...the weapon of choice

The two main threads of this blog don't intersect all that often, but it's fun when they do. Watching a recent Daily Show clip, I was treated to a host of Fox News personalities telling me about how liberals want to give Washington more power, to nationalize the banks, to take away your freedoms, and so forth. And it got me thinking about Scott Podsednik. I will explain this.

Scott Podsednik is a lousy MLB player. His career OPS+ is 88 (it's like IQ, "average" is 100), his defense is iffy, and he's been pretty injury-prone for the last few years. Needless to say, he's currently employed by the Kansas City Royals. His strengths are as follows: he plays hard, he steals bases (though not at an impressively high rate, and not as many as he could if he would, like, draw a walk once in a while), and he puts the ball in play, whether by swinging at the first pitch or sac bunting his teammates over to second. None of this is useful enough to outweigh his comically low OBP, nor his complete inability to hit for power. But it is, I will freely admit, fun to watch.
Sac bunts are exciting. Hit-and-runs are exciting. Shit, I'm a Sox fan, I watched Jacoby Ellsbury steal home once. And it was awesome. But it was also really fucking stupid. The point of baseball, after all, is pretty simple. Score more runs than the other guy, and you go home happy. Anything that helps you score more runs is good. Turns out, when you run the numbers, that the best way to do that is to have a bunch of players who walk a lot and hit for power. It's not as exciting, I'll admit, as the old "swing at everything and steal any base not nailed down" method, but it works pretty well.
So when sabermetricians go after Ozzie Guillen for bunting all the time, or the Royals for signing players who can steal every base but first, it's not because they hate the little stuff, or don't have any interest in exciting baseball. It's because they want their teams to win, and they understand that drawing walks is more conducive to winning than not drawing walks.

And here's where the politics angle comes in. Fox News was declaring that liberals want to expand government power, as though it were just for kicks, an end unto itself. And it's not true. While I will admit that my heart goes all aflutter anytime I hear that OSHA has written a new regulation, or that corporate tax rates went up by .1%, the main reason that I support government intervention or expanded powers is that it works. I live in a commonwealth, and I expect the government of that commonwealth to do whatever it can to improve the lives of its citizens. If the facts showed that minimal government involvement was the best way to do that, then that's fantastic. But they don't.
Liberals want to expand the role of government in American life when said expansion makes Americans' lives better. Thus, more oversight of coal mine safety: good. Subsidies to help poor people buy health insurance: good. Executive authority to assassinate American citizens by fiat: bad. See how simple this is?

I seem to recall reading in stories that the ability to figure out what works and then do that was one to be admired. It even seemed to correlate with the term "can-do American spirit" a lot. Someone will have to explain to me someday why this skill applies to neither America's government nor its national pastime.