So Albert Pujols of the fourth-place St. Louis Cardinals was voted the National League MVP today by the BBWAA. I'm a fan of not limiting the MVP to players whose teams made, or nearly made, the post-season, so I was a fan of the decision in that regard. Pujols' main competition, Ryan Howard of the eventual World Series-champion Phillies, came in second with 308 points. Pujols had 369. Close but not that close.

Rob Neyer has a piece suggesting other worthy candidates, including Lance Berkman, and I went to the stats to see what I could see.

First. The main argument for Howard is the gross numbers. He led the majors in HRs (48) and RBIs (146) but struck out a lot (199 times). The main argument for Pujols is the percentage numbers: .357 BA, .462 OBP, .653 SLG for a 1.114 OPS. Insane. Best in the majors. He also hit 37 HRs and drove in 116. Howard's percentages aren't lousy (.251, .339, .543 for a .881 OBP) but not MVP-calibre. Put it this way: Pujols' BA was better than Howards' OBP. By nearly 20 points.

That's one thing I saw. Here's another thing, and this wowed me. I sorted by HRs, with Howard on top, and I was glancing to see what other homerun hitters struck out a lot: Howard (199), Adam Dunn (164), Carlos Delgado (124)... The next number stopped me cold: 54. Only 54 strikeouts for a homerun hitter? I looked over. Pujols. I looked down. None of the top 15 NL homerun hitters struck out fewer than 100 times. None. And Pujols struck out only 54. Plus he walked 104 times. 

Put it this way: Pujols is 2nd in the NL in walks and tied for 116th in strikeouts. 

Howard is tied for 13th in walks but 2nd in strikeouts.

Berkman? Fourth in walks (99) and 38th in strikeouts (108).

I know. Walks/strikeouts. Who cares? But it is indicative of who's the dangerous hitter, and Pujols' ratios are like Ted Williams' ratios. It's rare to find anyone in the majors these days, let alone a slugger, who strikes out fewer times than they walk. And a ratio of almost 2-to-1? For a slugger? Wow. 

This isn't the argument why Pujols deserved the MVP. He deserved the MVP because he was second in batting, second in OBP, first in slugging, first in OPS.

It's just interesting, that's all.

"At a Clinton event in Hampton, New Hampshire, a seventy-one-year-old woman named Ruth Keene told me that 'the Republicans would chew Obama up.'

"They tried like hell. They called him an élitist, a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, an Arab, an appeaser, a danger to the republic, a threat to small children, a friend of terrorists, an enemy of Israel, a vote thief, a non-citizen, an anti-American, and a celebrity."

—George Packer in his article "The New Liberalism: How the economic crisis can help Obama and redefine the Democrats."

"The Rush Limbaugh attacks and other attacks from the far right generate a lot of heat but not much light."

—Colin Powell, in "The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama" by David Remnick, in the latest New Yorker

“If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as ‘not one of us,’ I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence. ... You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.”

Though McCain publicly called [Lewis’] accusations “shocking and beyond the pale,” a campaign aide told me that when McCain first heard Lewis’s remarks he sat in silence inside the campaign’s official bus.

But many who hoped that McCain could modify his policies without sacrificing his identity felt that he had crossed the line. He surrounded himself with conservative economic advisers, such as Phil Gramm, a fanatical proponent of deregulation, and Jack Kemp, the apostle of supply-side economics. He called for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent. He declared that the estate tax, which he, like Teddy Roosevelt, had championed, was now “one of the most unfair tax laws on the books.” ... [He] reversed his position on offshore drilling and endorsed the teaching of “intelligent design.” He disowned his own bill on immigration reform. Whereas he had once decried the use of torture under any circumstances, he now voted against banning the same techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that had been practiced against him in Vietnam.

“This is ridiculous. We met with Stalin. We met with Mao. The idea that we can’t meet with Ahmadinejad is ridiculous. This is a bunch of Washington-insider conventional wisdom that makes no sense. We should not run from this debate. We should have it.”

Just before the Republican Convention, McCain, who often seemed miserable in his new right-wing guise, tried to resurrect his former identity. He decided to choose as his running mate Joe Lieberman—a pro-choice Democrat who shared McCain’s views on foreign policy. The choice would have signalled both McCain’s independence and his return to a more bipartisan agenda. “He wanted Lieberman badly,” a McCain confidant said. But when leaders of the base threatened to challenge him at the Convention, McCain did the one thing that he believed a great politician never did. As the confidant put it, “John capitulated.

More than halfway through David Grann's must-read piece in the post-election issue of The New Yorker, "The Fall," about John McCain and his disastrous campaign, Grann paraphrases McCain speechwriter and close aide Mark Salter:

In a recent conversation, Salter told me that at one moment the press was criticizing McCain for lacking a central message and the next was castigating him for not being spontaneous.

First, the media is not monolithic. More importantly, those two criticisms are not mutually exclusive — as the sentence seems to imply. One can have a central message and be spontaneous. Just look at Barack Obama. Unfortunately, McCain didn't have (a central message) and wasn't (spontaneous). The worst of both worlds.

Has it been only two years since Daniel Craig first showed up as Bond, James Bond? I'm hoping to see QUANTUM OF SOLACE this weekend but in the meantime here's the stuff I did two years ago for MSNBC. First, a piece on the history of James Bond. My favorite graf — and apologies for quoting myself:

Bond’s goals with both villains and women were the same — to infiltrate the seemingly impenetrable fortress, make things explode and then get away — and many feminists thought him a misogynist. Yet if you look at the early films, sex is one of the ways Bond differs from his villainous counterparts. The bad guys were either clumsy around women, like Goldfinger, or asexual beasts in starched Nehru jackets, sublimating their sexual desires by repeatedly petting cats. The meta-message was that sex was good. As soon as it was denied, well, you began thinking up ways to destroy the planet.

Then there's the James Bond quiz: 25 questions in all. Fairly in-depth since I re-watched all of those 21 official James Bond films. How in-depth? I just re-took it and got a 24. (I missed no. 15 if you're keeping score.) So even the quizmaster can't master his own quiz. As Bond would say, "He always did have an inflated opinion of himself."

A lot of what I've been posting lately comes from Andrew Sullivan. As does this. The Prop. 8 vote is beginning to feel like a case of losing the battle and winning the war:

So the argument — jumpstarted, post-election, by Dan Kois — is that "The Daily Show" will have trouble with an Obama presidency because Jon Stewart and his writers are basically Dems who will have trouble mocking a Dem president. Certainly Bush provided a wider target than Obama, or anyone, will, but I've argued that Stewart's main target isn't really politicians anyway but the mainstream media and the effed-up way it portrays our world. 

As for the whole Dem thing, I suddenly realized — today — that the funniest thing I've seen on TDS in months, maybe ever, was the show's reaction to John Kerry's attempt to explain a "Depends" joke he made at the expense of John McCain. They spun it into its own mini-segment: "John Kerry Ruins Your Favorite Jokes."

Patricia can back me up. When we were watching this, I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard. The good stuff starts at 3:30 in.