The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more. Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews
For a fantasy league using a snake draft, I've always thought a good solution would be for teams to be able to bid for slots, using later picks as currency. Whichever team is willing to give up the highest later pick gets slot #1.
example - Slot #1 comes up for bidding, player1 bids his 15th round pick, player2 bids his 14th round pick, ... player1 bids his 7th round pick. No other bids.
So, player1 would get the 1st pick in the draft and draft from slot 1 in the normal snake manner, but would be skipped altogether in round 7.
That way, whoever values Pujols (or whoever else is the consensus #1) the most, gets the first pick.
“Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.”
-E.B. White
Other people have pretty much already said this, but based on my quickie analysis comparing the Tribe's actual performance to the PECOTA projections for all the players, the offense is somewhat outplaying its projections while the pitching is underperforming greatly. I calculate that the pitchers have given up about 65 more earned runs than they were projected to. The biggest underperformers (accounting for 60 of those runs):
Carmona -19
R.Perez -16
Huff -14
A.Reyes -6
Wood -6
Huff's a rookie and Reyes and Wood are fairly new to the franchise, so it's hard to imagine that they were caught up in a team-wide steroid party years ago.
Carmona and Perez both debuted in 2006. I have no idea whether they've used PEDs, but based on differences in veteran status, ethnicity, and position, they don't seem like the most likely candidates to be hanging out with Hafner in the gym.
xei/#27 - at least in Finland, the answer to your first two questions is yes. Click my name for a link.
"But Finland is also home to strong, politically powerful teachers' unions. And tenure. And principals who complain tenure makes it too difficult to fire bad teachers."
Also worth noting:
"What accounts for the prestige of the teaching profession in Finland? Every Finn has a pet theory, but my guess is that the historic lack of steep income inequality has something to do with it. Teachers in Finland make about what American teachers do, which is, of course, less than the income of Finnish doctors and lawyers. But there is not as large of a disparity between the salaries of various white-collar professionals in Finland as there is in the United States. That is changing, though, as Finland embraces more neo-liberal economic policies and its private sector expands."
Making educational improvements at the bottom of society requires a lot of hard work. The Harlem Children's Zone has been very successful by taking a comprehensive approach to improving the lives of children in its community. Click my name for an interesting article; excerpt:
"the Zone starts with Baby College, nine weeks of parenting classes that focus on discipline and brain development. It continues with language-intensive prekindergarten, which feeds into a rigorous K-12 charter school with an extended day and an extended year. That academic "conveyor belt," as Canada calls it, is supplemented by social programs: family counseling, a free health clinic, after-school tutoring, and a drop-in arts center for teenagers."
Steve/6: "It is more of a cultural problem than an educational system problem."
I think that's very true. The educational system definitely needs some work, but there are a lot of factors that make it hard to change things. Too many to list, including: parents who lack basic parenting skills (i.e. not reading to their children or encouraging development of basic cognitive skills); schools full of so many troubled kids that it's almost impossible to learn; and as Steve noted, a culture that often discourages a desire to learn.
The WSJ article puts an emphasis on teacher quality and makes it sound like one of the reasons for high quality is that being a teacher is a prestigious job in Finland. That's certainly not the case in the US. I know plenty of teachers who feel like most people look down on their career choice. There's no simple way to change public perception about the teaching profession. Even if there is, it will likely take decades to flush all the "bad" teachers out of the system.
Education is a very complex issue.
fifthOF/#5 - You're probably right that it's perverse to spend $100 on baseball tickets or a jersey. But, that's more of a commentary on our society in general than sports in particular. You can say the same thing about spending that kind of money on a Broadway show, a four-star restaurant, or a boxed set of the Sopranos. Not to mention larger expenses like giant flat-screen TVs and luxury cars.
You can make an argument that a moral person would only spend money on necessities and donate the rest to charity. You can also make an argument that we're all wasting our time analyzing baseball when we should be using our time and brainpower to figure out a way to solve world hunger.
I think the explanation is much simpler: Hall voters still primarily base their decisions on the traditional stats (batting average, homeruns, RBI). Raines doesn't fare well when looking at those stats.
Paul Molitor had 3,000 hits. Case closed. The last member of the 3,000 hit club who wasn't voted in the first time was Paul Waner in 1951 (he had to wait until 1952).
Joe Posnanski had a good piece last month (click my name for the link) where he made this basic point:
"There are really only three entry points into the Hall of Fame.
1. 3,000 hits/500 homers.
2. Positional greatness.
3. The Intangible Argument (rare)."
Tango - since distance and slice are already tracked by BIS and Stats, how about starting your own project to get readers/the public/Retrosheet people to start tracking hangtime? Just create a simple form that allows anyone to upload the hangtime for each batted ball in a given game. All that anyone needs to track hangtime is a stopwatch and a DVR. To reduce errors, you'd ideally receive info from multiple trackers per game and then average the results.
Even if you don't get data for every game in year 1, you'd still get some useful data, or at least get an idea of how feasible the project seemed.
Doesn't Rally's analysis simply imply that the replacement level is too low? According to his projections, both the Marlins and Red Sox have 11 starting pitchers better than replacement. Overall, he projects about 350 starting pitchers to be above replacement level. If you upped the replacement level for pitchers by 5 runs, then Boston's 4 players would total 6 WAR vs Hanley at 5.3.
When we're talking about big-time free agents like Sabathia and Teixeira, it doesn't matter much where we set the replacement level. But, it makes a pretty big difference when we're talking about players who are relatively close to replacement level, like Bowden and Buccholz.
Even if MLB was efficient, I'm not sure that we should necessarily expect equilibriums between all positions. Playing catcher leads to more injuries and a lot more wear and tear, so it's rational for baseball decision makers to move their top offensive players away from the position.
I'm not sure if the data supports this, but there's a lot of lip service paid to the idea that 2B is a dangerous position because they have to turn so many double plays. So, it makes sense that teams would choose to put their best players at other positions.
We should probably still expect something close to an equilibrium at the replacement level, but I don't see why we should necessarily expect there to be an equal number of stars at each position, which will throw off the averages.
From that article:
"It is my belief that audiences WAN T to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s recent high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage."
I see that THT accepts donations, but I'm not sure many readers even notice that tiny link. Maybe a semi-annual pledge drive would be a good idea. I'm sure you have a lot of readers who would be happy to pay something and this would be more direct than buying a $20 book that you only see $5 of. Maybe give some kind of token of thanks for donations of certain amounts and/or list benefactors in the THT Annual.
I don't think everyone has to agree that Pennant WPA (PPA?) is the new standard for choosing the MVP, but for the group of people who want to give significantly more weight to September and/or teams who win their divisions, PPA will be a more accurate way of doing so.
I don't think there's one correct way to define "value," it's a philosophical debate. But, once a person defines value for himself, he should have the best tools available to measure value based on his definition. For people who choose to define the MVP as the player who did the most to get their team into the postseason, PPA will be a very useful tool.
Excellent. I had the same basic idea (click my name), but I'm glad someone with much better technical ability thought of it.
Three thoughts that I also posted at BallHype:
1. Dave may already be planning this, but it should be combined with WPA, so that both in-game and season leverage/context are factored in.
2. This may make things a lot more complicated, but it would be nice to factor in whether the team's opponent is also in the pennant race. A Phillies game against the Mets is more important than one against the Padres.
3. I'll be curious to see the pure results, but he may also want to create a version that sets both a max and min LI for individual games. The pure method will probably crown John Danks AL MVP because he pitched a shutout in game 163 against the Twins and that game will probably count 100 times more than an average game. And I'm not sure if it's fair to say that a player's performance once his team his eliminated from the race can never be worth more than 0.
Tango - this might be a little outside of the sabermetric sphere, but considering the current economic climate, is it time to reconsider the assumption that salary inflation will remain at 10%?
It doesn't make a huge difference when evaluating a one year deal, but when looking at a 7-year Sabathia contract, the inflation rate makes a huge difference. My rough calculation based on him being worth 5.5 wins in 2009 and declining by .5 wins a year is that he's worth about $178 million at 10% inflation. If salary inflation is only 5%, then he's only worth about $150 million. If salaries remain flat, $126 million.
On the general topic of WARP's replacement level (and BP's defensive stats), from Jay Jaffe's article today:
"Clay Davenport has been hard at work revising the Wins Above Replacement Player system, our player valuation metric that covers the entirety of baseball history. Namely, he's incorporating two major changes; first, he's raising the replacement-level floor significantly beyond that of the bottom-of-the-barrel 1899 Cleveland Spiders or a current Double-A player to conform to a more modern definition of the major league replacement level, and second, he's adding a play-by-play based fielding component for the years where it is available."
later in the article...
"Roughly speaking, each full-season player loses about 2.0 WARP in the transition to the new methodology with a tougher definition for replacement level."
I think the initial premise of this thread was that 3.5 years is an extremely harsh penalty for gun possession. My first instinct was to agree, but now I'm not so sure. Please excuse all the generalizations/simplifications that follow.
Let's simplify things and assume that there are two types of people in a city: law-abiding citizens and criminals (and I'm not counting illegal possession of a firearm as a crime for these persons). Anti-gun people think the ideal situation is for nobody (including criminals) to have a gun. Pro-gun people think that criminals will have guns no matter what, so law-abiding citizens should be allowed to have them, too. I think both groups would agree that the worst scenario is that all the criminals have guns, but none of the law-abiding citizens do.
If you're going to make it illegal to carry a gun, you want to do it in a way that discourages criminals from carrying guns. If the penalty is a slap on the wrist, then criminals will still carry guns because a night in jail and a small fine isn't a strong disincentive. But, a slap on the wrist combined with the mere fact that it's illegal is a strong disincentive for most law-abiding citizens, so they'll stop carrying guns. So, a slap on the wrist will result in the worst possible outcome: criminals are the only ones with guns.
On the other hand, a 3.5 year jail sentence is a pretty strong disincentive for everyone, including criminals.
I'm curious to know what some of the pro-gun people here think about the combination of guns and alcohol.
Plaxico's situation is extreme because even if you believe that people should generally be allowed to carry guns, you might concede that the state has a right to restrict the rights of people to carry guns when they are intoxicated and/or when they are in bars/clubs.
If I'm sitting at the bar telling some drunk Yankee fan that Derek Jeter is a crappy fielder with a terrible UZR, I'd much rather get punched in the face than shot.
Sean - The article doesn't make it clear, but it's illegal to carry a handgun in NYC outside of your residence. There are very limited exceptions, but there's no legal way Plaxico could have possessed a gun in a nightclub.
Ari,
I read your post correctly, I just thought it was a little unclear.
You said "look at the Mets if they wouldn’t have had Beltran, Delgado," which implies that the acquisition of Delgado was somehow influenced by Pedro's presence on the team.
I'm a Mets fan and recall the Delgado trade; most people on this blog aren't Mets fans. I was simply trying to make it clear to those people how Carlos Delgado became a Met and whether it had anything to do with Pedro.
The Mets didn't acquire Delgado through free agency. They traded Mike Jacobs to the Marlins for him.
The main article on the ESPN baseball page is an article by Bob Klapisch, who seems pretty dismissive of the notion that Pedro's presence had anything to do with Beltran's decision. I'm not implying that we need to assume Klapisch is right about everything, but he probably has much better sources than any of us.
I agree with Patriot's point. Postseason experience probably correlates positively with actual talent because good players are more likely to make it to the postseason than bad players. The teams without postseason experience are more likely to be flukes - their true talent level is probably lower than their pythag.
To really determine whether experience has an effect, you'd need to do the same basic thing that MGL did to create odds for this year's postseason series - a projection for each player in the series (weighted by how much they played). Then, you'd be able to see whether the level of experience is able to improve the model's accuracy.
Click my name for a link to a chart from the President's Advisory Panel that shows (in their opinion) how the burden would shift under the FairTax - people who make under $15,000 or over $200,000 pay less; everyone in between pays more.
The Panel's report was based on the basic parameters of the FairTax, except that it determined that the tax rate would have to be 34% (exclusive), not 30%. (The 34% figure is based on a conservative estimate of tax evasion; using a more liberal estimate, the Panel calculated that the rate would need to be 49%.)
If you scroll down below that chart, there's a link to the relevant chapter of the report.
Click my name for a link to a post on Time's website about the FairTax. There are some interesting comments about tax evasion from someone who works as a state sales tax investigator.
See comment 68 in particular, and also 58, 65, 100.
MGL - you say that a flat income tax would be unpopular because it wouldn't be progressive. Why do you think a flat sales tax would be progressive? Generally speaking, the richer someone is, the lower the percentage of their income they spend. Poor people save very little money; rich people save a lot of money. I think it's pretty much universally accepted that state sales taxes are regressive. (Yes, I realize the ~$20k deduction would make it somewhat progressive, but that would be the same for the flat income tax).
I can't argue with your "government being in your business" concern, but it's never particularly troubled me.
Other than that, I don't see any advantage to a sales tax over an income tax. Why wouldn't interest groups push for exemptions from the sales tax? I'm sure that politicians would be pushing for exemptions for housing, education, and health care from day one.
And as far as illegal activities go, I don't see how the sales tax solves anything. Yes, the drug dealer will now have to pay taxes on stuff he buys, but the drug purchasers won't pay taxes on the drugs, so the tax base stays the same.
Regarding Wright - he's not a great defensive player, but the NL has a pretty weak field. Joe Posnanski pointed out today that Wright would've won the Fielding Bible Award if they had separate NL/AL awards (he finished 6th overall, but first among NL 3B).
The Fans ranked Pedro Feliz and Ryan Zimmerman ahead of him, but they only started 106 and 104 games this year, respectively.
Two more concerns related to transition from an income tax to a sales tax:
1. What do you do about double taxation? Responsible people earn more money than they spend for part of their life; when they retire, they spend (much) more money than they earn. So, if I'm 70 years old and already payed income tax on all the money I earned over the years that I put away in the bank, I'll get taxed again now that I'm spending it.
2. There'd be a huge surge in large purchases (homes, cars, etc.) in the months leading up to day 1 of the FairTax and then almost no sales at all in the months following once the prices go up by ~40%. It might take years for the housing market to adjust to the new price scheme. Depending on your perspective, this might not be a real negative, but it would be chaotic for a lot of people.
Maybe the book has answers to these, but I have two big issues with such a large sales tax:
1. How will the government prevent tax evasion? I've talked to a couple of people who work as state tax collectors and they say tax avoidance is a big problem (on state taxes of 5-10%). Even if the 30% rate is realistic, state and local sales taxes would have to be added on top of that (if the federal income tax is eliminated, states would have to eliminate their income taxes as well, so state sales tax levels would rise significantly), resulting in a total sales tax of at least 40% in most locations. That creates a huge incentive to avoid paying the tax. Large corporations like Wal-Mart will pay the tax, but what about local restaurants, mechanics, even landlords?
2. Wouldn't this kill the tourism business by creating a huge incentive to take vacations outside the country? Instead of going to the beach in Florida, why not go to the Caribbean where your hotel, meals, activities will all be taxed at much lower rates? I live in NYC, suddenly a 6-hour drive to Montreal becomes much more appealing than a 5-hour drive to Boston. A trip to London or Paris is suddenly just as cheap as a trip to California.
If you're in favor a flat tax, why not just have a flat income tax, but with absolutely no deductions/exemptions?
Brian - I'm curious what you think people who are intrinsically gay should do? Do you think they should deny their urges and force themselves into marriages with members of the opposite sex?
I'm not trying to be hostile by asking this question. I don't think it's a crazy opinion to have - this is what gay people have been doing throughout history.
Actually, if you were to design a very simple Marcel, it would have done almost as well. If you just averaged the 10 most recent polls for each state and gave the state 100% to whoever was ahead in those 10 polls, you would've projected 353 electoral votes for Obama (all the states he's won other than Indiana, plus NC).
Brian, sorry to pile onto the attack, but don't you think a lot of the same arguments you're making were used against interracial marriage? A lot of people used to (and still do) define the "traditional family" as a man and woman of the same race (/religion) and their children. You (and the majority of people) now define it as man and woman and their children. Is it really that radical a step to once again expand the definition, to any two adults and their children.
Tango/106 - the language in the proposed Colorado amendment raises a whole host of other issues, including whether it makes certain forms of contraception (i.e. birth control pills) illegal. One of the possible means of operation of the Pill is to impede implantation (in other words, after the moment of fertilization).
According to a Princeton doctor quoted in the linked NYT article (click my name), "there is evidence that there is a contraceptive effect of breast feeding after fertilization." So, would breast feeding be illegal if the woman had recently had sex?
Tango, I'm curious if you believe that history deserves any place in this discussion. The World Series has been around for over 100 years and has always been between a National League team and an American League team. Would you agree that if two proposals are equally good based on the merits, then we should stick with the way we've always done it? It seems to me that stability and consistency are worth something; the burden of proof should be on the side that wants to change things. I'm not sure how high that burden should be. If your new system is 1% "better," is that enough? Or does it need to be 10%? 20%? 50%? (or maybe it's easier to express it in this way: can you show that there's a 51% chance that the series will be "better"? 60%?)
MGL -
I realize the increase would be small, but if the Metrodome, Kindgome, and Astrodome all had above average HFAs, isn't it reasonable to speculate that Tropicana Field has one? I'm not sure what makes certain domes more quirky than others.
Also, a year ago, Tango listed the home/road records for every team since 1994. The Rays had the 4th highest split. (click my name for the link)
Tango/#10 - Actually, it seems that the 77% figure is totally ridiculous. I could be wrong, but I believe this oft-cited figure is based on the US Census figures for "Median Earnings of Full-Time, Year-Round Workers 15 Years and Older."
Click on my name if you want to see the PDF (the relevant chart is on page 14 of the PDF)
Mike/231 - You're forgetting that the HFA only comes into play if the series reaches game 7. If you have two evenly matched teams, there's around a 33% chance that they'll play a game 7. Therefore, the HFA for the series is whatever the HFA for an individual game is divided by 3 (i.e. if the home team should be expected to win 55% of the time, they should be expected to win about 51.7% of the time in a 7 game series).
MGL's probably right that playing time will wind up being the most important factor in winning.
You could do two separate competitions:
1. Each projection system bases list on both playing time and rate stats.
2. Each projection system submits rate stats only, and value is done for each using a single set of playing time projections (i.e. everyone has to use the PECOTA depth charts).
If anyone doesn't want to bother with projecting playing time, they can just compete in #2.
There's plenty of time to work out the details, but you're going to have to decide how purely you want to stick to evaluating the projection systems or whether you want other issues to come into play (such as, relative replacement values at different positions, relative values of pitchers vs hitters, SPs vs. RPs, etc).
And are you evaluating these systems based just on how well they predict rate stats, or do you also care about playing time projections?
Since MLB can't (realistically) make each round of the playoffs a 25 game series, maybe the answer for fans like Phil would be to give the team with the better record the home-field advantage in all 7 games. You wouldn't get to an 80% chance of a .600 team beating a .550 team, but I think you'd get past 70%.
Of course, if we're going to put so much emphasis on the regular season, you'd probably want to return to the balanced schedule and either eliminate or drastically expand interleague play.
I'll second that response, dcj's post helped me (a non-mathematician) understand rmse.
I think dcj is right that there's "no right answer between RMSE and AAE." I think in this case, using AAE makes more sense. I could be convinced otherwise, but I don't see why we necessarily want to penalize the system that is making a few large errors more than the system that is making lots of small errors if they have the same average error. I think each player's projection can be looked at in isolation.
RMSE seems like something that would be useful if we were trying to determine which players were similar to one another. You'd probably consider two players with a 25 point difference in both AVG & ISO to be more similar to each other than two players with the same AVG, but a 50 point difference in ISO.
But, I don't see why you'd care one way or the other about a projection system that was off by 25 points on each of 2 players versus a system that was off by 50 on one, but exactly right on the other.
Brian, I still think you're misstating what Nate is doing. The process you're taking issue with isn't Nate projecting past polls into the future, it's him projecting past polls to the present.
He does do a separate final step that projects the future (from "snapshot" to "projection"), but that just assumes that the race will tighten slightly (it's currently a pro-McCain adjustment).
Nate goes into tremendous detail regarding the methodology here:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-questions-last-revised.html
If you scroll down, you'll get to "Step 2. The Trendline Adjustment."
I didn't read all the previous entries he links to, but it seems that the trendline adjustment varies somewhat state-to-state based on demographics.
Brian/10 -
I don't think historical voting figures have more than a tiny effect, which would be included in the "538 Regression" he uses for each state. Those regressions only have a significant effect on states that haven't been polled much, so it's not much of an issue.
The main cause for the discrepancy between the straight polling mean and the projections on Nate's site is that he's making a "trend" adjustment based on when the poll was conducted. Basically, he's assuming that the state polling is moving proportionately with the national polling. So, if a mid-September Virginia poll was taken that showed McCain +2 when the national race was even and the national race today is Obama +6, he's adjusting for that national swing of 6 points, making it Obama +4 today.
So, overall, his weighted polling average for Virginia is Obama+2.6, but his "trend-adjusted" number is Obama+7.9.
Regarding the DH (and PH) penalty - shouldn't teams be trying to eliminate this somehow? If they think the cause is that the DH gets stiff just sitting on the bench, why not have him stretching/jogging/biking/throwing with a trainer in the clubhouse? Or hitting off a fancy pitching machine?
Or if they think it's a matter of mental focus, why not come up with something that forces them to be mentally engaged?
I agree with the overall premise that Ichiro is not an elite player (and probably not anywhere close to being one). In general, despite a lot of overblown talk about who the "most well-rounded player" is, fans tend to get impressed by players who do one thing very well. People are impressed because Ichiro gets a ton of hits. He's been in the top 2 every season of his career. That's a result of a combination of a high batting average (very important to a lot of fans), playing virtually every day (ditto), and not walking much. He also steals a lot of bases, appears to be a very good defender, is Japanese, and goes by his first name.
One point of contention - according to UZR, Ichiro is merely an average rightfielder. But, according to Dewan's system, he was the best RF in baseball from 2004-2006, worth 59 plays above average. I'm not taking any position about which system is correct, but that makes a pretty big difference in his overall value (even if he'd still be short of "superstar" with an extra win on defense).
If "The Fans" and UZR disagree, I'm not sure how to determine who's wrong, but isn't a possible problem with "The Fans" is that it's not actually one group of "Fans," it's 30 different groups of fans. Maybe Royals fans are just turned off by years of failure and have trouble seeing anything positive about the team. Maybe Royals fans are accustomed to seeing above average defense due to excellent Royals teams of the past (hypothetically, I have no idea whether that's been the case) or the overall high level of defense in the AL Central (the rest of the AL Central is +50 total in MGL's chart above). Maybe this particular group of Royals fans is just a harsh group of critics.
I think Tango has set up the project in a way to eliminate a lot of the biases (I think breaking fielding down into a bunch of different components forces the voters to really look at things pretty closely and to avoid snap judgments), but it's unavoidable that a group of people who watch mostly Royals games is going to have a somewhat different perspective than a group of people who watch mostly Dodgers games. If MGL is right that the AL as a whole is better defensively, then NL fans might have a different perception of "average" than AL fans.
Would it make sense to consider some kind of team-by-team adjustment, so that if it seems like Royals fans are being overly harsh overall, all the Royals players get a boost?
I have to profess ignorance. What exactly does the (1.73*OBP + SLG) * 0.27 * PA tell us? The below average batters that Lee faced would've scored over a run an inning (207.4 runs in 201.7 innings) against an average pitcher?
"A player's objective... is not to help his team get into the playoffs"?
I think that's taking it a little too far. I agree that the kind of calculation I'm proposing (let's call it PPA (Playoff Probability Added)) would produce some screwy-looking results. It probably wouldn't be wise to use it as the sole basis in determining an MVP choice, but I think it could provide some useful information to be used in addition to WPA (and defense, baserunning, etc.).
Let's say the Red Sox and Yankees play each other the final weekend of the season and come into the series tied for the wild card. The Red Sox win the first two games and clinch the wild card. Alex Rodriguez goes 0-5 in each game, grounding into double plays in two huge spots. Sunday night, A-Rod goes 4-4 with a walk-off homer. His WPA might be positive overall for the series, but his PPA would be extremely negative. It seems to me that most Yankee fans would agree that PPA is correct in this case.
Going back to the earlier discussion - I'm in the #2 camp with Tango. Assuming for argument's sake that's the "correct" method for choosing an MVP, isn't the next step to move from the implied assumption that every regular season game is of equal importance to a method that somehow weights WPA based on the importance of each game?
Voters sort of do this already - this is why they usually vote for players whose teams made the playoffs or at least came really close. And they will sometimes look at September performance because those games are more important (obviously, that's only the case if the team is in a tight race). But, it seems like there should be a more systematic way of doing it.
This is probably a little too narrow minded, but if we define the goal of every team as making the playoffs, then we could look at how much each win or loss increased or decreased the team's chances of making the playoffs based on the standings on that day. So, on opening day, every team's games are of the same importance, but on September 20th, a team that is tied for the division lead would be playing a very important game and a team that is mathematically eliminated or that has already clinched the division would be playing a game of no importance. And if you're playing the team that you're battling for the division, then your game is twice as important.
This system is probably a little too rigid. I don't know if it's fair to say that certain games don't count at all (the Orioles probably do care whether they win 60 games or 80 games), so maybe there should be an arbitrary minimum level of importance for each game. It also potentially puts too much importance on the final days of a tight race (i.e. Red Sox and Yankees tie for the Wild Card, have a one game playoff, and Julio Lugo hits a walk-off grand slam when the team is down by 3 runs with 2 outs - is he the AL MVP?). And there's some value in getting home field advantage in the playoffs, so that would need to be factored into the equation somehow.
Also, I'm not sure what the ideal way is to calculate odds of making the playoffs. I lean towards just assuming that every team has a 50% chance of winning every game (or with a home/road adjustment) because it doesn't seem fair for us to punish/reward players based on our expectations of what's going to happen. One flaw with doing it that way is that it doesn't allow us to account for the fact from the Yankees' perspective, an April game against the Red Sox is likely going to wind up being more important than a game against the Orioles even if it's not clear from the standings at the time.
I'd be surprised if this had more than a tiny effect, but is there any way for David to factor in the difficulty of pitchers faced in the clutch situations? And the handedness?
Tango's group is made up of somewhat better hitters with significantly more power - is it possible that they were more likely than the other group to face the opponent's best setup man or a lefty/righty specialist because they were perceived to be bigger threats?
re: Tango #84
Great analysis; always helpful to see a quick intelligent view of the trade (particularly after listening to NY talk radio). But, I think you have one error from the Sox perspective: you shouldn't factor in the $7mm of Manny's salary. That's a sunk cost - they would've paid it whether or not they made the trade. The only new financial obligation they're taking on is the $9.4mm for Bay. So, the math should be $15mm - 9.4 = $5.6mm. So, about $5.5 million vs. the value of Hansen and Moss.
Peter Jensen #8 - I'm somewhat inclined to agree that the fielder deserves some blame/credit for where he positions himself, but there are two things that view ignores:
1. The manager/coach may be responsible for the positioning, not the fielder.
2. The fielder is part of an entire defense. A fielder's job isn't to make the most possible plays himself, it's to help his team win. So, there are situations where a fielder's positioning may reduce his chance to make a play, but still be beneficial to the team, such as:
-2B/SS is out of position because a runner is stealing second base
-1B is slightly out of position because he was holding on the runner
-infield is playing shallow because there's a man on 3rd and the run is considered particularly critical
- the extreme shift used against Bonds/Ortiz (this is the clearest case - if the SS is standing where the 2B usually does and he fails to make the play, most systems will penalize the 2B)
- less extreme shift - if the entire outfield shifts in one direction it may increase the odds of the outfield as a whole making a play, but reduce the odds of an individual outfielder making a play
- bottom 9th, man on 3rd, 1 out - outfielders play shallow because a deep fly wins the game even if it's caught
- outfielders play extra deep in a "no doubles defense"
Those are just off the top of my head.
Doesn't it seem very possible that there is indeed a "cold hand" phenomenon, but that it's not very common/extreme/long-lasting, so it's hard to see in large sets of data?
And that if such a phenomenon existed, it would be most likely to show up in extreme situations, such as Rally's sample of pitchers who have gone to 3-0 counts on opposing pitchers?
It seems surprising that even a subset of pitchers with poor control can only throw the ball in the strike zone 71% of the time if that's all they're trying to accomplish.
Unless this sample of pitchers is made up almost entirely of really bad pitchers, I think what Tango/Rally have stumbled on is evidence that there is a "cold hand" phenomenon, even if that wasn't the original intent.
Tango,
Better late than never. I'm just glad the media is finally being more realistic, which will hopefully lead to the public being more realistic. I constantly encounter people who think Hillary still has a shot, maybe that won't happen as much anymore.
For anyone really into all the election math, this is a pretty cool website:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
I agree with pretty much everything MGL said, but the media coverage is finally getting a little more realistic. Quotes from the three morning shows:
NBC's Tim Russert: "I cannot find an objective Democrat who does not think this race is over"
ABC's Stephanopoulos (on whether Hillary is done): "Yes. Toast. Hillary needs a miracle. This nomination fight is over."
CBS's Bob Schieffer: "This race is over."
Interesting timing - the writer at Vegas Watch (I linked my name to it) reviewed the last 5 years of pre-season PECOTA team projections and found that in-season performance (as measured by pythW-L) does deserve some weight at this early juncture (just a bit more that a tenth of how much weight the pre-season projections should receive).
I'm inclined to agree with MGL that in most cases, the first 20 games are pretty much meaningless, but there might be exceptions:
1. For players for whom there was limited data before the season, a very hot start probably deserves greater weight. Think Johnny Cueto (should we really go back to his pre-season projection when he has a 29/3 K/BB ratio?). If a team has a few of these players and they're all trending in the same direction, that might change things going forward.
2. Whatever pre-season projections you make are based on some sort of assumption about playing time. The playing time projection going forward may already be radically different due to injuries or managerial preferences that have become clear in the first few weeks (i.e. dusty baker seems to be sticking with joey votto).
The camera idea sounds like it would be pretty easy to do for fielder positioning, but might be a little trickier for every batted ball due to timing issues and resolution issues (I'm ignorant about how high a resolution you can get out of a modern camera).
Do they need stopwatches? Can't they just get the time of most of the events off a video recording of the game? The booth may occasionally miss a shot of a play, but you can generally tell when a flyball lands or when a grounder gets past the infield.
The rapid pace of Cramer's show and the fact that the producer put up a graphic of the stock price makes this unclear, but I think the question he received ("in terms of liquidity") was asking whether the person should take their money out of their account at Bear, not whether they should invest in Bear stock.
So, while he's wrong a lot of the time, this isn't an example of it.
Sounds like there is something new in there. The Cardinals are actually going to look at fan-submitted scouting reports of amateur players? Interesting idea. Of course, there's a decent chance that they'll just be flooded with reports from college students touting their friends, but it's possible they'd figure out a way to separate the wheat from the chafe and actually make good use of this info. As we've seen with all the sabermetric-type sites out there, there are a lot of knowledgeable baseball fans out there who are willing to do a lot of hard work for free, so kudos to the Cardinals for at least seeing if they can gain any value for free.
I think I'm getting a little old to down endless hot dogs, but 5-10 years ago, I would've loved this idea. Seems like a great marketing ploy to fill the cheap seats. And since they're cheap seats, they might not have done so well in the past selling concessions there.
While I fully support their right to do so, the stadiums including beer in the deal may be asking for trouble. They should at least make sure there's security around in those areas.
You can't assign position-specific points for defensive stats on Yahoo. I don't think there's any good way to include defense on Yahoo.
Tango, great system you came up with. I've been using something relatively similar (but not quite as "accurate") since I started playing fantasy in the mid-90s.
I'm surprised that nobody's tried to popularize a fantasy system like this. There seem to be tons of sabermetrically-inclined people who still play 4x4 or 5x5 even though those systems don't correlate very well with reality. Why?
For a fantasy league using a snake draft, I've always thought a good solution would be for teams to be able to bid for slots, using later picks as currency. Whichever team is willing to give up the highest later pick gets slot #1. example - Slot #1 comes up for bidding, player1 bids his 15th round pick, player2 bids his 14th round pick, ... player1 bids his 7th round pick. No other bids. So, player1 would get the 1st pick in the draft and draft from slot 1 in the normal snake manner, but would be skipped altogether in round 7. That way, whoever values Pujols (or whoever else is the consensus #1) the most, gets the first pick.
"F-ck curing cancer. I want to watch baseball." (cannatar) —
“Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.” -E.B. White
Managerial firings... (cannatar) —
Other people have pretty much already said this, but based on my quickie analysis comparing the Tribe's actual performance to the PECOTA projections for all the players, the offense is somewhat outplaying its projections while the pitching is underperforming greatly. I calculate that the pitchers have given up about 65 more earned runs than they were projected to. The biggest underperformers (accounting for 60 of those runs): Carmona -19 R.Perez -16 Huff -14 A.Reyes -6 Wood -6 Huff's a rookie and Reyes and Wood are fairly new to the franchise, so it's hard to imagine that they were caught up in a team-wide steroid party years ago. Carmona and Perez both debuted in 2006. I have no idea whether they've used PEDs, but based on differences in veteran status, ethnicity, and position, they don't seem like the most likely candidates to be hanging out with Hafner in the gym.
The best education system in the world for non-adults (cannatar) —
xei/#27 - at least in Finland, the answer to your first two questions is yes. Click my name for a link. "But Finland is also home to strong, politically powerful teachers' unions. And tenure. And principals who complain tenure makes it too difficult to fire bad teachers." Also worth noting: "What accounts for the prestige of the teaching profession in Finland? Every Finn has a pet theory, but my guess is that the historic lack of steep income inequality has something to do with it. Teachers in Finland make about what American teachers do, which is, of course, less than the income of Finnish doctors and lawyers. But there is not as large of a disparity between the salaries of various white-collar professionals in Finland as there is in the United States. That is changing, though, as Finland embraces more neo-liberal economic policies and its private sector expands."
The best education system in the world for non-adults (cannatar) —
Making educational improvements at the bottom of society requires a lot of hard work. The Harlem Children's Zone has been very successful by taking a comprehensive approach to improving the lives of children in its community. Click my name for an interesting article; excerpt: "the Zone starts with Baby College, nine weeks of parenting classes that focus on discipline and brain development. It continues with language-intensive prekindergarten, which feeds into a rigorous K-12 charter school with an extended day and an extended year. That academic "conveyor belt," as Canada calls it, is supplemented by social programs: family counseling, a free health clinic, after-school tutoring, and a drop-in arts center for teenagers."
The best education system in the world for non-adults (cannatar) —
Steve/6: "It is more of a cultural problem than an educational system problem." I think that's very true. The educational system definitely needs some work, but there are a lot of factors that make it hard to change things. Too many to list, including: parents who lack basic parenting skills (i.e. not reading to their children or encouraging development of basic cognitive skills); schools full of so many troubled kids that it's almost impossible to learn; and as Steve noted, a culture that often discourages a desire to learn. The WSJ article puts an emphasis on teacher quality and makes it sound like one of the reasons for high quality is that being a teacher is a prestigious job in Finland. That's certainly not the case in the US. I know plenty of teachers who feel like most people look down on their career choice. There's no simple way to change public perception about the teaching profession. Even if there is, it will likely take decades to flush all the "bad" teachers out of the system. Education is a very complex issue.
Andre Dawson and the OBP (cannatar) —
Tango, I'm curious how you arrived at +40 offense above average. Fangraphs has him at 266.4 RAA and BB-Reference has him at 216.4 batting runs.
The perversity of sports salaries? (cannatar) —
fifthOF/#5 - You're probably right that it's perverse to spend $100 on baseball tickets or a jersey. But, that's more of a commentary on our society in general than sports in particular. You can say the same thing about spending that kind of money on a Broadway show, a four-star restaurant, or a boxed set of the Sopranos. Not to mention larger expenses like giant flat-screen TVs and luxury cars. You can make an argument that a moral person would only spend money on necessities and donate the rest to charity. You can also make an argument that we're all wasting our time analyzing baseball when we should be using our time and brainpower to figure out a way to solve world hunger.
Raines and the Race Card (cannatar) —
I think the explanation is much simpler: Hall voters still primarily base their decisions on the traditional stats (batting average, homeruns, RBI). Raines doesn't fare well when looking at those stats. Paul Molitor had 3,000 hits. Case closed. The last member of the 3,000 hit club who wasn't voted in the first time was Paul Waner in 1951 (he had to wait until 1952). Joe Posnanski had a good piece last month (click my name for the link) where he made this basic point: "There are really only three entry points into the Hall of Fame. 1. 3,000 hits/500 homers. 2. Positional greatness. 3. The Intangible Argument (rare)."
The first Hardball Times Annual available for download! (cannatar) —
Tango - since distance and slice are already tracked by BIS and Stats, how about starting your own project to get readers/the public/Retrosheet people to start tracking hangtime? Just create a simple form that allows anyone to upload the hangtime for each batted ball in a given game. All that anyone needs to track hangtime is a stopwatch and a DVR. To reduce errors, you'd ideally receive info from multiple trackers per game and then average the results. Even if you don't get data for every game in year 1, you'd still get some useful data, or at least get an idea of how feasible the project seemed.
WAR to dollar valuation, but roster space management (cannatar) —
Doesn't Rally's analysis simply imply that the replacement level is too low? According to his projections, both the Marlins and Red Sox have 11 starting pitchers better than replacement. Overall, he projects about 350 starting pitchers to be above replacement level. If you upped the replacement level for pitchers by 5 runs, then Boston's 4 players would total 6 WAR vs Hanley at 5.3. When we're talking about big-time free agents like Sabathia and Teixeira, it doesn't matter much where we set the replacement level. But, it makes a pretty big difference when we're talking about players who are relatively close to replacement level, like Bowden and Buccholz.
And more on positional adjustments (cannatar) —
Even if MLB was efficient, I'm not sure that we should necessarily expect equilibriums between all positions. Playing catcher leads to more injuries and a lot more wear and tear, so it's rational for baseball decision makers to move their top offensive players away from the position. I'm not sure if the data supports this, but there's a lot of lip service paid to the idea that 2B is a dangerous position because they have to turn so many double plays. So, it makes sense that teams would choose to put their best players at other positions. We should probably still expect something close to an equilibrium at the replacement level, but I don't see why we should necessarily expect there to be an equal number of stars at each position, which will throw off the averages.
The Studes interview (cannatar) —
From that article: "It is my belief that audiences WAN T to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s recent high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage." I see that THT accepts donations, but I'm not sure many readers even notice that tiny link. Maybe a semi-annual pledge drive would be a good idea. I'm sure you have a lot of readers who would be happy to pay something and this would be more direct than buying a $20 book that you only see $5 of. Maybe give some kind of token of thanks for donations of certain amounts and/or list benefactors in the THT Annual.
Chone has its own site (cannatar) —
Rally, do your pitching projections take team defense into account?
Seasonal Leverage Index (cannatar) —
I don't think everyone has to agree that Pennant WPA (PPA?) is the new standard for choosing the MVP, but for the group of people who want to give significantly more weight to September and/or teams who win their divisions, PPA will be a more accurate way of doing so. I don't think there's one correct way to define "value," it's a philosophical debate. But, once a person defines value for himself, he should have the best tools available to measure value based on his definition. For people who choose to define the MVP as the player who did the most to get their team into the postseason, PPA will be a very useful tool.
Seasonal Leverage Index (cannatar) —
hmmm, that link didn't work: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/best_performances_of_2008_as_of_today/#12
Seasonal Leverage Index (cannatar) —
Excellent. I had the same basic idea (click my name), but I'm glad someone with much better technical ability thought of it. Three thoughts that I also posted at BallHype: 1. Dave may already be planning this, but it should be combined with WPA, so that both in-game and season leverage/context are factored in. 2. This may make things a lot more complicated, but it would be nice to factor in whether the team's opponent is also in the pennant race. A Phillies game against the Mets is more important than one against the Padres. 3. I'll be curious to see the pure results, but he may also want to create a version that sets both a max and min LI for individual games. The pure method will probably crown John Danks AL MVP because he pitched a shutout in game 163 against the Twins and that game will probably count 100 times more than an average game. And I'm not sure if it's fair to say that a player's performance once his team his eliminated from the race can never be worth more than 0.
Sabermetric Moves of the 2009 Pre-Season (cannatar) —
Tango - this might be a little outside of the sabermetric sphere, but considering the current economic climate, is it time to reconsider the assumption that salary inflation will remain at 10%? It doesn't make a huge difference when evaluating a one year deal, but when looking at a 7-year Sabathia contract, the inflation rate makes a huge difference. My rough calculation based on him being worth 5.5 wins in 2009 and declining by .5 wins a year is that he's worth about $178 million at 10% inflation. If salary inflation is only 5%, then he's only worth about $150 million. If salaries remain flat, $126 million.
RARP v VORP, take 2 (cannatar) —
On the general topic of WARP's replacement level (and BP's defensive stats), from Jay Jaffe's article today: "Clay Davenport has been hard at work revising the Wins Above Replacement Player system, our player valuation metric that covers the entirety of baseball history. Namely, he's incorporating two major changes; first, he's raising the replacement-level floor significantly beyond that of the bottom-of-the-barrel 1899 Cleveland Spiders or a current Double-A player to conform to a more modern definition of the major league replacement level, and second, he's adding a play-by-play based fielding component for the years where it is available." later in the article... "Roughly speaking, each full-season player loses about 2.0 WARP in the transition to the new methodology with a tougher definition for replacement level."
NYC's 3 1/2 year mandatory jail time sentence for carrying a loaded weapon (cannatar) —
I think the initial premise of this thread was that 3.5 years is an extremely harsh penalty for gun possession. My first instinct was to agree, but now I'm not so sure. Please excuse all the generalizations/simplifications that follow. Let's simplify things and assume that there are two types of people in a city: law-abiding citizens and criminals (and I'm not counting illegal possession of a firearm as a crime for these persons). Anti-gun people think the ideal situation is for nobody (including criminals) to have a gun. Pro-gun people think that criminals will have guns no matter what, so law-abiding citizens should be allowed to have them, too. I think both groups would agree that the worst scenario is that all the criminals have guns, but none of the law-abiding citizens do. If you're going to make it illegal to carry a gun, you want to do it in a way that discourages criminals from carrying guns. If the penalty is a slap on the wrist, then criminals will still carry guns because a night in jail and a small fine isn't a strong disincentive. But, a slap on the wrist combined with the mere fact that it's illegal is a strong disincentive for most law-abiding citizens, so they'll stop carrying guns. So, a slap on the wrist will result in the worst possible outcome: criminals are the only ones with guns. On the other hand, a 3.5 year jail sentence is a pretty strong disincentive for everyone, including criminals.
NYC's 3 1/2 year mandatory jail time sentence for carrying a loaded weapon (cannatar) —
I'm curious to know what some of the pro-gun people here think about the combination of guns and alcohol. Plaxico's situation is extreme because even if you believe that people should generally be allowed to carry guns, you might concede that the state has a right to restrict the rights of people to carry guns when they are intoxicated and/or when they are in bars/clubs. If I'm sitting at the bar telling some drunk Yankee fan that Derek Jeter is a crappy fielder with a terrible UZR, I'd much rather get punched in the face than shot.
NYC's 3 1/2 year mandatory jail time sentence for carrying a loaded weapon (cannatar) —
Sean - The article doesn't make it clear, but it's illegal to carry a handgun in NYC outside of your residence. There are very limited exceptions, but there's no legal way Plaxico could have possessed a gun in a nightclub.
What was Pedro worth? (cannatar) —
Ari, I read your post correctly, I just thought it was a little unclear. You said "look at the Mets if they wouldn’t have had Beltran, Delgado," which implies that the acquisition of Delgado was somehow influenced by Pedro's presence on the team. I'm a Mets fan and recall the Delgado trade; most people on this blog aren't Mets fans. I was simply trying to make it clear to those people how Carlos Delgado became a Met and whether it had anything to do with Pedro.
What was Pedro worth? (cannatar) —
The Mets didn't acquire Delgado through free agency. They traded Mike Jacobs to the Marlins for him. The main article on the ESPN baseball page is an article by Bob Klapisch, who seems pretty dismissive of the notion that Pedro's presence had anything to do with Beltran's decision. I'm not implying that we need to assume Klapisch is right about everything, but he probably has much better sources than any of us.
Marcel 2009 is here (cannatar) —
Brian, does Oliver use different aging curves for different offensive components? Marcel doesn't, correct?
Post-season experience matters? (cannatar) —
I agree with Patriot's point. Postseason experience probably correlates positively with actual talent because good players are more likely to make it to the postseason than bad players. The teams without postseason experience are more likely to be flukes - their true talent level is probably lower than their pythag. To really determine whether experience has an effect, you'd need to do the same basic thing that MGL did to create odds for this year's postseason series - a projection for each player in the series (weighted by how much they played). Then, you'd be able to see whether the level of experience is able to improve the model's accuracy.
The FairTax and other "flat tax" schemes in lieu of income and payroll taxes (cannatar) —
Click my name for a link to a chart from the President's Advisory Panel that shows (in their opinion) how the burden would shift under the FairTax - people who make under $15,000 or over $200,000 pay less; everyone in between pays more. The Panel's report was based on the basic parameters of the FairTax, except that it determined that the tax rate would have to be 34% (exclusive), not 30%. (The 34% figure is based on a conservative estimate of tax evasion; using a more liberal estimate, the Panel calculated that the rate would need to be 49%.) If you scroll down below that chart, there's a link to the relevant chapter of the report.
The FairTax and other "flat tax" schemes in lieu of income and payroll taxes (cannatar) —
Click my name for a link to a post on Time's website about the FairTax. There are some interesting comments about tax evasion from someone who works as a state sales tax investigator. See comment 68 in particular, and also 58, 65, 100.
The FairTax and other "flat tax" schemes in lieu of income and payroll taxes (cannatar) —
One benefit of eliminating the IRS is that Barry Bonds would still be playing baseball.
The FairTax and other "flat tax" schemes in lieu of income and payroll taxes (cannatar) —
MGL - you say that a flat income tax would be unpopular because it wouldn't be progressive. Why do you think a flat sales tax would be progressive? Generally speaking, the richer someone is, the lower the percentage of their income they spend. Poor people save very little money; rich people save a lot of money. I think it's pretty much universally accepted that state sales taxes are regressive. (Yes, I realize the ~$20k deduction would make it somewhat progressive, but that would be the same for the flat income tax). I can't argue with your "government being in your business" concern, but it's never particularly troubled me. Other than that, I don't see any advantage to a sales tax over an income tax. Why wouldn't interest groups push for exemptions from the sales tax? I'm sure that politicians would be pushing for exemptions for housing, education, and health care from day one. And as far as illegal activities go, I don't see how the sales tax solves anything. Yes, the drug dealer will now have to pay taxes on stuff he buys, but the drug purchasers won't pay taxes on the drugs, so the tax base stays the same.
UZR and the 2008 Gold Glove awards (cannatar) —
Regarding Wright - he's not a great defensive player, but the NL has a pretty weak field. Joe Posnanski pointed out today that Wright would've won the Fielding Bible Award if they had separate NL/AL awards (he finished 6th overall, but first among NL 3B). The Fans ranked Pedro Feliz and Ryan Zimmerman ahead of him, but they only started 106 and 104 games this year, respectively.
The FairTax and other "flat tax" schemes in lieu of income and payroll taxes (cannatar) —
Two more concerns related to transition from an income tax to a sales tax: 1. What do you do about double taxation? Responsible people earn more money than they spend for part of their life; when they retire, they spend (much) more money than they earn. So, if I'm 70 years old and already payed income tax on all the money I earned over the years that I put away in the bank, I'll get taxed again now that I'm spending it. 2. There'd be a huge surge in large purchases (homes, cars, etc.) in the months leading up to day 1 of the FairTax and then almost no sales at all in the months following once the prices go up by ~40%. It might take years for the housing market to adjust to the new price scheme. Depending on your perspective, this might not be a real negative, but it would be chaotic for a lot of people.
The FairTax and other "flat tax" schemes in lieu of income and payroll taxes (cannatar) —
Maybe the book has answers to these, but I have two big issues with such a large sales tax: 1. How will the government prevent tax evasion? I've talked to a couple of people who work as state tax collectors and they say tax avoidance is a big problem (on state taxes of 5-10%). Even if the 30% rate is realistic, state and local sales taxes would have to be added on top of that (if the federal income tax is eliminated, states would have to eliminate their income taxes as well, so state sales tax levels would rise significantly), resulting in a total sales tax of at least 40% in most locations. That creates a huge incentive to avoid paying the tax. Large corporations like Wal-Mart will pay the tax, but what about local restaurants, mechanics, even landlords? 2. Wouldn't this kill the tourism business by creating a huge incentive to take vacations outside the country? Instead of going to the beach in Florida, why not go to the Caribbean where your hotel, meals, activities will all be taxed at much lower rates? I live in NYC, suddenly a 6-hour drive to Montreal becomes much more appealing than a 5-hour drive to Boston. A trip to London or Paris is suddenly just as cheap as a trip to California. If you're in favor a flat tax, why not just have a flat income tax, but with absolutely no deductions/exemptions?
An historic and sad day at the same time (cannatar) —
Brian - I'm curious what you think people who are intrinsically gay should do? Do you think they should deny their urges and force themselves into marriages with members of the opposite sex? I'm not trying to be hostile by asking this question. I don't think it's a crazy opinion to have - this is what gay people have been doing throughout history.
Nate Silver (cannatar) —
Actually, if you were to design a very simple Marcel, it would have done almost as well. If you just averaged the 10 most recent polls for each state and gave the state 100% to whoever was ahead in those 10 polls, you would've projected 353 electoral votes for Obama (all the states he's won other than Indiana, plus NC).
An historic and sad day at the same time (cannatar) —
Brian, sorry to pile onto the attack, but don't you think a lot of the same arguments you're making were used against interracial marriage? A lot of people used to (and still do) define the "traditional family" as a man and woman of the same race (/religion) and their children. You (and the majority of people) now define it as man and woman and their children. Is it really that radical a step to once again expand the definition, to any two adults and their children.
Sarah Palin, her family, and the Bible (Cannatar) —
Tango/106 - the language in the proposed Colorado amendment raises a whole host of other issues, including whether it makes certain forms of contraception (i.e. birth control pills) illegal. One of the possible means of operation of the Pill is to impede implantation (in other words, after the moment of fertilization). According to a Princeton doctor quoted in the linked NYT article (click my name), "there is evidence that there is a contraceptive effect of breast feeding after fertilization." So, would breast feeding be illegal if the woman had recently had sex?
Why the f!@# is the World Series so boring these years? (cannatar) —
Tango, I'm curious if you believe that history deserves any place in this discussion. The World Series has been around for over 100 years and has always been between a National League team and an American League team. Would you agree that if two proposals are equally good based on the merits, then we should stick with the way we've always done it? It seems to me that stability and consistency are worth something; the burden of proof should be on the side that wants to change things. I'm not sure how high that burden should be. If your new system is 1% "better," is that enough? Or does it need to be 10%? 20%? 50%? (or maybe it's easier to express it in this way: can you show that there's a 51% chance that the series will be "better"? 60%?)
Odds of the Rays winning (cannatar) —
MGL - I realize the increase would be small, but if the Metrodome, Kindgome, and Astrodome all had above average HFAs, isn't it reasonable to speculate that Tropicana Field has one? I'm not sure what makes certain domes more quirky than others. Also, a year ago, Tango listed the home/road records for every team since 1994. The Rays had the 4th highest split. (click my name for the link)
Equal pay for equal work? Or simply unequal pay for unequal work? (cannatar) —
Tango/#10 - Actually, it seems that the 77% figure is totally ridiculous. I could be wrong, but I believe this oft-cited figure is based on the US Census figures for "Median Earnings of Full-Time, Year-Round Workers 15 Years and Older." Click on my name if you want to see the PDF (the relevant chart is on page 14 of the PDF)
Odds of the Rays winning (cannatar) —
Mike/231 - You're forgetting that the HFA only comes into play if the series reaches game 7. If you have two evenly matched teams, there's around a 33% chance that they'll play a game 7. Therefore, the HFA for the series is whatever the HFA for an individual game is divided by 3 (i.e. if the home team should be expected to win 55% of the time, they should be expected to win about 51.7% of the time in a 7 game series).
Challenging Nate Silver (and all other forecasters) (cannatar) —
MGL's probably right that playing time will wind up being the most important factor in winning. You could do two separate competitions: 1. Each projection system bases list on both playing time and rate stats. 2. Each projection system submits rate stats only, and value is done for each using a single set of playing time projections (i.e. everyone has to use the PECOTA depth charts). If anyone doesn't want to bother with projecting playing time, they can just compete in #2.
Challenging Nate Silver (and all other forecasters) (cannatar) —
There's plenty of time to work out the details, but you're going to have to decide how purely you want to stick to evaluating the projection systems or whether you want other issues to come into play (such as, relative replacement values at different positions, relative values of pitchers vs hitters, SPs vs. RPs, etc). And are you evaluating these systems based just on how well they predict rate stats, or do you also care about playing time projections?
Do you really want the best team to win the World Series? (cannatar) —
Since MLB can't (realistically) make each round of the playoffs a 25 game series, maybe the answer for fans like Phil would be to give the team with the better record the home-field advantage in all 7 games. You wouldn't get to an 80% chance of a .600 team beating a .550 team, but I think you'd get past 70%. Of course, if we're going to put so much emphasis on the regular season, you'd probably want to return to the balanced schedule and either eliminate or drastically expand interleague play.
Evaluating the 2008 Forecasting Systems (cannatar) —
I'll second that response, dcj's post helped me (a non-mathematician) understand rmse. I think dcj is right that there's "no right answer between RMSE and AAE." I think in this case, using AAE makes more sense. I could be convinced otherwise, but I don't see why we necessarily want to penalize the system that is making a few large errors more than the system that is making lots of small errors if they have the same average error. I think each player's projection can be looked at in isolation. RMSE seems like something that would be useful if we were trying to determine which players were similar to one another. You'd probably consider two players with a 25 point difference in both AVG & ISO to be more similar to each other than two players with the same AVG, but a 50 point difference in ISO. But, I don't see why you'd care one way or the other about a projection system that was off by 25 points on each of 2 players versus a system that was off by 50 on one, but exactly right on the other.
Nate Silver meets Stephen Colbert (cannatar) —
Brian, I still think you're misstating what Nate is doing. The process you're taking issue with isn't Nate projecting past polls into the future, it's him projecting past polls to the present. He does do a separate final step that projects the future (from "snapshot" to "projection"), but that just assumes that the race will tighten slightly (it's currently a pro-McCain adjustment).
Nate Silver meets Stephen Colbert (cannatar) —
Nate goes into tremendous detail regarding the methodology here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-questions-last-revised.html If you scroll down, you'll get to "Step 2. The Trendline Adjustment." I didn't read all the previous entries he links to, but it seems that the trendline adjustment varies somewhat state-to-state based on demographics.
Nate Silver meets Stephen Colbert (cannatar) —
Brian/10 - I don't think historical voting figures have more than a tiny effect, which would be included in the "538 Regression" he uses for each state. Those regressions only have a significant effect on states that haven't been polled much, so it's not much of an issue. The main cause for the discrepancy between the straight polling mean and the projections on Nate's site is that he's making a "trend" adjustment based on when the poll was conducted. Basically, he's assuming that the state polling is moving proportionately with the national polling. So, if a mid-September Virginia poll was taken that showed McCain +2 when the national race was even and the national race today is Obama +6, he's adjusting for that national swing of 6 points, making it Obama +4 today. So, overall, his weighted polling average for Virginia is Obama+2.6, but his "trend-adjusted" number is Obama+7.9.
Complete WAR, 2008 (cannatar) —
Regarding the DH (and PH) penalty - shouldn't teams be trying to eliminate this somehow? If they think the cause is that the DH gets stiff just sitting on the bench, why not have him stretching/jogging/biking/throwing with a trainer in the clubhouse? Or hitting off a fancy pitching machine? Or if they think it's a matter of mental focus, why not come up with something that forces them to be mentally engaged?
Evaluating the 2008 Forecasting Systems (cannatar) —
Tango, are you adjusting for how each projection system predicted the overall offensive level?
Is Ichiro a Superstar? (cannatar) —
I agree with the overall premise that Ichiro is not an elite player (and probably not anywhere close to being one). In general, despite a lot of overblown talk about who the "most well-rounded player" is, fans tend to get impressed by players who do one thing very well. People are impressed because Ichiro gets a ton of hits. He's been in the top 2 every season of his career. That's a result of a combination of a high batting average (very important to a lot of fans), playing virtually every day (ditto), and not walking much. He also steals a lot of bases, appears to be a very good defender, is Japanese, and goes by his first name. One point of contention - according to UZR, Ichiro is merely an average rightfielder. But, according to Dewan's system, he was the best RF in baseball from 2004-2006, worth 59 plays above average. I'm not taking any position about which system is correct, but that makes a pretty big difference in his overall value (even if he'd still be short of "superstar" with an extra win on defense).
How good are the various teams' defense? (cannatar) —
If "The Fans" and UZR disagree, I'm not sure how to determine who's wrong, but isn't a possible problem with "The Fans" is that it's not actually one group of "Fans," it's 30 different groups of fans. Maybe Royals fans are just turned off by years of failure and have trouble seeing anything positive about the team. Maybe Royals fans are accustomed to seeing above average defense due to excellent Royals teams of the past (hypothetically, I have no idea whether that's been the case) or the overall high level of defense in the AL Central (the rest of the AL Central is +50 total in MGL's chart above). Maybe this particular group of Royals fans is just a harsh group of critics. I think Tango has set up the project in a way to eliminate a lot of the biases (I think breaking fielding down into a bunch of different components forces the voters to really look at things pretty closely and to avoid snap judgments), but it's unavoidable that a group of people who watch mostly Royals games is going to have a somewhat different perspective than a group of people who watch mostly Dodgers games. If MGL is right that the AL as a whole is better defensively, then NL fans might have a different perception of "average" than AL fans. Would it make sense to consider some kind of team-by-team adjustment, so that if it seems like Royals fans are being overly harsh overall, all the Royals players get a boost?
Strength of Schedule: Lee v Halladay (cannatar) —
I have to profess ignorance. What exactly does the (1.73*OBP + SLG) * 0.27 * PA tell us? The below average batters that Lee faced would've scored over a run an inning (207.4 runs in 201.7 innings) against an average pitcher?
Best performances of 2008, as of today (cannatar) —
"A player's objective... is not to help his team get into the playoffs"? I think that's taking it a little too far. I agree that the kind of calculation I'm proposing (let's call it PPA (Playoff Probability Added)) would produce some screwy-looking results. It probably wouldn't be wise to use it as the sole basis in determining an MVP choice, but I think it could provide some useful information to be used in addition to WPA (and defense, baserunning, etc.). Let's say the Red Sox and Yankees play each other the final weekend of the season and come into the series tied for the wild card. The Red Sox win the first two games and clinch the wild card. Alex Rodriguez goes 0-5 in each game, grounding into double plays in two huge spots. Sunday night, A-Rod goes 4-4 with a walk-off homer. His WPA might be positive overall for the series, but his PPA would be extremely negative. It seems to me that most Yankee fans would agree that PPA is correct in this case.
Best performances of 2008, as of today (cannatar) —
Going back to the earlier discussion - I'm in the #2 camp with Tango. Assuming for argument's sake that's the "correct" method for choosing an MVP, isn't the next step to move from the implied assumption that every regular season game is of equal importance to a method that somehow weights WPA based on the importance of each game? Voters sort of do this already - this is why they usually vote for players whose teams made the playoffs or at least came really close. And they will sometimes look at September performance because those games are more important (obviously, that's only the case if the team is in a tight race). But, it seems like there should be a more systematic way of doing it. This is probably a little too narrow minded, but if we define the goal of every team as making the playoffs, then we could look at how much each win or loss increased or decreased the team's chances of making the playoffs based on the standings on that day. So, on opening day, every team's games are of the same importance, but on September 20th, a team that is tied for the division lead would be playing a very important game and a team that is mathematically eliminated or that has already clinched the division would be playing a game of no importance. And if you're playing the team that you're battling for the division, then your game is twice as important. This system is probably a little too rigid. I don't know if it's fair to say that certain games don't count at all (the Orioles probably do care whether they win 60 games or 80 games), so maybe there should be an arbitrary minimum level of importance for each game. It also potentially puts too much importance on the final days of a tight race (i.e. Red Sox and Yankees tie for the Wild Card, have a one game playoff, and Julio Lugo hits a walk-off grand slam when the team is down by 3 runs with 2 outs - is he the AL MVP?). And there's some value in getting home field advantage in the playoffs, so that would need to be factored into the equation somehow. Also, I'm not sure what the ideal way is to calculate odds of making the playoffs. I lean towards just assuming that every team has a 50% chance of winning every game (or with a home/road adjustment) because it doesn't seem fair for us to punish/reward players based on our expectations of what's going to happen. One flaw with doing it that way is that it doesn't allow us to account for the fact from the Yankees' perspective, an April game against the Red Sox is likely going to wind up being more important than a game against the Orioles even if it's not clear from the standings at the time.
The Perfect DH rule (cannatar) —
This rule would've destroyed Edgar Martinez's shot at the Hall of Fame!
Does Clutch exist? Color me very impressed (cannatar) —
I'd be surprised if this had more than a tiny effect, but is there any way for David to factor in the difficulty of pitchers faced in the clutch situations? And the handedness? Tango's group is made up of somewhat better hitters with significantly more power - is it possible that they were more likely than the other group to face the opponent's best setup man or a lefty/righty specialist because they were perceived to be bigger threats?
Sabermetric Moves of the 2008 In-Season (cannatar) —
re: Tango #84 Great analysis; always helpful to see a quick intelligent view of the trade (particularly after listening to NY talk radio). But, I think you have one error from the Sox perspective: you shouldn't factor in the $7mm of Manny's salary. That's a sunk cost - they would've paid it whether or not they made the trade. The only new financial obligation they're taking on is the $9.4mm for Bay. So, the math should be $15mm - 9.4 = $5.6mm. So, about $5.5 million vs. the value of Hansen and Moss.
The Science of Fielding, a Century Ago (cannatar) —
Peter Jensen #8 - I'm somewhat inclined to agree that the fielder deserves some blame/credit for where he positions himself, but there are two things that view ignores: 1. The manager/coach may be responsible for the positioning, not the fielder. 2. The fielder is part of an entire defense. A fielder's job isn't to make the most possible plays himself, it's to help his team win. So, there are situations where a fielder's positioning may reduce his chance to make a play, but still be beneficial to the team, such as: -2B/SS is out of position because a runner is stealing second base -1B is slightly out of position because he was holding on the runner -infield is playing shallow because there's a man on 3rd and the run is considered particularly critical - the extreme shift used against Bonds/Ortiz (this is the clearest case - if the SS is standing where the 2B usually does and he fails to make the play, most systems will penalize the 2B) - less extreme shift - if the entire outfield shifts in one direction it may increase the odds of the outfield as a whole making a play, but reduce the odds of an individual outfielder making a play - bottom 9th, man on 3rd, 1 out - outfielders play shallow because a deep fly wins the game even if it's caught - outfielders play extra deep in a "no doubles defense" Those are just off the top of my head.
How much control do pitchers REALLY have? (cannatar) —
Doesn't it seem very possible that there is indeed a "cold hand" phenomenon, but that it's not very common/extreme/long-lasting, so it's hard to see in large sets of data? And that if such a phenomenon existed, it would be most likely to show up in extreme situations, such as Rally's sample of pitchers who have gone to 3-0 counts on opposing pitchers? It seems surprising that even a subset of pitchers with poor control can only throw the ball in the strike zone 71% of the time if that's all they're trying to accomplish. Unless this sample of pitchers is made up almost entirely of really bad pitchers, I think what Tango/Rally have stumbled on is evidence that there is a "cold hand" phenomenon, even if that wasn't the original intent.
Can we be frank about the Democratic candidate for POTUS? (cannatar) —
Tango, Better late than never. I'm just glad the media is finally being more realistic, which will hopefully lead to the public being more realistic. I constantly encounter people who think Hillary still has a shot, maybe that won't happen as much anymore. For anyone really into all the election math, this is a pretty cool website: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
Can we be frank about the Democratic candidate for POTUS? (cannatar) —
I agree with pretty much everything MGL said, but the media coverage is finally getting a little more realistic. Quotes from the three morning shows: NBC's Tim Russert: "I cannot find an objective Democrat who does not think this race is over" ABC's Stephanopoulos (on whether Hillary is done): "Yes. Toast. Hillary needs a miracle. This nomination fight is over." CBS's Bob Schieffer: "This race is over."
Small team sample size: Do I care that the Tigers are 7-13, the WS are 11-7, or that Flo is 12-7? (cannatar) —
Interesting timing - the writer at Vegas Watch (I linked my name to it) reviewed the last 5 years of pre-season PECOTA team projections and found that in-season performance (as measured by pythW-L) does deserve some weight at this early juncture (just a bit more that a tenth of how much weight the pre-season projections should receive). I'm inclined to agree with MGL that in most cases, the first 20 games are pretty much meaningless, but there might be exceptions: 1. For players for whom there was limited data before the season, a very hot start probably deserves greater weight. Think Johnny Cueto (should we really go back to his pre-season projection when he has a 29/3 K/BB ratio?). If a team has a few of these players and they're all trending in the same direction, that might change things going forward. 2. Whatever pre-season projections you make are based on some sort of assumption about playing time. The playing time projection going forward may already be radically different due to injuries or managerial preferences that have become clear in the first few weeks (i.e. dusty baker seems to be sticking with joey votto).
Recording Fielder Positioning (cannatar) —
The camera idea sounds like it would be pretty easy to do for fielder positioning, but might be a little trickier for every batted ball due to timing issues and resolution issues (I'm ignorant about how high a resolution you can get out of a modern camera). Do they need stopwatches? Can't they just get the time of most of the events off a video recording of the game? The booth may occasionally miss a shot of a play, but you can generally tell when a flyball lands or when a grounder gets past the infield.
Yappin' Jim Cramer's Forecast: Bear Stearns is Fine! (cannatar) —
The rapid pace of Cramer's show and the fact that the producer put up a graphic of the stock price makes this unclear, but I think the question he received ("in terms of liquidity") was asking whether the person should take their money out of their account at Bear, not whether they should invest in Bear stock. So, while he's wrong a lot of the time, this isn't an example of it.
Wall Street Journal: Wisdom of the Crowds (cannatar) —
Sounds like there is something new in there. The Cardinals are actually going to look at fan-submitted scouting reports of amateur players? Interesting idea. Of course, there's a decent chance that they'll just be flooded with reports from college students touting their friends, but it's possible they'd figure out a way to separate the wheat from the chafe and actually make good use of this info. As we've seen with all the sabermetric-type sites out there, there are a lot of knowledgeable baseball fans out there who are willing to do a lot of hard work for free, so kudos to the Cardinals for at least seeing if they can gain any value for free.
All-you-can-eat ballparks (cannatar) —
I think I'm getting a little old to down endless hot dogs, but 5-10 years ago, I would've loved this idea. Seems like a great marketing ploy to fill the cheap seats. And since they're cheap seats, they might not have done so well in the past selling concessions there. While I fully support their right to do so, the stadiums including beer in the deal may be asking for trouble. They should at least make sure there's security around in those areas.
Yahoo Fantasy Linear Weights League (cannatar) —
You can't assign position-specific points for defensive stats on Yahoo. I don't think there's any good way to include defense on Yahoo. Tango, great system you came up with. I've been using something relatively similar (but not quite as "accurate") since I started playing fantasy in the mid-90s. I'm surprised that nobody's tried to popularize a fantasy system like this. There seem to be tons of sabermetrically-inclined people who still play 4x4 or 5x5 even though those systems don't correlate very well with reality. Why?