Sunday, February 24, 2013
Boards: Odds of a Perfect Game this year
Discuss this in our forums?Someone asked the question, and I provide a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
(Almost) Complete History of DIPS
?A fantastic historical account of DIPS. A required reading if ever there was one.
The one part I would add is that in the 1980's Bill James had DER, which is in essence 1 minus BABIP. Bill did it at the team level, and never really explored it at the pitcher level. And, I think, Eric Walker also had DER a few years before Bill (but I'm not sure).
Guide to Sabermetric Research
?Phil Birnbaum gives us a primer that should be a starting point for anyone out there. Just choose something on the table of contents sidebar, and go.
The worth of SB, HR, and all other categories, in Fantasy Baseball
?An oldie, but always useful at this time of year. (post 60)
Is this how the baseball community views the sabermetric community?
?Star Trek redshirt probability casualty rates.
Friday, February 22, 2013
MLB opens its vault
This is that Marquis Grissom inside-the-parker walkoff in the 10th inning of a tie game, with Larry Walker on deck. I counted 14 seconds.
This one is on Youtube, but it's Curtis Pride's first MLB hit, and the greatest fan reaction of all time. Start at the 3:45 mark. I wish MLB vault had this one.
Realignment to reduce travel
Brian applies his work to the NHL to see what a 6-division and 4-conference setup looks like.?
Will this season be Strasburg’s peak?
Will has an interesting note here:
An unpublished MLB study from last year confirmed this effect, extending it to seven years. During this period, the transplanted tendon is physiologically changing, becoming a ligament in a process called "ligamentization." It appears that this process, along with the undamaged tendon that reconstructs the elbow, gives the elbow an additional strength.
I call this period the "Tommy John honeymoon."
This means that Strasburg, innings and pitches aside, is physiologically the safest he may ever be.
I'd love to see that research. And didn't Jeff Zimmerman show that the long-term prognosis of ANY TJ pitcher is very limited??
Secondary ticket marketplace
Stubhub released details as to how the pricing is going to work, and it seems to make it as transparent as possible for all concerned. In the example they cite, a buyer will spend 57$, the seller will get 41.23$, with the remaining going to... I dunno... I guess split somehow between Stubhub and the team. In this illustration, pays out nearly 28% in, effectively, commission?.
In comparison, Amazon will take a 30% cut on ebooks. It seems that actively managing and insuring that transaction has a standard cost, so from that respect, Stub Hub is no different.
The alternative of course is one-to-one transaction without the facilitating means of Stub Hub as the authorized reseller. There's always ebay + UPS, but the lower cut that ebay charges also comes with the higher risk of fraud. The middleman cut if you go through ebay is probably going to be about 25% (after you account for the lising fee, final fee, and shipping charge). eBay/PayPal does have some protection for fraud. In terms of fixed-pricing, it sure seems that Stub Hub is a better bet than ebay. However, ebay of course has the extra risk/reward of auction pricing, and so, for people who like that, ebay is hard to beat.
The final alternative is one-to-one face-to-face. You get the risk/reward of ebay auctioning, but then there's the extra risk of fraud. Is all that worth the 25% or 30%? Given enough people, it would seem that one-to-one face-to-face is the best way, but, if you are at the park, and you want to see that game, the chance of fraud might be a little too high.
Anyway, I find it fascinating the way the whole secondary market has developed and is coalescing.
(13)
Comments
• 2013/02/23
•
MLB_Management
Football is America’s Pastime
?I had always thought it was baseball, like this guy wants to believe. But I remember back in 1987, the NFL was on strike, while there was a thrilling run for the division title between the Jays and the Tigers. Without any live football, one of the networks replayed the prior Super Bowl. Meanwhile, Jays/Tigers was the game of the week on NBC. The two games came in head to head. Remember, not only is football a rerun of a game, but the fans must be disenchanted as well because the players were on strike. And the TV ratings had the rerun of the Super Bowl game beating the end-of-season thriller series between Jays/Tigers. It was then that I knew that it was football, not baseball, that had already captured America's heart.
And really, who cares? As long as they show baseball and hockey somewhere, I don't really care what anyone else thinks.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Fans v Steamer Forecasts
Dave makes an important point that the Fan forecasts need to be deflated.
I actually do that with the Fans Scouting Report as well. The ?average talent evaluation on the 1-5 scale must be 3 by definition, but it comes in at 3.3 every year. Fans basically may understand the little bits and pieces, but they don't know how to put them together without bias. So, I actually deflate those numbers BEFORE showing it to the reader. I think David at Fangraphs must do this adjustment. Otherwise, people may not realize this bias, run off with it, and forecast the average team with 88 wins or something. Whether the adjustment should happen at the rate level or the PA/IP level or both, I don't know. But, it should be easy enough to test. Dave Allen might have even done it.
Anyway, the other part that Dave C points out is that there is a further age bias, that fans are overenthused with young guys, and underenthused with old guys. And he makes the claim compared to Steamer. Except. Well, except no one has shown that Steamer is not biased itself.
So, in order to test this, all you have to do is take out the 2012 forecasts from last year (unadjusted), then compare the WAR and WAR/PA (and WAR/IP) numbers for the four groups of players that Dave identified, and see how/where the Fans need adjusting, and if Steamer is biased.
(2)
Comments
• 2013/02/21
•
Forecasting
Silly thoughts: QB talent is randomly distributed in the draft
There's likely no sillier idea than seeing this:
But when when we control per possession, we see that top drafted QBs aren’t that really any better than their peers drafted later.
This is no different than looking at the average performance of 37 year olds in MLB (say ERA or OBP), comparing it to the average performance of 27 year olds, seeing there's no difference, and then concluding that there is no difference between a 27 and 37 year old player. Except all the bad 37 year olds are no longer playing in MLB, while any half decent 27 year old is playing in MLB.
If you want to get to an extreme point: here's the list of all players selected 1390th in MLB draft history. Sean notes this astounding fact: "Total of 55.4 WAR, or 27.7 per major leaguer"
That's right, the career average WAR is nearly 28 wins! That's even better than the 1st overall pick, which averaged only 19 WAR. I can play this selection bias game along with everyone else.
What gets me is that Wages of Wins brings this up so often, and they must be fully aware of the issue, and yet they just keep bringing it up as if it's uncontested. And it's really tiresome to have to constantly refute this silliness. This is no different than the media perplexed that Felix can win a Cy Young with a 13-12 record, and have no problem with him having a 175MM$ contract based on a 40-35 record over the last three years. There's bias abound in all the data, and our job is to UNDERSTAND THE BIAS. To intentionally ignore the bias is to be silly.
I remember way back in the 1982 or 1983 Bill James Baseball Abstract where Bill brings this up. This very idea. And, if you look closely enough at Moneyball, the chart that Bill uses for this idea is used in the movie! Anyway, if somebody can scan those couple of pages and send them to me, I'll post it.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
The e-Book, coming soon
?A faithful Straight Arrow reader is working diligently on making the e-version of The Book top-notch. We're still weeks away, but we'll get there soon enough.
Inertia train to limbo
Wendy once again highlights the fact that MLB is not changing the rules to reduce home plate collisions. While the NFL and NHL go to great lengths to limit unnecessary contact plays, MLB has not kept pace.
We had a fantastic thread two years ago. I'd suggest reading through that before commenting:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/posey_at_the_plate/
Grading Curve, or How Odds Ratio Method could have saved the day
I'm glad that the students were smart enough to beat such a basic curving scheme.
It's weird to set the starting point as the most extreme point, and work from there. You could have a real outlier that would kill everyone below him. Or,have no outliers at all, in which case, everyone would do great. The kids realized that by mandating the non-outlier scenario, everyone would do great.
The ideal way is to set the MEAN as the starting point. If for example you wanted the mean to be 85%, then that's what you do. And then adjusting around that really is best done with the Odds Ratio Method.
Let's say for example you had 10 kids, and this was their actual scores:
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Pedro a Hall of Famer?
?It's obvious that Pedro has the accomplishments of someone you (the Straight Arrow readers) would put in the Hall of Fame.
However, after which year would you say he was only a borderline candidate, that had he retired after year X, that you'd be on the fence with his candidacy?
And after which year Y would you say that he finally did enough to warrant a place in your Hall of Fame?
I do NOT want to talk about the actual Hall of Fame, or what the Holy Writers think. I want to know what YOU think.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Methinks thou doth protest too much
?A reporter is found to fabricate quotes, then spends the day explaining how he misquoted himself.
Non-uniform playing area dimensions
?I asked Bill James about this issue. Here was our exchange:
I think you are a proponent of baseball having non-standard dimensions for its parks. All the other major sports however have taken the opposite view of standardizing everything (though in the NHL, Boston and Chicago had smaller rinks until their new arens were built 20+ years ago). In light of the NFL thinking of expanding the field of play (side to side, closer to what the CFL has), would you support the idea that each team can set those dimensions as they want, within a league-imposed min/max range? I'd even go with non-standard field goal posts too. And why don't the leagues see it as one of baseball's charms that the parks are unique and capitalize on that?
Asked by: tangotiger
Answered: 2/17/2013
That would be my thinking as well. From the standpoint particularly of basketball, I wouldn't think of it as one of baseball's charms; I would simply argue that it is better. It is better from everyone's standpoint. If you make the court wider, for example, you favor a smaller team with more quickness, and put a premium on ball-handling skills. If you make the court more narrow, it favors big, burly guys, puts a premium on passing, and minimizes the importance of dribbling. Allowing different teams to experiment with different sized courts allows the game to breathe, allows the game to search out the most satisfying combinations. Mandating one size for all courts makes the game rigid, unable to adjust.
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