At the risk of rendering this a baseball blog...

I'm compelled to hold forth on the vote of the Major League Baseball Rules Committee to outlaw the upper-body collision at homeplate: Beyond the question of the emasculation even of baseball, there is the question of how the homeplate collision can be outlawed as a practical matter, unless as A. J. Pierzynski joked, a fifth base is tacked on someplace behind homeplate.

A play at the plate will be very much more often than not a tag-play, that's to say, the baserunner will need tagging out as opposed to forcing out, which is in turn to say, it won't suffice for the catcher to get a foot on the plate while in possession of the ball, and in order to record the out the catcher must make physical contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate.

That in itself wouldn't make for collisions at homeplate; the collisions come into it because homeplate is of course the fourth and final base, and a baserunner is thus free to overrun it. Safe or out, once he's crossed homeplate, a baserunner is through running the bases. And because sliding means slowing, not only in the act itself but in the preparation for it, a baserunner will often find that unless sliding will get him around or under the catcher somehow, he'll be further ahead to run through homeplate: he'll get there faster by running through it than by sliding to it.

It is the natural right of a catcher to block his plate, following from the necessity of his making contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate, and in that same way, it is the natural right of a baserunner to run his course through homeplate, and may the best man win. Those are among the more fundamental of the natural rights and laws of the Great American Game and most Victorian of sports.

And all those fixed and moving parts work together to produce the collision at the plate. It's not as though Abner Doubleday sat down one fine day in Cooperstown, New York* and said, what this game needs is brutalizing, bone-crunching, bodily collision. Collisions are what come out the other end of the natural rights and laws, and formal rules, and physics, and plain sense, in baseball.

Now it may be stipulated that all of this is right and true, but at the same time, the homeplate collision is an injurious institution and consequently MLB is left with no alternative but to "do something". But I fail to see how a collision at the plate should be any more injurious today when it's outlawed than in the 20th and presumably also 19th Centuries when it was lawful and a commonplace. My idea is that what has changed is the society, with this decadent nature-is-what-we-say-it-is 21st-Century erosion and subversion of the manful virtues, and my suspicion is that what has moved MLB to action is the 21st-Century peril of the disabled list, if not also the monetary valuations of the catchers and runners.

A collision at homeplate cannot rationally be more injurious in the 21st Century than it had been in the centuries prior, but in this 21st Century an oopsie can knock a multi-million-dollar-salaried asset out of the lineup and make a treatment-and-rehabilitation case of him, and a season can easily be decided by the names appearing on the disabled list as opposed to the starting lineup. And fair enough: I'd never say that money on that order of magnitude oughtn't be a consideration, that a ballclub oughtn't have a right to expect some playing time out of a man they're paying maybe multiple millions of dollars in a single season, and the disabled list has gotten to be a scourge of big-league baseball to where it's a cliche for a contending ballclub to pray "so long as we stay healthy" as a sort of "Lord willing" appended to their more hopeful pronouncements. But it does strike me that that's what's moved MLB to action just now in rewriting a rule which I have to assume reaches back more or less to the dawn of the game as we know it.

In another century I played catcher, albeit as the rankest amateur, so I like to think I know whereof I speak on this score, not that I ever let my ignorance stand in the way of my opinion. I respect too much some of the men who've championed the MLB ruling to call it pussified, but I will say I'm against it and what's more that I regard it as an artificial imposition counter to the natural law of baseball, and time will tell if it can be enforced without aggrieving and outraging the catchers and runners, their ballclubs, and their fans. A baseball type can have his day spoiled by an umpire's calling a ball for a strike, even, and a play at the plate is as big a call as they come, ending as it does in an out or a run -- one or the other and nothing else.

* - Yes, yes, I know: that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, NY is known now to be a ludicrousness

The trouble with the World Series

When somewhere along the way the All-Star Game went from life-and-death struggle to exhibition and spectacle, with no great import attached to the winning or losing of it, Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to "make it count", investing it with the determination of home-field advantage for the World Series.

We haven't got so het up about the All-Star Game in these past years and decades because we don't have any great investment in one league over another. I'm an American League man of longstanding, but I can't think of a good reason for it, and I couldn't think of a good reason to be very upset that the National League had won three All-Star Games in a string before 2013.

The two leagues aren't Republican and Democrat, or even GM and Ford; it's the luck of the draw whether your ballclub happens to belong to one or another, and it wouldn't make any rational sense at this point to attach to one over the other with any great emotion. It's something like being born with a surname starting in "S" as opposed to, say, "A": those of us blessed with surnames starting in "S" might think we've got the finest last initial going, but we'd be worse than silly to invest any great emotion in the S names, or to set ourselves against the A ones, because we've got to know on some level that A or S, it's the luck of the draw.

And there's a practical cause for divesting the All-Star Game of world-ending passion. Big-league ballplayers are something like Winston Churchill's description of modern warships: egg-shells with hammers. One rolled ankle from turning second base in a hurry, and a ballplayer can wind up on the disabled list, watching from the bench and worse than useless to his team. Injuries anymore have gotten to where "stay healthy" has become a sort of "Lord willing" of winning ballclubs, as in, "We ought to make it to the post-season, if we stay healthy."

If an injury is a tragedy to a ballclub, then an injury in a game that counts for nothing is a catastrophe. And if the fans and players and management weren't bothered about injuries from an All-Star Game before 1970, Pete Rose and Ray Fosse had a run-in at homeplate for the ages in the All-Star Game of that year which separated Fosse's shoulder and had some part in truncating his career.

But they say they had to "do something" to "make it count", so here we are, with the outcome of the All-Star Game determining home-field advantage for the World Series.

Maybe in some other sports a home-field advantage isn't so concrete, but in baseball the home field can and not infrequently does make the difference. Home-field advantage when it comes to the World Series means the first two games and the last two are played in the home ballpark, assuming the series goes to seven games. And since 2003 when home-field advantage for the World Series was first decided by the All-Star Game, the league that's won the All-Star Game has carried the World Series as well, seven times out of ten. Apart from the more psychological element of many tens of thousands of human beings supporting as opposed to spitting on the men on the field, there are at least two very practical advantages to playing at home in the game of baseball.

No two big-league ballparks are alike, for a start: the contours and heights of the walls, the dimensions from homeplate to the outfield walls and from the baselines to the sideline walls, the liveliness or otherwise of a ground ball on the grass and dirt, the way the wind carries along or knocks down a fly ball, the very atmosphere of the place -- vary from one major-league park to another, and sometimes appreciably. An outfielder for instance will be familiar with the way a ball caroms off the outfield walls in his home ballpark, and where those walls are in the first place, and familiar with the prevailing winds and native atmosphere in that park and their effects on an airborne baseball. And so on.

And home-field advantage means hitting last. Hitting in the bottom of the inning makes very little odds except when the game happens to be tied or close in the bottom of the 9th and into extra innings, when a go-ahead run for the home team ends the ballgame and the visiting team has spent its chance to answer that run. That may be said to be psychological like the support or otherwise from the stands: the visiting team gets no fewer at-bats for hitting first, after all, so hitting last is no advantage except in that psychological sense of knowing where you stand, that a run here wins the ballgame, say, or that you've got to register one run before the other fellow registers three outs just to stay alive, etc. But it's a structural psychological advantage, and very real, for the home team and against the visitor. And because the World Series is played between the two best teams in the game, by definition or anyway on paper, you're apt to get some evenly-matched, close-run ballgames between them, and tie-games in the bottom of the 9th and later.
　
So this is not scrapping over scraps. Baseball is a game of fractions of an inch and of a second, and whole ballgames and even World Series can turn on infinitesimally small things. And home-field advantage for the World Series is no small thing.
　
The one fair way of deciding home-field advantage would be to compare regular-season records, so that the superior ballclub of the two left standing in late October was rewarded for having been the better team over the course of the season. A coin-toss would be capricious, and the present arrangement of determining home-field advantage by All-Star Game outcome puts the decision into the hands of men who are uninvolved in the World Series, inasmuch as the All Stars are drawn from all 30 major-league clubs.
　
This scheme for "making it count" that Major League Baseball and the Players Association hit on in '03 is probably the best that could be devised for investing the All-Star Game with anything approaching the import it had in the time of Ted Williams. But I fail to see why the All-Star Game must be so life-and-death, and why it's not perfectly reasonable to regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, as opposed to desperately, earth-shakingly serious.
　
And anyhow, Major League Baseball ought to make it its policy to let the people decide. If the fans do invest the All-Star Game with some world-ending passion then more power to them, and if they regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, well, so be it. Who can blame them if they do conceive of the All-Star Game more as a spectacle, and what on earth is wrong with it? It ought to be good enough for the All-Star Game to be what the name implies, the one moment in a season when all the very best are assembled on one field and two dream teams. Let the people decide if it counts for anything, and don't let it skew the World Series.

So, about this Syria business

Syria in 2013 looks in places like Berlin circa 1945, it's been carved up already by jihadist and Islamist rebels, instituting sharia wherever they command a preponderance of men and arms, the Alawite, Ba'athist "national government" is sustained by Russian and Iranian and Hezbollah intervention, and the body count has hit 70,000 and counting, per the United Nations which is useful for such jobs as counting corpses in the more godforsaken corners of the earth, and not a lot else.

So what's to be done about this Syria business. The short answer is, as of now and beyond the usual humanitarian assistance, nothing. There was a moment when an intervention on a small margin, supporting the rebels without a very direct involvement on our part, would have been advisable, at the outset of this Syrian civil war in '11 when there was a true national rebellion, led by elements of the Syrian armed forces, against the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship and enemy to the United States and Israel.

But that moment came and went because Obama and his administration prefer to "lead from behind", which is to say, go golfing and hope things somehow work out in the end, or that no-one notices if things don't work out, or that somehow the decision is made for us, or that Britain or France or anyone else at all rides over the crest of the hill and spares us from getting our hands dirty. Plus which, Obama and his administration had committed themselves to the line that Bashar al-Assad was a "reformer", some sort of misunderstood moderate and great man worthy of the praise of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and his Ba'athist dictatorship worthy of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations with the United States. Bush and his administration had recalled the American ambassador to Syria in '05 after Syria's assassination of Rafik Hariri, twice the Prime Minister of Lebanon, so of course Obama and his administration had to go altogether in the contrary direction.

Obama's timing was impeccably awful to boot: he claimed a recess appointment to circumvent Senate confirmation of his nominee for ambassador to Damascus, rewarding Bashar al-Assad with normal diplomatic relations, not three months before the onset of this Syrian civil war, just in time for al-Assad to demonstrate beyond all doubting that he was a dictator and butcher of the first magnitude, with whom the United States ought to be in a state of cold war at the very best. And it was worse than even that: Obama was so loath to come down against the Butcher of Damascus, exposing himself as a fool and vindicating Bush's judgment on the al-Assad regime, that he watched five months of al-Assad's butchery before calling for his resignation, at long last, and even then, Obama couldn't bring himself to speak the words, preferring the medium of the presidential "written statement". So our moment passed, and with it our only good alternative.

Because before long, the national rebellion was hijacked by the international jihad, as in Libya not long before. So that by this point, per a memorable and frank New York Times report, "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of."

Obviously the United States isn't great guns for getting in the middle of this Alawite-jihadi-Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah melee, although in the abstract, that would be the one unalloyed good alternative, to sort of descend on Syria like some Heavenly host bringing ruin to the wicked on all sides, then institute a democracy for the ordinary Syrians still drawing breath. But that's as comprehensively mooted a point as can be, inasmuch as it'll never happen, which leaves us with the binary choice of keeping clear of Syria, or intervening indirectly as in supporting one side over the other.

But to support one side over another would be to support our principal enemies and threats in the world, and without reason to believe the end would be anything other than awful for us and for the people of Syria both. If I may be forgiven for invoking that most overdone of wars a second time in one piece, this Syrian civil war has gotten to be something like a science-fiction parallel-universe theater of the Second World War, where for various reasons the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese wound up going at one another hammer-and-tongs, somehow at war against one another and not together against us. We'd have been fools to touch that with a pole, instead of letting it play out and letting the works of them bleed one another dry, while we followed the developments from afar and counted the blood and treasure expended on their side and husbanded on ours.

The peculiarities of this Syrian civil war have conspired to assemble our principal enemies and threats in the world, on opposing sides. Al-Qaeda, or the international jihad more generally, and Iran are more or less equivalent as menaces to the United States, and this Syrian business has set them one against the other, to the point where the reports are that Iran has expelled some of the al-Qaeda-ists it had made welcome before Syria made things awkward between them. Then Hezbollah which menaces Israel has come into it, and the Russians who are our geopolitical rivals and general ne'er-do-wells have been on the ground in support of the al-Assad regime as well, for reasons best known to themselves. And the Syrian regime, or rather whatever's left of the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, is an enemy of longstanding to the United States and to Israel, and has been at the very least an enabler and ally to those people trying to blow us up. So given that those are the parties to this Syrian civil war, as of now, what justice may be claimed in helping any faction over any other, and what good may be expected, for us or for the people of Syria?

Of course the trouble with this is that in the meantime those people of Syria are dying by the tens of thousands, and indeed the last man standing in Syria, holding or inheriting whatever assets and armaments are left by that time, will be no friend to us. But that's the price of not intervening at the outset, when there were still white hats against the black hats, and when indirect intervention might have helped those white hats to victory inasmuch as the outside forces propping up the al-Assad regime had not yet come into it with both feet.

So there is no good alternative left to us, but there is one least bad alternative, namely, to keep our powder dry, do nothing for the time being apart from putting up some innocuous humanitarian assistance. But of course Barack Obama has just now commenced thumping his chest on Syria, days after being reduced to impotent observer while Israel acted in Syria boldly and deftly, Obama's chest-thumping coming complete with a gratuitous and unjust slight against President Bush and a declaration of "moral obligation" which Obama discovered only after two years and 70,000 dead bodies. And Obama's interventionism is of course to take the form of some unquantified new support for the rebels who are by now al-Qaeda-ists and Islamists and assorted jihadists. How we or the people of Syria would be better off for al-Qaeda's being propped up by the United States, so as to carry on the civil war with the aim ultimately of rendering Syria a terrorist squat and a colony of the new caliphate, is unknown to me, but that is the course set for us by our occasional Commander-in-Chief.

He does nothing at the moment when supporting the rebels might conceivably have tipped the balance, and when it'd have meant supporting worthy men against a common enemy and conceivably helping to replace a tyrant and a menace with friends and allies in a decent and democratic successor government; then when it's far too late for that and supporting the rebels amounts to aiding al-Qaeda and Islamists and the international jihad, Obama gives the order to support the rebels. The worst of all worlds, as ever.

On the official divorce of the stock markets and the real economy

One wonders if January 30 of 2013 may be one of those days like they write into movies set circa 1929: "Oh, Father, don't be such a bore. 'Gross domestic product' is for the university men. All I know is, my Radio Corp shares are up and I'm taking my best gal Millie out for a malted." Or something like that.

On that day the news came down from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that its initial estimate for gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012 was very slightly negative, that's to say, the United States economy actually shrank a bit in the final few months of 2012. Barack Obama ought to praise Almighty God that the BEA doesn't issue those initial estimates as projections and before November 6, because the exit polling found a clear plurality of voters on Election Day holding to the quaint notion that the economy was affirmatively improving, where we now know it was in fact contracting, or at best standing still, at just about that time.

Time was, the stock markets were dependent on what we fusty traditionalists insist on calling "the real economy". A BEA report like the January one showing Q4 2012 GDP at -0.1%, making the first decline since the official, statistical end of the recession in '09, would've been received by the markets as bad news and sent them lower -- and indeed the markets did go lower, only just, but they dusted themselves off and carried on toward their sunlit uplands such that all of two days later, the Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 were registering 52-week highs, with the NASDAQ not far off a 52-week high of its own and the Dow crossing 14,000 for the first time since October of '07 when its record of 14,165 was set, putting it one good day away from a new record high. The stocks-and-economy headline for those few days might read something like "U.S. economy shrinks, markets rejoice."

The markets and the real economy were seen in public together hand-in-hand until sometime after the economy found its bottom in '09; as the economy bounced along that bottom in 2010 and '11, neighbors overheard the real economy and the markets squabbling acrimoniously, with the markets becoming by times accusatory; by 2012 as the markets went from strength to strength, the real economy was known to be sleeping on the couch while the markets took the master bedroom upstairs, with the real economy stopping on the way from work for a hamburger while the markets had salmon and risotto at home on the good china; and finally when the Dow crossed 14,000 points two days after GDP came in negative on January 30 of 2013, the divorce papers came through. It's now official: the real economy and the stock markets are well and truly divorced, and they don't much feel like speaking to one another for the time being, either.

I'm not a writer of upper-middle-class American vernacular dialogue circa 1929, and I'm certainly no market analyst, so I offer herewith the considered assessment of Bob Janjuah who despite the funny name was Chief Markets Strategist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, via the pseudonymous Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.com:

"Real wealth can only be created by innovation and hard work in the private sector, with policymakers, the financial sector and financial markets there to aid and encourage/incentivise. Real wealth is not created by the printing press and by excessive government spending. We simply cannot turn wine into water – after all, if it were that easy, why have we not done this before...

"Sure, central bankers through [quantitative easing] can create a chemical/synthetic concoction that may well get us even more intoxicated than real wine, but like most chemical processes that are focused on by-passing the rules and focused on immediate quick fixes, the "wine" they are synthetically creating will I fear ultimately lead to either a large market hangover (at best) or – at worst – to the "market equivalent" of serious liver poisoning or something even worse.

"The scale of the fallout will I feel be determined largely by how far markets and policymakers are willing and/or able to stretch the elastic band between real world reality and liquidity fed asset markets. Past experience shows us that this band can be stretched a long way, and we know that central bankers have a bad track record at both spotting and managing asset bubbles."

Thus spake Janjuah. And that looks about right. Every ridiculously overinflated boom must bust; the trouble with this bubble is, it's the product of the wholesale printing of dollars and profligate deficit spending, and built on an economy that's arguably recessionary and inarguably enervated. The United States could absorb a crash in 2000 and again in '08, because by those times it was near enough to full employment and coming off good long stretches of healthy expansion in GDP, plus which the American dollar hadn't been debased wantonly in the inflation of the bubbles that were popped in those crashes.

There is just no reconciling the Dow Jones skipping giddily toward its record high, with -0.1 percent GDP and 14.4 percent effective unemployment. A crash in these circumstances, and affecting the dollar that all Americans deal in, could be a catastrophe.