Iowa's Big Day + Barackatude + Cards On Roll + Davis on Swine Flu Blues

Congratulations to Iowa and all the Iowans set to join in long-term union on this history day! Next up, Vermont!

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We're approaching the 100th day of President Barack Obama's tenure, which sometimes feels to me like 10 days and others like 1,000. On such latter days, I have to remind myself how fanciful his election seemed two years ago this time, and how tense things were at times throughout much of 2008, when the W Gang were still in office and the GOP really brought the crazy with the McCain-Palin ticket. (I also realize on such days that having had him as one of my almost-Senators for 4 years, I got very used to thinking of him in office, though serving in the US Senate is of a different order than being President of the United States.) I intend to write a brief titled "One Hundreds Days of Obamatude" soon, once I'm out of the new thicket of university tasks, he's been as good a leader as I imagined, in some cases far better (signing the Ledbetter law and the stem cell ban right away, appointing some true progressives like Hilda Solís, Harold Koh, and Dawn Johnsen, the Cuba overtures), and in a few far worse (that horrid financial team of his, the continuing drone attacks in Pakistan, the coddling of the Bush Crime Syndicate's state secret claims and treatment of prisoners). But on balance, he's been quite good. I was expecting a more liberal Clinton 2.0 or Eisenhower, but we're much closer to FDR+, which what we desperately need right now.

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I didn't believe it was possible, but the St. Louis Cardinals are in first place in the National League Central and are tied for the best record in the NL with a 14-6 showing so far. Although they always have a trump card in future Hall of Fame first baseman Albert Pujols (at right, AP), they did little over the winter to boost the team compared to a number of other squads in both the AL and NL. Yet so far, despite the loss of their best pitcher, Chris Carpenter, to an oblique strain/tear, they have cobbled together decent performances from their starters, especially Joel Pineiro (now 5-0 as of tonight), and decreased bullpen meltdowns, while the heavily farm-team stocked lineup has provided enough runs to put them ahead. They even ran the board with 9 straight at home just recently, including 3 straight over the New York Mets. One pressing weakness is the high number of errors so far: they have 20 errors in 20 games, a rate they'll have to lower if they want to stay in the lead. Pujols, sterling in every other regard, with 7 home runs, 20 runs (for 1000 in his career), and 25 runs batted in thus far, has made 4 all by himself. In the rest of the league, only the Los Angeles Dodgers are having a breakout year so far. The project NL leaders, including last year's World Series winner Philadelphia, the Mets, the Cubs, and the hot-for-a-minute Florida Marlins, have played middling ball at best. Can the Cardinals sustain their success? I for one hope so.

Pujols after hitting his grand slam against the Chicago Cubs, Sunday, April 25, 2009

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Here's another take on the swine flu epidemic, by Mike Davis in the Guardian Online. He lays the blame for what we're facing at several different doorsteps, including that of the industrial food complex--the industrial pig farming industry in particular--Big Pharma, and wealthy nations that seek to erect a pharmacological and public health moat around themselves. As the last few weeks have shown, pathogens can travel as easily as human beings, across every possible border. (Why am I sneezing as I type this?) But neoliberal ideology is also under indictment here. After you read the following quote (and the article, I hope), ask yourself, have you heard any of the people on TV or in our papers of record here advancing any of the discussion that Davis is broaching here?

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen). [H/t to my cousin, Lowell Denny]

Obama-ana + A Little Baseball

More Obama, but a different tip: fivethirtyeight's Poblano has been producing some of the most accurate polls on the primary race. It looks very close, but according to Poblano, McCain right now is beating both Obama and Clinton in the overall race and state-by-state breakdowns. With increases in the percentage of black voters, pro-Obama latino voters, or younger voters, Obama could substantially increase his chances of winning the popular vote and the electoral college vote.

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Then there's this article, by the Washington Post's Kevin Merida, on the racist abuse some of Obama's staffers have faced when campaigning for the Senator. Are you surprised? Are you also surprised that the establishment media will hardly report on this? I thought not....

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The Daily Howler's Bob Somerby highlights two very good articles on Obama's and Clinton's supporters, one by Post reporter Darryl Fears (who does respond to email quickly, and is very polite), and one by the New York Times's former anti-Goreist, Katherine "Kit" Q. Seelye. He also critiques the ever-deplorable Richard Cohen, about whom the less said, the better.

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Shifting gears again, I am following the baseball season. The Cardinals are hovering near the top of their division, with the Chicago Cubs in first place and the Houston Astros close behind. The Milwaukee Brewers have also been decent enough. This was supposed to be Chicago's year, and the Cardinals were thought to be middling at best, but the young players, clustering around the club's lone star, Albert Pujols, have proved to be more than up to the challenge of keeping pace with the Cubs. The league's other top teams, the Florida Marlins (how having shed some of their best players do they do it?) and Arizona Diamondbacks, have similar records. The beauty-laden Mets have been a real disappointment. No hitting, spotty pitching, a general lackadaisical approach to their games.

In the AL, the team I'm watching is Cleveland, whose starting pitchers have thrown shutouts in at least 1/3rd of the team's games so far. In fact, they've thrown about 32 innings so far, with big, young righty Francisco Carmona (above, AP Amy Sancetta), throwing a complete game, 5-hit, 3-0 shutout in the first game of a double header yesterday against the Toronto Blue Jays, and CC Sabathia, last year's Cy Young winner, pitches tomorrow. Boston, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (when are they going to shed this tongue-freezer of a name?), and for a change, Baltimore (!) and Tampa Bay are among the best teams. The Yankees, in 4th place in their division, aren't so far off the lead, but they haven't looked like contenders at any point so far. Would Joe Torre not have at least gotten them to the same record?

Jumping back 40 years, here's a classic, the Cardinals' sublime Bob Gibson, striking out 17 batters to set a new World Series record, in the opening game of the 1968 World Series, against the Detroit Tigers (which Detroit won). That was the year Gibson posted his peerless 1.12 ERA, the lowest since the deadball era, and 13 shutouts. Watching him pitch this game, you see why; but how did he ever lose 9 games?

MLB Season Opens (Ho Hum)

The Major League Baseball season is underway, and, perhaps for the first time since the 1994 strike, I'm not particularly excited. I will follow the Saint Louis Cardinals' (and a few other teams on the semi-ups, like the Yankees, Mets, Tigers, etc.) play throughout the season. They look to be as middling as they were in the 1970s and 1990s. I'll probably try to go to some baseball games in Chicago, since I'll be teaching through June, and, if I can get my act together, set foot in either Yankee or Shea Stadium when I'm back in the New York area. But my interest has, to put it mildly, dimmed substantially. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older and increasingly feel I don't have the mental or emotional space to devote to retrograde, monopolistic, social, secular opiates like professional baseball (or even college sports--I hadn't realized the NCAA and NIT basketball playoffs had begun until friends on a sports list started posting about and C asked me about the "brackets"). But I do think another part of my disaffection comes from the lingering steroid/performance enhancement scandal, which hasn't been fully addressed, by any of baseball's major players. MLB, including its administration and the owners, and the Players Union have bandied about punitive Band-Aids, when not demonstrating that they're in denial, and Congress's entry into the debacle was just a lot of bad spectacle. So what did we learn? That lots of players were using performance enhancers, but only a few, like Barry Bonds, have been pilloried. That some high profile players like Roger Clemens probably also were doping, but have lied about it, or maybe they haven't. That José Canseco, of all people, is turning out to be one of the most honest people in this whole mess, and he's even fingered the gazillionaire Adonis himself, A-Rod (A-Roid?). The reality seems to be that countless other players from the late 1980s onwards were probably using steroids and performance enhancers, that MLB and the union probably knew, and looked the other way, and that they want to condemn and punish players who got caught, without taking any responsibility for their action in abetting the situation, or admitting that it was beneficial for their bank accounts, which is what it all comes down to in the end, no? With 28 million people just getting by on food stamps these days, who has time for truculent, whining, lying multimillionaires? Well, maybe a few, if they're named Albert Pujols (at top), or José Reyes (at right), or Derek Jeter, or Johan Santana....

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And now, for a little nostalgia. 40 years ago, a St. Louis Cardinals baseball player turned in a season-long performance that is unlikely ever to be challenged. I'm talking about Hall of Famer Bob Gibson's astonishing season, when he registered a modern era-record low ERA of 1.12. The league ERA was 2.90. The 32-year-old Gibson's overall numbers were equally remarkable. He threw 28 complete games, 13 shutouts, surrendered only 198 hits in 304 2/3rds innings, and struck out 268 batters. Perhaps his weakest stat was his win-loss total: 22-9, which presses the question, how on earth did this eventual Most Valuable Player award and Cy Young winner lose 9 games?

Derrick Goold offers some answers in his recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch article: Gibson's teammates weren't getting a lot of hits against his pitching opponents, who included some of the other great pitchers of that era: Juan Marichal, Don Drysdale (who pitched 58 2/3rds consecutive scoreless innings, a record that stood for decades), Tom Seaver, Ferguson Jenkins, and Gaylord Perry. To quote Goold:

In his first 10 starts that season, Gibson was 3-5 despite a 1.52 ERA, mainly because opposing starting pitchers had a 1.34 ERA against the Cardinals.

His teammates scored two or fewer runs in eight of Gibson's losses that season and twice he lost 1-0, once when Gaylord Perry twirled a no-hitter.

Eleven of Gibson's 34 starts that summer were opposite another Hall of Fame-bound pitcher. He went 5-5 with a 1.45 ERA in those games.

"We wish we could have done more on his behalf," Cardinals Hall of Famer Lou Brock said. "Not just the ERA, but the victories. He could have won 30. ... As a hitter, you make it a goal to destroy the pitch before it destroys you.

"You could not do that with Bob. You could not destroy his pitch. You don't have a lot of time to come up with a plan to destroy something you can't see."

One of the results of that season was that Major League Baseball lowered the pitcher's mound, shrank the strike zone, and clamped down on trick and illegal pitches. Gibson's record in 1969? 20-13, with a 2.18 ERA, and 269 strikeouts. Only 4 of his 28 complete games that season were shutouts. These days few leading pitchers, who throw fewer games and fewer innings because of the 5-man starting rotations and ample relief corps, ever approach 10 complete games, let alone 4 shutouts or ERAs under 2.00; last year's ERA titlist, Padre Jake Peavy, came in at 2.54; last year's shutout leader, Arizona's Brandon Webb, posted 3; and last year's complete game top finisher, Roy Halliday, only posted 7. The AL Cy Young winner C. C. Sabathia, managed only 4 complete games, 1 shutout, and a 3.21 ERA, while the NL Cy Young winner, Peavy, had no complete games and no shutouts. Both pitchers also only won 19 games. A different game indeed.