THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Only HALF of you writes like Asimov.  I lazily pasted only the first half of your excerpt and I got David Foster Wallace.

I put in a random Joe Sheehan passage:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?type=2&articleid=11401#61593

and got back James Joyce.

Ok, I took the first two pages of each chapter, and I got this:

Tango
Preface - Stephen King
Ch1 - Edgar Allen Poe
Ch3 - Dan Brown
Ch5 - P.G. Wodehouse
Ch7 - Isaac Asimov
Ch8 - David Foster Wallace
Ch11 - Isaac Asimov

MGL
Ch2 - P.G. Wodehouse
Ch9 - Stephanie Meyer
Ch12 - Cory Doctorow

Andy
Ch4 - David Foster Wallace
Ch6 - Isaac Asimov
Ch10 - P.G. Wodehouse

Between the list above and the results from Poz, I’m not sure that their algorithm is much more sophisticated than e.g. rating batters by RBI.

I’ll confess that I couldn’t resist, and sent a few paragraphs from an old article of mine, and got Stephen King; I have no idea what this might mean.

Anyway, it might be interesting to play with “If he were an author, Joe Carter would have written like______.”

How about a reader’s poll, e.g. “Who’s the Edgar Allen Poe of relief pitchers [think The Telltale Heart]?”

The P.G. Wodehouse of managers (let alone the David Foster Wallace --- here I’m thinking footnote king --- of GMs) might be worth a laugh.

I pasted two different articles I wrote from the Baseball Research Journal and one said Stephen King and the other said P. G. Wodehouse. Then another one got me Arthur C. Clarke. Then still another one got David Foster Wallace. Maybe I should go to a therapist.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith started out like Daniel Defoe, then switched to James Joyce and then to Johathan Swift.

I have no doubt it’s mostly bullsh!t.  For example, the Arthur Conan Doyle style might look at the ratio of question marks to periods, and once it goes above a threshhold, calls that work of art as a Doyle piece.

Ha… I just tried it out.  I put in some nonsensical two sentences, but made each end with a question mark.  And I got Arthur Conan Doyle.

I used exerpts from Swift’s “Battle of the Books.” One said he wrote like H. P. Lovecraft and the other said James Joyce. So he does not write like himself but Adam Smith did (at least sometimes).

Now I know why liked chapter 3 of the book so much! Tom, maybe you could write a book called “The DiMaggio Code” about the secret of clutch hitting that has been passed down through ages from Yankee to the next.

Random spot testing of the works of H.P. Lovecraft gives about a 50% success rate for this thing. So it’s a little better than a random number generator. (It also seems to be repeatable - will return the same answer for the same exact work. I only tested that once, though.)

Colin

Interestng. Surprised it is that accurate after what I found and what Tom found. 50% sounds pretty good.

Cy

"Great Derek Jeter Conspiracy” = Stephanie Meyer

“What I Hate About Line Drives” - William Shakespeare

It tagged a series of long excerpts from William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” as Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Mitchell, James Joyce, and Mark Twain.

I could never understand the lyrics from “As I Lay Dying”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Lay_Dying_(band)