Our Lady of Sorrows gave a statement to ESPN explaining that the school bans co-ed sports and will not play a co-ed team because “proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty” under those circumstances. Despite the fact that it takes a lot of imagination to imagine boys and girls getting frisky on the basepaths or across vast swaths of outfield in full view of the public, Sultzbach and her team have been more considerate of Our Lady of Sorrows’ views than they have been of her rights to participate in sports programs under Title IX:

From early on, Paige tried to blend in, her mother said. When the coach referred to the kids as “guys and gals,” Paige spoke up and said that they all wear the same uniform, so the coach should just call them all guys.

Her teammates have stood up for her.

During Mesa Prep’s two previous games with Our Lady of Sorrows, Paige didn’t play out of respect for the opposing team’s beliefs, but that wasn’t going to be an option this time, Pamela said.

“We respected their school rule … but she took it hard,” Pamela said. “She didn’t like it and neither did her teammates. They went out and played the best they could because they wanted to prove a point.”

As depressing as this story is, it’s encouraging that Sultzbach’s teammates have supported her. The reason it’s important to let girls try out for their high school baseball teams, to have women in all arenas in public life, is not just because it’s nice for women. When 15-year-old girls play second base for championship teams, edit magazines and hold high office, sometimes men find that they like having women there. The more boys figure this out, and the more feminism becomes their cause too, the harder it will be for anyone go give credence to the idea that girls don’t belong on baseball fields or anywhere else in the public square.

It seems like some of the other cast is shaping up nicely. Sensitive hardasses are Christopher Meloni’s wheelhouse, so he should be dandy as Leo Durocher, the manager who laid down a clear line in support of Robinson. T.R. Knight, who knows a thing or two himself about hostile workplaces and coworker solidarity, will play Ralph Branca, the first Dodger player who stood with Robinson in public. And Nicole Beharie, who was just smashing as Michael Fassbender’s coworker and potential girlfriend in Shame will play Rachel Isum, Robinson’s wife. I just am not that familiar with Chadwick Boseman, who is playing Robinson, and I do worry that the movie who will marginalize him in favor of exploring the reactions of white people to a key moment in Civil Rights history. But it is nice for a younger, less-famous black actor to get a shot at stardom through a big sports biopic.

-The end of the Red Sox decade.

-Joss Whedon on The Avengers and creative frustration.

-More details on SyFy’s new series Defiance.

-Morgan Spurlock, having written a shallow love letter to Comic-Con, is moving on to male grooming.

-Great: more ammunition for the men and women can’t be friends lobby:

-How Fenway Park reached its 100th birthday.

-Matt Zoller Seitz on Veep and June Thomas talks to Armando Iannucci.

-The worst heroes in pop culture.

-Earth’s most adorable Avengers.

-Glee may be a huge mess, but the voices of some of its stars are just undeniable:

-May 6 will be my favorite day of 2012.

-If I was a star Japanese pitcher, looking at the available evidence, I’d probably want to stay in Japan.

-HBO GO may finally be available to all HBO subscribers.

-Time to start playing with Google Music.

-Really excited for the Star Trek sequel.

Over the years Mrs. E has hosted give or take 160 players. In her view, parents are a clear and present danger to their offspring. One year looking over the roster for the coming season, she told her manager, “You’ve talked to the fathers of three sons and all three have the second coming of Christ living at home. How is that possible?”

She snorts. “We oughta hire only orphans to play the game.” If that proves impossible, Mrs. E suggests an all-out ban on living vicariously through your children. “After five years in The Show, they can look up their parents,” she said.

Jim Collins gets at this a bit in The Last Best League, his 2004 book where he follows a group of players through a Cape League season. But as much as the Cape League is a showcase and developing ground for major league talent, they also preach what’s essentially an anachronistic set of values. The players work side jobs. They stay in Cape Cod families’ extra bedrooms. They sign autographs and sell 50-50 raffle tickets during games. That kind of humility and service to fans isn’t a skill set that they’ll need in the majors, or at least not at the same intensity. Professional athletes who don’t want to be seen as terrible human beings at least make the motions at fan service and charity work, but the alignment and priorities are just totally different, and I’d love to see someone explore at greater length how long the Cape League’s character-building structure can last, and what kinds of pressures it’s come under at an age when stars are anointed at younger and younger ages, and made increasingly aware of other people’s perceptions of their own worth by their parents and agents.

In any case, for as long as it’s seen as a necessary stop on the road to the majors for elite college athletes, the Cape Cod League will remain a delight. Leavy’s totally correct to single out Orleans, though the Brewster home field is a wonderful combination of high school field and major-league promise.

In their defense, the Chinese certainly have plenty of money to put into the team if they see fit. But if it was harder to root for the Dodgers under Murdoch than under the O’Malleys, and harder still under McCourt than under Murdoch, imagine rooting for a team owned by an authoritarian government that jails its citizens for organizing unions or worshiping the wrong gods, and depresses its currency to decimate what remains of American manufacturing.

Over the last 30 years, the financial whizzes who dominate this country have sold off our industry to China in return for some quick and huge returns, never mind that they were wiping out the American middle class in the process.

It’s too late to stop the sale of our industrial might, but the proposed sale of a team in which millions of fans have invested their dreams for decades may be the moment when Americans say they’ve had enough — that the claims of the many, which matter so little in the normal conduct of American big business, should at least this time outweigh the interests of the few (particularly when that “few” is really just Frank and Jamie).

I’m not sure I can get quite as irritated by this as Harold is. It’s not like the Dodgers would be the first team to be under corporate ownership, or even under foreign corporate ownership. The Seattle Mariners are owned by Nintendo of America, the Atlanta Braves are owned by Liberty Media, and the Toronto Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Media. Individual owners are entirely capable of doing noxious things. When Ted Turner owned the team, he tried to nickname a player with the same jersey number as one of his stations Channel as an effort in cross-promotion. In the National Football League, Dan Snyder is a poster child for both poor management of a franchise and general terrible person-ness. It’s a bit of an odd hierarchy that we prefer ownership by fabulously wealthy individual Americans to ownership by corporations to ownership by foreign corporations.

To paraphrase Annie Savoy, baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a big, big business. There have been long-standing efforts to spark interest in baseball in China after Mao’s ban on the sport expired, and in 2003, the Chinese government asked Major League Baseball for help—the league actually pays the coaches for China’s national baseball team. And if we’re going to treat baseball as a major symbol of American democracy (which may be a sentimental overstating of the case but none the less an appealing myth), maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to stoke Chinese interest and emotional in a quintessentially American game. Either way, the ownership of the Dodgers may be an important symbol, but it isn’t necessarily a substantive intrusion of corrupting capitalism and foreign influence into a game that’s already plenty impure.

-The importance of geography, economics, and legal regulation to arts criticism.

-Debunking the myths of the 1961 baseball season.

-Wesley Snipes could have been Geordi La Forge, and boy would that have been strange.

-Because more brass in pop music is always a good thing, this is my track of the day:

-USA Network execs discuss their show-design jujitsu.

-A first-hand account of what it was like to work at News of the World.

-How to fix the All-Star game.

-Table-flipping and weave-pulling for Jesus:

Ten of the players on the American League All Star roster and seven members of the National League side were born in countries other than the United States. The immigration system works for them, making it possible for them to come to the U.S. and make very large amounts of money. There’s no question that there are abuses in Latin American baseball academies, people who prey on the dreams of families who hope that years of training in a low-paying developmental league will translate into wild success in the States, just as folks prey on people who just want to get to the U.S. period. But if you make it to the United States and into a secure job in the Major Leagues, you’re one of the most visible and one of the most protected immigrants in America. And those 17 players will be in the ballpark long before Joe Arpaio sets up his ghastly spectacle outside of it. It would be tremendous value if one of those 17 spoke up to point out that what folks will see Arpaio doing — and what Arizona is doing as a whole — isn’t just embarrassing, or silly, it’s deeply wrong.

I think the real problem is that the movie just feels a bit late—Stephen Soderberg was replaced as the director, Aaron Sorkin ended up rewriting the script, and while those changes may have made for a better movie (though who knows), they also removed the movie’s release date from the moment of the A’s last triumph. Sabermetrics won in that the approach is an accepted part of the methodology almost every front office in baseball now, but being early adopters didn’t actually let Oakland overcome its financial disadvantages and win a league championship or the World Series. And the introduction of a new means of evaluation didn’t permanently (or even really temporarily) upset the corporate order of baseball. Oh, well. At least there will be Chris Pratt and Philip Seymour Hoffman to be entertained by.

You’ve written serious policy books, an activist’s guide to the democratic process. Why write a novel?

Anger. I was very distressed at the way in which the 9/11 issue was handled by the [Bush] administration. In my opinion there were a number of important issues for which there was an answer, but where that answer was consciously and to date largely effectively been withheld and I wanted to tell that story.

Do you think fiction gives you a better shot of reaching more people than op-eds or policy books do?

That was part of it…While I was a senior fellow at the Kennedy School, Joe Nye, who had been a director of the Kennedy School and then was an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, told me a story that when he came back to Harvard, he had wanted to write a nonfiction academic book about his experiences in the Defense Department and make a series of recommendations. As he got into the book, he realized that in order to do that he would have to use classified information which was not going to be available to him. So he shifted from writing the book that he thought [he wanted to write] to writing The Power Game, which is a novel about his experiences in the Pentagon. I’ve indicated in [Keys to the Kingdom] that the report of the Congressional inquiry into 9/11 was fairly heavily censored, particularly as it related to the role of the Saudis. So I decided I would see if I could write this. I am a member of the external advisory board to Director Leon Panetta at the CIA. We have a fairly high security clearance and anything we write that touches on the agency, we’re required to submit it for prior approval. So at three or four occasions while I was working on this book over a period of 5 years, I submitted manuscripts to the review board and it always got a clean bill. I think I was able to tell the story without being restricted by censorship.

What were your inspirations? Do you read thrillers?

I would have to say because there’s so much material as a Senator that you have to read, I would not call myself an extensive reader of novels. I’ve read airplane paperbacks of Grisham and Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and a few other people, but I wouldn’t say I had one that was my model of how to write a suspense novel.

Tony, your main character, seems to be tailor-made to appeal to a lot of different constituencies: What was your inspiration for him? Is he based on anyone real?

He’s a composite character. I have a friend who was from Guanabacoa, and he talks a lot about his former home in Cuba, so I gave Tony that same home. I talk in there about the fact that Tony’s father and grandfather were both good baseball players. I’ve known some of those Cuban former athletes. And one scene in the book was going to a game with my father and seeing a Cuban baseball team. So it was a composite character. I’m not going to start putting names on the fictional characters in my book.

Tony seems to have a tough time with women. He’s a risky guy to date…

Of the women in the book, [Carol, Tony's girlfriend] was the one I thought was the most affecting. And [Laura Billington, the daughter of the character who stands in for Graham] also is a composite character. Without mentioning it, there’s probably one person to whom she is quite similar.

Well, with the financial problems she seems a little like Annie Leibovitz…

No comment.

The character who most resembles you gets killed off fairly early in the book. Was that to avoid putting yourself too much in the novel?

[Sen. Billington] is not a perfect person but he tries his best. Actually, my wife has had some difficulty with the novel precisely for that reason. It makes her sad when she reads of my passing and then the funeral and those things. But that’s life.

How intentional is the juxtaposition between career civil servants and political appointees? The novel really establishes a trust in those who have spent their careers in civil service.

Well, my experience is that, unfortunately, that’s not an infrequent situation where you have a political appointee who has a particular agenda and frequently is under the close supervision of a political superior.

Since you wrote the book, Osama bin Laden’s been killed, in a way that makes Keys to the Kingdom look prescient: the country may be different, but he was kind of hiding out in plain sight, and there’s a real sense that he betrayed his children. How did you come up with the scenario for bin Laden’s post-September 11 life?

There’s one section in the book where Tony has gotten this assignment of trying to find these bombs. He goes to the Air Force counter-proliferation center in Maxwell Air Force base in Alabama, which is a real place. In fact, I had a briefing from one of the people at that center while I was writing the book. She didn’t know that she was briefing me, but she was. And I think that chapter is the best reflection of the best intelligence of what Al Qaeda would do if it came into possession of a nuclear weapon.

In terms of the scenario of bin Laden hanging out at the Saudi Court, was that based on conversations you had?

I don’t have any empirical evidence that bin Laden ever had an experience like the one that I described where he goes into the back room with the king and cuts a deal.

Since bin Laden’s capture, we’ve reevaluated our relationship with the Pakistani government. Do we need to reevaluate our relationships with the Saudi government as well?

Yes, and I think that such a reassessment may be under way now. It’s hard for me to believe that Saudi Arabia, let’s just say 25 years from now, in light of what is going on in North Africa and the Middle East today, is going to be the same kind of authoritarian regime that we’ve known for most of the 20th century.

As we’re reassessing our relationship with Pakistan, what needs to change about how we see the region as a whole?

I chaired the weapons of mass destruction commission, which issued a report called World at Risk and one of the things we commented on is the fact that the types of relationships which developed during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, such as the red phone where presidents could pick up the phone and talk directly to each other, none of that exists between Pakistan and India. The chance of an accidental nuclear war where someone misinterprets what the other side is doing, as I suggest in this novel where the Indians assumed that that nuclear attack on Mumbai on Sept. 19 was the result of the Pakistani government and actually they had no role, it was a bin Laden event, and yet they almost went to nuclear war over that.

How realistic are the scenarios? Do you want your readers to walk away feeling that they’ve read a concrete warning?

I hope they walk away feeling they’ve been entertained, but I also hope they feel they’ve been educated. As Billington says in that opening op-ed in the New York Times, is it realistic to think that Saudi [Saudi Arabia] would have some aspirations to become a nuclear power? I think the answer is that it is realistic. They have two principal adversaries, one of which is Israel, which according to a recent column in the Washington Post is now estimated to have 200 nuclear devices. And Iran is their other enemy, and it hasn’t been successful but it is aspiring to become a nuclear power. With the amount of financial resources that the Saudis have, and it has been escalating in recent years, the idea that they’d want to go nuclear and they could do so fairly quickly, associating themselves with some entity, in this case, a private firm with heavy connections to the government of the United States, is not an irrational set of possibilities.

These are superficial, anecdotal pieces of evidence; the sabermetric literature (that I am familiar with, I am now a couple years behind I’m afraid, although there is some interesting stuff here) has had a difficult time establishing that the field manager of a ball club has much measurable effect at all, and is negligible at best.

The link is to a research that indicates managers don’t have an impact on player performance. But insofar as some players perform better than others, and insofar as managers decide who plays and how much, I don’t see how sabermetrics could possible show that the field manager of a team has no impact on how many games the team wins. Say your team’s 8th-best offensive player is a slightly below-average defensive shortstop whereas your 12th-best offensive player is an above-average defensive shortstop. Who do you play? In what situation? Answering these kind of questions correctly seems incredibly important, and the importance of these issues is precisely why sabermetric research has been of so much interest. Or am I missing something?

The Cleveland Indians have taken extra precautions to be sure their young Latin players aren’t caught unaware and unprepared.

“We held a seminar under the direction of our cultural development director, Lino Diaz,” said Ross Atkins, the Indians’ player development director. “We brought in a local police officer to explain the situation and issued each player an ID card so they don’t have to rely on carrying around their visas and paperwork with them.”

The article explains that SB-1070 requires police officers, while carrying out their responsibility to enforce the laws, to verify an individual’s immigration status if they have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is illegally present in the U.S. Since the law provides no criteria for “reasonable suspicion,” the Associated Press points out that “a young Latin player who speaks no English might fit that description.” Given the fact that a large number of Latin Americans playing on major and minor baseball leagues, baseball managers want to avoid running into any problems.

Shortly following the passage of SB-1070, the Major League Baseball players’ union issued a statement condemning the law.

It’s obviously well-within the rights of Major League Baseball to articulate and begin enforcing a workable ban on consumption of certain kinds of substances. And my understanding of the evidence is that it’s good for the health of the players, and also for the health of aspiring players in high school and college and the minor leagues, for such a ban to be in place.

But the impulse of this sort of asterixing displayed in ESPN’s article on Mark McGwire, really makes very little sense to me. The players being marked out on this list played during a time when there was no real effort to curb the use of currently-banned substances and the use of such substances was widespread. In particular, they were used by pitchers as well as hitters, and any position players whose physical attributes were enhanced by PED was also playing defense. There’s just no clear reason to believe that widespread use of steroids and HGH represented some structural advantage for hitters.

In general, all sports are always changing all the time in terms of standards of training, nutrition, and conditioning as well as sundry tweaks of the rules. That’s why it’s inherently problematic to compare statistics from far-removed time periods. But the issue raised by PEDs is no different from the normal difficulties of historical comparison. Awareness of these ins-and-outs is part of what differentiates informed fans from less knowledgeable ones. But there’s no good reason to single out one aspect of one period in the game for some kind of special shaming.

Whatever happens in the National League and American League Championship series unfolding over the next week or so, one outcome has already been decided–the effective end of the theories of Moneyball as a viable way to build a playoff-caliber baseball team when you don’t have the money. That no doubt sounds like heresy to the millions who embraced Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, but all you need to do is keep in mind one number this postseason: 528,620,438. That’s the amount of money in payroll spent this season by the teams still in it–the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Moneyball? You bet it’s Moneyball, true Moneyball, like it always has been in baseball and always will be.

Bissinger goes on to diss Billy Beane across various modalities. But my impression watching from afar is that recent developments in baseball largely vindicate Beane’s work. Obviously, having a bigger payroll to work with is helpful to a general manager. But for a while, detailed attention to statistical work allowed Beane to exploit massive market inefficiencies and put together high-quality, low-payroll teams. But then other people noticed. Michael Lewis wrote a bestselling book about it! So the insights spread, and there are fewer inefficiencies to take care of. If it had somehow been possible to copyright on base percentage and force everyone else to keep relying on batting average, that would have been nice for the early adopters. But it’s not, and the broad outlines of statistical analysis of baseball performance are now pretty widely understood.

Washington Post opinion page editor Fred Hiatt continued to disgrace his paper, publishing yet another column questioning climate science by George Will, the seventh this year. “Cooling Down the Cassandras” (alternatively titled “For Alarmists, Ugly Truths on Global Warming”) is a master class in cherrypicking words and misinterpreting science. Will’s thesis — that there has been no global warming since 1998 — is based on his reading of a poorly written article about temperature trends by New York Times climate reporter Andy Revkin:

By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere “plateau,” not warming’s apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

By Will’s logic, we’d have to conclude that the Toronto Blue Jays just clinched the A.L. East division title — after all, they’ve won six games in a row and are 9-1 in their last ten games, while the New York Yankees lost their last game and are only 7-3. However, when the Wonk Room contacted Mr. Will to confirm this theory, he responded:

You don’t seem to understand baseball. The Blue Jays are not even in contention.

Will’s persistent assertion that global warming has stopped during the hottest decade in recorded history is just as nonsensical as the idea that a team that is nine games below .500 is beating one that is 45 games above .500. Unfortunately, Will hung up before we could ask who he believed was the hottest team in baseball.

Essentially, Will’s “global cooling” argument is pinned on an ambiguity of the English language. Just as the Yankees are a winning team but did not win their last game, global warming is terribly real even if 2008, one of the hottest years in recorded history, was cooler than 2007. “Global warming” is popular shorthand for the well-understood phenomenon that the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is amplifying the natural radiative forcing of the troposphere’s temperature — and as the greenhouse pollution continues to rise, the forcing continues to rise, given the natural variability in solar radiation and heat transfer between the ocean and atmosphere. It is not shorthand for “every day will be hotter than the next everywhere on the planet.” As the U.K. Met Office, whose temperature record Will cites in his scientifically illiterate column, explains, it is a “fact” that “temperatures are continuing to rise“:

The rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15 °C per decade since the mid-1970s. Warming has been unprecedented in at least the last 50 years, and the 17 warmest years have all occurred in the last 20 years. This does not mean that next year will necessarily be warmer than last year, but the long-term trend is for rising temperatures.

In fact, the tremendous rise in greenhouse gases — now 396 ppm CO2-equivalents, 115 ppm higher than in pre-industrial times — is having an obvious and accelerating effect on decadal global temperatures, not withstanding the significant natural interannual variability:

Ross Douthat says past steroid use shouldn’t keep you out of the Hall of Fame forever, but it should carry a penalty:

This isn’t to say that the steroid effect shouldn’t be considered in evaluating a player’s fitness for the Hall. I wouldn’t give A-Rod or Bonds the honor of a first-ballot induction, and I think that evidence of steroid use is a good reason for keeping borderline HoF candidates out. If you think a player wouldn’t have reached Hall-worthy numbers without cheating – as I suspect McGwire wouldn’t, for all his gifts – then don’t vote him in. But there’s no question that Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens would have made the Hall without the edge that steroids provided. And if you grant that premise, I think that they belong there, unless the sport is willing to take the plunge of banning them from the diamond permanently.

I think I’d go softer on McGwire than this. Maybe it’s true that absent the juice McGwire wouldn’t have been a good enough hitter to rack up HoF stats. But one of the problems a juiceless McGwire would have faced was the need to hit the pitches thrown by Roger Clemens. Suppose McGwire hadn’t had assistance and the pitchers against whom he played didn’t have it either—is there any reason to think it wouldn’t have all just evened-out in the end?