200 Best Major League Baseball Players Ever, #198 BOB LEMON

#198 BOB LEMON RHP Indians
1946-58
ERA+ 119
PW 34.2
WARP3 84.4

An example of where the Pete Palmer stats from the Baseball Encyclopedia (Total Baseball is gone, or maybe its taken over the Baseball Encyclopedia, regardless, I heart it so dearly and my copy sits beside my computer, well, not this computer, since I'm at work, but the other computer, the one I sit at pantsless) help to balance WARP3 - the Davenport number for Lemon is low; if BP ever puts out a list of the 200 best MLB players ever, Lemon won't be on it - but Lemon's Palmer number is high, and in the wash, Bob comes out, coincidentally enough, right one spot ahead of Chet. In my head I see them sitting over a beverage of some type, a cool refreshing drink perhaps, chuckling at the result. Of course, this ranking would take Bob clean out of the HOF (dude had a short career, yo) I don't know where I'd cut off membership to the HOF, but I'm thinking I wouldn't invite all 200 guys - maybe only the top 100 make it, the second 100 wind up celebrated in an auxillary unit - actually, concentric circles make sense - as, while all of the guys at this level are real close - once we get higher, there's real separation among the top guys - not hard at all really to find a top 25, for example. Perhaps you have, I don't know, 9 circles, ever widening, of players in the HOF, maybe for a total of 200, maybe fewer, maybe just 180 - and when a player comes into the list, as obviously will keep happening - that means someone gets kicked out. Why not? Kicked out of the HOF - absolutely. Moved down to a new circle. Sure. Right now, the Lemons are on the edge of this list - but five years from now, certainly they can't keep their spots.

Concentric circles for the Baseball HOF, say 9 of them and a total of 180 guys, and you get moved down once you're passed up. How about that?

Revelation 24 - The Democrats are Like the Republicans, but Without All the Guns.

Either you believe in civil liberties or you don't; it's one thing - one, ugly, gutless thing to criticize the left, the moveon.orgs in an effort to make that general election "move to the center" that is part of the Democrats playbook. It's irritating; it's insulting, and it's not surprising - guys like Obama don't have to move far to get to the center; in fact, they'd have to move left in order to get there.

But rhetoric is one thing - if the nominee of the Democratic party does not stand on a table and shout as the US Senate authorizes warrantless surveillance of US citizens (and gives cover for the Bush Administration's policy of what was then, inarguably, felonious surveillance) I'm uncertain why the Democratic party is needed. It would be better for the Democrats to disappear; at least then the illusion that we have a left wing political party in this country would be harder to sell. There is literally nothing Democrats could do which is conservative enough that they wouldn't be immediately branded as crazy liberals, enemies of Jesus and Capitalism by the Republicans. The FISA vote will quickly be framed not as capitulation by the Democratic party but as an issue that transcends ideology, that even liberals basically agree with the President.

They don't. A liberal not only would never, ever, ever have cast this vote, he'd resign his seat in protest.

After 9-11, the most common response from Americans when asked why the attacks took place was "they hate us for our freedoms."

This is childish, obviously - but pretending for the moment that it's true, this FISA vote may, in fact, have the impact of ending the need for the "war on terror", as we have less freedom than did we yesterday.