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Sunday, September 26, 2010

Poll: The Best Baseball Movie is…

By Tangotiger, 11:21 PM

You tell me.

I hope you enjoy it, as I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

UPDATE: Candidate list of movies has been whittled down to about 30-35 movies.  This will make it a much better chance that you will get two movies that you actually have seen.


SabermetricsPoll
#1    Zach      (see all posts) 2010/09/26 (Sun) @ 23:32

Heads up: Moneyball is one of the movies, and it doesn’t come out for another year.


#2    MGL      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 00:05

I gave up after clicking “Never saw either one of them,” about 8 times…


#3    CajoleJuice      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 00:33

Same as MGL, only I did it about two dozen times.


#4    colintj      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 00:39

same as #2/#3…

but the answer is obviously Bull Durham.


#5    colintj      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 00:42

nevermind, despite having never seen it, the answer is clearly Deadly Strike:

“To boost morale at Dirkschneider Inc., Boss Franz decides to create a company baseball team. In short time, members of the group wind up dead due to baseball related deaths. Could this be the revenge of failed mascot Homer Pinstripe?”

brilliant.


#6    Ken Arneson      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 00:48

Holy cow, I had no idea there were so many baseball movies. 

I clicked “Pass” about 40 times, without ever once coming across a pair of films where I had seen both of them.


#7    Devon & His 1982 Topps blog      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 01:20

Easy. For The Love of The Game.


#8    dkappelman      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 01:43

I wouldn’t consider Naked Gun a baseball movie....


#9    Nick Steiner      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 02:39

Major League!


#10          (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 04:34

I never would have guessed that there were so many baseball movies, and I’ve only seen a few of them. Of what I’ve seen, my favorites are Bull Durham and Major League.


#11    Tom N.      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 07:34

I went through 40-50 pairings, and only found one pairing where I had seen both (A League of Their Own and Field of Dreams).

I also found it funny that I had Major League 2 come up 6 times and Major League 3 twice, yet the original Major League never came up.


#12    Ian      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 08:04

Bull Durham is my answer as well, though it didn’t come up through 20 pairings or so.


#13          (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 08:55

Gave up.  Bull Durham is the answer, though.


#14    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 09:34

Hmmm… let me take this offline, and whittle down the movies.

Thanks for the input.


#15    Jeff Z      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 10:22

It looks like you may need to have people vote on baseball movies they have seen and then take those that received a certain % of votes, say 33%, and have us vote on those movies.


#16    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 10:51

Jeff: that is EXACTLY what I am in the middle of coding!

I’m going to present a random list of 30 movies.  You checkoff those that you have seen.  After about 70 of you vote, that gives me an average of 10 movies being asked about.  I’ll take the top of the nominated movies.  Then we can restart this thing in a couple of days.


#17    MGL      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 13:10

Not sure if it is in the list, but Long Gone with a young William Peterson (CSI) is a great little known baseball movie, as well as the one with Mark Harmon and Jodi Foster (Stealing Home).  To me, there is no comparison between these and baseball movies like Bull Durham and Major League.  It’s like comparing Gone With the Wind with School of Rock.  The latter was highly entertaining and well made, but…


#18    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 13:28

The list of movies in my database is here:

http://www.tangotiger.net/movies/index4.php


#19    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 14:34

MGL: 39 people have been asked if they saw it, and none said they did for Long Gone.

For Stealing Home, it’s 3 of 37.


#20    mettle      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 15:18

Until I had them head-to-head, I didn’t notice the difference between the original Bad News Bears and the remake with the same exact title. Some of us probably aren’t reading the descriptions or looking at the pictures too closely (since we know what the movies are about), so maybe put something in the title indicating the latter is a remake!


#21    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 15:41

Thanks, made the change.

It’s a three horse race (Major League, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham).

Summer Catch is leading for worst baseball movie, and I agree.  That movie is impossible to watch in more than ten minute bursts.


#22    BrianK      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 16:18

I must be the only sucker for The Natural.


#23    MGL      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 16:22

I loved The Natural


#24    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 16:28

Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.  Summer Catch is now 4th from the bottom.


#25    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 16:35

The Natural is currently #4.  That movie, plus A League Of Their Own and Eight Men Out are fighting for the #4-#6 spots.

Next 4 ighting it out for #7-#10: Ken Burns, The Sandlot, Bad News Bears, and Sugar.

After that, it’s a big gap.


#26          (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 17:08

It is nice to see Sugar so high.  Really under rated.

Tom - Sorry about the early comment.  I didn’t see your comment that you were redoing the survey


#27    mettle      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 18:15

You should do a quick analysis to see how “honest” people were.

I know I was inclined to click on a movie I really liked if it was paired with a movie I never wanted to see (e.g. Field of Dreams v. Summer Catch) even though I was supposed to click ‘pass’. For two clunkers I’ve never seen, I was happy to click ‘pass’.

I think you could do it using conditional probabilities.


#28    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 18:17

mettle: great idea!  Just the kind of challenge I like.  I’ll see what I can do this week…


#29    JD      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 18:33

Sugar is a movie I started to watch one day, but I was also busy doing chores and couldn’t focus on the subtitles. I loved the concept though, so I intend to watch it again.

For what it’s worth (this could be the result of Tango eliminating the unknown movies), I’ve seen both movies in the very first pairing (The Rookie and Eight Men Out).


#30    MGL      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 19:44

And thanks for the entire list!  There are many movies that I have not seen but sound like they might be good.  How do you generate a list like that with pictures and descriptions?


#31    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 21:30

I scraped it from the Baseball Movies site I linked to, and the guy gave me his blessing to post it here, with Amazon referral links that has his ID.


#32    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2010/09/27 (Mon) @ 22:52

Here are current results (not updated in real-time):

http://www.tangotiger.net/movies/index3.php

It’s Bull Durham and Major League for the top 2.

Someone asked about the voters “honesty”.  Well, look at the “opponent win %”.  While we expect it to be below .500 for the great movies (since they don’t come up against itself), the observed values are too extreme.

Look at Summer Catch, the 2nd worst movie in the competition, but with an opponent win% of .581.  It was almost as if any good movie gets an automatic win, and any bad movie gets a “pass” and therefore doesn’t register a vote.  I’ll run a query to see if my guess is correct.

But the overall pattern among all the movies taken together certainly points to a non-random distribution of opponents.


#33    MGL      (see all posts) 2010/09/28 (Tue) @ 02:26

BTW, Amazing Grace and Chuck is an amazing movie, if anyone has not seen it (probably most of you).  If you have kids and your are socially conscious, it is a must see…


#34    Zack      (see all posts) 2010/09/28 (Tue) @ 09:49

I know I voted non-transitively at least once, since I was going somewhat quickly and they were often spread out by a few dozen other choices in between. I also sometimes voted for the most baseball movie and sometimes for the best movie that featured baseball.


#35    mettle      (see all posts) 2010/09/28 (Tue) @ 11:31

Tango/32

I guess if you had permuted the match-ups rather than randomize them, if would have been easier to calc, perhaps.
It is tricky because one would expect AWP ~ ClickRate. You have the data from your DidYouSeeThis poll, though, so can you use that? Or can you calculate some p(seen movie A) using all but the top 5 movies, then see if p(A|B) deviates from that expected value, where B is those top 5?


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