THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tom, I’ll be there.  I have email on my cell phone if you don’t happen to bump into me.

I wondered when one of the super-rich was going to get himself cloned and now I see that Mark Cuban has actually done it.

David, I won’t be there, but I’m looking forward to real-time updates.

Is there a Twitter tag that will be setup so that maybe we can follow along there?

I’ll be there...don’t anticipate twittering, but ill definitely have a THT wrap.

I have a hard time taking any analytics conference seriously if Jim Bowden isn’t on the program.

(sorry, couldn’t resist)

Should be a lot of fun. In past years at the conference I have mostly hung out with other basketball people, but I’d love to talk more with some baseball folks this time around.

What Eli said. I will ask the Twitter community what our hash tag should be. Any suggestions?

I have suggested #ssac - It is not used much and is perfect for the sloan sports analytics conference

David, Sal, Eli, others- looking forward to seeing you all there again.

I’ll be there, hope to meet many of y’all there.

Oh if only I could…

Kind of depressing that there’s no hockey.  I would have gone if there was something of interest that was hockey related.

Tyler/12:

GM Brian Burke has been there the past few years.  I guess he deserves a break after his Team USA work this year.  That and the tragic death of his son in a car accident.

Burke’s listed on the Next Generation Sports Management and Ownership panel. And the Buzz-Worthy Events panel has John Collins (COO, NHL) and John McDonough (President, Chicago Blackhawks).

Eli/14-
Oops.  Good catch.  I actually just re-checked the site as well.  I guess I didn’t see him on Tango’s list.  A busy month for Mr. Burke. 

They used to have a Football Analytics panel, but to me it seemed like the sport is 20-30 years behind what has been going on in baseball and basketball, if the panel was any indication.  I suspect something similar is true of hockey.  Just not enough interest (yet).  Maybe in a year or two?

Pinto’s updates:

http://www.baseballmusings.com/?p=47703

I appreciate David’s updates as well as the updates from others on Twitter.

John [Dewan] says the Red Sox will gain six to eight wins with their defensive improvements.

Didn’t Ben assure us that John and BIS were not defensive performance last year?  Yet Dewan keeps repeating this same mistake in many forums.
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/yet_another_fielding_goes_mainstream_in_front_offices_article/

John Abbamondi says that at the start of 2009, the Cardinals front office thought they were a good defensive team, but the projections on ESPN said otherwise. John thinks they were right, given Wainwright and Carpenter’s seasons. He acknowledged that the ESPN ranking, however, made them go back and look again.

What projections on ESPN is he talking about?

John Abbamondi is afraid FIELD f/x is going to make defensive analysis too easy, and teams like the Cardinals will lose their competitive edge.

Ha!  It’s not going to become easy.  I can assure him of that.  Whether the Cardinals will know what to do with the FIELDf/x data, I can’t say, but I can almost guarantee you that very few teams will.  How teams use that data will serve to magnify the differences between smart and dumb teams, not to close the gap.  That data is going to be incredibly hard to use well.

Tom Tippett thinks there are lots of things we don’t know, because every day he gets a question that he doesn’t know. That was my impression working at ESPN. There’s always a new and interesting question.

Yes. Yes!  A thousand times, yes.

It would have been interesting to have an anti-analytics person up there to criticize.

Not IMO.  I’d love to have someone representing an alternative source of knowledge, e.g., someone who really understands how to use scouting data effectively.  I have no interest in hearing from someone who simply wants to criticize sabermetric knowledge.  It seemed to me like all of guys on this panel understood the limitations of and opportunities for improvement in the data they currently have.

I also thought the Coaching Analytics panel was interesting.  Again, I am indebted to David Pinto and various people on Twitter for sharing their updates on the conference.

http://baseballmusings.com/?p=47827

Nate Silver makes the point that if something is going to work 2/3 of the time, the trick is trying to pick the right 2/3, rather than just trying it every time.

Hmm.  Maybe this is just semantics, but it seems to me that either you need to do more research so that ultimately you understand when the odds are better than 2/3 and when they are worse, or if you have done all the research you can, then you also need to understand the game theory aspects of the situation.  But I don’t see it as “the trick is trying to pick the right 2/3”.

Showalter notes that it’s tough to shift odds in baseball, since you usually can’t set the hitter facing a pitcher. It’s the next guy in the lineup. Silver notes that with all the research in baseball, there’s little used for in-game situations.

I’m not sure I understand either of these quotes.  I guess maybe Showalter means in comparison to other sports, like basketball or football where you can choose a play that goes to a certain player?

And I’m not sure what Nate meant.  There’s all sorts of research into in-game situations.  Does he mean that teams aren’t using this research?

Tango, would you be kind enough to fix the missing closing bracket after the Dewan quote at the beginning of my post #17?  It’s messing up the formatting of the rest of the post.  Thanks.

Mike: take a look at the detailed summary of Nate’s argument on the blog.

If the “accepted wisdom” says you should choose A over B because A will work 2/3 of the time, are there any conditions when you should choose B?

The accepted wisdom is safe, defensible, and won’t get a coach in trouble if it fails 1/3 of the time.

Nate calculates that choosing B will require information that increases its odds of success from the base 1/3 probability.

So the question is how much better odds than the base 1/3 success rate do you need to justify choosing B? And more importantly (but not stated in the summary that is linked), what kind of information is that?

To me this boils down to a standard issue in multivariate analysis, where you have to decide whether adding another variable to a regression model will improve the prediction enough (perhaps allowing for interaction among predictor variables) to justify the additional complexity—and let the coach off the hook for defying the conventional wisdom.

It can’t just be a coach’s intuition, but most likely an assessment of contextual information of some kind (e.g., injured key player on the other team; offense/defense mismatch of some kind) that is not just randomly related to the outcome. WHEN do you “go for it” on 4th down rather than punt?  When do you pull your goalie? (me: when you know there’s a 95% probability you will lose and only such a desperate move gives you a significantly better chance of winning. I don’t know the real odds here, but Tango probably does.)

So while I think Nate’s logic is good, it doesn’t answer the question when you should go against the conventional wisdom. Of course, that’s what research is all about—finding holes in the conventional wisdom by either improving measurement (of performance indicators) or looking for other predictive factors over outcomes that are also practical for managers/coaches to follow.

Fargo/20, I assume you’re talking about the comment by BenS to Pinto’s post.  I took those comments to be by BenS and not by Nate, although I’m not sure.  In any case, I found that analysis wanting. 

First, the only real approach is one that considers game theory.  Second, if you ignore game theory, then the only right decision is always to go with the choice that’s right 2/3 of the time.

I guess I’m curious what Nate was getting at, because on the surface, his comment seems very simplistic or even wrong.

Well I imagine that we’ll only know for sure if he publishes his comment. I’d surmise that he was calculating this from a game theoretic perspective (he is a card player, after all). My own experience is more in statistical testing, in the sense that I described.

But the point stands, I think, that taking the “safe” option will not get a coach in trouble. Deviating from it—taking the risk of doing so—requires that he have something more than just intuition to go on, but instead some other factor(s) that research or experience shows can shift the odds in a predictable way.

Mike/17:

John [Dewan] says the Red Sox will gain six to eight wins with their defensive improvements.

Didn’t Ben assure us that John and BIS were not defensive performance last year?  Yet Dewan keeps repeating this same mistake in many forums.

Yeah, I cringed when I heard him say that in Boston on Saturday- I knew someone here would pick up on that.  I still maintain that the assumption and qualifier is implied, but maybe it should be more explicit.  oh well.

Also, they’ve had scouts on the panel in past seasons.  I remember talking to a scout from the D-backs at MIT a couple years ago.  Seemed at least knowledgeable about some of the advanced metrics as well.  It was a nice perspective to have on the same panel with Bill James.