THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, August 21, 2008

A-11 offense in football

Seems like a good idea for lower-level leagues:

The A-11 base sets use two quarterbacks lined up at least seven yards from the line of scrimmage. A center, bracketed by two tight ends, comprises the three-person offensive line. Six receivers are split wide. On a given play, only six men are eligible to receive a downfield pass. But because all players can become eligible by wearing jersey numbers 1-49 or 80-99, the defense is left to guess at who is going downfield on each snap.

“We’re doing futuristic football,” Humphries said. “We’re doing football where every play is innovative, and that’s why people find it fun to watch. It’s fun to play. Every player has the potential to be a part of almost every play.”

And a website too!

Thursday, July 17, 2008

That will be 300,000,000$ please… paid in 3 installments

The NY Giants announced their plans in selling personal seat licences.  It looks like the average licence is around 4K I suppose, and with 75K seats… well, the math is easy here.  K times K is MM.  And 75 times 4 is 300.  Wow.  Imagine buying a baseball team for 300MM.  Instead, here, you pay 300MM for the right to buy tickets!  Fantastic idea.  I’m sure the Jets will follow something similar.

By the way: no complaining.  If you don’t like it, don’t buy it!  Reminds me of Kelly Ripa being outraged at the 20,000$ price tag of some Hermes purse. 
- “This is an outrage, this is ridiculous, I can’t believe it!” 
- “Miss Ripa?  It’s our last bag.” 
- “I must have it!!”

Monday, June 16, 2008

The Greatest Play Ever

Joe Posnanski has his criteria:

• in a hugely important game

• more than brilliant … it has to be utterly unrepeatable.

• decide the game

His focus was on football, to which these three criteria make the most sense.  Anyway, in my lifetime for MLB, and sticking to the above rules, I guess it would be Kirk Gibson v Eck.  But baseball is really about the build-up of drama, not that single event that really marks football.  In basketball these rules wouldn’t even make sense.  In hockey, these rules would only make sense in an OT game, and the goalie can never win here.

What rules can you make up for baseball?  First, I’d call it the Greatest Moment ever, since that’s what baseball is about, not a single play.  The first criteria is fine, and the third criteria would be “impact the game hugely” (basically, a high WPA play, or a series of such plays).  The second criteria would be “I don’t believe what I just saw”.  Kibson/Eck still qualify, but now you have the 8th inning of Cubs/Marlins and Pedro/Little game added in (again, in my lifetime).  Carlton Fisk, but that was just a bit before my time.  9th inning of 1986 Game 6.

In hockey, I’d keep the first criteria, and the new second criteria (“I don’t believe what I just saw”) and the third criteria would be (“back-and-forth action, where each team was about to take a huge lead or win the game; or a play that you can relive knowing that you’ll never see such a play again”).  So, the Rangers/Islanders Game 5 would be one such game (1984).  The Gretzky/Lemieux Canada Cup 1987 winning goal.  I’m not happy with that third criteria, since it lets you bring in the 1972 Summit Series, but not the 1980 Miracle on Ice.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

ESPN’s Fan Satisfaction Rankings

Would most magazines exist if they didn’t make lists like this one?

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Deconstructing the Passing Paradox

I’ll point you to Phil, who does a great dissection and who links to the academic paper, along with Brian Burke’s great 3-part blog post (read only the third one if you are pressed for time).

Monday, February 04, 2008

One second to go

This is what happens when you put the statisticians, with their noses in spreadsheets and stopwatches, in charge of sports.  If chess and boxing have a more intelligent approach to ending a game with time still left on the clock, why can’t the NFL follow suit?  The two coaches shake hands, and the game is over.  Is that so hard?  The rule may say that you have to play with time still left on the clock, but it also says that you can only have the 22 players and referees on the field.  You can’t do one without the other.

It was a decent first 3 quarters, and pretty good fourth quarter.

Friday, February 01, 2008

Super Bowl Squares

Doug Drinen does what we’ve always wanted to do one second after the Squares sheet lands on our desk.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Per Possession Win%

In response to a Phil-linked thread about figuring the chances of the Patriots winning if their number of possessions goes down, I said:

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Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Football Reference.com

Re-launched.  I’m a CFL fan, but I imagine most of you are not.  Canada’s big claim to fame are Jackie Robinson, Warren Moon, and Doug Flutie:  “Give us your Blacks, your necessities-less, your Little People…”  But, we do have our language issues.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

We love cheaters!

So says Peter Beinart:

Editorials called Belichick a disgrace. And us fans? Well, when Belichick’s mug appeared on the video screen just before the Pats’ second game, the hometown crowd cheered so loudly and so long that Belichick actually waved… In the abstract, fans oppose cheating… But fearing the consequences of cheating is a far cry from opposing it because it’s wrong. When the refs go to review a close play, fans don’t sit there thinking, I hope they’ll make the right call. They pray that the call goes their way… So by all means, penalize Belichick… He doesn’t care about being fair to the other team; he doesn’t even really care about his own players. He just wants to win. He’d make an excellent fan.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

QB rating

When I was a kid, I used to do QB ratings for CFL players.  I did something like Yards minus 5*incompletes minus sacks minus 50*interceptions, all divided by pass attempts plus sacks.  I didn’t really have anything to back me up.  I just sort of reasoned that getting an incomplete pass (losing a down) would be as costly as the difference between gaining 15 and 10 yards.  And ths was 25 years ago, so I would have hoped that we can be clearer on the answer. The Wages of Wins tries.  In their case, they do minus 3*plays, rather than minus 5*incompletes.  I’m not sure I agree that you look at plays (PA in baseball talk) and not incompletes (outs in baseball talk). Also, for whatever reason, they round “35*interceptions” down to “30*interceptions”.  What’s wrong with leaving it at 35?

Friday, March 23, 2007

Field Of Dreams

Tim talks about the double-standard that MLB faces with regards to drugs.

Ken Fidlin ponders a what-if, which I’ll paraphrase for baseball purposes:

Suspend reality for a moment while we paint a grim, fictional picture. It is the day after the final game of the World Series and the Yankees, America’s most decorated franchise, have won their 25th title, double the total of any other team in MLB.  There is, however, little joy in New York, or any other city in America for that matter.

The team general manager has resigned, embroiled in a game-fixing scandal that appears to involve league referees and administration officials. The scandal already has claimed the MLB commissioner, who was forced to resign in disgrace the week previous. Former President George W Bush has been appointed “extraordinary commissioner” to sift through the allegations and clean up the mess. The entire Yankees board of directors has resigned and shares of the publicly-traded company are sinking faster than the Titanic. 

Meanwhile, the Yankees’ highest paid player is under investigation as part of a massive gambling and game-fixing scandal from two years previous. The star is accused of betting on games in which he was playing. In all, dozens are under investigation for various roles in the scandal, and that may just be the tip of the iceberg. If the allegations are proven against the Yankees GM, it is very likely that the World Series victory will be nullified and the team banished from the league.

With that horrifying, fictitious scenario fixed firmly in your brain, we welcome you to the wonderful world of Italian soccer. And this is no fantasy. It’s real and it’s happening, almost on the eve of the 2006 World Cup.

European soccer can weather its gambling scandal.  The NBA, NHL, and NFL would be able to weather any drug scandal that will come its way. If I were to tell you that rock stars dabble in drugs, you’d hardly be surprised.  The surprise would be that they didn’t.  And the truth is that teenagers are far more influenced by musicians than athletes.  Parents know this because they’ve lived it.

We’ve all come to accept that everything in our world is tainted, and we’ve gotta live with it.  But, not baseball.  Baseball is above it all, a pure and beautiful game that MLB has the privilege to control.  A right that it must abdicate if they don’t keep it pure and beautiful.  That’s the bullshit that Field of Dreamers believe.

Baseball is baseball, and MLB is MLB, and MLB is Eurpoean Soccer, NHL, NFL, and Rock Stars.  When you are watching MLB, you are not watching baseball, that pure and beautiful game.  You are watching an event, like any other event performed by the best money (and other things) can buy.  And all the sellers (the performers) and all the middle-men (management) and all the buyers (you) are complicit. 

Live with reality.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Copyright Law, DMCA, NFL, and a lone gunslinger

A great story about fighting a bully.  I also highly recommend the Chilling Effects site linked in the article.

(Hat Tip: Baseball Musings)

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Does getting a great RB help the QB?

Nope. 

(Though I would have liked to see the population mean, I know enough about football to see that 7 yards per attempt is probably average, and therefore, we don’t need to be concerned with regression toward the mean.)

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

NFL Draft Slotting

Phil Birnbaum points to an article here with a cool chart that assigns a value to each draft slot.  If you work it out, it basically becomes a logarithmic function that looks like this:

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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Game Theory in Football

A look at whether teams should pass more on 1st and ten, from Ben Alamar.

The key data for those who don’t want to read the whole thing is…

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Monday, September 25, 2006

Article of the Week

An excerpt from Michael Lewis’ latest book.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Win Probability in Football

Pro Trade looks at win probability in football.  In baseball, the minimum states you need is inning, score, base, out.  In football, it’d be time to half, time to game, score, down, yards to 1st down, yards to goal.  The Pro Trade gang also added timeouts, which is neat.  As you can see, alot more states to consider.  However, there are far fewer events to consider in football.  What I’d like to see from them is a Leverage Index chart.  Based on their chart in the article, it seems that there is more clutch situations, but who knows.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Football Strategies

Software for Football coaches:

EndGame was founded by Charles Bower, a computer modeling and stats wizard, and Frank Frigo, a “Game Theory Expert” who was at one time the highest-ranked professional Backgammon player in the world.

Together, the two friends – who first met on the pro backgammon circuit — took NFL data going back a decade and designed software to play out various games millions of times, looking for commonalities and patterns.

What evolved from that exercise was ZEUS, a program which calls each play based on what EndGame refers to as its “Game Winning Chance,” a philosophy that ignores the number of points a particular play might score, but relies instead on its chance of eventually winning the game.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

True Talent Levels for Sports Leagues

I’m engaged in a discussion on True Talent Levels across sports leagues.  The question on the table is how many games do you need to get the truly better team to have the better record.  In that thread, I give you a couple of useful equations to use.

I will reprint all my comments into this thread here (which may look somewhat bizarre without the accompanying context), but I encourage all to also follow the discussion there.

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