THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

UZR … for congressmen?

By Tangotiger, 10:10 AM

Non-sports post.

Nate does something we’re pretty used to with UZR and other plus/minus type of systems:

For example, a congressman in a district with a PVI of R+6 had a .37 likelihood (37% chance) of voting for the stimulus package. A congressman from such a district who voted for the stimulus package would be rated positively for his vote: specifically he’d receive a score of 1 less .37, or +.63. If the congressman voted against the stimulus package, on the other hand, he’d receive a score of -.37. I then added up each representative’s score across all 10 votes.

• Blogging

#1 Brian (see all posts) 2009/12/23 (Wed) @ 10:56

Nate’s got it backwards. Negative values should go to a Congressman who votes for the bill.

Nate might also want to calculate the correlation between his UZR score for the bill and the largess and pork set to flow from our pockets to each district.

#2 (see all posts) 2009/12/23 (Wed) @ 11:33

very cool stuff. one clear big challenge is sometimes voting against a bill is actually voting for something else. as you can see with the least valuable representatives and the stupak admendment.

like in football, taking a knee at the one yard line instead of scoring the touchdown and giving the ball back.

i don’t know what the baseball fielding equivalent would be. dropping a shallow OF fly to force the speedy runner at second?

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THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

UZR … for congressmen?

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