THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

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

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

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

same as #2/#3…

but the answer is obviously Bull Durham.

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.

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.

Easy. For The Love of The Game.

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

Major League!

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.

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.

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

Gave up.  Bull Durham is the answer, though.

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

Thanks for the input.

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.

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.

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…

The list of movies in my database is here:

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

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.

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!

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.

I must be the only sucker for The Natural.

I loved The Natural

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

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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?

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.

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.

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…

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.

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?