How baseball analytics show that Ontario's vaccine rollout deserves the hall of shame
You never go Full Seamhead, but thinking in terms of baseball's fancy stats aids in being mentally healthful while resisting a government who wants to mask the mediocrity of Old Thinking.
Vaccination FOMO had me in the first half of the day on Thursday — not gonna lie. I have social anxiety disorder, and when it flares it feels like it is me against the world, which is not the case.
On April 18, Ontario’s government for the property developers — whose official position is to open a bottle of white whine from Whataboutism Estates whenever prodded about, y’know, maybe-possibly trying to govern — lowered the age threshold for receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine from age 55 to 40. It might help Canada actually beat the United States to the 75 per cent threshold which triggers herd immunity against coronavirus. Take that, Jake Tapper of CNN! It was also a rushed decision, and I daresay that I am nowhere near as high-priority as a pregnant person of any age and their fetus. Expectant mums were only moved into the high-risk category on Friday.
Beating the U.S. in public health crisis management, of course, is Canada like beating Norway in the world junior hockey championship. Complacency or self-satisfaction can literally kill.
Every person who gets jabbed one to two weeks sooner might equal one fewer needless death, especially in cities such as Brampton where the positivity rate is over 20 per cent. Ontario’s weak leadership is hoping people will get lost in a fog of line graphs that do show an increase in daily vaccinations. Of course, surely it is getting a reliever up to come in for the crocodile-tears-cryin’ premier, whose career arc has been described by one ivory-tower type as “the death spiral of Bozo the Clown.”
Daily vaccinations, as any baseball nerd knows, are a counting stat, and time has proven those do not count for much.
Putting some afternoon baseball on the TV, going Full Seamhead, brought on some chill. I called around and got an appointment. Going Full Seamhead created the headspace to reject the narratives that Ontario’s situation is tolerable. That, of course, is coming from the leadership.
Showing the steady increase in daily vaccinations, of course, has no apples-to-apples comparisons or frame of references. Comparisons to other nations with widely varying population demographics and densities, along with vaccination strategies, might also exacerbate vaccine FOMO to spike.
Any baseball fan who keeps current knows about the fancy stats that are a proxy for comparing a player’s performance against what a league-average player would do in the exact circumstances.
Those include but are not limited to:
Wins Above Replacement: Intended to sum up a player’s contribution to their team by suggesting roughly how many more wins the team had than it would have if the playing time had gone to a replacement player.
ERA+: How much better, or worse, was a pitcher’s earned-run average than the average pitcher in the league?
Weighted Runs Created Plus, or Weighted Runs Above Average: Trying to measure “the number of offensive runs a player contributes to their team compared to the average player.”
Each one contains multitudes and variants that I would never claim to fathom.
It is relevant since it points up the readily available modelling that is missing. We do not seem to seem how many people per day any province could be vaccinating, if, in the case of Ontario, “artificial scarcity” and lowered expectations had not been baked into the clusterfudge cheesecake. One is information-poor from knowing how many vaccinations per day would be performed if there had been a centralized database, or if the age thresholds were lower, or if it was more prioritized by profession.
That is meant to help old thinking get over. Why should one have to accept government that is willfully behind the curve ’cause, well, beat it nerd?
One knows better than to hold their breath waiting for much intellectual honesty anywhere in Canadian retail politics. Sunday’s announcement that the age threshold was coming down to age 40 was probably below replacement level, though.
It was a classic Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario joint. What, not even a link to a “FIGGER IT OUT” supercut of Letterkenny characters?
The most populous province in Canada, that also has the most first-language diversity anywhere outside the territories, did not create a centralized booking website like those in Québec and Nova Scotia. We have only been in a pandemic for 13½ months. It was clear that lowering the age threshold was connected more more to the end of the PCs’ “pandemic honeymoon” than any hard science.
An Ontario resident between ages 40 and 54 is expected to go on the site and enter the first three characters of one’s postal code to get a list of pharmacies that might be doing vaccinations. Some listings do not have phone numbers. Of course, one can also luck out by waiting in line outside for an hour and getting a walk-in appointment.
It is all random. Randomness is bad for an anxiety condition — not mine, but the one everyone has been plunged into, with multipliers for people who essential workers, racialized people and/or poor who are wired into the survival trip. Or unwired, if you were a Rogers wireless customer on April 19, the first business day to make an appointment.
Some strong volunteerism has sprung up to fill the void left by a government that has corporate lawyer energy, the only renewable energy source that paleoconservatives seem to embrace. It might be telling that a CBC feature on Vaccine Hunters Canada mentioned the volunteer group is partnering with city governments and pharmacies, but not the province, which is responsible for the vaccine rollout.
Couching this in mentally healthful terms used a couple days ago, good leaders’ actions can be mood stabilizers. Bad leaders’ actions are mood inhibitors.
I am one of the lucky ones within my age cohort. I am an English speaker, and my journalism background means I am comfortable using a mobile phone to call around until I found a human voice and made an appointment. But that is privilege afforded by birth and a terrible career choice.
But I am all about hope. I have another obscure baseball reference for that.
Let us hope for an electorate, and a media, who regards leaders who are “govern(ing) according to the polls” in a civic emergency with the same contempt that was injected into “he pitched to the score” during the debate about the baseball hall of fame worthiness of Jack Morris, a pitcher from the 1980s and early ’90s.
Getting Morris into the hall of fame as opposed to a better pitcher from his generation — cough, Dave Stieb!1 — was just a McGuffin. It was really about helping the old thinking formed around Morris’s One Great Game narrative and “he pitched to the score” with getting over, as they say in wrestling.
(Morris, across his first 14 full seasons, had an ERA+ of 109, meaning he was 9-per-cent better than a league-average pitcher. Stieb, arriving in the majors about a season and a half, posted an ERA+ of 126 in the same period. Then he started having back problems, while Morris was a World Series MVP and then joined the Blue Jays and pitched to the score some more.)
Let us look at governing according to the polls in much the same way. Any party that wants to get into power and retain it, especially in Canada where politics tends to be a marketplace of vague ideas presented by vaguely likable people, has to do it to a degree. But, to use another obscure baseball reference, the traditional 20-to-80 scouting scale, you can live with that when it is a 30, 40 or 50. Governing according to the polls during a pandemic is in the 70 or 80 range, or where a Los Angeles Angels scout wanted to rate a high school centrefielder named Mike Trout about a dozen years ago.
In any event, my vaccine FOMO is now transferred outward. It goes to everyone under age 40 who should be higher-priority than I, since their situations preclude watching a Diamondbacks-Reds game on a weekday afternoon in April while dreaming about having a second career as a very specific type of math lecturer.
Lastly, but not least of all
That is Dr. Hayley Wickenheiser to you, and she is saying “medical and health experts, not corporate and big business” must decide whether to hold the Tokyo Olympics.
Did the pandemic fix the CHL-NHL Top Prospects Game and the NHL Draft scouting combine? I was unswayed by the emotional pleas to have an Ontario Hockey League season to give the draft-year players some live reps. The juice was not worth that squeeze; and now, according to John Shannon, an alternate plan for late June is in the works. Prospect teams from each league, with some scouting combine elements.
The mid-January Top Prospects game involving players from the Canadian Hockey League’s Ontario, Québec and Western leagues has its value, but the game is often scrambly. Keeping the players from each league together might actually make it watchable.
The unintentional comedy in the scouting combine is that it involves every part of hockey talent evaluation except having players skate. Commissioner Gary Bettman wants the NHL to compete for the same space in sports fans’ minds as the NFL, so you get the combine. That leads to the absurd outcome of a 160-pound goalie who has not darkened the door of a weight room in 10 months trying to show scouts he can bench-press 150 pounds, which is probably only half as ridiculous as believing Mitchell Trubisky would be a better quarterback than Patrick Mahomes II.College football’s overtime format will still have less of a risk element than the Canadian Football League’s, so take that. College football’s “slight tweak that doesn’t suck,” per Deadspin, involves making two-point conversion attempts after a touchdown mandatory starting in the second overtime.
The CFL has required a two-point attempt in the first overtime since the mid-aughts. Why wait? Everyone wants to get home safe by that point.Three weeks into the baseball season, Los Angeles Dodgers star Mookie Betts is indirectly reminding us of how much those 20th-century counting stats do not count. Betts has two RBI, both off home runs, so he has yet to drive in a teammate. Betts’s .397 / .462 slash is not far off of career norms and he is doing superstar things in centrefield, but the leadoff batter in a no-DH league does not get to come up with ducks on the pond as often as Joe Carter in a fever dream.
That is more than enough for today. Please like and subscribe, and thank you for allowing these words on to your screen.
Stieb pitched about 1,000 fewer innings in MLB than Morris, facing virtually the same competition in the 1980s since they were both on American League East teams. Stieb finished his career with a better earned-run average, ERA+, FIP (fielding-independent pitching), WHIP (walks and hits per inings pitchers), and Wins Above Replacement.