28 September 03
End Of Season
Today was the last game of the regular baseball season. The one game I followed was the Detroit Tigers-Minnesota Twins matchup: the Tigers won, thus avoiding the ignominy of tying the 1962 Mets’ record of losing 120 games in a season. The downside of their sudden winning ways—they just took 3 games out of 4 from the Twins—is the fear that the Twins won’t be up to their forthcoming duty to eliminate the Yankees from the playoffs.
The playoffs look to be quite exciting. All three of the teams we root for—the San Francisco Giants, the Boston Red Sox, and the Oakland A’s—made the playoffs. Alas, at most two of them will make it past the first round since the A’s play the Red Sox right away. Then there’s the Cubbies factor. The Chicago Cubs swept yesterday’s doubleheader with the Pirates to win their division. I was pleased by this event; Pica less so, since this sets up the possibility of a Cubs-Red Sox World Series. Since the Red Sox last won the Series in 1918, and the Cubs in 1908, heartbreak is inevitable. Indeed, some suspect such a series would be a sign the Apocalypse is near.
24 September 03
Chance, Statistics, And The Game
One of the compelling aspects of baseball is how the whole enterprise skates on a mirror of luck. At the major league level, differences in talent are slight, and it really takes much of the 162-game season to sort out the pecking order among teams. Perhaps because so much of the game takes place in discrete events—pitch-by-pitch, batter-by-batter, out-by-out—statistics has been a large part of the game. Terms like batting averages, on-base percentages, and earned run averages make up the common idiom.
I recently read Curve Ball, by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett, a book that takes a look at the plethora of statistics in baseball from the point of view of a couple of academic statisticians. It’s an excellent introduction to thinking probabilistically about baseball. Some numbers are meaningful, some are not. Often broadcasters will say things like: “His lifetime batting against Jamie Moyer is 4 out of 11”. Even though this represents a batting average of .364—very high—it is a statistically meaningless ratio since with so few at bats the result is probably due to luck. Other times intuitions lead managers quantitatively astray. Albert and Bennett give the example of Barry Bonds being walked intentionally so often in the 2002 season (a pattern which has persisted in this season). Despite Bonds’ immense home run threat, when one goes through the play-by-play probabilities, it turns out in terms of expected runs that one is better off pitching to Bonds rather than putting him on intentionally in almost all situations.
Baseball is a game where the unlikely turns commonplace, given all things that can occur. How often does a team score 10 runs in a single inning? Not very often, but the Giants did it last night in a game against the Houston Astros.
The Red Sox will be the AL wild card team unless a) they lose all of their final four games of the season and b) the Seattle Mariners sweep the Oakland A’s in their final series this weekend. Let’s hope that unlikely combination doesn’t come to pass.
20 September 03
One Week To Go
The Giants have 8 or 9 games left (depending on if they have to make up a game with the Mets next Monday), and are trying to stay sharp before they start the playoffs. Meanwhile, the Seattle Mariners are not rolling over like they’re supposed to be, having taken the first two of a three-game series from the A’s at Oakland. Boston lost to Cleveland, which means that the Mariners are now only 1 1/2 games behind Boston in the wild card race: the A’s aren’t doing their job to flatten the Mariners at this juncture! The playoff permutations are still complicated, though not as much so as a couple of weeks ago.
12 September 03
River Cats Win The PCL
The Sacramento River Cats just won the Pacific Coast League championship, beating the Nashville Sounds 8-1. They were undefeated in post-season play. The team has been in Sacramento four years, and has made the playoffs three times, but this is the first time they’ve won the championship. I listened to most of the game on the radio; the crowd was quite into it. Were we more mobile nowadays, it would have been fun to have been at the game ourselves.
Yolo County now has their very own championship baseball team!
8 September 03
The RealAudio Jinx
We finally got around to subscribing to the MLB Audio deal where you can listen to live streaming RealAudio of the radio broadcasts of any major league baseball game. (It’s $10 for the whole season.) This lets us listen to the Red Sox games over the computer. Tonight’s game turned into a miserable Boston bullpen collapse, and we’re now 0 for 2 in games listened to via RealAudio. Have we started something for ill here?
At least tying up the phone line like this is a good way to shoo off telemarketers.
6 September 03
Laptops At The Game
According to a report in Wired News, fans at Raley Field, home of the Sacramento River Cats, next year will be able to use a free wireless network to order food, beverages, and check email during the game. We really ought to get out to more games next season: the River Cats have played superbly this season and are about to start playing for the Pacific Coast League championship.
Back East, the Red Sox routed the Yankees in the Bronx today 11-0. We are thrilled.
31 August 03
A Team For The Statheads
The Oakland A’s beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 4-3 today, winning their ninth game in a row. This has become an A’s trademark, to come on strong in the second half of the season, often after Biilly Beane has made a clever trade just before the July 31st trading deadline. I have just finished reading Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, which is an account of how Billy Beane, general manager of the A’s, has turned the A’s into a successful franchise through superior wiles and a deep statistical understanding of the game despite having a rock-bottom budget. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if you aren’t enamored of statistical analysis or particularly interested in baseball. (Tim O’Reilly, the renowned tech publisher, is one of the latter, writing about the book: “I’m not much of a baseball fan, but Michael Lewis’ Moneyball has been a revelation. Not only has it given me understanding of why people like baseball so much, it’s given me a real impetus to rethink how I approach my business.”)
The book gives an excellent account of how a set of passionate fans and writers, most notably Bill James, started doing novel quantitative analyses about the game. They questioned the traditional statistics used in baseball, such as RBIs or win-loss records for pitchers, and began to come with better metrics for individual performance, such on-base percentage. These fans were all outsiders to the baseball managerial system, but their ideas started to percolate.
Enter one Billy Beane. He started out as a baseball player who had the burden of being marked for greatness. But rather becoming the All Star everyone expected him to be, he floundered in the majors, and at the age of 27 made the unusual decision to quit playing the game to take a front office job. Here he excelled, and a few years later became general manager of the A’s. Because of his experiences as an unsuccessful player, he was skeptical of traditional baseball methods for evaluating prospects, and quite receptive to the statistical approach of Bill James and his followers. With little money to spend, Beane soon calculated he was far better off stocking his team with unheralded up-and-coming players rather than paying top dollar for established stars (noting that once stars reach free agency, they are usually old enough that their performance starts to decline).
Good baseball quote for the day:”Baseball is a fat Victorian novel, replete with colorful minor characters and discursive subplots, into which a fan can disappear for months; football is a series of quick- cutting TV cop shows.”
29 August 03
One Down, Two To Go
The Red Sox beat the Yankees this evening 10-5 in the first game of a key three game series at Fenway. I checked out the score early on and saw that the score was 2-0 Yankees in the first inning and thought oh no, it’s going to be one of those games. But the Red Sox rallied twice from behind to win the game.
David Halberstam has an excellent piece in today’s Boston Globe about the state of Red Sox Nation.
27 August 03
Beavers Go On Rampage
19 out of 20 players on the Portland Beavers, the Triple-A team for the San Diego Padres, were suspended yesterday after an incident in a game in Las Vegas last month where they chased and got into a scrum with a Las Vegas fan who heckled and threw a stress-relief ball at one of the Beavers’ players. The one remaining player, a pitcher, will have his work cut out for him if the team wants to make the playoffs.
25 August 03
Three-Way Tie
The Boston Red Sox concluded a four game sweep of the Seattle Mariners today, making the playoff picture with about 31 games to play very interesting. The Mariners, Red Sox, and Oakland A’s all have identical records (76-55) and are completing for two playoff spots between each other (assuming the Yankees don’t collapse), the AL West division lead and the American League wild-card spot. The A’s are playing well, the Mariners are slumping, and the A’s may be about to claim the AL West lead, after trailing the whole season.
Meanwhile, the Central Division races in both leagues are quite tight. Unlike Aaron Gleeman, who’s quite excited to see a real race in the AL Central, I have basically no interest in what happens in either of these races. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Cubs win the NL Central, but that’s about it.