Economists jerk it out of the park
Unlike Patrick Fitzgerald, I don't have just one trick up my sleeve: I've got yet another baseball-related compliment for a prominent Republican today. The New York Times shows that our next Fed chairman has his values in the right place:
The man nominated to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve knows of one policy he would like to change. Earned run average, he says, needs to be calculated in a way that is fairer to pitchers who leave runners on base.
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[Ben] Bernanke, a Southerner by birth who stands well shy of 6 feet, became a Red Sox fan in the mid-1970's while he was a student at Harvard. After moving to Princeton as a professor, he kept his allegiance to the Red Sox. He also became fascinated by the way that statistics can capture the game or distort it, much as they can for the economy.
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Pitchers unlucky enough to be followed by ineffective relievers, as the Yankees' Randy Johnson was in 2005, have unfairly high E.R.A.'s. Pitchers who are bailed out by their bullpen, as Roy Oswalt of the Astros often was this season, end up with artificially low E.R.A.'s.A better system would divide blame, depending on the base the runners were on when a pitcher departed and the number of outs, Bernanke argued.
Now, I know I get suckered in by new baseball stats pretty easily, but Ben Bernanke makes a lot of sense. Senators, vote to confirm.