2010 in retrospect

The 2010 MLB season has come to a close, and so begins a time of reflection and resolutions.

a) I started this blog, and rarely posted. I started a few posts, often in response to other blogs, but finished fewer still. I am confounded by the traffic on the blogosphere -- I thought I could respond thoughtfully and add something of value, but I find myself either repeating what gets said elsewhere, or sounding like a condescending pedant. Or both.

So I'll start off on a different tack, starting now.

b) I went to two MLB games in 2010. (There's nothing like living across an international border to the closest team, and 4,300 km from the "national" club). Two shutouts! Fangraphs has the results here and here.

c) The local pro team just announced they are closing up shop. More on that later.

World Series predictions

The 2010 World Series starts this evening, and many pundits are making their predictions on who will win (a sample: The Baseball Analysts, New York Times, and Sports Illustrated.

But perhaps the best way to think about evaluating the pundits is contained in this article "Slick talkers and bad forecasters" by Dan Gardner. Gardner's article is about economic forecasting, but the point is relevant -- when it comes to predicting the outcome, a nuanced understanding of all of the influencing factors produces the best forecast. Or as Gardner puts it, "experts who gathered information from many sources, who were comfortable with complexity and uncertainty, and were more prepared to admit mistakes and adjust conclusions accordingly -- these were the experts worth listening to."

Skill and luck on the links

Differentiating skill and luck has been a hot topic of late -- here's an article at Slate by Michael Agger titled "Dead Solid Lucky" looking at the topic in the context of golf.

The article draws heavily on an analysis by Robert A. Connolly and Richard J. Rendleman Jr., both from the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina. (Their article, from the Journal of the American Statistical Association, can be found in PDF format here.)

A tidy summary, quoted directly from Agger's article: "How big a deal is luck on the golf course? On average, tournament winners are the beneficiaries of 9.6 strokes of good luck. Tiger Woods' superior putting, you'll recall, gives him a three-stroke advantage per tournament. Good luck is potentially three times more important. When Connolly and Rendleman looked at the tournament results, they found that (with extremely few exceptions) the top 20 finishers benefitted from some degree of luck. They played better than predicted. So, in order for a golfer to win, he has to both play well and get lucky."

Sounds like real life. And baseball.

Skill, luck, and more than a little style

Pictured: "Mr. May", Dave Winfield, comes through in the clutch in the 1992 World Series with, in his words, "One stinkin' little hit." The 11th-inning double drove in two runs and sealed the World Series win for the Blue Jays.


The BBC has posted an article and calculator ("Can chance make you a killer?") that is used to demonstrate the challenges in differentiating luck from skill. In this case, a simple scenario with fixed parameters is linked to a calculator that generates the range of possibilities.

While I'm not sure how this could be used in a baseball setting, it is a very good tool for demonstrating that it can be difficult -- particularly if you just look at "the numbers" in a selective way -- to make definitive statements about a player's ability. Such as, say, clutch hitting.

(Acknowledgement: The Book.)

Baseball imitates real life

How understanding luck in baseball can help understanding real life, or at least your investment portfolio: "Untangling skill and luck" by Michael J. Mauboussin.

Mauboussin uses a variety of sabermetric analysis, including Jim Albert's 2004 paper “A Batting Average: Does It Represent Ability or Luck?” and Tango's True Talent Level analysis.

Probability of winning the division

The Cool Standings website presents the probabilities that any Major League Baseball team will win the division or wild card. They also have this available for the NHL, NFL, and NBA.

If I am interpreting their methodology correctly, they are using a Pythagorean basis in a Monte Carlo simulation. (To read more, here's an ESPN article on the method.)

Interesting...

Behind in the count

Time to get caught up with the goings-on elsewhere...

First up, Tom at Heureusement, ici, c'est le Blog! cleverly adapted the same Poisson method I used for perfect games to examine the plethora of no-hitters this season.

And no surprise, the number fits nicely with the outer range of the "expected" frequencies.