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Great day for a honkball game!
Mar. 9th, 2009 02:29 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 1. High today: 5.
Speaking of the baseball card bubble: I noticed last night, wandering around the dome before Italy vs. Venezuela at the World Honkball Thing, that they have vending machines with packs of baseball cards--Topps, O-Pee-Chee, Score, Donruss, Fleer--from 1989, 1990, and 1991. A few from this decade, but mostly from those three years, the three years before the bubble burst, or, I guess, the three years after the bubble had burst and before everybody faced the fact. (I remember the most sought-after card of the bubble being Mark McGwire's rookie card, which would make 1987 the height of the bubble.) These packs of cards are all $1 and $1.50; not much more than they would have been back in the day, but now nothing but sentimental kitsch value. $1, too, for a rookie card of that young Pat Borders, who has bright things ahead of him after his World Series MVP.
I haven't seen an atmosphere at a baseball game around here like on Saturday for Canada vs. the US since 1987 at Exhibition Stadium, out in the $4 general admission grandstand, the last game of the late-September 4-game series against the Tigers, the only game of that series they lost, a game they were winning 1-0 from the first inning to the ninth and lost 3-2 in 13, the game that launched the 7-game losing streak to close out the season that cost them, the best Jays team of all those good teams, the division, finishing with a sweep in Tiger Stadium, finishing the sweep with a 1-0 loss, a shutout by Frank Tanana, ending with Garth Iorg tapping out weakly to the mound. Even four division championships and two World Series later, in a way, it was all downhill from that last game at Exhibition Stadium in 1987.
Doyle Alexander started that game for the Tigers. He had pitched the division clincher in '85 against the Yankees, the team that had cut him loose mid-season in 1983, a 99-pitch complete-game. (The next day, Phil Niekro became the oldest pitcher ever to throw a shutout--throwing, he claimed, nothing but ephus pitches. I was annoyed: it left the Jays stuck on 99 wins for the season.) The Jays traded him mid-season 1986 to the Braves for Duane Ward (who went on to make his first major-league start with the Jays out of it and facing elimination against Boston in September--he didn't get anybody out in the second inning and gave up four runs, and the Jays lost 12-3). The Tigers got him mid-season 1986 for John Smoltz. How about that. We chanted "Doy-ul" like "Dar-rel". We chanted "Let's foil Doyle", because we were all kids and we weren't cool. He gave up a run in the first and nothing over the next nine and two-thirds. You could look it up.
Another thing related to the margin of error: last summer or so I read a book by Charles Karelis called The Persistence of Poverty. This is one of those books that has one idea and just keeps playing it out over and over. It even has one simile that it keeps referring to over and over. But it's a pretty good simile and a pretty good idea. The simile is this: being poor is like being covered in bee stings. Someone who is covered in bee stings doesn't care if they get a dab of bee-sting salve or not, because it's not going to make any noticeable difference to the amount of pain they're in. The point is that diminishing marginal utility is not uni-directional. The way people (economists? philosophers interested in distributive justice or whatever?) ordinarily think about diminishing marginal utility, the richer you get, the richer you have to get for it to make any difference to you, and so, conversely, the poorer you get, the less richer you have to get for it to make a difference to you; having a billion and one dollars is infinitesimally better than having a billion dollars, so having one dollar is infinitely better than having nothing. But actually, having another dollar, or another hundred dollars, maybe another thousand or ten thousand dollars, doesn't make any difference to you when it's going to take, what, several tens of thousands of dollars to pull you out of whatever you consider to be poverty. The more general point is that poor people are not being irrational when they do things like the panhandler did when he told the cashier to keep the change. That kind of thing is as rational for him to do as it is for a billionnaire. What he does with small amounts of money isn't going to make any difference to his destitution, just like it's not going to make any difference to the billionnaire's wealth.
So, yeah, that's not bad, though I think the margin of error explains more. It does for me, anyway.
Geez, I remember this, writing these posts for an hour every night. How did I do that? Wow.
Speaking of the baseball card bubble: I noticed last night, wandering around the dome before Italy vs. Venezuela at the World Honkball Thing, that they have vending machines with packs of baseball cards--Topps, O-Pee-Chee, Score, Donruss, Fleer--from 1989, 1990, and 1991. A few from this decade, but mostly from those three years, the three years before the bubble burst, or, I guess, the three years after the bubble had burst and before everybody faced the fact. (I remember the most sought-after card of the bubble being Mark McGwire's rookie card, which would make 1987 the height of the bubble.) These packs of cards are all $1 and $1.50; not much more than they would have been back in the day, but now nothing but sentimental kitsch value. $1, too, for a rookie card of that young Pat Borders, who has bright things ahead of him after his World Series MVP.
I haven't seen an atmosphere at a baseball game around here like on Saturday for Canada vs. the US since 1987 at Exhibition Stadium, out in the $4 general admission grandstand, the last game of the late-September 4-game series against the Tigers, the only game of that series they lost, a game they were winning 1-0 from the first inning to the ninth and lost 3-2 in 13, the game that launched the 7-game losing streak to close out the season that cost them, the best Jays team of all those good teams, the division, finishing with a sweep in Tiger Stadium, finishing the sweep with a 1-0 loss, a shutout by Frank Tanana, ending with Garth Iorg tapping out weakly to the mound. Even four division championships and two World Series later, in a way, it was all downhill from that last game at Exhibition Stadium in 1987.
Doyle Alexander started that game for the Tigers. He had pitched the division clincher in '85 against the Yankees, the team that had cut him loose mid-season in 1983, a 99-pitch complete-game. (The next day, Phil Niekro became the oldest pitcher ever to throw a shutout--throwing, he claimed, nothing but ephus pitches. I was annoyed: it left the Jays stuck on 99 wins for the season.) The Jays traded him mid-season 1986 to the Braves for Duane Ward (who went on to make his first major-league start with the Jays out of it and facing elimination against Boston in September--he didn't get anybody out in the second inning and gave up four runs, and the Jays lost 12-3). The Tigers got him mid-season 1986 for John Smoltz. How about that. We chanted "Doy-ul" like "Dar-rel". We chanted "Let's foil Doyle", because we were all kids and we weren't cool. He gave up a run in the first and nothing over the next nine and two-thirds. You could look it up.
Another thing related to the margin of error: last summer or so I read a book by Charles Karelis called The Persistence of Poverty. This is one of those books that has one idea and just keeps playing it out over and over. It even has one simile that it keeps referring to over and over. But it's a pretty good simile and a pretty good idea. The simile is this: being poor is like being covered in bee stings. Someone who is covered in bee stings doesn't care if they get a dab of bee-sting salve or not, because it's not going to make any noticeable difference to the amount of pain they're in. The point is that diminishing marginal utility is not uni-directional. The way people (economists? philosophers interested in distributive justice or whatever?) ordinarily think about diminishing marginal utility, the richer you get, the richer you have to get for it to make any difference to you, and so, conversely, the poorer you get, the less richer you have to get for it to make a difference to you; having a billion and one dollars is infinitesimally better than having a billion dollars, so having one dollar is infinitely better than having nothing. But actually, having another dollar, or another hundred dollars, maybe another thousand or ten thousand dollars, doesn't make any difference to you when it's going to take, what, several tens of thousands of dollars to pull you out of whatever you consider to be poverty. The more general point is that poor people are not being irrational when they do things like the panhandler did when he told the cashier to keep the change. That kind of thing is as rational for him to do as it is for a billionnaire. What he does with small amounts of money isn't going to make any difference to his destitution, just like it's not going to make any difference to the billionnaire's wealth.
So, yeah, that's not bad, though I think the margin of error explains more. It does for me, anyway.
Geez, I remember this, writing these posts for an hour every night. How did I do that? Wow.
