THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I just sent them a comment about the new system and I will warn everyone here.  You need a “display name” in order to post, which you can put in under “manager your profile.” You can only change your display name once per 90 days which is fine by me.  But, while it lets you put in any length display name, it apparently truncates it to only 15 characters or so.  So, if you put in “Jared Saltalamacchia,” it going to come out as “Jared Saltalama.” Then you can’t change it for 90 days.  My display name is “Mitchel Lichtman (MG.”

My comment was kindly responded to by Mr. Pease (Jeffrey?), and the problem has been fixed.

Dave Pease.

And yup, when you are in Beta, you will get issues.  And, hopefully, to get it resolved.

He sent me an email and signed it “Jeffrey.” Maybe one is his middle and one is his first name.  Or maybe he has a twin brother…

Maybe I’m just spoiled by the quality of comments here and at Hardball Times and StatSpeak, but the introduction of the comment feature at Baseball Prospectus is telling me far more than I wanted to know about the knowledge level of the readership there.

I responded to Will Carroll’s column yesterday with an actual substantive response about Pedro Martinez’s fastball speed, and my comment was downgraded below the viewing threshold in favor of a bunch of people asking Will, “Is so-and-so hurt?”

I haven’t read the comments on every article so far, but for the ones I have, it seems like that’s par for the course.

This is the thread Mike is noting:

http://baseballprospectus.com/comments.php?id=8046

It seems that the readers control the rating system in a Wisdom of Crowd way, which is par for the course.  Ideally, you want them to rate up and down the comments in a manner befitting the content.  But, realistically, the rating will be based in the manner befitting the readers.

If Mike’s comment was downgraded, and there’s no other readers stepping in to upgrade, that really sets the stage for the kind of readers who are there.

That said, having the post showing as hidden and requiring the reader to click the link to open it is a good idea.... as long as the rating is bad.  Having a single minus 1 rating be sufficient to make the post hidden is not a good decision.

Then again, they are in Beta, and it would be a snap to change the threshhold for hiding the message to -3 or worse.  You don’t want a single reader to control the viewing of the comments.

More then again: it’s up to Will or whoever the leader writer on the article is, to step in and upgrade the post to cancel out the -1.

Hmmm… lots of -1 ratings in that thread.  Indeed, that thread looks like a mess, as the ratings look inconsistent.  The -1 look no different than the rating 0, really.

I don’t think the self-police state works unless the threshhold is set so that fewer than 10% of posts (across all threads) is set to hidden.  Having that many posts hidden does not give a good appearance, especially if you have to open each posts one at a time.

It would probably be better to have a user profile page that shows the threshhold level per user.