Could the Diamondbacks become the first MLB team ever to be outscored and still have the league’s best record? Further, could there be some kind of intent behind that stat?
“That could, charitably, be described as giving up on certain games, leaving pitchers out there to take a beating while saving the rest of the [bull]pen for a closer game,� Mr. Davenport told me.
August 15th, 2007 at 03:55pm by paul
New Yorker article about Media Predict which does a good job summarizing prediction markets. Book publishers, record companies and Hollywood are lousy at predicting hits. But what if they watched how the punters bet on the next big thing?
Prediction markets avoid many of the faults of focus groups, which tend to be dominated by the loudest and most opinionated people, to be driven toward consensus decision, and to discourage disagreement, making them of limited usefulness. (“Seinfeld,� famously, was a complete bust with focus groups.) Prediction markets, by contrast, are competitive environments, and so they encourage diversity of opinion, minimize people’s influence on one another, and force people to think not only about their own tastes but about those of consumers as a body.
Now compare this to Michael Lewis’s idea of the player exchange. In this case you are betting on an athlete’s future performance. But the popularity of a book or movie is based on the subjective decisions of many consumers. An athlete’s (or a team’s) performance is an objective, singular fact. Unless of course we aren’t measuring them correctly. In which case we need the stats experts to set us straight, not the fans or the talk-show callers.
July 10th, 2007 at 10:01pm by paul
James Fallows has a point. Watching a long-ago sports event can still be compelling, under the right conditions:
We know, watching decades later, what the outcome means. Navratilova — who, as I watch, is down one set — will soon rally to win the match, the first of her nine singles championships at Wimbledon. Evert will never beat her at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open from this point on. But neither she nor Navratilova knows that as they struggle for control of the third set, just as Bjorn Borg doesn’t know, while battling John McEnroe in 1981 (in the match shown last night), that even though he has won the past five Wimbledon championships plus six of the previous seven French Opens, he will never win a Grand Slam title again. Watching with this extra knowledge, is a little sad — but interesting.
Probably helps if you’ve been a fan for that long. We at XML Team can offer the same thing in reduced form. Our FeedFetcher software has a feature where you set the date and run in “real-time” to get stats for old games. Not as fun as the TV but nice if you’re developing a live scoreboard in the off-season and need to test.
July 6th, 2007 at 12:07pm by paul
Media Predict expands on the entertainment/props option at the bottom of the sportsbook menu bars (just above “other sports”). Eg: which myspace band will get signed next? They get a mention in the Economist. It’s not just about betting, it seems: Media Predict wants to help identify that most elusive prize: the next big thing.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:03am by paul
Numbers Guy summarizes all the factors dumped in to predict when HR #756 happens. Projections will always smash against two factors: injuries and “random variation in player performance”.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:02am by paul
Ever wonder why they remove the bottle caps before giving you the Pepsi at a ball game? Me neither. That’s what separates economists from the rest of us. (Hat tip: Economist)
June 7th, 2007 at 10:01am by paul
Forget mechanics, let’s talk cogsci (cognitive science, that is). Back in the day, hockey fans noticed something strange uncanny whenever Mario Lemieux had the puck in enemy territory. The defenceman would freeze and the whole game would slow down. Why? Maybe because he could see their moves before they made them? Some are now saying this can be taught.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:00am by paul
A curious article by Michael Lewis on a new kind of fantasy game: player exchanges. In these, you bet on players as if they were company stocks. If the value of the player goes up, you can sell and make money, just like on a real stock market. In this system, your returns depend on how the market evaluates your holdings, which is in turn dependant upon your players’ perceived salary prospects, which depends upon their performance, which is measured by–you guessed it–stats.
One example of this is Protrade.com. Lewis says Wall Street is “on a collision course with professional sports” and thinks that one day players, like companies, will “want to sell a piece of [their future] to advance themselves a bit of cash, just in case.” The idea is that players could hedge against career-threatening injury while those who pick winners could make a lot of money. If you had bought stocks in the 26-year-old Barry Zito, you would be rich.
That’s the only reason I can think of why an athlete would need “capital” and Lewis takes the analogy of player and firm too far. Players are talent in a firm, the team, which is a business like any other. Other forms of talent–say, musicians and artists–have real expenses and really do need capital, and there are record companies and commerical galleries which provide it for them.
My biggest question concerns the “moneyball” angle. We know that there are kinds of players that are over- and under-valued. Smart teams are hiring MIT stats geeks to find out just who they are. The investor should take an interest in whatever the prevailing conventional wisdom is regarding player evaluation. But, unlike general managers, they have no motive to improve those methods. Their only concern is the perceptions that determine a player’s salary.
To put it another way, investors have no interest in providing the owners with a more efficient market so long as salaries keep going up and down. The market inefficiencies Lewis talks about in Moneyball only mean that the wrong guys are getting the money, they aren’t holding back hidden money.
May 14th, 2007 at 10:58am by paul
Sorry, all I do these days is let my inbox fill up:
May 4th, 2007 at 03:23pm by paul
Some free items to liven up your day:
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:33am by paul
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