Armstrong Confession Draws 4.3 Million Viewers to Oprah\'s Network

The first part of Lance Armstrong’s doping confession to Oprah Winfrey drew about 4.3 million viewers to OWN on Thursday night, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings released on Friday.

About 3.17 million watched the first telecast of the interview at 9 p.m. When the telecasts later in the evening were added up, the total audience came to 4.3 million, according to a spokeswoman for the channel.

That’s a great result by OWN’s standards, but not by Ms. Winfrey’s historical standards. Some of her interviews on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” scored upward of 10 million viewers; her biggest, a primetime interview with Michael Jackson, brought 62 million viewers to the ABC broadcast network in 1993.

2013 is a very different time, and cable is a different animal than broadcast. Some viewers had a hard time finding OWN on their cable lineups, as evidenced by a spike in online searches about the channel. But enough viewers found it to make the Armstrong interview the highest-rated telecat in OWN’s two-year history, at least when all of Sunday’s telecasts are counted as one.

Previously, the title of highest-rated telecast belonged to Ms. Winfrey’s interview of Whitney Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and her family last March, one month after Ms. Houston died. That program attracted 3.5 million viewers to the channel.

Of course, that interview wasn’t promoted as heavily as the interview with Mr. Armstrong was. After sitting down with the former cyclist on Monday, Ms. Winfrey appeared on “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday and said, “I think it’s certainly the biggest interview I’ve ever done, in terms of its exposure,” comparing it to the Jackson interview in 1993.

With that in mind, she may have been hoping for a higher rating. But OWN and the company that co-owns the channel with Ms. Winfrey, Discovery Communications, cautioned ahead of time that Mr. Armstrong’s confessional might not hit the highs of the old “O! prah Winfrey Show” in syndication. For one thing, the daytime talk show was on popular local television stations that blanketed the country. OWN is only accessible in about four-fifths of the country’s homes. It is further hindered by the fact that, in many places, it’s not available in high-definition.

The initial ratings released on Friday did not include viewers who chose to record the interview and watch it over the weekend. Nor did they include viewers who watched the interview on the Internet, courtesy of an online stream on Oprah.com. An OWN spokeswoman said the Web site recorded a “couple hundred thousand” streams.

The interview did spur a huge amount of chatter on social networking Web sites. Bluefin Labs, which tracks that chatter, found that an unofficial Twitter hashtag for the interview, #Doprah (a combination of doping and Oprah), was used more frequently than the one OWN encouraged, #OWNTV.

Notably, about 61 percent of the Twitter comments about the interview were rom men, according to Bluefin. Normally, OWN skews much more toward women, with only 33 percent of Twitter comments about the channel coming from men.

One of Discovery’s other channels, TLC, showed the interview in many countries, but Nielsen does not provide ratings estimates outside of the United States.

The second part of the Armstrong interview will be shown on OWN on Friday night. Originally, Ms. Winfrey’s producers were going to edit it down to 90 minutes, but after she talked to Mr. Armstrong for two and a half hours on Monday, she conferred with the producers and decided to break it into two parts.

It was “impossible to try to cut 80 minutes out,” Ms. Winfrey said on CBS. “As you all know, a 90-minute interview on TV is really only 65 minutes.” She added, “We felt that to leave over half of this on the cutting room floor after millions of people have been waiting for years for many of these answers would not be the right thing to do.”

Armstrong Confession Draws 4.3 Million Viewers to Oprah\'s Network

The first part of Lance Armstrong’s doping confession to Oprah Winfrey drew about 4.3 million viewers to OWN on Thursday night, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings released on Friday.

About 3.17 million watched the first telecast of the interview at 9 p.m. When the telecasts later in the evening were added up, the total audience came to 4.3 million, according to a spokeswoman for the channel.

That’s a great result by OWN’s standards, but not by Ms. Winfrey’s historical standards. Some of her interviews on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” scored upward of 10 million viewers; her biggest, a primetime interview with Michael Jackson, brought 62 million viewers to the ABC broadcast network in 1993.

2013 is a very different time, and cable is a different animal than broadcast. Some viewers had a hard time finding OWN on their cable lineups, as evidenced by a spike in online searches about the channel. But enough viewers found it to make the Armstrong interview the highest-rated telecat in OWN’s two-year history, at least when all of Sunday’s telecasts are counted as one.

Previously, the title of highest-rated telecast belonged to Ms. Winfrey’s interview of Whitney Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and her family last March, one month after Ms. Houston died. That program attracted 3.5 million viewers to the channel.

Of course, that interview wasn’t promoted as heavily as the interview with Mr. Armstrong was. After sitting down with the former cyclist on Monday, Ms. Winfrey appeared on “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday and said, “I think it’s certainly the biggest interview I’ve ever done, in terms of its exposure,” comparing it to the Jackson interview in 1993.

With that in mind, she may have been hoping for a higher rating. But OWN and the company that co-owns the channel with Ms. Winfrey, Discovery Communications, cautioned ahead of time that Mr. Armstrong’s confessional might not hit the highs of the old “O! prah Winfrey Show” in syndication. For one thing, the daytime talk show was on popular local television stations that blanketed the country. OWN is only accessible in about four-fifths of the country’s homes. It is further hindered by the fact that, in many places, it’s not available in high-definition.

The initial ratings released on Friday did not include viewers who chose to record the interview and watch it over the weekend. Nor did they include viewers who watched the interview on the Internet, courtesy of an online stream on Oprah.com. An OWN spokeswoman said the Web site recorded a “couple hundred thousand” streams.

The interview did spur a huge amount of chatter on social networking Web sites. Bluefin Labs, which tracks that chatter, found that an unofficial Twitter hashtag for the interview, #Doprah (a combination of doping and Oprah), was used more frequently than the one OWN encouraged, #OWNTV.

Notably, about 61 percent of the Twitter comments about the interview were rom men, according to Bluefin. Normally, OWN skews much more toward women, with only 33 percent of Twitter comments about the channel coming from men.

One of Discovery’s other channels, TLC, showed the interview in many countries, but Nielsen does not provide ratings estimates outside of the United States.

The second part of the Armstrong interview will be shown on OWN on Friday night. Originally, Ms. Winfrey’s producers were going to edit it down to 90 minutes, but after she talked to Mr. Armstrong for two and a half hours on Monday, she conferred with the producers and decided to break it into two parts.

It was “impossible to try to cut 80 minutes out,” Ms. Winfrey said on CBS. “As you all know, a 90-minute interview on TV is really only 65 minutes.” She added, “We felt that to leave over half of this on the cutting room floor after millions of people have been waiting for years for many of these answers would not be the right thing to do.”

John Geddes, Managing Editor, Is Leaving The New York Times

John Geddes, managing editor for The New York Times for the last decade, has decided to leave the company. In a note sent to the newsroom staff on Friday afternoon, Mr. Geddes said he was accepting a buyout package and would depart in several months after helping with transition on the newspaper’s masthead.

In his note, Mr. Geddes reflected on the many things he would miss about The Times, where he has worked for nearly two decades.

“After serving four executive editors, it is time for new horizons,” said Mr. Geddes in his announcement. He said would “ache for the vibrations that the newsroom gives off when a crisis erupts and we scramble” and would miss “hearing about a great story (or new ways to tell one).”

Mr. Geddes joined The Times in 1994 as its business editor and worked his way up the company’s editorial ranks. Before joining The Times, he had spent 13 years at The Wall Street Journal working in both New York and in Europe.

His departure comes as the paper ndertakes a broader restructuring in the newsroom. Like many newspapers facing a troubled advertising market, The Times is trying to cut expenses; in December the paper offered buyout packages to non-guild staff members. It sought 30 volunteers, and said it would resort to layoffs if not enough employees opted for the buyout.

In recent months, The Times has also announced the departures of executives on the business side, including Robert Christie, senior vice president of corporate communications, and Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and general manager of The New York Times. Both of their positions have been eliminated with their departures.

Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said in a statement: “John Geddes is the consummate newsman with superb instincts for stories and people. We’ve been partners in the newsroom for nearly a decade. He has given his all to the Times for far longer than that. Most of all, I’ll miss his company.”

Here is Mr. Geddes’s memo to the staff:

A man walks out of a bar . . .

I’m moving on. I’ve arrived at that magical spot where a buyout offer miraculously appears and presents me with new opportunities. Yes, yes, I know everyone says you have to do this carefully and be armed with a plan, but I don’t have one - not yet.

Frankly, I blame this lack of personal preparedness on this place. I’ve always believed The New York Times works because it is, at heart, a collective of unique individuals bound together in pursuit of great journalism. We’re about the common goal, not about jostling one another for a place in a transitory spotlight. The mission is about us, not about me or you.

We know that our vaunted pedestal is really the achievement of those who came before us, and our chief charge is to build on their legacy. While our readers and our colleagues â€" you â€"are the ultimate jury, I’ve tried over the last 15 years on the masthead to do my best to help figure out how we marshal the resurces to cover the news, develop one another’s talents and secure as firm a hold as we can on our digital future.

I’ve tried to do it with both brains and heart. You’ve deserved no less, and I’m going to miss you. I’ll ache for the vibrations that the newsroom gives off when a crisis erupts and we scramble. I’ll miss helping shape new sections, launching new apps, hearing about a great story (or new ways to tell one) and seeing you in the elevators, across the floor and at the New Faces parties at my apartment.
I got into this profession partly because I wanted a job without repetition, a chance to deal with something new each day. Geez, Louise, I got what I asked for. I’ve had fun, and even on the bad days couldn’t imagine not coming into work.

But after serving four executive editors, it is time for new horizons. Jill has asked me to delay my departure for a few months to help with the masthead transition. I’m happy to do that because it will give me t! ime to sa! y thanks to so many of you individually.

. . . and on his arm is a wonderful woman he met inside.
Best, John

New Tribune Chief Signals Greater Television Focus

Two thirds of the Tribune Company’s revenues currently come from the newspapers it owns. But that most likely won’t be true a year from now.

Peter Liguori, who was named the new chief executive of the company this week, said Friday that he was open both to selling some of the newspapers and buying more television stations. While he made no definitive statements on the matter, his sentiments lined up with investors’ expectations that Tribune will focus more on television and the Internet in the future.

Tribune emerged from bankruptcy at the end of December. It is now controlled by a number of private equity firms and banks. The company’s new board elected Mr. Liguori, a longtime television executive, to be chief executive on Thursday.

“I do think you’re going to see more television focus,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday, calling TV a “great opportunity” for the company. Tribune owns stations in big cities across the country, and operates a cable channel calle WGN America that reaches about 75 million homes.

Mr. Liguori said he wanted to introduce more original programming on WGN America, including in prime time, and on the local stations. The stations, he said, “are a platform to introduce fresh, original content. If we own or co-own the content, that provides new revenue streams for us. We’ve yet to begin that fight, really.”

Then he brought up the statistic about two-thirds of the company’s revenue emanating from newspapers. Tribune owns The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and an assortment of other smaller papers. Newspapers are the tradition of Tribune, going back to its founding more than 150 years ago, he said, “and on a daily basis we’re going to have to focus on furthering that.”

Mr. Liguori spoke of being more “digitally focused” with a “deadline every minute mentality.” He described the company’s reporter bylines as brands. But he didn’t back awa! y from the possibility that Tribune may sell off some of the newspapers in the months to come.

“People have called about the newspapers,” he said. “There are suitors. As the chief executive I have a fiduciary responsibility to hear these suitors out â€" to kind of weed out the contenders from the pretenders. And to see if in fact these suitors are willing to recognize the true value of these newspapers.

“With all that being said, I still think job one is managing the newspapers well; creating the best possible journalism; being as efficient as possible; creating programs for advertisers. And by concentrating on running the newspapers on a daily basis, we’re going to create the greatest value for the company.”

Separately, Mr. Liguori said Tribune is “certainly open” to acquiring more television stations.

“There are opportunities for us to look into duopolies and there are opportunities for us to horse-trade stations with other groups,” he said.

Big Music Companies Are Said to Pursue a Top Dance Promoter

Last year, the growing popularity of electronic dance music, or E.D.M., brought out the dealmakers of the music industry like the scent of prey. A handful of big dance promoters were sold, and one media mogul, Robert F.X. Sillerman, announced plans to build a $1 billion E.D.M. empire. But the year ended without any big, market-defining deal.

That deal may be coming soon, however, with the possible sale of Insomniac Events, which puts on the huge Electric Daisy Carnival festival. Bidders for the company include Live Nation Entertainment and Mr. Sillerman’s company, SFX Entertainment. A.E.G. Live and Red Light Management, an artist management firm with interests in music festivals like Bonnaroo, have also made offers but are not believed to be strong contenders in he auction, according to several people directly involved with the talks.

These companies â€" among the biggest players in live music â€" are valuing Insomniac at between $70 million and $100 million, and are looking to buy anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent of the business, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing.

Representatives of all companies declined to comment.

Insomniac, founded 20 years ago by Pasquale Rotella, is the biggest E.D.M. promoter in the country. The company sold more than one million tickets last year to dozens of events; its biggest, Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, had more than 300,000 people in attendance over three days. The company did not report sales figures for that event, but a smaller Electric Daisy last year, in New Jersey â€" with only 100,000 in attendance â€" had $7.3 million in gross ticket sales, according to Pollstar, a concert industry trade publication.

!

A sale of Insomniac could shift the competitive landscape of the business. SFX, for example, which so far has made only a handful of deals, would instantly become a major player with Insomniac in its portfolio, while Live Nation, which puts on dozens of festivals around the world, could end up controlling many of the biggest dance events in the United States as well.

A deal for Insomniac could be particularly important for Mr. Sillerman, who wants to build a national media network around the disconnected dance audience. So far he has bought two promoters, and according to a report on Thursday in Miami New Times, SFX has also made an investment in a number of major nightclubs in Miami. That is a small empire compared with Live Nation, but Mr. Sillerman has been down this road before: In the 1990s, he established the core of what became Live Nation by buying up dozens of rock promoters around the country, much as e is attempting to do now in the world of E.D.M.

The people briefed on the talks said it was possible that the sale process could break down. One reason is that Mr. Rotella, like many promoters of his generation, built up his company gradually, on the fringes of the industry, and he may prefer to remain independent. Mr. Rotella has also spoken out against corporate deals in the past.

The dance world is also seen as risky by some investors, and the scene has never shaken its reputation as a drug haven. At Electric Daisy in Los Angeles three years ago, for example, a 15-year-old girl died of a drug overdose. Mr. Rotella has had other problems as well. Last year he was indicted on charges related to the embezzlement of $2.5 million from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. He has denied the charges.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Big Music Companies Are Said to Pursue a Top Dance Promoter

Last year, the growing popularity of electronic dance music, or E.D.M., brought out the dealmakers of the music industry like the scent of prey. A handful of big dance promoters were sold, and one media mogul, Robert F.X. Sillerman, announced plans to build a $1 billion E.D.M. empire. But the year ended without any big, market-defining deal.

That deal may be coming soon, however, with the possible sale of Insomniac Events, which puts on the huge Electric Daisy Carnival festival. Bidders for the company include Live Nation Entertainment and Mr. Sillerman’s company, SFX Entertainment. A.E.G. Live and Red Light Management, an artist management firm with interests in music festivals like Bonnaroo, have also made offers but are not believed to be strong contenders in he auction, according to several people directly involved with the talks.

These companies â€" among the biggest players in live music â€" are valuing Insomniac at between $70 million and $100 million, and are looking to buy anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent of the business, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing.

Representatives of all companies declined to comment.

Insomniac, founded 20 years ago by Pasquale Rotella, is the biggest E.D.M. promoter in the country. The company sold more than one million tickets last year to dozens of events; its biggest, Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, had more than 300,000 people in attendance over three days. The company did not report sales figures for that event, but a smaller Electric Daisy last year, in New Jersey â€" with only 100,000 in attendance â€" had $7.3 million in gross ticket sales, according to Pollstar, a concert industry trade publication.

!

A sale of Insomniac could shift the competitive landscape of the business. SFX, for example, which so far has made only a handful of deals, would instantly become a major player with Insomniac in its portfolio, while Live Nation, which puts on dozens of festivals around the world, could end up controlling many of the biggest dance events in the United States as well.

A deal for Insomniac could be particularly important for Mr. Sillerman, who wants to build a national media network around the disconnected dance audience. So far he has bought two promoters, and according to a report on Thursday in Miami New Times, SFX has also made an investment in a number of major nightclubs in Miami. That is a small empire compared with Live Nation, but Mr. Sillerman has been down this road before: In the 1990s, he established the core of what became Live Nation by buying up dozens of rock promoters around the country, much as e is attempting to do now in the world of E.D.M.

The people briefed on the talks said it was possible that the sale process could break down. One reason is that Mr. Rotella, like many promoters of his generation, built up his company gradually, on the fringes of the industry, and he may prefer to remain independent. Mr. Rotella has also spoken out against corporate deals in the past.

The dance world is also seen as risky by some investors, and the scene has never shaken its reputation as a drug haven. At Electric Daisy in Los Angeles three years ago, for example, a 15-year-old girl died of a drug overdose. Mr. Rotella has had other problems as well. Last year he was indicted on charges related to the embezzlement of $2.5 million from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. He has denied the charges.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Suspicion of Steroid Use Could Keep Bagwell and Piazza Out of Hall

Left, Barton Silverman/The New York Times; Chris Livingston for The New York Times Some Hall of Fame voters lump Mike Piazza, left, and Jeff Bagwell together with known steroid users.

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, eligible to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame for the first time, will almost certainly not be named when the next choices for Cooperstown are announced on Wednesday. Instead, tallies of sportswriters who have publicly announced their ballots suggest that they may only get 40 to 50 percent of the vote, despite having statistical records thatrank them as among the best players in history. A player must be named on 75 percent of the ballots to be elected to the Hall of Fame.

There is little mystery about why Bonds and Clemens will be denied a place in the hall: the reason is the evidence that they used performance-enhancing drugs. But for the first time we will be able to say essentially without doubt that some players have been rejected from Cooperstown specifically because they are known to have used or suspected of having used steroids.

Bonds and Clemens are not the first players implicated in baseball’s steroids era to have become eligible for the Hall of Fame. Mark McGwire, who first appeared on the ballot in 2007, acknowledged in 2010 that he had used steroids. Rafael Palmeiro, suspended in 2005 after testing positive for a banned substance, was on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2011 and 2012 but got less than 13 percent of the vote each year.

For McGwire and Palmeiro, however, there is some uncertainty about whether they would have been elected to the Hall of Fame on the basis of their statistical accomplishments alone. McGwire hit 583 home runs, including a record-setting 70 in 1998, and had a .394 career on-base percentage. But he was also a .263 lifetime hitter who had little value in the field or on the basepaths, who was frequently injured throughout his career, and who ranks just 155th in history according to the statistic Wins Above Replacement, which seeks to evaluate a player’s contributions in all phases of the game. Nor have the baseball writers necessarily rewarded a spectacular one-year performance of the sort that McGwire had in 1998. The man whose single-season home run record McGwire broke that year, Roger Maris, never got more than 43 percent of the vote in 15 years of Hall of Fame eligibility.

Palmeiro hit 569 hom runs and had 3,020 hits in his career. But he participated in an era in which gaudy offensive totals were the norm, and he played many of his seasons in strong offensive ballparks. Palmeiro never led his league in home runs, batting average, on-base percentage or runs batted in, never finished higher than fifth place in M.V.P. balloting, and was selected to only four All-Star teams, meaning that he was not routinely among the best players in this league by either subjective or objective measures. He also never appeared in a World Series.

This is not to assert with much confidence that McGwire and Palmeiro would not have been elected to the Hall of Fame on the basis of just their stats. But they are more debatable cases than they might appear on the surface, and even if they had no association with steroids use, they might have challenged the hall’s history of enshrining all players to accumulate 500 home runs or 3,000 hits.

For Bonds and Clemens, there are no such ambiguities. Bonds wo! n seven M! .V.P. awards, holds the lifetime and single-season records for home runs and ranks third in Wins Above Replacement. Clemens won 354 games and seven Cy Young Awards, appeared in the World Series six times, and ranks third among pitchers in Wins Above Replacement.

I recognize that I do not need to convince anyone about the strength of Bonds’s and Clemens’s statistical résumés. No player has been elected to the Hall of Fame unanimously: a few writers found dubious excuses to leave players as great as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Cal Ripken and Tom Seaver off their ballots. A few writers would undoubtedly have done the same for Bonds and Clemens.

For an overwhelming majority of voters, however, a rejection of Bonds and Clemens is a signal that they see steroid use as completely disqualifying.

Some voters have sought to apply a standard in which players are given full credit for statistics they compiled during seasons in which they were not suspected of steroid use, while discarding or discouting those in which they were. But Bonds and Clemens would probably have qualified for the Hall of Fame even by this rule. News accounts suggest that Bonds began using steroids after the 1998 season. By that time, he had already won three M.V.P. awards and eight Gold Gloves and had hit 411 home runs and stolen 445 bases. On the basis of Wins Above Replacement, he would have ranked as roughly the 30th best player in baseball history had he retired then. The same sort of reasoning does not work for McGwire, whose signature seasons were associated with steroid use, or for Palmeiro, who was found to have used banned substances late in his career and whose Hall of Fame case rests largely upon his longevity.

My ambition is not necessarily to endorse this voting standard, which runs the risk of false precision in the face of substantial uncertainty about which players used performanc! e-enhanci! ng drugs, and when.

But it does seem fair to say that the vote on Bonds and Clemens is close to being an up-or-down referendum on whether suspected steroids user are fit for the Hall of Fame; they are not borderline cases otherwise. As such, the vote on Bonds and Clemens provides a useful benchmark for how writers are handling the steroids issue â€" and how it may be affecting the vote on players for whom the evidence of steroids use is circumstantial at best.

One tangible question is this: How did the writers who accepted or rejected Bonds’s application for the Hall of Fame handle the other couple of dozen players on their ballot

As more writers have begun to disclose their ballots publicly, there is more direct evidence of exactly how they did so. The Twitter user @leokitty has developed a spreadsheet of these ballots, which contained 84 complet entries as of Monday afternoon.

In the chart below, I have compiled the data on how these writers voted on other players based on how they voted on Bonds. Clemens provides the clearest example of how the votes on suspected steroid users are related to one another. Some 97 percent of the writers who voted for Bonds also voted for Clemens, but none of the writers who voted against Bonds did. Similarly, none of the writers who rejected Bonds voted for McGwire or Palmeiro.

McGwire and Palmeiro also did relatively poorly, even among those voters who did elect Bonds; each one got only about 30 percent of the vote among these writers. The same was true for Sammy Sosa, whom The New York Times reported tested positive for steroid use in 2003.

But it is hard to say whether this implies that McGwire, Palmeiro and Sosa are regarded as having insufficient statistical credentials for Cooperstown even in the absence of the steroids issue. It could also be, as mentioned previously, that some writers discount a player’s statistics for steroid use but do not reject them completely, and that this discount is sufficient to push McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa below the threshold for Hall of Fame inclusion whereas Bonds and Clemens were good enough to withstand the penalty.

The most interesting cases in the chart are two players for whom there is no hard evidence of steroid use. Jeff Bagwell was chosen for the Hall of Fame by 82 percent of writers who also picked Bonds, higher than the 75 percent threshold required for election. But he was only named on about half of ballots that excluded Bonds.

The pattern is similar for Mike Piazza, the former Mets catcher who ison the ballot for the first time. While 82 percent of voters who named Bonds also picked Piazza, only 46 percent of those who rejected Bonds did.

In other words, while a significant number of voters who rejected Bonds were willing to vote for Bagwell and Piazza, another contingent seems to be punishing these two players for mere suspicion of steroid use. This group of voters may very well be large enough to deny Bagwell and Piazza entry into the Hall of Fame when they would otherwise have made it in.

Hall of Fame voters are not making such sharp distinctions for other players on the ballot. Bagwell’s teammate with the Houston Astros, Craig Biggio, was named on 76 percent of ballots that also included Bonds, but 70 percent of those that did not, which is not a statistically meaningful difference. Other players, like Tim Raines and Jack Morris, were slightly more likely to be named by voters who rejected Bonds than those who included him. (Hall of Fame voters are allowed to name a maximum! of 10 ca! ndidates: does this imply that some voters are running out of space on their ballots, and might have more room to vote for players like Raines if they reject suspected steroid users We will examine that issue in a separate article.)

The comparison between Bagwell and Biggio may be especially instructive. The suspicion that Bagwell used steroids seems to be based on a sort of stereotyping. Bagwell hit for significantly more power than expected based on his minor-league statistics, and grew heavier and bulkier physically. Slugging first basemen who played in the 1990s are automatically suspected of steroid use by a certain contingent of voters, while speedy middle infielders like Biggio are not.

If one were actually to look at the list of players who have been suspended for performance-enhancing drugs, it might call some of these assumptions into question. Among these players are the utility infielder Neifi Perez, who hit 64 home runs in a 12-year career, the slap-hitting outfielder Jorge Piedra, and a substantial number of pitchers. The incidence of performance-enhancing drug use seems to be fairly randomly distributed between stars and benchwarmers, players at different positions and those with different skills.

Some writers seem to think they can profile steroid users, and some otherwise-deserving players seem likely to be denied a place in Cooperstown because of it.

Transcript of Nate Silver\'s \'Ask Me Anything\' on Reddit

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight took questions Tuesday on the popular social news site Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” section. What follows is an edited transcript, with the questions and answers sorted into several subject areas.

Questions About Elections

Q.

At what point did you feel the 2012 Presidential Election ceased being a ‘close race’ And do you think other media entities who maintained it was until the end were simply not in agreement with you, or kept towing that line to keep ratings up

Also, what did you view as the biggest missteps during the election
â€" DragonPup

A.

2012 was a reasonably close election. Not 2000 close, obviously, but closer than average.

The distinction that got lost a bit was between closeness and uncertainty. If a baseball game is 3-2 in the bottom of the 9thinning and you've got Papelbon on the mound or whatever, it has definitely been a "close" game but not one in which the outcome is in all that much doubt.

Less abstractly: when it became clear (i) Romney's "momentum" from Denver had begun to recede and (ii) that the final major news event of the campaign (Hurricane Sandy) was working to Obama's benefit, some of the uncertainty was removed.

Q.

Do you believe the theory that Anonymous stopped Karl Rove from stealing the election via hacking electronic voting machines
â€" cpresc12

A.

No.

Q.

At the end of the day, what would it take for a 3rd party candidate to seriously challenge for, or even win, the presidency Was Perot a once in a lifetime phenomenon, or is there a possibility of something outside the 2 party system
â€" SEHumphrey

A.

Historically, periods of greater polarizati! on are associated with better performance for third-party candidates, so the chances of a successful independent campaign are probably higher than average. However, that still might mean there's 3 or 5 percent chance of an independent candidate winning the 2016 election as opposed to a 1 or 2 percent chance. You might need a perfect storm where (i) Obama is perceived as really having screwed up and (ii) the Republicans nominate someone terrible and (iii) someone VERY talented runs and takes his campaign very seriously and (iv) then gets a few breaks in the Electoral College, etc. None of those individual steps are impossible, but the odds against the parlay are pretty long.

Q.

Nate, do you think most of the popular news sources (cable, network, newspapers) intentionally overlooked the data analysis from you and those like you in order to hype up the 2012 election
â€" sghallmark

A.

News organizations tend to have incentives to "root for thestory". Part of what were were saying for much of the campaign â€" both at different stages of the general election and perhaps even more emphatically in the end-stage of the primary when Romney pretty much had things wrapped up â€" is that the outcome had become fairly certain. So that creates a bit of a culture clash.

Q.

Are you concerned that during future elections, the accuracy of your predictions will lull readers into a mindset of “it has been foretold, therefore I needn’t bother to vote”
â€" whydidijoinreddit

A.

It worries me a bit. There is probably a danger zone in which a candidate's supporters take for granted that he'll win the election and so don't turn out to vote, but the election is nevertheless close enough for him to lose. That may have happened in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in 2008, for example. There were a lot of reasons why Hillary beat her polls, but one contributing factor may have been tha! t a lot o! f independent voters who would otherwise have voted for Barack chose to vote in the GOP primary instead since it seemed more competitive.

Q.

Were the Romney campaign predictions a result of bad polling, analysis, or just group think
â€" TheGribbler

A.

Groupthink and perverse incentives were the causes; to the extent their polling or analysis was bad, it flowed from that.

Q.

Be honest. How much did you enjoy getting the ire of pundits (not the few who actually critiqued your method, models, or assumptions, but those who just dismissed your work wholesale) Was there a part of you that wrung your hands together, laughed a tad manically, and egged them on to continue, since all they were doing was bringing more attention to your work and the lack of rigor in their approach
â€" Jerseywhat

A.

At some point in the last few weeks of the election, I guess I decided to lean into th upside outcome a little bit in terms of pushing back at the pundits in my public appearances â€" as opposed to emphasizing the uncertainty in the model, as I had for most of the year. (Nothing about the model design itself changed â€" just how I tended to talk about it.)

Stupid poker analogy: part of playing well is in maximizing the amount of value you get from a hand in the event that things go well, in addition to mitigating your losses if they don't.

Q.

Your prediction of 2012 presedential elections gave Romney a ~20% chance. That’s lower than ~80% of Obama, but it was still somewhat possible. If Romney had won you would have not been proven wrong (things much less likely than 20% happen all the time), but how would you have handled it What you would you say to people who would say you were wrong How would you defend math

Edit: Also, do you have any opinion on the way students are graded (not an american, so the overall stuff) Is there anything wrong ! with it S! omething you would change I know it doesnt seem a very statistics related issue, but statistics play an important part in it.
â€" TauRho

A.

Intellectually, the defense is pretty simple, which is that 20 percent outcomes happen 20 percent of the time. In fact, the 20 percent outcomes are supposed to happen 20 percent of the time (not substantially more OR substantially less) or you've calibrated your model incorrectly.

OK, not quite that simple: any time a low-probability event occurs (although I'm not sure that I'd describe a 20 percent outcome as a "low-probability event") you ought to be asking whether your model of the universe was correct, particularly in cases where there is a considerable amount of structural uncertainty. The answer may well be "yes" â€" you shouldn't necessarily be in a rush to change your model and there can be harm in doing so â€" but you should be posing the question.

But I have no illusion: this defense would have been less than pesuasive to many people. If you watch a poker hand, and a guy gets all-in before the flop with aces against kings (an 80/20 bet), our animal instinct is very much to tag him as a LOSER if a king comes up on the flop, even though he probably played his hand perfectly. So I'd just have had to take my lumps and acknowledge that I'd been very fortunate in many respects in life (i.e. often getting much more credit than I deserved) up through 11/6/12.

Questions About Sports

Q.

Is it correct to assume that sabermetrics will never work in football and basketball like they do in baseball And if so, is that because baseball is much more of an individual sport, or are there other reasons as well

(Edit: By an individual sport, I mean that for the most part it’s pitcher vs. batter, with anything happening after that only a result of the initial matchup. This is not like football, where even a simple five yard run only happens because of many moving part! s, i.e. b! locking, and thus makes it much harder to grade anyone on a completely individual level.)
â€" AllDaveAllDay

A.

Well, I guess I'd put it like this: statistical analysis may not get you as far in basketball* or (especially) football as it does in baseball. But it still probably gets you much further than in most industries.

• A lot of NBA teams (especially the ones that win a lot) have become VERY sophisticated about their decision making. Basketball may be closer to the baseball than the football end of the spectrum, both in theory and practice.

Q.

How would you fix baseball Hall of Fame voting
â€" MrDNL

A.

I'd probably lower the threshold for players getting dropped from the ballot, from 5 percent to 2 percent or so, or have some sort of a sliding scale where the threshold depends on how many times a player's name has appeared. It now seems plausible that Alan Trammell will eventually get n, for example, and it's a little weird that Lou Whitaker got dropped from the ballot years ago when he might otherwise be gathering some support along with Trammell right now.

Q.

Given that Barry Bonds will likely be declined a first-ballot visit to the Hall of Fame tomorrow, is there any way to look at numbers from the steroid era (both for those implicated, and those that just happened to play in the era) such that they show actual performance Essentially, can we actually make any assessments of numbers from the steroid era
â€" OhEmGeeBasedGod

A.

If we had a list of exactly who used steroids and when, you could do a lot of clever things. But we don't, and the sample of alleged and actual steroids users is liable to be nonrandom and biased in various ways.

Q.

Would you vote for Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens to get into the Hall of Fame

Edit: Spelling
â€" Dovercourt

A.!

! Yes, I think, in large part because the split-the-baby solutions to steroids use are hard to apply in practice. I might use steroids use as a tiebreaker for otherwise very close cases (and I think McGwire, Sosa and Palmeiro all fall into that category). But I don't think people should pretend that we can put each player's stats through some kind of algorithm and come up with "steroid-neutral" statistics. We just don't know all that much about who did and didn't use steroids, and when.

Q.

Nate, do you think you can come up with a system for college football that is better than the BCS
â€" bigedave

A.

Yes, it's called a playoff. Ideally an 8- or 12- or 16-team playoff, I think.

The irony is that of all college and professional sports, NCAA football is the one that might most necessitate a playoff because 12 games just isn't enough to tell you very much â€" especially when many/most are played against mediocre competition. If instead ateam needs to win 3 or 4 games against top-flight opponents to win the national championship, you can say with a bit more confidence that they're deserving.

Q.

Is sabermetrics useful in soccer
â€" inquisitive872

A.

Traditionally, soccer leagues just kept track of goals and bookings, and there's only so much value you can mine from that data. But I know that the EPL and MLS are starting to track all other sorts of statistics as well: tackles, passes, time of possession, etc. Would be interesting to explore that at some point. I suspect there is some low-hanging fruit since the soccer culture (even more than in most American sports) tends not to be very data-friendly.

Questions About Public Policy

Q.

Can you prove whether gun control would make America safer
â€" grecojc

A.

It's a tricky problem, statistically. The issue is that while gun ownersh! ip rates ! could plausibly be a cause of fatal crimes and accidents, it can also be a reaction to it, i.e. people purchase guns because they feel unsafe.

I'm not saying that the issue is intrinsically inscrutable. But it's something that more requires a PhD-thesis-level treatment than a blog post to really add much insight, I think.

Q.

What are your thoughts on data-driven metrics for teacher evaluation Do you think a system that accurately reflects teacher value could ever be created, or will it always be plagued by perverse incentives (teaching to the test, neglecting certain types of students, etc)
â€" GrEvTh

A.

There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those.

In my job out of college as a consultant, one of my projects involved visiting public school classrooms in Ohio and talking to teachers, and their view was very much that teaching-to-te-test was constraining them in some unhelpful ways.

But this is another topic that requires a book- or thesis-length treatment to really evaluate properly. Maybe I'll write a book on it someday.

Questions About FiveThirtyEight

Q.

What software do you use to analyze your data
â€" tab1901

A.

I use Stata for anything hardcore and Excel for the rest.

Q.

Hey Nate-

Been a big fan for a long time. You had a couple great pieces on your site back before it was picked up by NYT about the futures of different domestic issues (i.e. same-sex marriage, drug legalization, etc.) and I found them to be really insightful. Your analysis of same-sex marriage in particular stuck with me-you highlighted, if I’m remembering correctly, a linear path and an “accelerated” path that has been crazy accurate over the last few years.

Given your overwhelming success with the electoral s! ide of th! ings, are there any plans to have you continue coverage of specific policy issues or are you going to stick exclusively with the horserace

Also, are you a redditor and/or do you own a cat
â€" ZachWahls

A.

One of the things I'm trying to figure out is what range of topics to cover at 538. After the 2008 election, it became sort of a quantitatively-flavored politics blog, and I think that was something of a mistake. Some things, like cabinet nominations, really do requite careful reporting, and statistical analysis will provide a dollop of color commentary at best. On other days, the lead political story is just gossipy and stupid and isn't really newsworthy at all. So on a day like today, when the Chuck Hagel nomination is the major political story and that doesn't really play into our strengths, I'd rather write about something like baseball instead. The ambition is to expand 538 "horizontally" across topics, based on HOW we cover the news, rather than into the poltics vertical, if that makes sense.

We're definitely overdue to do a couple of posts on same-sex marriage, however.

I don't own (or rent) a cat.

Q.

Could you please address some of the biggest misconceptions of what it is you do and **can** do

A lot of “Silver is a wizard who can calculate everything” jokes have emerged, as you have grown in popularity, but often so at the cost of understanding what statistics are actually about.
â€" kskxt

A.

More often than not, people overrate the reliability of predictions in systems with a lot of complexity. There are certainly exceptions, and presidential elections are almost certainly one of them, but it's a bit weird/ironic that I'm known for one of the exceptional cases.

Miscellaneous

Q.

What’s been the strangest experience you’ve had due to your sudden fame
â€" sharilynj

A.

Wh! en I was ! in Mexico last week, I got recognized at the top of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, which I'm pretty sure really is a sign of the Apocalypse.

Q.

Which do you find more frustrating to analyze, politics or sports
â€" doogie92

A.

Politics. I don't think its close. Between the pundits and the partisans, you're dealing with a lot of very delusional people. And sports provides for much more frequent reality checks. If you were touting how awesome Notre Dame was, for example*, you got very much slapped back into reality last night. In politics, you can go on being delusional for years at a time.

• Full disclosure: I said in a NYT video yesterday that I'd bet Notre Dame against the spread.

Q.

In a recent profile, you stated you wished not to be known as a “gay statistician” but as a statistician who happens to be gay. Isn’t that a bit naive in today’s political and social climate Don’t you thik that whether you like it or not, people will treat you differently because you are gay and that your identity as a gay man cannot be limited to your private sexuality As someone so ubiquitous now in the public sphere, should you be addressing issues in your writing that are related to gay rights as much as baseball
â€" snsiegel

A.

It's a complicated issue that maybe doesn't lend itself so well to the reddit treatment.

My quick-and-dirty view is that people are too quick to affiliate themselves with identity groups of all kinds, as opposed to carving out their own path in life.

Obviously, there is also the issue of how one is perceived by others. Living in New York in 2013 provides one with much a much greater ability to exercise his independence than living in Uganda â€" or for that matter living in New York forty years ago. So perhaps there's a bit of a "you didn't build that" quality in terms of taking for granted some of the freedoms that I have n! ow.

And/but/also, one of the broader lessons in the history of how gay people have been treated is that perhaps we should empower people to make their own choices and live their own lives, and that we should be somewhat distrustful about the whims and tastes and legal constraints imposed by society.

Q.

Last month, the quant-blogger mathbabe took your book to task for confusing cause and effect. She said, “We didn’t have a financial crisis because of a bad model or a few bad models. We had bad models because of a corrupt and criminally fraudulent financial system … this is not just wrong, it’s maliciously wrong.” She then claimed you were “a man who deeply believes in experts,” which is where your book went wrong.

Could you address this criticism and defend your conclusions

(full post: http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/20/nate-silver-confuses-cause-and-effect-ends-up-defending-corruption/)
â€" stickycinnamon

A.

I'd encourag you to read my book and ask whether she fairly interprets my hypothesis. I don't think she does. The financial crisis chapter is quite explicit about asserting that the credit ratings agencies were not just stupid, but also a bunch of dirty rotten scoundrels, so to speak. And the book is generally quite skeptical about the role played by "experts".

Q.

Very simple: Do you prefer Chicago or New York, and why
â€" kbuw

A.

In terms of quality of life, it's very close. But New York is a lot better for someone working in "the media", and probably also more broadly for most people who are super ambitious about their careers. One of the big cultural differences here â€" very much for better and worse â€" is that people are often very career-driven well into their 40s, 50s, 60s.

Q.

What the biggest abuse of statistics that people aren’t aware of
â€" bgrrr

A.

Overfitting, which I discuss quite extensively in my book, is a way more pernicious problem than most people realize.

Q.

For aspiring applied statisticians, what do you think are the best and hottest new skills to learn and add to one’s resume
â€" madjoy

A.

Maybe this is too vague, but I think the most important thing is just to lessen the amount of book-learnin' that you do and start to play around with some data sets instead.

Q.

As an Econ major, how did you gain your statistics background
â€" derekw518

A.

Mostly from trying to win my fantasy baseball league and my NCAA tournament pool.

Q.

Your ability to predict election outcomes has lead to your work moving election betting markets… have you ever been tempted to profi via these markets
â€" willjsm

A.

Tempted, yes, but sometimes resisting temptation is a good thing.

Q.

As a baseball nerd (Go Royals!) and a politics/elections nerd, Thank you for doing an AMA.

One of the manifestations of my political nerddom involves me finding and entering election results on a website. Really. Seeing as you’re someone who has had some success with the idea of using actual election-related data to shape an idea of what could happen in the future, I’ve got a question to ask you:

**”Is there a reasonable opening for a baseball-reference equivalent for the world of campaigns and elections and such Are there enough solid facts that can be cataloged for such an effort”**

To add extra notes if this helps you answer or understand the question:

I say solid facts since a lot of the ratings that get associated with politics have their flaws. Some are blatantly cherry picked (Interest Group sc! ores), so! me could be a bit inadequate (National Journal) and on the other extreme, some could just be too much like Earnshaw Cook to really sink in with people.

The basic information about who got so many votes in such and such election is out there, although it’s a bit dispersed in a sense. Some of it is in books, some is in databases (ICPSR). Some states with interesting electoral histories have a lot of results out there (West Virginia, Louisiana), and some with interesting histories don’t have a lot of their results online (Michigan, Mississippi)

I could probably write way way too long on the topic of what’s out there state-by-state but your post isn’t titled “I am Nate Silver, I predicted the freaking election, what’s YOUR line”

I just find it quirky (in a way) that we have box scores online for every major league baseball game from 1918. But the same really can’t be said for elections held in 1918. That difference might reflect a difference between people who do political sciece and people who research baseball.

I’m sure you’ve had your fun going out to find the electoral data that is necessary to figure out the future and such, so if you could add some insight about if the data can be disseminated to more people, that’d be really cool.

And go Royals too.
â€" rbhindepmo

A.

Sorry for a brief answer to a very long question, but I've long been surprised that there isn't an elections-reference.com. Sean Forman had better get on that or I might steal the idea.

Q.

Are you ever going to finish your Burrito Bracket Project
â€" CaptainSasquatch

A.

Perhaps I can convince Penguin that my next book should be a 256-taqueria burrito bracket with entries from all across the country.

In Cooperstown, a Crowded Waiting Room

Jessie Schwartz for The New York Times Baseball writers elected no one to the Hall of Fame on Wednesday, despite what might have been the deepest ballot in years.

The failure of the writers to pick Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens was not a surprise given the low vote totals received in the past by Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, other players associated with the use performance-enhancing drugs. But the vote totals for Bonds and Clemens, just 36 and 38 percent, were lower than expected.

Craig Biggio, who received 68.2 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility, will almost certainly make it into the Hall of Fame someday.Still, his profile is quite similar to Robin Yount and Roberto Alomar, two players who did better in their first year on the ballot. (Yount got 77.5 percent of the vote in his first year on the ballot in 1999, while Alomar got 73.7 percent of the vote in 2010 and made it in the next year.)

Perhaps the clearest effect of the crowded ballot, however, was realized among candidates who were returning to the ballot from last year. Of the 13 players who carried over from the 2012 ballot, nine received a lower share of the vote, including Lee Smith, Alan Trammell, Fred McGriff, Don Mattingly and Bernie Williams.

This is atypical; instead, players usually add votes with each additional year they spend on the ballot. Since 1967, when the Hall of Fame adopted balloting rules similar to the ones it uses now, about two-thirds of holdover players gained ground from their prior year’s vote percentage.

It is possible to be a bit more precise about this pattern. Based on an analysis of Hall of Fame voting between 1967 and 2011, I found that the increase in a player’s vote total is typically proportional to his percentage from the previous year. In his second year on the ballot, for example, the typical player’s vote share increases by a multiple of about 1.1.

Thus, a player who received 10 percent of the vote in his first year would be expected to receive about 11 percent on his second try, while a player who got 50 percent of the vote would go up to 55 percent.

The pace of improvement is typically highest in the first several years that a player spends on the ballot, slowing down once he has been eligible five or six times. (The exception is in a player’s 15 and final year of eligibility, when he may receive a fairly large boost.) But these small percentage gains can add up, something like the way in which interest compounds over time. For example, as shown in the chart below, a plyer who gets just 30 percent of the vote in his first year on the ballot would be projected to make it in on his 14th year of eligibility if he follows the formula each year.

In practice, the growth in a player’s vote share is rarely this smooth â€" and you should not necessarily expect the pattern to hold for Bonds and Clemens. (Instructively, the vote shares for McGwire and Palmeiro have actually been declining.) Nonetheless, Hall of Fame candidates typically have a tailwind as time passes.

This year, however, veterans on the Hall of Fame ballot faced a headwind instead. The next chart compares the actual vote that each player received against that projected by the historical formula.

Actual results in 2013 compared to projections based on historical patterns.

Twelve of the 13 players underperformed their projection; the exception was Dale Murphy, who got a larger-than-average boost in his final year of eligibility, but still came nowhere close to winning election.

Even some players who gained ground did not necessarily help their chances. Jack Morris went from 66.7 percent of the vote to 67.7 percent, below his projection of 69.4 percent. The small difference could be important because next year will be Morris’s final year of eligibility, and he projects to be very close to the 75 percent threshold for election. (Perhaps the player who had the best year, nstead, was Tim Raines, whose vote share grew to 52.2 percent from 48.7 percent, and who is now a clear favorite to be elected someday by the writers.)

Most other players lost ground outright. Trammell, in his 12th year of eligibility, declined to 33.6 percent from 36.8 percent of the vote. He was an underdog to make it in before, but now he seems to have very little chance. The same also holds for Smith, who lost most of what he gained last year after years of stagnant vote totals.

McGriff, as Joe Posnanski writes, seemed to be a plausible candidate to gain ground this year as writers sought out players who were perceived as clean, as opposed to known or suspected of steroid use. Instead, his vote share declined to 20.7 percent from 23.9 percent. Williams had received just under 10 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility, but his case was not entirely hopeless; players like Bob Lemon and Carl Hubbell were eventuall! y selecte! d by the writers with a similar vote total in their first year.

Instead, Williams fell below the 5 percent threshold required for a player to stay on the ballot.

The crowded and confusing ballot may be affecting these players in several ways. The most obvious is that the writers are limited to voting for a maximum of 10 players. This year, according to the sample of ballots collected by the Twitter user @leokitty, 24 percent of writers used all 10 of their picks. That compares with 12 percent in 2011, and just 4 percent in 2012.

Did the 10-vote limit keep Biggio and Morris out of the Hall of Fame, perhaps along with other players

Actually, it was almost certainly not responsible all by itself. Of the 24 percent of writers who used all 10 ballot slots, 90 percent did name Biggio, meaning 10 percent did not. At best, therefore, if all writers whoexhausted their ballots would also have named Biggio if they had unlimited votes, he would have gotten only 10 percent of the 24 percent, adding only 2.4 percentage points to his overall vote total.

The logic here is that it’s hard to make a case that Biggio was only the 11th or 12th best player on the ballot. Instead, most of the writers who left him out were probably more like Jon Heyman of CBS Sports. Heyman wrote that he saw Biggio as the eighth best player on the ballot â€" but he also thought that only six were worthy of inclusion. Most of the writers who left Biggio out, in other words, were those who take a conservative overall approach to how many players they want in the Hall of Fame, and not those who ran out of ballot positions.

Morris is a more debatable case. If all writers who maxed out their ballot slots had included him, he would have come v! ery close! to 75 percent of the vote. However, Morris is also a highly polarizing candidate. Those writers who included him often thought he was among the very best players on the ballot; on several ballots, in fact, Morris was the only player named. But other writers think he falls fall short of Hall of Fame standards and would not have picked him no matter how many votes they had to spare.

Nor, obviously, were Bonds’s and Clemens’s totals affected to any material degree by the 10-player limit. Nobody left Bonds off their ballots because they thought he had only the 11th-best statistical record; they did so because they don’t think steroids users should be in the Hall of Fame. (In fact, most of the writers who maxed out their balot slots included Bonds and Clemens; the writers who are willing to consider performance-enhancing drug users have much more crowded ballots than those who are not.)

Instead, players like McGriff, Trammell, Williams and Edgar Martinez were probably most affected by the 10-player limit. The logic for McGriff, for example, is very close of the opposite of that which might be applied to Biggio. It’s fairly hard to sustain a case that McGriff was one of the best six or seven players on the ballot this year. But you might credibly argue that there is a glut of a dozen or so qualified players, McGriff among them, and you had to leave McGriff out because of the ballot limit.

However, the players are not only being affected by those writers who ran out of ballot slots. There were a higher-than-average number of writers this year who listed very few players, or even none at all. Some 10 percent of voters named two or fewer players this year, according to Leokitty’s spreadsheet. That is lower ! than in 2! 012, an underwhelming year on the ballot, when 16 percent of voters did so.

But it is less than 2009, 2010 or 2011, when between 3 and 8 percent of writers listed so few players. Some writers are deliberately listing very few players as a protest vote, whether against the steroids era or the Hall of Fame balloting process.

Between the protest voters on the one hand, and the maxed-out voters on the other, the players are being squeezed at both ends.

Finally, some players may be harmed by the psychology of the ballot. If Clemens were not on the ballot, for example, then you could credibly make a case that Curt Schilling was the best pitcher on the ballot (if you don’t think that Morris is). But Schilling’s accomplishments look poor by comparison to Clemens’s, as do those of almost any pitcher â€" even if you aren’t willing to vote for Clemens because of his steroids use. The same holds for outfielders whose statistics might be compared with Barry Bonds’s.

There is even somethng to be said for the so-called “paradox of choice”: that when presented with too many options, we may be overwhelmed with information and have trouble making any decisions at all.

Hall of Fame voting is ultimately designed to be a consensus process. One reason that players tend to gain votes over time is because the writers are looking at what their peers are doing and value the endorsements of their colleagues. Moreover, because they have as many as 15 chances to elect a player, many writers tend toward conservatism initially. There is no way to remove a player from the Hall of Fame once he has been elected, but you can change your mind to include him later. When a writer initially votes “no” on a player, it really means “wait and see” in many cases.

But consensus is harder to achieve when! members ! of a group have divergent values and ideologies. Instead of the typical friendly arguments about how a player’s lifetime accomplishments might be weighed against how dominant he was in his best seasons, or how to compare players at different positions, the writers are now spending most of their time arguing about who used steroids and when, and how this should affect Hall of Fame consideration. Many have passionate beliefs about this, whichever side of the argument they take. An increasing number of writers would like to elect a dozen or more players; an increasing number would like to lose the whole “steroids era” to history. Good-natured debates may be replaced by tactical considerations, as voters make guesses about who everyone else might vote for, or where their ballots might be wasted.

Next year will place even more pressure on the voters, when Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas and Mike Mussina are added to the list of candidates. Those who apply little discount for steroids use may cedibly claim to identify 15 or more qualified candidates, and even those who do not may have to drop one or two names that they otherwise see as worthy. The New York Times will probably not have to publish a blank page again, but no one but Maddux seems sure to make it in.

Why Obama May Drive a Hard Bargain

President Obama has repeatedly stated that he will not negotiate over the federal debt ceiling, which must be raised soon to avoid a default.

As observers on both the left and right have pointed out, saying that you will not negotiate may itself be a negotiating position. And in the past, Mr. Obama has not always held firm to the negotiating positions he has taken. In advance of the so-called fiscal cliff, for instance, Mr. Obama said that he wanted taxes to be raised on family incomes of $250,000 or more. Instead, he settled with Republicans on a threshold of $450,000.

But there is one important difference between the current round of negotiations and the stand-off that Congress and Mr. Obama engaged in over the debt ceiling in July 2011. It is such an obious point that it almost seems to have been forgotten: Mr. Obama no longer needs to worry about re-election. Members of Congress still do, however.

To be sure, this represents a simplification of a complex set of incentives and priorities. Mr. Obama surely has a variety of reasons, political and otherwise, to see the debt ceiling increased. An economic crisis brought on by an actual or near-default would very probably harm his approval ratings, as occurred when negotiations were pushed to the brink in 2011. That could make it even harder for him to pass substantive reforms through Congress, like those for gun control or immigration. Mr. Obama is also presumably concerned with his legacy, with the fate of Democrats in Congress and with who will succeed him in the White House in 2017.

For many members of Congress, meanwhile, concern over re-election is mitigated by the fact that they are in extremely Democratic or Republican districts that have almost no chance of electing someone from the other party. A profound political or economic crisis could put a higher-than-usual number of seats in play; even so, the majority of members of the House now come from districts where one party’s presidential candidate wins by landslide margins every four years.

Nonetheless, the aim of seeking re-election may have colored Mr. Obama’s priorities during the prior debt ceiling negotiation.

Economists differ on exactly how severe the economic costs of a United States debt default would be. But the most severe recessions, like the one that officially began in December 2007, can persist for about a year and a half. When added to an economic recovery that was already very feeble, a new economic shock could easily have produced a new recession that lasted through the November 2012 elections. Even if he economy had technically exited recession by then, growth in jobs tends to lag other economic indicators, so labor-market conditions would almost certainly have remained very poor.

Of course, the political science models that link the president’s fate to economic conditions are also oversimplifications. Ordinarily, the public defaults toward giving the president credit or blame for economic performance late in his term. The effect of the economy on Congressional incumbents is more ambiguous, especially under divided government.

Ordinarily, however, recessions do not have such a direct and immediate link to the actions (or the deliberate failure to act) by Washington policymakers. A debt default might have had catastrophic consequences for the economy; it would also have been a fascinating data point for political science.

But Mr. Obama’s willingness to negotiate looks prudent, in retrospect.

His approval ratings recovered from their lows of just over 40 percent in late 2! 011 to ab! out 50 percent by Election Day. The protracted negotiations over the debt ceiling may well have damaged the economy by undermining business and consumer confidence â€" the economy grew at just a 1.3 percent rate in the third quarter of 2011 â€" but there was just enough good news by late 2012 for voters to give Mr. Obama another term.

Mr. Obama has less to lose this time around. That does not necessarily imply that he will not negotiate at all, but it does make his bargaining position more formidable.

The change in conditions may help to explain why the administration has disavowed ideas like minting a platinum coin or invoking a provision of the 14th Amendment to avert a debt default. In the 2011 negotiations, much of the Republicans’ leverage came from the possibility that an economic crisis might have imperiled Mr. Obama’s re-election more than it di their own. End-around approaches that might have mitigated the economic damage might therefore have diminished their bargaining power.

This time, it is only members of Congress who will come before voters again. Given the lack of certainly in how the public reacts to economic crises in Congressional elections, the aesthetics of the debt-ceiling endgame could matter a great deal. Minting a platinum coin, especially if it proved to be less effective at staving off financial panic than its advocates hoped, could look like a clumsy power grab by the White House, perhaps allowing the G.O.P. to stave off blame for the economic harm that ensued.

The White House’s stated refusal to consider the platinum coin has been described as a capitulation by some liberals, but it is actu! ally the ! more aggressive negotiating posture. It implies that Mr. Obama thinks the G.O.P. will swerve first - or will only damage itself if Congress fails to lift the debt ceiling. That threat was less credible when a debt default might have wrecked Mr. Obama’s chances at a second term.

What Is Driving Growth in Government Spending

It’s one of the most fundamental political questions of our time: What’s driving the growth in government spending And it has a relatively straightforward answer: first and foremost, spending on health care through Medicare and Medicaid, and other major social insurance and entitlement programs.

But I thought it was worth reviewing the evidence in a bit more detail. There are a few surprises along the way, some of which liberal readers might like and others of which will please conservative readers.

The Web site usgovernmentspending.com has an abundance of data on federal, state and local spending at different points in time. My focus will be on how government has been spending its money in the present and the past, rather than evaluating any future budgets or projections.

I’ll be looking principally at government spending as a share of the overall economy, specifically as compared to the gross domestic product. In the long run, te overall economic health of the country is the most important constraint on fiscal policy. A growing economy gives us a lot of good choices: maintaining or expanding government programs, cutting taxes or holding them at a moderate level, reducing or managing the national debt. A stagnant economy means that everything gets squeezed.

The first chart, below, documents the growth in federal government spending over the past hundred years as a share of gross domestic product spending is broken down into four major categories:
1. Entitlement programs, under which I classify government expenditures on health care programs; pensions and retirement programs like Social Security; and welfare or social insurance programs like food stamps and unemployment compensation.
2. Military spending
3. Interest on the national debt
4. Infrastructure and services, under which I include everything ! else â€" the pot that is often referred to as discretionary spending: education spending; fire services, police and the criminal justice system; spending on physical infrastructure including transportation; spending on science, technology, and research and development; and the category called “general government,” which largely refers to the cost of maintaining the political system (like salaries for public officials).

The most striking feature of the chart is the extraordinary amount of military spending during World War II (and to a lesser extent, during World War I). Even after World War II, however, military spending constituted the outright majority of federal government spending until 1969.

Military spending makes up closer t 24 percent of federal expenditures today. That’s up from the near-term low from 1998 to 2001, when it made up about 20 percent of federal spending. (One contributor to the budget surpluses achieved briefly during the Clinton administration was a peace dividend in the interim between the cold war and the Sept. 11 attacks.) And military spending in the United States has generally been rising relative to inflation and remains very high relative to most other nations. But over the longer term, it has fallen slightly relative to the gross domestic product, and substantially relative to other types of government spending.

Another surprise is how little we are paying in interest on the federal debt, even though the debt is growing larger and larger. Right now, interest payments make up only about 6 percent of the federal budget. In addition, they have been decreasing as a s! hare of t! he gross domestic product: the federal government spent about 1.5 percent of gross domestic product in paying interest on its debt on 2011, down from a peak of 3.3 percent in 1991.

How is this possible The reason is that although the government is borrowing a lot of money, it is doing so very cheaply because interest rates are low both over all and on government debt specifically. We’re now spending less than 2 percent of the principal annually to service our debt, down from a peak of close to 7 percent in the early 1980s. Borrowing costs aren’t expected to remain this low forever, so this ratio is bound to increase some. Fortunately, much of the debt we have issued has relatively long maturities, meaning that we have locked in low rates. (This won’t necessarily apply to future deficit spending: one of the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling would be a significant rise in borrowing costs, whic would compound our debt problems later on.)

The growth in federal spending on physical infrastructure and on services provided directly by the government like policing and education, has been modest. In fact, federal spending on these categories has declined somewhat as a share of the gross domestic product over the past 40 years.

It might also be surprising that spending in this category is relatively quite small â€" federal expenditures in these areas totaled only about 2.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2011 â€" considering that they make up some of the most traditional functions of government (along with defense).

But part of this is because many of these services are financed and provided for by state and local! governme! nts, which spend most of their money in these areas.

That means most of the growth in federal government spending relative to inflation â€" and essentially all the growth as a share of the gross domestic product â€" has been because of the increased expense of entitlement programs.

We’ll return to this theme in a moment, but let’s first consider the role played by state and local governments.

While most discussions of government spending focus on what the federal government spends, state and local governments are a bigger part of the picture than you might think. Their collective spending is now the equivalent of about 15 percent of the gross domestic product, not counting money which is granted to them by the federal governmnt for programs administered by states and localities. (By comparison, federal government spending, including grants to the states and interest on the national debt, has recently been about 24 percent of the gross domestic product.)

The states also spend their money much differently than the federal government: principally, as I mentioned, on infrastructure and on services like policing and education. States and localities do spend some on entitlement programs, and their expenditures in this area have been increasing, but federal expenditures have accounted for most of the growth.

However, states and localities pay for essentially nothing that would be classified as military spending. They also accumulate relatively little debt, so they don’t pay much in the way of interest; many states are required by law to balance their budgets, or routinely do so as a matter of custom.

The flip side is that states and localities have very limited ability to engage in stimulative spending durin! g economi! c downturns. Instead just the opposite is true: recessions reduce their tax base, so they either have to increase tax rates or cut services to keep their budgets balanced. The federal government provided various grants to the states in the stimulus package it passed in 2009, offsetting some of the states’ expenses, but these programs have since largely expired, and many states and municipalities have had to cut their budgets or raise taxes since then. Partly as a result, about 500,000 local and state government jobs have been lost since 2009, even as private-sector employment has (somewhat) recovered.

Although accounting for state and municipal expenditures alongside federal ones increases the share of government expenditures that are spent on infrastructure programs, it does not change our conclusion
about what is driving the increase in spending relative to gross domestic product entitlement programs, which accont for the vast bulk of it.

The usgovernmentspending.com data classifies three subcategories of entitlement programs. Spending on welfare programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance is the most cyclical - or technically the most countercyclical, since much of it kicks in automatically during an economic downturn. Spending on retirement programs, principally Social Security, is the steadiest, but it has been increasing faster than the rate of gross domestic product growth and considerably faster than inflation. And health care spending has been increasing at the fastest rate.

Specifically, overall government spending on entitlement programs increased at a 4.8 annual rate in the 40 years between 1972 and 2011, net of inflation. Health care spending increased at 5.7 percent per year (and federal government spending on health care increased at a 6.7 percent pace). In contrast, the gross domestic product grew at a rate of 2.7 percent over this period, with tax revenues increasing at about the same rate as the G.D.P.

Spending on infrastructure and government services, excluding defense, has kept pace with gross domestic product growth. (Spending on infrastructure and services by the federal government specifically has lagged gross domestic product growth somewhat, growing at 1.8 percent per year.) Also, most of the subcategories of infrastructure and services spending that usgovernmentspending.com tracks have decreased slightly as a share of the gross domestic product, icluding spending on transportation, education, science and technology. The major exception is spending on the category they describe as “protection,” reflecting the increase in the criminal justice apparatus, which has grown at 4.8 percent per year.

Another way to view these data is to allocate the increase in spending-to-G.D.P. between the different categories of expenditures. Total government spending â€" including federal, state and local spending â€" rose to about 39 percent of the gross domestic product in 2011 from about 30 percent in 1972. So we have a 9 percent increase to account for, which is equal to about $1.3 trillion per year in current dollars.

Spending on entitlement programs was about $500 billion per year ! in 1972 i! n today’s dollars. If it had increased at the same rate as the gross domestic product, it would now be about $1.4 trillion. Instead, it is now about $2.9 trillion per year. What this means is that there has been about a $1.5 trillion increase in entitlement spending above and beyond gross domestic product growth. This is actually slightly larger than the overall increase in government spending relative to gross domestic product. This results from the fact that spending on the other categories has been essentially flat relative to the gross domestic product (infrastructure and services), or constitutes a negligible part of the budget for the time being (interest), or actually decreased relative to gross domestic product over the 40-year period (defense).

To clarify: all of the major categories of government spending have been increasing relative to inflation. But essentially all of the increase in spending relative to economic growth, and the potential tax base, has come from entitlement programs, an about half of that has come from health care entitlements specifically.

The growth in health care expenditures, for better or worse, is not just a government problem: private spending on health care is increasing at broadly the same rates and is eating up a larger and larger share of economic activity. It’s an immensely complicated problem, but the arithmetic is simple: if we can’t slow the rate of growth in health care expenditures, we’ll either have to raise taxes, cut other government spending or continue to run huge deficits. Or we could hope to grow our way out of the problem,! but heal! th care expenditures may be impeding private-sector growth as well.

And soon, we may cross an important symbolic threshold: when the overall majority of government expenditures are spent on, essentially, insurance programs. (Another way to conceive of the major categories of entitlement programs are as health insurance, retirement insurance, unemployment insurance and so forth). Already, this is true of federal government spending (and it has been true since the early-to-mid-1990s). It is very close to being true even if one also accounts for state and local spending, and may well become true as soon as this year.

Slowing the growth of entitlement spending will not be easy. Particularly in the case of health care, it has become substanially more expensive for individuals with both public and private insurance to purchase the same level of care.

And on a political level, cuts to entitlement programs are liable to be more noticeable to individual voters than cuts to things like infrastructure spending. A 10 percent cut to Social Security or Medicare benefits will surely draw the ire of voters. A 10 percent reduction in the amount allocated to bridge repair, or in the amount of government-sponsored energy research, will affect individual citizens less directly (even if they are perhaps ultimately more economically damaging: most of the academic literature is supportive of high long-run returns to infrastructure and research and development spending on private-sector productivity and economic growth).

Nevertheless, the declining level of trust in government since the 1970s is a fairly close mirror for the growth in spending on social insurance as a shar! e of the ! gross domestic product and of overall government expenditures. We may have gone from conceiving of government as an entity that builds roads, dams and airports, provides shared services like schooling, policing and national parks, and wages wars, into the world’s largest insurance broker.

Most of us don’t much care for our insurance broker.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/17/2013, on page A16 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Health Care Drives Increase in Government Spending.

The Breakfast Meeting: Armstrong Comes Clean, and Kucinich Enters the \"Fox Lair\"

Lance Armstrong finally had his confessional moment Thursday, acknowledging in a television interview with Oprah Winfrey that he had used performance-enhancing drugs for much of his career. Juliet Macur writes in an analysis in The New York Times that the cyclist mixed humility and regret with a resolute rejection of some of the charges against him. Alessandra Stanley, reviwing the show as television fare, called the interview “strangely low on energy and emotion,’’ and that while Ms. Winfrey got some answers, she didn’t “pierce his armor.’’ Brian Stelter writes that getting such a high-profile interview could be a breakthrough moment for Ms. Winfrey’s struggling network, OWN.

Two and a half weeks after emerging from bankruptcy, the Tribune Company got a new chief executive, Brian Stelter reports. It named Peter Liguori, a longtime television executive, to the position. Mr. Ligouri previously worked, among other compan! ies, at News Corporation, where he oversaw the popular FX channel then became chairman of entertainment for Fox Broadcasting. Tribune Co. is expected to sell off some of its newspapers and focus more directly on its television stations.

The real-life hoax involving the fake girlfriend of the Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o has a striking parallel in the television entertainment world, Mary Pilon reports. An MTV show called “Catfish’’ deals each episode with a case of digital duplicity, whn a person who has hooked up in a relationship online discovers that the other person has been deceptive about his or her identity. A so-called catfish is the person who orchestrates the fake online identity.

Politico reports on the debut of Dennis Kucinich on Thursday night as a contributor to Fox News, a pairing that matches the famously liberal former congressman with the conservative news network. Mr. Kucinich, who will be a regular paid contributor, called himself a “rooster in Fox lair’’ while the host, Bill O’Reilly, called his gues! t “the ! same left-wing nut we know and love,’’ the article reports. The two engaged in a discussion about gun control.