182. Baseball Pain (4). The Pythagorean Number

 
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When you're a fan you become so focused on your own ballplayers that you get to thinking they're the cause of everything.  The other guys don't "get" three hits; your pitcher "gives them up."  He "gets" batters to swing at bad pitches, hit the ball on the ground, pop up, even line out.  When your guy comes to the plate and does that it's all his fault.

Other teams are known mainly by what they have done to you. The Phillies beat us up in the first two series we played with them in 1964 and after that they were "the mighty Phils," kept on their eminence by memory — and, of course, the numbers in the won-lost column.  That's why I referred to them (in the preceding post) and the Giants as the two "really talented" and "strong" teams, up there battling for first place.  Well the Phils weren't nearly as strong as they appeared, as I recently found out.

One number in one of those genius statisticians' columns, called "the Pythagorean number," made it all clear.  The number is the percentage of wins a team "should have," given their talent, measuring talent by the differential between number of runs scored and number of runs allowed up to that point (see note, below).  You can see right away whether or not a team is "playing over its head" — that is, beyond its basic talent — or not.  If it is, you're not so surprised at a fold.  Class will tell.

Well, on September 21, the day Ruiz greased their skids, the Phils had a Pythagorean number of  .561.  Their won-lost percentage at that point was .600.  They had been playing "way over their heads."

What a useful number!  How much it tells us about past pennant races.  Knowing that on the 21st the Phils were playing .39 over their heads I check the Reds and see that their Pythagorean is .564 while their actual won-lost is .557.  They're playing a little under their heads.  If there had been a Pythagorean number in '64 I'd have been saying, "Yeah, man, we'll catch 'em.  We got the class."  To a Philly fan after the fold I could have said, "Don't take it so hard, buddy.  It was in the cards.  Class told."

In the cards.  In the cards.  Easy to say but when I think about that old fatalist expression, especially during a game, it troubles me.  In my seat I don't for one moment believe that Brandon Phillips' game-changing break for third base (see Post #172) was in the cards.  It was a decision he made, and it came out of his character.  Everything my players do is a manifestation of character.  I see it in every action on the field.  I can't help it.  That's the way I watch and that, I think, is the way most fans watch.  Do the numbers show that we're fools?

If we are fools some of us, the nuts for whom "in the cards" will suggest simulated games, should know it well by now.  Robert Coover, the novelist, certainly should know it.  One of his heroes matches every percentage event in a baseball game to a comparable percentage throw of the dice.  Most nuts use playing cards (jack for a single, queen for a double, and so on) with the proportion of cards in an arranged deck adjusted for event (only one ace for a home run, for example) and player (more face cards for sluggers).  Play that game over the winter and you'll have no doubt that "in the cards" refers to a mathematical outcome independent of human agency.  Or, where the shoe pinches, that winning a pennant has nothing to do with character.

A cynical, illusion-smashing statistician could really drive this home.  "Oh sure, you can find parts of a season — winning streaks, losing streaks, sudden turns — that appear to be character-driven, you can use words like 'confident' and 'demoralized' and 'momentum.'  You can talk about 'psychological advantage' and a player 'choking.'  But those are just you, constructing something dramatic and intelligible." 

And you know, as you learn more about statistics you begin to wonder if that killjoy has a point.  Do you know that 100 random win-lose tosses will produce, more often than not, at least one six-game winning streak?  Look at that streak in your winter game and try not to make up a story about it.  Hell, that's the point of playing the game, to trigger your imagination.  Turn over one card and a team boards the train home fired up, turn over a different one and they're in the dumps.

If you upped the technology and had ballplayers running on batteries wired to a talent program that cranked out their performance would the season they produced be in any way distinguishable from a season produced by human ballplayers?  Might you produce the 1964 season this way?  How, to go Cartesian with this, do I know that the 1964 season wasn't produced that way, by some all-powerful demon?

What a prospect!  Every team's line on the graph wobbling toward its Pythagorean number, every player's line showing more and more accurately how much a victim or beneficiary of his basic talent he is.  But then there are those streaks at the end of 1964, by all three teams we're interested in.   Once you acquire the statistician's view you can't get rid of it.  So, fair warning.  The drama in the rest of this narrative could have no basis in nature.  An evil demon could just be playing with my mind.

Note: The Pythagorean number was first obtained by dividing runs scored² by the sum of runs scored² and runs allowed².  The exponent was then changed to 1.83 in order to bring the number closer to results in the world.

181. Baseball Pain (3)

Until September 23 the pain in Cincinnati was so dull it's not worth measuring.  We were out of the race and had never really been in it.  Right from the beginning it had been the Giants and Phillies, really talented teams, they had been the ones, up there jockeying back and forth for first place, May, June, July, up there where losses really hit you, up where pain was significant.  Then Philadelphia had pulled away in August and few really sharp jabs were possible.  Cincinnati had stumbled around in third or fourth place, occasionally bumping into St. Louis, down in fifth, and by mid-September all either city was feeling was the old ache of the loser.

"Then, boom, Chico Ruiz!"  That, for the sake of drama, is what I'd like to say, but no, baseball fans understand numbers too well for that.  After Chico's steal, no matter how hard the Phils are taking it (I understand that their manager, George Mauch, was walking around the locker room saying, "Chico Fucking Ruiz, Chico Fucking Ruiz") the Reds are still five and a half out.  No, the boom doesn't come until after the win on the 23rd, and then it's a small one.  We're suddenly three and a half out.  With ten left to play.  Some hope is justified.  Excitement rises.

The other two cities, I assume, are still in the dumps.  They're five back, well outside the hope circle.  San Francisco fans have probably had more pain up to this point than St. Louis fans.  On June 15 the Giants were tied for first place.  "Ho, ho, this could be the year."  The Cards were in 8th place, three games under .500.  "Guess these guys don't have it."  On August 23 they were eleven games behind.

If you're a Cardinal fan you're depressed but you're not pained.  Not sharply, anyway.   Sharp pain is what you feel when your demonstrably strong team, up there battling for first with another strong team, blows a game.  That's what the Giants did in August.  Again and again.   August 16: Error by Hart gives Milwaukee its winning unearned run.  August 18: In the eighth inning pitcher Bobby Bolin goes to second with Marty Keough's bunt, an intended sacrifice, but the runner, Chico Ruiz, Chico Fucking Ruiz, beats the throw.  Bad gamble.  Two grounders and Ruiz has scored.  Final score 1-0.  August 21: Giants give up three runs in the ninth inning and lose to the Cards 6-5.

The Phils, the team Giants fans expected to battle down to the wire, pulled away.  The expression for what happened to the Giants, the one the fans could expect to find in every season summary in the future, is "fell out of contention."  The Reds "fell out of contention in June."  It's neutral but it hurts.  On goes the writer to the teams that counted.

It's less painful to fall out of contention in August than it is in September, when you're closer to the prize.  But the city that does that is not free of pain in September.  That's the month for spectator pain, for watching, from a distance, the drama of close contention, the struggle of the last few on their feet in the arena, knowing that, if only a few things had gone differently, you could have been there.  "If only Bolin had gone to first with that ball.  If only...If only...."

But Giants fans not only had retrospective pain in September, they had immediate pain.   It was a combination, and the team made sure of it — by winning just enough to keep hopes of contention alive.  In early September they nosed into third place, and kept clawing, from fourth place, to get back into the ring.  Right up to the last week.  There were many September nights, I'm sure, when San Francisco fans could have turned off their radios feeling the pain of the August losses that put them where they were.

Would we, in Cincinnati, have found that odd, that Giants fans should be grieving because they wouldn't have a chance to be as wounded as fans in two of the three contending cities would be?  Not at all.  We had grieved that way for decades.

If you haven't put in that kind of grieving time, or if you are an outsider, you're going to find that kind of understanding hard to come by.  Maybe you could do it in a season, but you'd have to have a good imagination.  Can you imagine, in '64, what those fans of the teams under San Francisco are feeling?  Put yourself in Pittsburgh, or Chicago, or Houston, way down there, 6th, 8th, 9th place.  Where the Phils and Reds spent so many years.  Can you imagine it?

Now I don't ever want to say that watching a baseball game is dull.  With the poorest team there's always individual drama, a rookie trying to make it, a veteran trying to hang on, a marginal pitcher trying to master the pitch that will save him.  But that's the little picture, and what we're trying to understand is the pain in the big picture, particularly when it is impressed on you that your team is not in it.  And hasn't been for years.  And isn't likely to be.

(Remember here that the seventies, the years that sweetened the Cincinnati imagination forever, are still to come.)

So there's something to remember about the pain you're going to witness, or experience, in future posts: that below those feeling it are many, many others who would be glad, so glad, who would give their eye-teeth, to feel it.

180. Baseball Pain (2)

   

First you have to understand the pain of the Philadelphia fan, since that is the pain I am going to have to compete with. 

It's not a hidden pain.  The cries of old and middle-aged men, and a few women, have been sounding in newsprint and blogs for forty years.  "It hurt so much I couldn't even watch baseball for a year afterward."  "All I had to do was look at [my father's] face to know the horrible news."  "I saw those [happily printed] 1964 World Series tickets framed in my cousin Donnie's den, and I almost cried."  

Your handicap, youngster of today, is that you live in a time when teams come to the end of a season competing for ten places in the postseason playoffs.  In 1964 ten teams competed for one place.  It was go to the World Series or go home.  If you were a loser like the Phillies (17 last place finishes between 1919-1947, only two league championships in 81 years) that meant that if you missed your chance here you might go decades before getting another one.

Another possible handicap is living in a city with a lot of really good sportswriters writing about a really good team.  You won't know what it's like to be condescended to when those writers, knowing your team's record, come to town.  In Philadelphia your stadium will, after Yankee Stadium, "seem to be made of Tinker Toys."  In Cincinnati it will be "The Great American Small Park."  Your city will be "dowdy, conservative Cincinnati," and your team, though it burns holes in the base paths stealing bases (nine in one game), will be "conservative" because its square management demands haircuts.

I won't draw out the pain of 1964, since the Philly collapse, one of the two or three most famous in baseball history, is probably already known to you: the team lost ten straight and finished in a tie for second.  The game, and maybe the play, that started the losing streak is the one pictured on my theologian's blog, the one that has the catcher looking backward.

The man is looking at a baseball that has sailed past him.  The reason it is doing that is that his pitcher, Art Mahaffey, has been emotionally unsettled by the sight of Chico Ruiz running for home plate. 

"And what should be so unsettling about that?" even a European, watching the game, might wonder.  Home plate, he can see after an inning or two, is where the pitcher normally throws the ball.  The need to throw it very hard, or put various spins on it, makes throwing the ball exactly over the plate difficult, as his American host may explain, but now there is no batter there.  All Mahaffey has to do is throw the ball at moderate speed within the catcher's reach.  Ruiz has many yards to go before he gets there.  If anything in baseball is duck soup, this is duck soup.

Philadelphians know a lot now about the man who made it so ducky.  Chico Ruiz was a rookie, a fill-in, who never quite made it to journeyman.  In 1964 he apparently hadn't been around long enough to know that managers would kill you if you tried a naked steal of home (as opposed to a steal covered by a teammate stealing second) against a right-handed pitcher (one who's looking right at you).  And he'd double-kill you if you did it with a hitter like Frank Robinson up, somebody who had a good chance of bringing you in with a hit anyway.  Double-kill you, that is, if Robinson, not noticing you, hadn't swung and taken your silly head off already.

Well that's the salt the media have been putting in the Philadelphia wound for 48 years, that their heroic masters of the game were done in by a twit, and I don't want to add to it.  I just want to note the special nature of their pain: that it's nearly all retrospective.  If the 1964 Phils, after their bad spell, had gone on to win the pennant and then the World Series as the 1950 Phils had done, there would be no pain at all.  Just a little relieved wonderment, if that.

Try a little counterfactual experiment here.  In 1950 the Phillies had an even bigger lead, seven and a half games, on a comparable date, September 20.  They blew it and had to beat the Dodgers on the last day, October 1, to win the pennant that took them to a World Series victory.  Suppose they hadn't done that.  Suppose they'd lost the tiebreaker.  Philadelphians would be looking at the 1950 bad spell the way they're looking at the 1964 one now, and picking out moments, a tipping point, with an image, probably, the way they're doing now. 

We don't have any images because those moments have been forgotten, buried by the glorious successes that followed. And that prompts me to put a question to Philadelphia fans:  Would you really like to have this painful image buried?  Would you like to have Ruiz mean nothing to you, emotionally?

That's a harder question than it looks, as years of teaching good fiction have taught me.  It's a question, I think, of how much we value images that fit into a story, and how much we value stories that give us understanding.  And that's going to vary with individuals, especially when they're looking at a painful image.  I don't know about the theologian who started me on this series of posts, and I can't contact him, but my guess — based on I don't know what — is that he would not like to give up this painful image, even for a triumphant one.  Nor would certain other Philly fans, the ones who would value the same thing in fiction.  They've got a great story, it helps them understand life (that time and chance make it so cruel), and they would hate to give this up.

If anybody else can testify to this response, I'd like to hear from them. The image can be found at Chico‑Ruiz‑Steals‑Home.jpg

179. Baseball Pain (1)

  

A man in Philadelphia is grieving over the approach of the autumnal equinox.  Because it tells him winter is approaching?  That his powers are declining, that his days are dwindling down to a precious few, that yellow leaves, or none, or few, are hanging on his life's bough?  No.  It's because it brings back memories of the Phillies' loss of a baseball game to the Cincinnati Reds on September 21, 1964.

That's 48 years ago.  One game.  No, narrower than that.  One play: Chico Ruiz, of the Reds, stealing home.  He heads his blog post with a picture of it: Ruiz with his foot in the air, starting his slide, Frank Robinson, the batter, standing back, looking at the plate where the foot is soon to go, Clay Dalrymple, the Philly catcher, one knee on the ground, looking (of all places!) at the backstop behind him.

This picture comes back to this man every year as, he tells us, it does to many Philadelphia fans. Those fans must have lived through pretty many other things by now.   He, a grandfather, has (by his profile) had a career as an academic, a theologian.  His Ph.D. thesis was on Paul's theology of justification.  Who knows how deeply he has been engrossed in philosophical problems.  And every fall, that play at the plate.

Well, I have some painful memories of those days in September, 1964, too, and so, I dare say, do some fans in St. Louis, and San Francisco.  It was a record year for pain.  Teams so close in the standings, so much depending on each game.  The last two weeks were like having a kidney stone.  And only one team would pass it.

Why would anyone ever want to relive a kidney stone?  Masochism? Maybe, but with fans of teams with a history of losing it's more likely to be pride.   A need to win at something, some way.   "You think you've suffered, listen to what I went through."  I've heard that enough to think it's pride.

It's sort of what I want this fellow in Philadelphia to hear now.  I see him over there crowing away (he'll call it moaning): "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."  Well, buddy, I know it.  And my friend in St. Louis knows it.  And there are probably a lot of guys in San Francisco who know it. 

So there's one reason to display my pain: to get even with this theologian.  Another reason is to educate.  There are so many people, particularly in Europe, particularly in football cities, who still don't understand the appeal of baseball.  And I think that if they can just understand the pain of it, and how this pain is different from the pain of other games, and superior to it, and how it makes this game superior … but then I lose them.  How can degree of pain signify superiority?  I guess you have to feel it.

And you could feel it, if I could just recreate it in words.  That, though, is so difficult that I have pretty well given up — until now.  Now, thanks to the wonderful new statistics, and the passionate fans who, profiting from the cyber miracles of our age, have managed to fill them out, I have a chance.  Do you know that I can now expose my heart to the meeting, or not, of bat with ball in every plate appearance in every game the Reds have played in the last seventy years or more? 

These geniuses have come up with a way to quantify what every heart in every stadium is doing.  To graph it.  They can give you a line representing, batter by batter, your team's progress to victory or defeat.  Up or down, sloping or sinking, soaring or diving, there it is.  And of course, since victory or defeat is everything to a fan, there's his heart.

You might take a look at this line, examples of which you can find at http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/.  Go to 23 September, 1964, the game between the Cardinals and the Mets.  I hope you see how much the line conveys.  It's like the line some teachers put on the blackboard to show a moral defeat.  Like (for me) the defeat of Eve by Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost:  down as she's tickled by Satan's praise, up as she recognizes it as flattery, more steeply down as she accepts his lies about the tree, up as she asserts the truths she has been taught, then vertically down, off the cliff, as she shows, by eating the fruit, that she doesn't believe those truths.  You can't see it on the board without realizing what a process moral defeat is.  The line at baseball-reference.com does the same thing for you.

Look at it now for 23 September, one of the days in my period of agony, squiggling along the center line for six innings at Shea Stadium, nobody scoring, few men getting on base.  There's the Cards' high point in the seventh, Ken Boyer's single after Bill White's home run.  One run in, nobody out, maybe a multi-run rally starting.  Win Expectancy 73%.  Now look at the change.  The line teeters at the top, as Boyer is sacrificed to second, descends some as the rally fizzles (McCarver and Javier ending the inning by grounding weakly to the pitcher) and then plunges as the Cardinal pitcher gives up two straight doubles and throws away a sacrifice bunt in the eighth.  The line shows it all.  Long inaction and uncertainty, then prosperity, crash, and a wiggling depression.

All right, in the '64 season we've seen our four teams emerge as contenders in June, then seen Philadelphia take a four-game lead in mid-August (worry in the other cities), raise it to five and a half on September 1 (big worry), and to six on September  15 (near despair).  By September 20, with the lead at six and a half, the rest of us have pretty well given up (or told ourselves we have given up).

Before I go ahead with my project, to relive, with the help of the new statisticians, the fans' last two weeks of the season, I want to make sure non-baseball people understand how rational our despair was.  Games ahead in the standings represent what has to happen for the team behind to catch the team ahead.  If you're one game behind entering the last day you have to win and the other team has to lose.  That has to happen six straight times if you are six behind with six days remaining.  As the sun rose on 21 September the Reds were six and a half behind with 13 games left to play.  The Phils had 12 left.  That meant that if the Phils won just six games the Reds would have to win all of their games.  Any Reds fan (or any St. Louis fan, whose team had the same record the Reds had) who wasn't in despair was crazy.  As for the Giants fan, he was even crazier, though only by a little bit.  His team was seven back, with 12 to play.

Very well, the next post will relive the game that has burned itself into the Philadelphia theologian's memory, first in his skin and then in my skin, in Cincinnati.  After that I will relive, with commentary, some of the other games played by these teams, to the extent that they contribute to our understanding.

178. Absolutism in Congress

 

It isn't often that we get to see three cases of thought-stopping absolutism play out at the same time but that is now our privilege.  The Norquist pledge, the Second Liberty Bond Act (debt ceiling), and the Budget Control Act (fiscal cliff) are all about to do just what our Philosophy 101 instructors were trying so hard to do: teach us to bear the pain of critical thinking.

Carefully assessing the present situation, making your best projection about the future, weighing all the options, and finally striking a workable balance — that was mentally painful.  But, if you wanted to find the best solution to a problem and a good grade in the course, there was no way to avoid it.

Not that freshmen didn't have a way.  My instructor called it "the absolutist escape."  Any time you declared that there was one value, one course of action, one thing that you would never do or always do, you were taking it.  And yes, you'd get a period of ease.  No more thinking, no more pain.  "That's settled.  Whew!"  But, sure enough, there would be the instructor (or the textbook) with a case that unsettled you.  "Non-violence, you say?  Well, here's this monster whose greater violence your violence can prevent."  There went your declaration.

Absolutists were, in the card-playing analogy my instructor liked to use, one-card-trumps-all people.  They were a drag in any complicated game, like morality, or politics, or life.  Among other people they contributed little.  Among themselves they wound up with solutions that seldom fit the problem.  It could hardly be otherwise.  As soon as they said, "X, whatever the situation," they doomed themselves to a misfit for every situation that wasn't exactly like the situation in which they said X.

Grover Norquist, who has been to college (Harvard BA, MBA), must have known this.  Yet with his offered pledge he was willing at the start of the 112th Congress, to turn 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate into absolutists.  "I will not raise taxes, whatever the situation."  We college teachers have to wonder.

The debt ceiling operates a lot like Norquist's pledge.  It says, "You will not budget more than X whatever the situation."  Only in this case X is an exact number, declared first in 1917.  That has been a misfit so many times that by now you'd think the absolutism would be clear, but apparently not so.

Who can miss the absolutism in the Budget Control Act?  "Budget cuts will be made on this date whatever the situation."

See who the absolute authority is in both of those last two?  Members of Congress.  Only at an earlier date.  Both are acts saying, "Congressmen in a different situation are wiser than Congressmen in the middle of the situation that has to be dealt with.  Accept their authority."

The debt ceiling will, according to Timothy Geithner, kick in sometime in February or March.  The Budget Control Act takes effect on January 1.  The Norquist Pledge hangs over the whole period — about the length of a college quarter.  Plenty of time to measure the pain of absolutist playout against the pain of critical thinking.

177. "Conquered territory" vs. "occupied territory."

Oh how much depends on the word you use for land your country's armed forces have won.  Call it "conquered territory" and nobody objects (with words, anyway) to what you do with it.  Call it "occupied territory," though, and you're in the stew.  "Hey, that land belongs to somebody else."  Occupation, unlike conquest, is not legitimate.

Conquest is legitimized by history.  This is the way the world has gone. The conquering country is a member of a very large, very ancient class.  Challenge what it's doing and you're challenging all of them.  Hell, you're practically challenging the foundations of the earth.  Very few of today's people are living on land that hasn't, at some time, been conquered for them.

The Israelis are paying the price for accepting "occupied" as the word their newly acquired Palestinian Territory in 1967.  Constantly being criticized.  Why didn't they insist on "conquered territory"?  They'd have freed themselves of so much flak.  Besides, isn't "conquered" a better fit with the way they have been treating the land, or have shown, by their tolerance of the settlers, the way they want to treat it?

Well, there were a lot of reasons they didn't use "conquered," beginning with the fact that conquest would have incorporated enough non-Jews in their country to make the Jews a minority, but a very big reason was that by 1967 conquest wasn't legitimate any more.  International law had changed.  In the early days of the Zionist movement "conquest" was in international law recognized as a "right" — meaning, like most things in international law, "something we're not going to argue about."  Unless you were willing and able to take the land back from the country that took it there was no point in opening your mouth.  The word "right" gave nations victorious in war the feeling of legitimacy that people victorious in lawsuits had.  It was a very useful term at the end of the 19th century, when Europeans were taking African land.

But "right of conquest" didn't hold up.  Though it was riding high in 1897, when Theodore Herzl first envisioned a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East, and still had plenty of momentum in 1917, when the British government blessed Herzl's vision, by 1946, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was dying and by 1974, with United Nations resolution 3314, the word was dead.  The "right" of conquest became the "crime" of conquest, called "aggression."

If only Israel had won the Palestinian territory 70 years earlier!  Things would have been (linguistically) so simple.  "We got it, boys.  Legitimately.  Might as well quiet down."

That's words for you.  You get one you can take shelter under and, whooosht, somebody takes it away.  Who took "right of conquest" away?  Well, grandchildren (this blog isn't just for profs), they are called "humanitarians" and they have taken a lot of the old words away.  They did it by changing our attitude toward the thing the word referred to.  Invading a country was bad.  And not just bad where it had always been bad, in the eyes of the invaded country, but in the eyes of the world community. If that community thought something was bad you couldn't use a good word, like "right," for it.  Not for long.  

The world community had begun to count for something at the time the humanitarians got together (the 18th century) and they made use of it.  Get those first public intellectuals, get those gabby philosophes, get everybody in the Republic of Letters, talking in a disapproving way about conquest (or slavery, or prisons, or insane asylums, or child labor) and you could change the attitudes of the literate world.  (That's what you finally had in the 18th century, a big, literate, middle-class world.)  The change succeeded, children, and we call the change "the Enlightenment."

I offer that name, not for your use on a quiz, but for your understanding of Israel's pain, its linguistic pain.  The words that fit its actions, and were once acceptable, cannot be used.  The enlightened community has replaced them with other, more humane, words, and Israelis must use them.  One must debate in the style (some would say "fashion") of the times.

176. Choosing a President: Prior Questions.

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Suppose we had to answer these two questions before we listened to another word, or had another thought, about this presidential election:

(1) How much can any President do about the economy?

(2) How much better off (or worse off) could I have been if somebody other than the incumbent had taken office at the moment he did?

I don't know how much a president can do about the economy but I'll bet it's a lot less than those now blaming or praising President Obama are assuming he can do.

As for having more or less money than you had four years ago, you might remember the fundamental forces like those at work right after World War II (all that pent-up demand), and if you did you might realize that in some four-year slices you would have been in clover no matter who was president.  Tarzan of the Apes could have been president from 1952 to 1956 and his economic numbers would have been good.

Downturns, incipient recessions or depressions, may be different.  A president's emergency measures can have an effect.  But what are you going to measure that effect (even if you can distinguish it) against?  Your projections (even if you can distinguish them from your hopes and dreams) of how your candidate's measures would have worked out? 

And speaking of your candidate's measures, was he ready with them?  Where was he when we were on the brink of a great recession, or maybe depression?  That's the moment you need to measure your "better off" question from.  Compare 2008 with 1956, when there wasn't a brink in sight.

A good year to think about is 1992.  George H. W. Bush is coming up for re-election after four pretty good years.  But there's been an interruption, a downcurve in the graph that, in the big picture we see now, keeps going up.  The nominal GDP, the one people pay attention to at the time, has gone from 6.6 and 6.9 in the first two quarters to 6.1 in the third — the quarter just before the election.  (It will go back up to 6.7 in the fourth quarter.)  No brink, not much of a recession (if there was one it lasted only eight months), but oh, what a big deal in the eyes of the opposition party.  George Stephanopoulos gets the press to notice James Carville's reminder on the wall behind his desk, "It's the economy, stupid," and we're off to the races.

Well, it wasn't the stupid economy, as we can see now.  Nobody looks back to '92 as a year of decision, much less a crisis.  All it gave us was a little swerve in the prosperity line.  But oh what it did to George H. W. Bush.  It knocked his approval rating down to 37%.  And you know what?  Within three months, after a little swerve in the other direction, it was back to 56%.  But the election had been taken care of.  What timing!  What a gift to Carville and Stephanopoulos! 

Well, the American public was a gift to them too, as it is to all campaign advisers.  I'm referring to its capacity, to every busy human being's capacity, to be swayed by little, twistable, sometimes falsifiable things.  In this case it was Bush's polite, unremarkable wonder at the powers of a supermarket scanner displayed at a Grocer's Association convention.  The public, following journalists' slant (starting with Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times) and publicists' drums, saw a candidate who was "out of touch with ordinary Americans."  He hadn't even shopped at supermarkets, the rich bastard.

So there's one moral of the story:  Don't get so busy you become a member of the American public.