from Amazon
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Crowd has spoken: Crawford 5-6 yrs, 16-17MM a year
I love crowdsourcing because there’s so many smart people out there who know alot, and their voice drowns out those who don’t know much. And the best part: if you disagree, you are automatically in the minority.
Dave is crowdsourcing the crowd as to Crawford’s likely contract signing (meaning what they predict he will get, not necessarily what he is actually worth).
And, he notices what I’ve noticed any time I do these surveys: you don’t need alot of people. He said results stabilized after 25 votes. And, you guys probably noticed that when I run my Polls around here, after 20-40 votes, results don’t change much.
That’s why for the Fans Scouting Report, we don’t need much participation. Once I get 20 votes for any single player, I’m happy. Indeed, even at 10-15 votes, that’s pretty good. The reason is because we already kinda know the answer. And after 15 votes, you get a very strong pull toward the consensus.
And, for this reason, something like Fans tracking plays (in parks that can’t afford FIELDf/x) would have great value. You position 9 fans across the park, and get them to record what they see. Rotate them every inning to account for potential bias. See which fans are closest to consensus, and weight them heavier for the season. Indeed, you won’t even need to download play by play, because those 9 fans can agree on what the various calls were. 9 fans x 81 home games x 30 teams x 50$ = one million dollars. Call me crazy, but I think it’s worth a million bucks to 30 teams.
You are crazy. First, I am pretty sure that Sportvision would be pretty satisfied if every team was paying $35,000 a year for Field Fx. Second, you must not have been paying close attention to the presentations on Saturday. There is no way that an observer is going to be able to give accurate information on the positions of all 9 fielders plus the batter and runners throughout an entire play. Without that you can’t assess routes to the ball (as John Walsh and Dave Allen did), or baserunner speed and acceleration (as Mike Fast did), or a continuous probability that a fielder will make a play (as Jeremy Greenhouse did). And you have no hope of building a better fielding metric on objective data like the one that Greg Rybarczyk described.