THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

result for “Tom Tango”
There are 1 or fewer people in the U.S. named Tom Tango.
We have information on both names, but chances are low that someone has this combination of names.

There are 8 people in the U.S. named Andrew Dolphin.

And there are 12 of me.

This site is really cool.

Poking around the site, it looksl ike they don’t actualy have a database of everyone’s names; rather, they have a table of how many people have each first name and each last name, and just multiply the two probabilities.

Right, but one would hope it’s a bit smarter than that.  For example, “Hyman Corleone” should not be treated as if the two names would come together independently.

From the link on my name:

The program assumes that the chance that your first name is “Juan” is the same, regardless of whether your last name is “Arteaga” or “Epstein”. Episodes of Welcome Back Kotter aside, we would hazard a guess that there are not that many people in the U.S. actually named “Juan Epstein”. Depending upon what your family name is, it makes certain first names more likely, and certain others less likely. The program cannot compensate for that.

Second, the data is old. The data for this program comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1990 census. That makes the data about 18 years old or so.

I stand illuminated.  Thank you.

----"There are 1 or fewer people in the US named Tom Tango.”

Then I vote for “fewer”

So I guess I’m slow to figure this out, but Tom Tango really is your name, right?  I initially thought it likely was a psendonym, a more formal version of your Tangotiger handle, but looks like I’m wrong.

Tom Tango is a pseudonym, created only so that it would be more respectful to Mickey and Andy on the cover of The Book.  Had I been solo, I would not have bothered. 

The rest of this post doesn’t apply to the poster who asked the question, nor is it directed to him, but I’ll go on a tangent anyway.

There are plenty of people around the internet who actually have regular sounding names, but are actually aliases. 

There are alot of old-timers who think that I should sign my Christian name.  I don’t see why it’s anyone’s business other than mine.  (There are good reasons and bad reasons to use an alias.  Luckily, we live in a country that you don’t even need a reason to do so.)

There are alot of young-timers who think that you should never disclose any kind of personal information on the internet.  And young-timers who don’t think twice about it.  I think people are insane to use their real name, especially on websites.  Just to use an example: AaronGleeman.com ?  Plus, he posts where he lives, when he moves, where he works, where he goes to school, and what newspapers turn him down for a job.  It would be very easy to assume his identity with social hacking, and do damage to his site.  Facebook is filled with enormous amount of personal information.  Identity fraud is serious business.

In Canada, we had a law some 15 years ago where businesses weren’t even allowed to ask us for the equivalent of our SSN.  First time I came here, I was taken aback that SSN was the common id always being asked for.  And still, no movement to change that.

What I don’t do is have a flurry of aliases.  In all my sports and non-personal postings anywhere on the web, I am always Tango something.  (Makes it real easy to google stuff.) That is unlike lot of people who use different handles on different sites, even if those handles sound like a real name.

There are 8 Eric Seidman’s.  I thought I would have more company, at least double-digits.