THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I’m sure at least 2 of the more than 1,600 2009 PECOTA projections were “deadly accurate” so there’s no false advertising there!  I don’t think it includes last year’s Matt Wieters projection though.

I’m not sure why they would put Bumgarner up there on the cover when there are so many questions about his velocity drop. His status is clouded until his velocity returns (or doesn’t) by the spring.

Why not just throw Strasburg up there?

Ignoring the content for a moment: egad, that is a hideous design.  I can’t even read half of it.

I have color blindness though so maybe it’s legible for others.

@Ryan: I’m not colorblind, and while it’s legible for me, I’d still say that’s a terrible design. The goal of a cover is to visually convey a message which concisely reflects the content. For an organization like BPro, I think a well-designed title would appeal to past readers while having a visual hook which elicits interest from new discoverers of the publication.

Using seven pictures, one logo, six questions, a blurry background image, and 124 words doesn’t achieve such goals. Add on that there is very poor layout — text and graphic elements not properly aligned, for instance — and I agree with you about this design.

Tango, you’re beating a dead horse. It’s hype for a book cover. B.F.D. Get over it already.

You could make a far better criticism of this promotional cover if you wanted to:  Nate Silver invented PECOTA but has had nothing to do with the 2010 projections, as Kevin Goldstein made clear the other day. This is basically in the hands of Clay Davenport now, and no doubt he will be tweaking the procedure some more, as he did last mid-season.

Fargo: Technically speaking, I actually made NO comment.  You chose to read whatever you wanted to into my starting a thread on a book cover that THEY started a thread on.

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And as for your specific point, it’s not just the book cover.

http://baseballprospectus.com/subscriptions/

You’ll receive:

  * Complete depth charts and forecasts for AL and NL pitchers and hitters using Baseball Prospectus’ deadly-accurate PECOTA projection system—the same one used in MLB front offices.

I do find it amusing that they started to use Nate’s name, the way STATS and BIS use Bill James name, even if he might not actually be involved in parts, or all, of their books.

PECOTA is actually owned by BPro, which Nate sold to them in return for equity in the company.  And their website makes it clear it belongs to BPro.  But the cover is cashing in on his name.  I can only imagine that Nate sold his naming rights for the cover as well.

Tango: don’t pretend you didn’t post the cover to make the same point you’ve made many times before.

As for the issue of using Nate’s name, I wonder whether they cleared that with him.  If I were him I wouldn’t want my name on the forecasts themselves unless I did them. However, they could have worded that promo differently on the cover while still drawing on Nate’s name recognition: “Featuring projections for 1600 players based on Nate Silver’s deadly accurate PECOTA.”

I just assumed the most notable thing was Matt Wieters’ picture right above said claim about PECOTA.

Colin’s first contribution to the Annual?

Tango, can you send me the link to the expression engine web site?  My hard drive crashed and I lost all my bookmarks, email addresses, etc.  Thanks.

I have no involvement in the annual, Kincaid. If you’ll note, a week before my first BP article I was still writing for THT. And when I wrote my last THT article, I thought my next article would be for THT as well. This all happened pretty quickly and there was no time to have me do anything for it. (I did participate in some marathon late-night proofing of the PECOTA weighted-mean forecasts, for what that’s worth to anyone.)

In the “State of the Prospectus” it was mentioned that Nate did help with the PECOTA rewrite:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9906

So I think there’s still some involvement there. (But I think, not know, so please take that for what it’s worth.)

“Deadly accurate” is of course a marketing term with no real meaning - taken literally, nobody is being killed by PECOTA. It is used mostly in marketing literature. I’ll try to talk them into putting RMSE for the past three seasons’ PECOTAs on the cover instead next year, but for any number of reasons I don’t think it’ll happen.

Can I perhaps ask for equal time for the Prospectus Roundtable?

http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9928

Totally free to nonsubscribers. A lot of it may be old hat to Book readers (we spend some time discussing my THT article on liners, for instance) but I think you’ll find something of interest there.

Colin: just take it out of the subscription page.  Kevin and Christina have 100% access there.

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By the way, remember when MGL talked about “publication bias”?  That the only people who post articles on how well the evaluation systems do are those where they themselves come off reasonably well?  And if they don’t publish anything, well, you can pretty much guess how well they did. How come this year BPro does not show how well they did? 

This is why you can always trust me with Marcel (oh, I just realized I haven’t posted them this year… I’ll do that today): I really don’t care how well they do, and I PREFER that they do NOT do well.  That’s because I’m more of a trustee in the system, ready to expose those oracles by giving them the (very low) standard to beat.  And they can barely manage to stay above water.

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Fargo: I’m not pretending anything.  This is the chain of events:
1. I posted a picture with NO commentary.
2. You told me I’m beating a dead horse.
3. I said I made no commentary.
4. You say I’m pretending something.

So, I have made no statement to confirm or deny anything.  Where exactly is my pretense?

What you are suggesting is the following:
a. Baseball Prospectus posts that picture, with no commentary, and it’s very cool
b. Any other blogger posts that picture, with no commentary, and it’s somewhat cool.
c. *I* post that picture, with no commentary, and I’m beating a dead horse

If I were to ask BPro: “hey guys, I’m going to post a picture of your book and I won’t say a word about it”, they’d say, what, “please, no, stop it already”?  And if someone else asks the same thing, they’d say “yes, great”.

In your eyes therefore, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for me to post that picture without my beating a dead horse.

“In your eyes therefore, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for me to post that picture without my beating a dead horse.”

You’re probably right because you’ve been beating that horse for years.

I don’t think the hype is smart either, BTW. But who takes it seriously?

Seeing that they went out of their way to use “Nate Silver” in the line, and, can I guess, gave it a bigger font (someone want to verify that?), I presume BPro takes it seriously.

I figured you joined to recently to have any real involvement, Colin.  I just meant that as a joke about the Wieters picture because of this article:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-death-of-superman/

Tom, I haven’t seen any study of forecast accuracy at the player level for last season. (We know PECOTA’s team-level forecasts did spectacularly badly last year. What I was able to find so far on that front is that the projected spread of win percentage was much higher for PECOTA than it was in years past, and probably much greater than it should have been.)

I took an informal look at it a while back and found no real difference in PECOTA forecast accuracy for hitters in terms of OPS, comparing ‘09 PECOTA to past years’ accuracy. I wish I still had the data so I could show it to you. I haven’t done anything with pitchers yet.

Fargo #13, who takes it seriously?  Probably not the sabermetric community, but that’s a pretty small percentage of the baseball world.  I’m guessing most of the rest of the baseball folks don’t really know much about projections and do buy into the hype.

I have a friend who said his brother bought him a subscription to BP for Christmas.  His brother doesn’t know much about baseball but said, “I know that’s the only place you can get those PECOTA projections.”  So you can give BP credit for clever, if misleading, marketing.

I just assumed the most notable thing was Matt Wieters’ picture right above said claim about PECOTA.

Yeah, that’s pretty funny.  That was either done with brass balls or big serving of ignorance.

Sorry Tango, but I’m going to have to call bullsh!t on this:

Fargo: I’m not pretending anything.  This is the chain of events:
1. I posted a picture with NO commentary.
2. You told me I’m beating a dead horse.
3. I said I made no commentary.
4. You say I’m pretending something.

So, I have made no statement to confirm or deny anything.  Where exactly is my pretense?

The BP link includes a picture of the full cover.

Your blog only shows the bottom half of the cover, ie the half that includes the Wieters picture and the “deadly accurate” claim.  In fact, by only showing the bottom half you’ve enlarged the Wieters picture so readers can clearly make out who it is.

Your recap does not mention that the picture you posted is cropped.  Was it accidentally cropped to convenienty focus on the Wieters/PECOTA link?  If you say so, then I’ll beleive you.

But intentionally cropping a picture prior to posting it is absolutely a form of commentary.

If you told BPro that you were going to re-post half of their cover picture and told them they could chose the half with New Yor Times Bestseller or the half with “PECOTA is deadly accurate”, I think they might take the top half afterall.

Philly:

1.  I was originally inspired by the first comment on BPro’s site, from philly(!!), that said:

I can’t tell. Is the catcher pictured above the phrase “Nate Silver’s deadly accurate PECOTAs” Matt Wieters? Because that’d be awesome on a lot of different levels.

Without that comment, there is no link.

2. I linked to their picture in preview, but it was so huge, that it covered the whole screen.
http://www.wholesomereading.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/bp-2010.jpg

You actually have to click it once or twice to see it in its actual size.

(Interesting… that’s Steve’s non-baseball blog.)

3. So, yes, I had to crop it.  Obviously, what I kept was what had the most “meat” to it.  There was NO enlargement.

4. Once I had that, I thought it was amusing how much the “deadly accurate” stood out.  I also saw Wieters, but I also saw the other ridiculous questions, of which, all the answers would have to be “I don’t know”. 

5. That’s when I had my inspiration.  I thought about adding circles and highlights, etc, to make an explicit commentary.  But, I thought that I didn’t want to go there.  Posting the cover as I did is certainly “art”, in that it is nuanced enough that the regular readers here would appreciate my point-of-view, but that the non-regular readers would think “yeah, so”.

6. I never confirmed or denied anything.  I made no pretense.  I never said it was all coincidental, and that everything was innocent.  I never said anything than what I actually said.

I figured that the more I said, the more a dead horse I would beat.  And I thought, “if I said nothing at all, that would be perfect”.  I would offend no one at all.  A little side joke that gives the regulars a little smile.

Apparently not to some.  Anyone else did exactly what I did, and there’s no issue. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

I can confirm with absolute certainty that is Matt Wieters.

But, I’m not sure if Nate’s name is any bigger. It looks the same to me.

Not to mention his name is there. But it is a picture of him too.

I’m not a fan of the “Team of Experts” label.  It’s a matter of preference, I’m turned off by pretenses of superiority (like the stuff Bradbury writes as well).  I’m just an old school Jamesian, who remembers Bill stating quite cleary that he did not consider himself an expert.  Just a guy who wants to learn more about the game.

I don’t have a problem considering myself an expert on a very, very limited set of baseball topics, an apprentice on a few more, and a student of many, many more (with better grades in some areas than in others). 

If I’d played the game at higher levels I might even expand the list of topics at which I’d consider myself an expert.  But there is no way one person can be an expert on the whole game of baseball.  It is far too complex.  And since the various topics interplay with one another, you can’t ever say that you know everything you need to know in order to tackle a problem.

It certainly does help in that regard to function as part of a team where you can share the knowledge and expertise of others.

That said, I don’t really have a strong opinion about BP’s “Team of Experts” label.  It’s one of those things that’s obviously a marketing claim, and it’s fairly easy for me to ignore it as such.  Other marketing claims may bug me more.  But when you talk about being “deadly accurate” or “expert”, you’d better eventually be able to back that up.  If it were me, I’d probably make a different claim.  I guess that’s why I’m an engineer/scientist and not in marketing.

BPro has always used hyperbole in its marketing, and it’s always sort of bugged me too.  It really bugged me when it impacted their style of writing.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t read their stuff very much or refer to their stats (or join their discussions!).  Their marketing turns me off.

I don’t really have a problem with “Team of Experts”—I think that collectively, they qualify as baseball experts.

Along the same lines, I think it would be appropriate to refer to the “expert commentators at at The Book blog”, even if Rally, Mike, Studes, me, Colin, David, Guy, etc. wouldn’t hang that label on ourselves as individuals.  Collectively, that’s a pretty strong team, even though we each have a lot to learn about everything.

Ooooohh… I like that.  “Baseball’s foremost expert commentators”.  You guys want that in your underwear?  I’ll do a CafePress for you…

#20/Tango

Fair enough.  I would still say that providing “a little side joke that gives the regulars a little smile” is something different than providing no commentary.  Afterall, you could post pictures of puppies and kittens in an effort to give the regulars a little smile too. 

Or do you think we don’t like puppies and kittens?

I do agree that there’s a big difference between posting something for an inside joke (which as you pointed out in #1 I obviously got and enjoyed) and beating a dead horse.  But it’s a subjective area and once you’re there, there’s always going to be someone not agreeing with where you draw the line. 

And thanks to the internet, that person will be happy to tell you so.

I only objected to the characterization of beating a dead horse.  My objections to the characterization on this issue ARE beating a dead horse though!

I find it hard to believe that we’re debating the difference between an (ambiguous) implicit commentary and an explicit one, based on who the speaker is making the same commentary.

If we can agree it is “art”, then we can move on.

And, I objected to the “pretense” characterization, since I made no pretense.

Otherwise, I’m ok with everything else.