<< Back to main
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
By
My son got married this past weekend. He and his wife did not receive a card or gift from a couple of people who attended the wedding and a few who were invited and did not attend.
Most people who were invited but could not make it sent a gift. The few who did not may not have felt it was appropriate to send a gift, which is fine. However, the two people who attended may have had their card/gift lost in the shuffle. It is rare for someone to attend a wedding and not give a gift, I assume.
How do you let someone know that you did not receive a gift from them and that it may have gotten lost in the shuffle? How about the few people who were invited and did not attend and did not send a gift. Should my son and his wife try and ask them if they sent one, or just leave that alone?
Thanks in advance.
(15)
Comments • 2012/05/24
•
Personal
By
It was posted on BBTF. I watched the video. Incredibly heartwarming and emotional. Better than a no hitter (lol)…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xCSzysu_flY
(2)
Comments • 2012/05/24
This is the LibraryThing in Maine. They have no idea who I am, so don’t even bother going that route.
(3)
Comments • 2012/05/24
•
Blogging
Doesn’t this sound alot like the way they were pitching espnW:
They describe their site as a sports talk-show for women, “Sex in the City” meets ESPN. They bill their banter as “sports from a woman’s point of view” with talk about the game and players or coaches “in need of a makeover.”
Phil looks at the variables into a study that showed that there was no statistically significant reason for a differing in card value, but the card values of the black players was almost 10% lower. The most obvious reason is the one pointed out: the year of the rookie card. I don’t know if it was a variable, but it seemed to not have been.
The “spirit” of the salary cap was broken, the NFL fined teams that went over a(n apparently) non-existing, but “secret” cap. This sure seems like a big deal, the way it’s reported.
Point out that a superstar has slump-numbers enough times, and eventually you’ll be right. People love to point out the winner bet and forget all the loser bets along the way.
Anyway, so it’s reported that the last time Halladay had a first-10-start stretch that was worse than what he currently has was back in 2007. In those 10 starts, in 68 IP, he had 46K and 10 BB, which is pretty good. He had 6 HR, which is about average. He had a .321 BABIP, which is terrible. He was also on the mound for 38 runs of the 86 baserunners (44% scoring, which is way above the league average, likely indicating he had a poor split with men on base). Of the numbers that have the most meaning in terms of persistence (that is, that the skill is most associated to the outcome), it’s: K rate, BB rate, HR rate, BABIP, men on base split. Halladay happened to have bad outcomes in those things he has the least control over. But, he’s on the mound, and he’s getting ASSIGNED all the blame. Assigned as in assigned, not as in earned.
Anyway, what happened in his next 10 starts? 70 IP, 40K, 19 BB, which is actually worse than his first 10 starts. 4 HR, which is better, and a .289 BABIP which is much better. He gave up only 27 runs (30% of runners on base scored), which is pretty good. If these were his first 10 starts of the 2007 or 2012 season, no one says a word.
In his next 10 starts of 2007: 80 IP (that’s 8 IP per start!), 49K, 18BB (basically somewhere between his first 10 starts and his second 10 starts), 5 HR (right in the middle of his first 10 and second 10 starts), .287 BABIP (back to his normal self), and 31 runs scored (32% of runners on base scored), which is pretty good.
In 2012, Doc is: 70 IP, 56 K, 13 BB, which is a tremendous K/BB level. He’s at 5 HR, which is good. A .290 BABIP, which is his normal self. He’s given up 28 runs (35% of runner scored, which is not that good). In 2012, Doc has a .263 BABIP with bases empty, and .338 with men on base. If you consider BABIP to be hugely influenced by fielders, and good/back breaks, then a split of BABIP by men on base is even more so.
Anyway, place your bets against the best pitcher of his generation, because in 10 starts, he happened to be on the mound with a high BABIP with men on base. To simply ASSIGN Doc 100% responsibility of all that, and completely absolve his fielders, is ridiculous. And to not even consider random variation (good/bad breaks) means that you are ignoring how the real world works, and you think you can simply compartmentalize things into a neat little box, and think you have the world figured out.
The above is a long-winded way to say: sh!t happens.
Good for Bochy, to chew him out, but delay any punishment.
The way I see it, a game is at least as important as practice drills. When you do drills, you go all-out. You go all-out in drills not because you want to win at that moment (after all, there’s nothing to win in a drill), but to condition yourself so that when the moment comes in the future, you will naturally go all out.
The same applies in a real game: even if you think you can’t win at that moment, you should then shift into “drill mode” and go all-out: not to win at that moment (because the chances are that you may not increase your team’s chance of winning), but to condition yourself so that when the moment comes in the future, you will naturally go all out.
You should never put in less effort in a game than in a drill. To do that, you are simply being myopic, only considering the immediate cost/benefit of going all out relative to increasing your chances of winning. You have to think like a drill, and treat a real game as a simulated game or drill, and go all-out. Again, it’s all about the future benefit, not the immediate one.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Even before the injury, Strasburg was getting a quicker hook. This is what happened, start by start:
70 after 6, ended at 82 (12 pitches in last inning)
84 after 5, ended at 108 (24 in last)
61 after 5, ended at 93 (32 in last)
71 after 5, ended at 94 (23 in last)
82 after 6, ended at 101 (19 in last)
76 after 6, pulled
73 after 5, ended at 103 (30 in last)
74 after 4, pulled
78 after 4, ended at 90 (12 in last)
The basic story after the first five starts is that if he finished the inning with under 85-90 pitches, he was sent out for one more inning, even if he labored in the last inning for 20 or 30 pitches (they don’t pull him out until he gets all three outs). The exception to this rule was his first start.
In his next four starts however, it was a 50/50 proposition that if he was still under 80 pitches, that he would be sent out for one more inning.
Normally, I don’t like to look at the “last inning” of a pitcher, because the last inning of a pitcher is usually a pretty bad inning (that’s why it’s his last). With Stras though, it seems that they have a more specific plan, that they don’t really care about his performance. It’s actually a beautiful thing from an analyst’s viewpoint, because we always worry about selective sampling, and we don’t seem to have that here.
Anyway, I wonder if they decided that sending him out in starts 2 - 5 was telling the Nats that maybe they were overly ambitious. He threw a sh!tload of pitches in the last inning in each of his games.
So now, instead of definitely sending him out if he’s still at 70-80 pitches at the end of the inning, they MIGHT send him out for one last one.
A loyal reader was interested in hearing from the Straight Arrow readers:
I’d benefit from a comparison thread of phone operating systems: (iOS vs Android personally, but Windows is a viable alternative, too.
(13)
Comments • 2012/05/23
•
Web Admin
While I am sure I am biased, I’ll include hiring Dan Fox in the mix.
There are different identifiers, with age, experience, and production being among them, and that’s the focus Bill shows in this good piece. It could be that the focus would simply be on the identity of the hitter, but there’s still lots of work today between here and there.
This is a great way to use WPA to start to tell a story. They all have the same thing in common: the Brewers were tied or behind, and then after the HR, were ahead or tied. And it was in the late innings in most instances. We could have used THAT as the english-definition (ties or puts you in the lead, in the 7th or later innings). WPA basically refines that by quantifying it in a continous scale, rather than an either/or binary scale.
Cool piece by Troy, showing the percentage of called pitches were deemed strike, according to the umpire, and the percentage of called pitches were tracked as strikes, according to PITCHf/x. At the league average, both are 45.4%.
. YEAR Zone % Zone % Pitch f/x
2009 51.70% 50.80%
2010 47.80% 50.90%
2011 48.30% 52.90%
2012 43.50% 51.00%
Another knockout interview by David Laurilia. I have several hundred articles and blog posts in my reader every day, so I will usually skim headlines, and for a small portion of them, I’ll open them up, and then just skim the article. In a few rare cases, I’ll read every single word, and that’s what I did here.
I love it whenever a player talks about fielding, and you can tell how much Ryan cares about it.
<< Back to main
from Amazon