Filter posts by...
Bill_James
Saturday, February 04, 2012
By , 06:48 PM
I downloaded Bill James Baseball IQ onto my iphone (I don’t think it is available on droid phones, but I’m not sure). Here is the web site for the app on Acta Sports:
http://www.actasports.com/titles/bill_james_baseball_iq_app/
It is pretty cool. You can read a description and see some screen captures on the above site, but basically it allows you to see heat maps and color maps of batters and pitchers (in all combinations, counts, situations, etc.) for K zone, batted balls, pitch type, etc.
Best of all, the app is free! Seems to me that they could have charged for this one, but I know nothing about the best way to make money from apps. It also seems like they could use these graphics more often on TV broadcasts.
Anyway, give it a try and see what you think…
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Phil did most of the scanning, and it’s posted at SABR.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Great stuff.
JAMES: Right. That’s right. That - and there are a lot of people who don’t understand how statistics work and can’t think along those lines and consequently tend to perforce, reject whatever conclusions come out of that line of thinking, and there’s really nothing you can do about that. You can, you know, argue to those people for generations, but the only way you could ever possibly convince them would be to reeducate them, which, you know, you don’t have time to do that. So yeah, it’s a waste of time to argue with those people.
I have a little saying along those lines:
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, learn. The rest, we ignore.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
His mailbag page (15 most recent entries only) is available for non-subscribers. If you are a subscriber, you get access to the archives.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
By , 03:46 AM
http://mlb-facts-and-rumors.blogs.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/22297882/26016289
Some nice questions and some good and some bad (and some evasive, as usual, although not intentionally, I don’t think) answers, IMO, by BJ. I’ll comment more, and perhaps answer each question myself, after some of you have had time to read the interview.
Once again, for the record, I love Bill James. I think he is iconic, brilliant in many ways (much more so than I am), a wonderfully creative and critical thinker, humble, and a very good writer.
Then again, I can be very critical of him, but no more than I would be with any other sabermetric writer and researcher. For what it is worth, and I don’t know this with any confidence whatsoever, but while we have occasionally corresponded in a pleasant manner, I have never, ever seen or heard him reference me or any of my work in any way, shape, or form, and I suspect that consciously or subconsciously it is because he has seen or heard that I can be critical of him. I’ll repeat - I am not confident in that assertion. I could easily be all wet. And of course, who cares!
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Good interview.
If someone has studied the data and can demonstrate that our projections are over-optimistic, of course we’d look at it. If someone speculates that this is true, I’m not really too interested.
Intuitively, I doubt that that is true. Our projection for Jason Heyward last year was extremely accurate—a few points high on batting average, but an extremely good projection. For Buster Posey, we projected .270 with 11 homers, 54 RBI. He actually hit .305 with 18 homers, 67 RBI. We had projected Jose Tabata at .273. He hit .299. We had projected Tyler Colvin for 4 homers, 17 RBI; he had 20 homers and drove in 56. We had projected Michael Stanton for .228 with 9 homers, 22 RBI; he hit .259 with 22 homers and 59 RBI.
As part of the process of producing the Handbook, we look at every projection that we made the previous year, and compare it to what the player actually did. I study those charts every year, looking for any systematic problems. I would be surprised if anyone else actually looks at them as closely as I do after the fact, comparing what the hitters actually did to what we had projected for them, and I would be surprised if we were systematically optimistic on young hitters.
Other than playing time.
Last year, or two ago, I sent Bill something simple, on a league-wide basis: the runs scored per game on offense was quite different from the runs allowed per game on defense.
I never checked regarding biases by age, but if he uses the three best hitting rookies (Heyward, Posey, Stanton) as evidence that he is not optimistic by nailing their forecasts, then that’s evidence that he is too optimistic.
This is how a forecast works: you forecast a player’s true talent level, and presume that there is no good or bad luck involved. That is, you do NOT forecast luck. If, AFTER THE FACT, you select the three best hitting players of whatever population you want (rookies, outfielders, 35-and-over, whatever), then your forecast for them better have been LOWER than what they actually did. Because, as a group, any player that performed better than league average is more likely to have benefited from good luck than bad luck.
HOWEVER.... if you selected Heyward, Posey and Stanton because they were the three guys you had the best forecast on, that is, you selected them BEFORE THE FACT, then you would definitely want to nail their forecasts.
So, it all comes down to how you select your players to show if you are being optimistic or realistic. So, to test Bill James’ assertion, you need to rewind the clock to April 1, 2010, and select all the players that had, say, less than 100 career MLB plate appearances, and of those players, select the 10 guys that Bill James had the highest wOBA (or OPS or OPS+) for them. And THEN compare to what they actually did.
If it’s a match, then Bill James was being realistic.
This is another one for you aspiring saberists…
Monday, September 13, 2010
That’s how Bill James sees how Americans see things.
Having lived about an equal number of years of my adult life in Canada and USA, I can tell you the #1 difference is that Americans take risks. While a Canadian saves his dollar to earn the inflation rate, an American will gamble that dollar. (Not “all” obviously. Just a noticeable difference.) The crazy credit card offers don’t exist in Canada like USA. The diversity of mortgage plans and lengths of plans don’t exist in Canada like USA. Americans are risk-takers.
Given what America has delivered, per capita, it seems to be a good thing, a very good thing, that they are such risk-takers. The rest of the world has benefited greatly. That doesn’t mean that Americans themselves have derived as much benefit though, given how they are not as happy as those with less “success”.
Back to James’ point: I agree that there’d be tons of old-timers who would have taken the risks of using steroids. Baseball players are no different than any other successful person in America, or the world: they take risks, and treat rules as guidelines, to be followed to your level of risk-aversity.
***
I myself am a stubborn, sometimes arrogant person who refuses to obey some of the rules that everybody else follows. I pay no attention to the rules of grammar. I write fragments if I goddamned well feel like it. I refuse to follow many of the principles of proper research that are agreed upon by the rest of the academic world.
I agree with this. ALOT.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Start at the 14 minute mark.
Monday, March 22, 2010
By , 11:11 AM
From an interview with a Reds journalist:
I think the new system with cameras is that for several years it will create so much information that nobody will have any idea what to do with it. It’s the first generation, I started this stuff I do before anyone had computers, I was literally adding stuff up in notebooks. When we all got computers it created so much information that for 10 years we were just bewildered by it and nobody had any idea what to do with it. The Pitch F/X stuff has done the same thing in the last five, six years, it’s created so much data that nobody’s been able to analyze it yet, in my view, and make much of it. I think the same thing will happen. Eventually something good will come of it, but it will take a while.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
By , 09:45 PM
I don’t know how it works, but you can’t get better video quality for these live (and recorded) internet feeds?
Is Geoff Baker THE most sabermetrically knowledgeable mainstream journalist?
Bill James facial expressions at the beginning are priceless! Like a little kid on TV for the first time.
James offers some good stuff, as usual. At the same time, he is vague on questions that don’t require vague answers, and just flat our wrong on some things (like when he declares that the Mariners were a true 75-win team last year, presumably because that was their pythag win total).
When he was asked, “What stat he likes best (even though that is a silly question)?” he responds that he is partial to win shares and losses, of course, which should make Tango scream. Reminds me of a Steven Wrightesque joke I heard on the radio from a comedian: He said, “I heard an interesting statistic today - 7.364!”
Saturday, March 13, 2010
By , 07:21 AM
Just got my Bill James Gold Mine today and I skimmed it. On page 263 is an article entitled, The Attribution Problem (In Baseball and in Life). It is an interesting read. To be honest, I am not sure I fully understand his logic. In fact, I KNOW that I don’t FULLY understand it. I do think a lot about the, “Is what is good for the individual good for the whole or for society?” problem, which is one of the things that Bill discusses. I am not sure I agree with his premise that a “good RBI” man will reduce the number of runs a bad team scores, although it depends on what you mean by “a good RBI man” and “a bad team.”
Has anyone else read this article? I would like to have a discussion about it. Again, there are lots of smart folks who frequent this blog, and I love learning things from them.
In fact, and I’m sure Tango will agree, but one of the reasons, maybe the main reason, we have this blog is to learn from the many intelligent and thoughtful folks who post here.
As a side note, what do you think our country would be like if it were run by the likes of, or perhaps with the assistance of, folks like Tango, Bill James, Rob Neyer, Keith Law, and I dare say MGL, and some of the other people in sabermetrics that we know and love. I am sorry if I left you out but if you think you should be included, consider yourself included or send in your application!
Seriously, maybe we should start a think tank and somehow make ourselves known to the powers that be. What do you guys (and gals, if we have any) think? Do we have any gals? Sorry about using the word “gal.” How do you know when you are getting old? Your waist size becomes larger than your inseam (somehow my inseam has gotten smaller over the years), you start calling girls gals, and your put on your trousers and not your pants! (And you start calling 30-somethings “kids,” your childhood movie and sports heroes are dying of old age, etc.)
Friday, February 19, 2010
Bill James is starting with the 1980s, and proposes:
1. September 11, 1985, New York at St. Louis (Dwight Gooden against John Tudor)
This was Gooden’s next start, five days after the duel with Valenzuela.
You may be wondering why we started this with the 1980s. We started it with the 1980s because, in the 1980s, it is clear what the right answer should be. This game is hard to beat.
With Gooden starting against Tudor, that was not only the best starting pitching matchup of the decade, but the best regular season starting pitching matchup that was possible during the decade.
Good Bill James article overall, using numbers to help get to an answer, while the real point of the article is to highlight the non-number aspect of the game.
Monday, February 08, 2010
The kind of reasearch I love:
Anyway, I was wondering: does a low walk rate predict a failure to develop as a hitter? Because I can see it either way. I can see that a low walk rate for a young player could be an impediment to development, but I can also see how a low walk rate might be predictive of development, in this way: that the hitter who walks more, as a young player, can be seen as a more finished product, and therefore as a player who has less room to develop. There’s an extra door open for the undeveloped hitter.
My thoughts exactly. I was thinking Frank Thomas, who was such a polished hitter at such a young age, and I knew that walk rates for players generally increase all the way until their late 30s, that I figure that polished hitters simply are wise early, and don’t need to make the mistakes that others do to learn to take a walk early. At the same time, maybe they are so smart that they will draw a walk when they realize they can’t reach that outside pitch in their late 30s.
Bill then does his magic (behind the pay wall). And ends with:
Essentially, there is no reason to believe that the walk rate plays any predictable role in the future development of a young player.
Monday, January 18, 2010
I remember checking it last year and concluding “yes, or rather “YES!”. Ben, through Derek, seems to disagree. I’ll have to do it more systematically, but I believe that if I take the exact same players and weight them exactly the same, that the Bill James hitters will come in higher than Marcel, Chone, ZiPS, et al, and that the Bill James pitchers will come in lower.
If someone wants to do the work instead of me, by all means, a pot of gold awaits you at the end of the rainbow.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Since I licenced my Leverage Index data to be used in the Bill James handbook (free of charge), I was able to reclaim my subscription to BJO. Nice tit-for-tat. (Sean offered a similar freebie to me for Play Index, for giving him my LI/WE charts.)
Anyway, I’ve got several months of reading to catch up on. I’ll give you some highlights as I come across them. And don’t worry, I’ll be as tough and fair as usual.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
His summary if I can paraphrase loosely: the Holy Writers are completely out of touch with reality, and is the reason that newspapers will die.
Well, he actually didn’t say any of that. But, any chance I have to give those who don’t deserve the self-claimed moral high ground a good punch to the gut, I take it.
Glove-slap: Repoz.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A reader asked the above, who added “He seems to be a bit edgy these days when questioned.”. When I asked him to provide a reference, the reader replied that James said:
To those of you who are hung up on the Aparicio/Mantle type of issues, let me point out what you are missing. What you are missing is, everybody already knows that. What you are pointing out to us is deafeningly obvious, and everybody except you has already got it. I mean, I spent pages and pages in the opening article talking about the failings and limitations of my system, pointing out case after case in which my system failed for one reason or another. What exactly did you think was the point of that?
I’m no longer a bjo subscriber, so it seems I’m missing out on something. Feel free for you guys to post your thoughts, quotes, analysis, etc, and I’ll chime in as appropriate.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Bill James posted Mariano’s seasonal Win Shares - Loss Shares, whereby he gives him a total of 136 Win Shares and 24 Loss Shares. I replied:
Read More
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Dan Okrent’s article introducing Bill James to the sports world in 1981.
from Amazon
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 320 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date