red sox suck – Jim Eltringham

It looks like David Ortiz – “Big Papi,” as he is so affectionately known in Boston – will retire after 2016. Expect the coming baseball season to be a year of celebration for one of the iconic baseball players of the past 15 years.

What has been most amazing about David Ortiz’s career is his success since joining the Red Sox in 2003. Remember, he spent the first six seasons of his major league career with the Twins. He seemed like a solid player, but not spectacular. And that’s no small sample size. For all the world, it looked like Ortiz would spend his major career as a platoon player or an extra roster piece.

Then he went to Boston, and something happened.

In Ortiz’s three years as a regular before leaving Minnesota, he hit 48 home runs total. Amazingly, In his first three years in Beantown, he hit 119 (almost 2.5 times as many over the same span). As the sluggers who made baseball so much fun in the 1990’s faded, Ortiz stepped in to take up the baton passed from stars like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Barry Bonds.

Despite stretches where Ortiz appeared to suffer the physical breakdowns that afflicted so many of the other promising sluggers of his era – like Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi – he remained productive. He’s ninth all time in home runs hit after turning 30, putting up numbers comparable to the likes of Bonds, Palmeiro, McGwire, and Sosa.

As a player who spent much of his career as a key element within a heated rivalry, Ortiz has his detractors, opposing fans, and other negative voices. Results speak for themselves, though, and Big Papi’s results speak positively.

(Cliff Claven-to-English translation: I parked my blog at Harvard Yard.)

Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society released an extremely flawed study of influential political blogs that found some interesting contrasts between the ones on the left and the right. In sum, liberal blogs are more communal, set up as digital campfire “Kumbaya” sessions that invite multiple users and issue more frequent calls to action. Conservative blogs tend to be solo acts.

As highlighted by The Nation’s coverage, the study floats the idea that the difference could be as political as it is technical:

The right’s relatively limited integration of user contributions is consistent with readers or users who seek the stability of authoritative voice, consistent with claims… about the kinds of psychological needs that conservatism serves. Similarly, the more egalitarian, participatory practices on the left require tolerance for the unpredictability of open and fluid discourse.

The concept that conservative philosophy leads to more individually-themed blogs makes sense, but for the complete opposite reason outlined here. In just about every domestic policy debate over the last 30 years, conservatives have argued for a reduction or limitation of government programs, while liberals and progressives have argued for an expansion of government programs. It follows, then, that a conservative is more likely to start a blog by himself or herself than to round up a bunch of friend; a liberal might be more inclined to look for collective action. I don’t necessarily buy it, but I can understand the argument.

The paper also presents a second, much more plausible explanation: that leftist online political discourse came of age in the mid-2000s, when liberals saw Republicans in power and a Democratic party that boasted dynamic leaders like Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, and John Kerry. Remember at this time, John Edwards was the breath of fresh air that was supposed to bring new life to the party – that’s how hopeless things looked for the Democrats.

This explanation,though it may be closer to the truth, highlights the major problem with the study: it’s based on data collected in 2008. That’s before Twittering conservatives started holding local tea party protests last year to protest government spending – and well before those protests became a national organizing flash point.

The openness of the tea party movement – and its base of activists who are frustrated by both parties – seems to bolster the latter conclusion on the nature of 2008’s conservative blogosphere, but it begs two more questions:

At the rate technology and tactics develop online, how can you say you have credible current findings about the nature of online activism with two-year-old data?
If a UMass guy can understand that, what the hell is going on Harvard?

Tag: red sox suck

Congratulations, David Ortiz!

I pahked my blawg at Hahvahd Yahd