Florida and the Tarnished Legacy of Billy Beane

rhubarb35 · 3 months

I agree with you to a certain point, obviously when you're losing 90+ games a year (like the Rays did until 2008) it's little consolation that your wins are coming on the cheap. However, I think that by only looking at a team's final divisional standing you're missing a lot of the story.

For example, in 2008 the Marlins went 84-77 and the Mets went 89-73, coming in second in the NL East (neither team made the playoffs). By record and divisional standing alone the Mets had a better season, but the Marlins paid only $260,000 for each of those wins while the Mets paid $1,550,000. Did the Mets have a better season? Sure. Does the management of the Marlins deserve more credit for getting those wins? Absolutely. Same can be said for the Marlins in 2004, 2005, and 2009.

This is another important consideration: during this span, the A's main rivals in the AL West (Angels and Rangers) won an average of 85 games a year. The Phillies and Braves (NL East) won 89 games, and Red Sox and Yankees (AL East) won an average of 95 games. The Marlins and Rays were simply playing in tougher divisions, which makes divisional standing an unfair comparison.

In terms of defining an "elite" GM it's tough to say, since this role differs so much from organization to organization. For example, from 2004-2007 Theo Epstein spent $1.4 million per win, which was second worst in the league. However the Red Sox, unlike the Marlin's, had money to spend, and Epstein spent that money very wisely on his way to two WS wins. At the end of the day GM's mostly control contracts, so I would say the elite GM's are the one's that make the best teams out of the financial resources they have available to them, and since 2003 that would not describe Billy Beane.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

More than casually is a fine line

rhubarb35 · 4 months

Poll was taken in April, there was no football to follow.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

Here's the original post from a week or so ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/Montana/comments/o44x1/turner_montana_worst_access_to_mlb_teams/

rhubarb35 · 4 months

Fair enough I guess; not totally sure I agree with you that it's more polite to explain than to just downvote and move on.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

Just a web poll, that's right. I'd love to get my hands on that sort of grain of data if I could, I'm just not sure where to find it or if it even exists.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

No, 52 states/locations are sampled with two variables per state (bowls picked and apathy to college football), with one observation per variable.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

This walks you through the steps, basically you calculate a t-value from the correlation coefficient (r) and degrees of freedom (sample size minues 2), and then compare that t-value to a critical value table for a various levels of one-tailed p.

Or you can just use a calculator that does that all for you.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

Depends on how you look at it. That's a correlation coefficient of 0.324, which is a one-tailed p = 0.01

Obviously only explaining 10.5% of a variance isn't terribly impressive but geographic data is also insanely difficult to control. There are hundreds of variables that are affecting how each state performed at picking bowls, and I'm happy to see that this particular theory fit as well as it did.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

R-sq = 10.51%. Not huge but still plenty significant with a sample size of 52 (DC + "World" included).

rhubarb35 · 4 months

Full article here: http://www.sportsnationdivided.com/2012/01/11/which-states-are-best-at-picking-bowls/

Gist is that states that are more apathetic to college football and not as strongly associated with a region were better at picking bowl games.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

http://xkcd.com/397/

Obviously this study isn't too rigorous - at least that's what Nature told me when I tried to submit - but is is a fun exercise in trying to figure out what we can from the only data that's available.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

Very interesting point. I looked into familiarity as a factor a little bit but I only went so as far as to examine how the other eight Big 10 states considered Indiana. Within this group:

2 states had particularly high votes for Indiana given their whiteness (Illinois and Nebraska).
1 state had a particularly low vote for Indiana given its whiteness (Wisconsin)
5 states were basically spot on where the trendline predicted they'd be (Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, and Pennsylvania).

This was sort of mixed result, but I think your method of looking at who Indiana has actually played this season makes a lot more sense. Kentucky, Maryland and New York were all much more likely vote for Indiana than the model predicted, and this could help explain why.

Also, like you pointed out, there were a lot of teams that were much less likely to vote for Indiana than the model predicted, and it makes a ton of sense that Indiana hasn't actually played these teams since 2009 (nice lookup). It would also help explain why Wisconsin is so down on Indiana, since it's the only ranked Big 10 team that hasn't actually played Indiana yet this year.

This being said, I think there still is (small) racial effect at play here. States like Texas, Nevada, and Mississippi are anchoring the bottom-left of the graph (non-white, anti-Indiana) while states like Vermont, Maine, and South Dakota are anchoring the top-right (white, pro-Indiana). These states should be roughly equivalent in terms of familiarity with Indiana, but they're still showing a big divergence in how they consider this year's team.

rhubarb35 · 4 months

These a pretty legitimate critiques of the article, and I'd like to respond to your two questions separately (and out of order):

Who cares about these ESPN polls? At least 70% of Americans follow sports to some degree; over 200 million people. Sure a lot of ESPN polls are kind of stupid and this one is no exception, but over 92,000 people have still voted on it: 75% of the number of people who participated in the Iowa caucus. As one of the 200 million sports followers, here are two things that I know are true.

Thinking/reading about sports takes up a lot of my average day; I am not unique in this.
I have about a thousand opinions about sports teams/leagues all across the country (the Big 10 plays boring basketball, the Lions are a dirty team, Alex Rodriguez is a diva) and it's hard to pinpoint why I have these opinions.

ESPN polls, despite their crappiness, are one of the only places to get geographic data on sports opinions, meaning they're one of the only ways to get the bottom of what sorts of factors (demographics, socioeconomics, ethnicity, etc.) help determine why people think the way they do about sports, and sports are something that a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about.

Who cares if Indiana has x number of white players and x number of black players?

African-American's make up 12% of the U.S. population, but they make up 83% of the NBA and 67% of the NFL. If you asked your average white person to name 25 prominent African-Americans, how many of them would be athletes?

It is depressing but true that for a lot of (white) people in the US, your feelings about race are going to be much more painted by athletics than you'd care to admit. This doesn't mean that race should dominate discussions about Hoosier's basketball or any sport for that matter, but it's something worth thinking about from time to time. When Indiana's on TV for March Madness, the fact that their bench has a lot of white players will definitely influence how viewers think about them in subtle but significant ways.

Also, it's interesting that 8 out of 10 of IU's committed players are black, thank you for letting me know.

TL;DR: I am way too obsessed with this stuff.

rhubarb35

TROPHY CASE

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