAL	110-52	71	3.41	162	162	5	1466.1	1350	133	409	1133	623	556

What's striking here is that, even for a modern team, this staff never finished its starts. Felipe Alou had a great bullpen (and a deep roster to pinch hit for his helpless-hitting starters), and made extensive use of it. . . Ken Hill and Dennis Martinez went in opposite directions down the stretch in 1993, as Martinez salvaged what had been an awful year, while Hill had the swoon some were expecting again in 1994 when the strike hit . . . Wetteland was incredibly lights-out in 1993, and even moreso the end of the year.

More players:

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Dr. Manhattan has a rundown on the Yankees. Check it out.

Well, so much for optimism: Victor Zambrano walked off the mound in the second inning with an inflamed elbow, and is listed as day-to-day.

UPDATE: Not the same guy. A relative? Even so, it kind of moots the point. Consider this item corrected.

So last night, I saw John O'Neill of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on Joe Scarborough's show, debating John Hurley, national director of "Vietnam Veterans for Kerry." (I missed the same duo on Hardball last week, but it sounds like they did the same routine). Some Kerry supporters may wish to know: who is John Hurley? Well, Hurley is obviously a politically active head of a veterans' group, and he has a pretty thick Boston accent. Which leads me to believe that he is one and the same as John J. "Wacko" Hurley, head of the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, who successfully fought all the way to the Supreme Court in 1995 to keep a gay group out of the Boston St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Somebody call Media Matters, which tried to discredit the Swift Boat group by dredging up a variety of intemperate and in some cases intolerant quotes by O'Neill's co-author, Jerome Corsi. At least Corsi isn't actually heading a group directly affiliated with the Bush campaign.

(Of course, the merits of keeping gay groups out of the St. Patrick's Day Parade is open to fair debate, depending on one's view of the parade, but what do you think Atrios would say if Hurley was heading a pro-Bush group?)

As for the merits, I gotta say, if this was the first I'd seen of this controversy, I would have started off very skeptical - O'Neill seems so over-the-top in attacking just every bit of Kerry's service record, and his demeanor is very cheesy trial-lawyer. But I was definitely more convinced by the end that O'Neill's charges could have some weight to them. O'Neill just had a whole lot more specifics on his side, and all Hurley could do - besides say he thought O'Neill should be ashamed of himself - was to cite Navy reports that apparently relied on Kerry's own information.

The debate over the circumstances of Kerry's Bronze Star (the rescue of James Rassman) seems particularly stark - Kerry and Rassman say that Kerry came back alone under fire to pull out Rassman, O'Neill cites the captains of several other boats who say Kerry alone fled the scene and came back when the shooting stopped while there were several other boats around pulling other guys out of the water. It's very hard to write this off as a difference in perceptions.

Anyway, I remain open to persuasion on who's right here, and I remain skeptical of how relevant any of this really is to the 2004 campaign. But there's clearly an interesting story here.

U.S.A. Basketball has been taking a deserved beating from critics since Sunday’s brutal loss to Puerto Rico. Bill Simmons, starting off an otherwise-pop-culture-dominated debate on Page Two, asks a provocative question:

What happened to the point guard position? Why are the best ones (like Arroyo and Tony Parker) coming from other countries? Why do we keep producing dominant, shoot-first point guards who can't create for teammates in the open floor (Marbury, Baron Davis, Steve Francis, etc.)? Have we really failed that much? Is this the main reason why I'm constantly watching classic games from the '80s on NBA-TV and ESPN Classic, because those games represent the way basketball should look (everyone running the floor, people making the right decisions, guys using their teammates)? I wrote about the death of the point guard position three years ago, but things are even more depressing now.

At least the U.S. won today…barely.

I’m not terribly fond of wading into the partisan fray, especially as the presidential “debate” becomes increasingly bogged down in the quagmire of the Vietnam era, but every now and then I read something that really irritates me. So, be forewarned, a bit of a tirade follows.

The subject this time is Senator Tom Harkin’s denunciation of Vice President Dick Cheney as a “coward" for advocating an aggressive U.S. foreign policy in the War on Terror while having failed to go fight in the Vietnam War in the 1960’s. Don’t see the connection? Maybe that’s because you’re not living in Tom Harkin’s world.

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