Sports
jtoney | December 15, 2011
Nick Swisher, the prospect the traditional scouts and statisticians agreed upon.
After watching the film "Moneyball" with my young son about professional baseball and the struggle to build a strong team on a shoestring budget, I wondered "What really determines a player's salary?"
Is it how telegenic they are? Provocative, reckless? A reliable hitter? How many walks?
What do you think? A research group at MIT took on this question from, of course, a mathematical and computer science point of view. To address this and many other questions, they developed an entirely new way to mine…
drorzel | August 18, 2011I'm not much of a baseball fan, but we're edging our way toward football season, so I flipped to ESPN radio a couple of days ago, in time to hear Mike and Mike discussing Jim Thome's 600th home run. They were questioning how much meaning we should attach to home run records any more, given how many players were using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. In support of the record being a big deal, they played a clip of ESPN analyst Bobby Valentine pointing out that even with the steroid-inflated batting numbers, not that many guys are making a serious run at this particular milestone…
oracknows | June 15, 2011You know, even though I haven't lived in Cleveland since 1996, sometimes I kind of miss Ohio. Here's the sort of reason why, via Balloon Juice:
I thought it was a hoax at first, but it isn't. Just check out the the official website of the Governor of the State of Ohio if you don't believe me.
I must admit a little chuckle of schadenfreude here.
drorzel | May 9, 2011A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of "hot" shooting-- a player who had made his previous couple of shots was, if anything, slightly less likely to make the next one. Lehrer writes:
Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row - an utterly unremarkable event…
drorzel | May 6, 2011Maryland head basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement suddenly yesterday. He was a player at Maryland back in the 60's, and has been the coach there for 22 years, now. As I didn't start rooting for the Terps until I went there for graduate school in 1993, he's the only coach I've really seen them have (though I am, of course, aware of the Lefty Driesell years).
This comes as a surprise, but then, he is 66, and has been doing this for a long time. And in recent years there have been a number of stories about his distaste for the AAU system that has become such a shady and…
drorzel | April 4, 2011This past weekend, I ended up hearing sports-radio pinheads holding forth proudly about their ignorance of college basketball. The justification for this is that "the regular season doesn't matter," since the NCAA tournament is single-elimination, and lesser-known teams keep ending up making big runs in the tournament. Since there's apparently no way in their world to keep tabs on anything outside the AP Top 25, they couldn't possibly know anything about the teams that end up being important, so there's no reason to pay any attention until the conference tournaments start.
Of course, by that…
drorzel | March 27, 2011Occasional commenter Evan Murphy emailed to bring my attention to Siege Toys, a new venture that aims to make desktop snap-together wooden trebuchets. Why? Because medieval siege warfare engines are awesome.
They're looking for funding via Kickstarter, so if you've ever wanted your very own trebuchet, go place a pre-order. And lest you think this is a complete lark, their web page includes this design note:
We spent a solid month and a half adjusting the prototype after figuring out the rough dimensions on a 4th-order runge-kutta simulator that I wrote a year and a half ago.
So, you know,…
drorzel | March 27, 2011I'm old enough to remember when the three-point shot was a new addition to college basketball, and it was not without controversy. It's been part of the game for better than twenty years now, and you'll still hear people talking about how it's revolutionized the game, generally in a positive way. The case for this is usually based on the idea that a great three-point shooting team can hang with and even beat teams that would trounce them if they only shot twos. Another common argument is that it adds drama, giving teams that are trailing a way to claw back in the final minute.
Overall, I tend…
drorzel | March 21, 2011I've been watching a lot of basketball lately, and between the channel-flipping and occasional single-game windows, it has not been possible to use the DVR to avoid seeing commercials. Which means I've seen a lot of the current paradigm of advertising in America, which seems to consist of two main modes:
Smug and "dickish": The main exemplar of this is the Fidelity commercial in which a smug Fidelity customer at a cafe sneers at another customer for not knowing the wonders of his commercial invetment advice provider, but really, just about any investment commercial would do. Sam Waterston for…
drorzel | March 18, 2011This year's NCAA tournament is being spread over four tv networks, so that every game is shown in its entirety. Previously, you got whatever game was deemed to hold the most interest for your region of the country, plus occasional looks in at games elsewhere, that usually managed to miss the most exciting bits. For a hoops junkie like me, this was fantastic, with the only problem being how to manage to overload. I eventually settled on switching channels every time whatever game I was watching went to a commercial, so I got to see a bit of everything.
I was struck, though, but just how often…
drorzel | March 18, 2011There was a lot of great basketball yesterday, but I want to talk quickly about one small thing at the end of the Kentucky-Princeton game, that I think is kind of the basketball equivalent of the oft-debated punt on fourth-and-short in the opponents' end in football. That is, it's the wrong play, but also the play that is dictated by conventional wisdom, so even people who ought to know better slip up.
The situation was this: Princeton scored to tie the game with 37 second left. Kentucky couldn't quite hold for the last shot, so the Tigers were guaranteed a last possession with 2 seconds to…
drorzel | March 17, 2011The 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship officially started Tuesday, with the first of the "First Four" games, formerly known as the "play-in" game. It gets going in earnest today, though, which means that once this posts, I'll be shutting the Internet down and working like crazy for a few hours, so I can justify moving everything into the living room and working at a slower pace through a long, glorious afternoon of hoops overload. I may or may not post periodic updates on Twitter (mirrored to Facebook), so if you want live-ish sort-of-blogging follow me there.
As always, the run-up to…
drorzel | March 15, 2011It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball:
An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…
drorzel | March 14, 2011Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it's time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can't-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click for the full bracket):
OK, maybe there are a few bugs yet to be worked out with this method...
drorzel | March 12, 2011I stayed up way too late last night, watching televised basketball and reading Steven Erikson (about which more later). It wasn't a good night for my teams, with both Syracuse and Maryland losing, but this is the most hoops I've watched all season, and I have a few miscellaneous comments:
-- How about that Big East? Two hard-fought games in the semifinals, both going to overtime, with a spectacular individual performance by Kemba Walker. Sadly, both Syracuse and Notre Dame lost in large part due to grievous lapses in judgement, with players who ought to know better rushing three-pointers when…
drorzel | March 4, 2011As has been mentioned numerous other places, ESPN is backing a new Bill Simmons project, which basically sounds like a pop-culture blog network kind of thing, headlined by Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. I saw this a while ago (I think I may have tagged a press release for a Links Dump), but was reminded of it yesterday when listening to Simmons's podcast fro ESPN, which was a monster two-part thing with Klosterman as the guest (part 1, part 2).
I'm not much of a podcast guy-- I listen to Simmons and Klosterman, and that's about it-- but this is right in my wheelhouse. It's two guys, both of…
drorzel | March 3, 2011Brigham Young University dismissed one of its best post players, Brandon Davies, from the basketball team for violations of the university's honor code. Reportedly, this was for sex, which is one of many enjoyable things forbidden by the school's rules, which stem from the principles of the LDS church.
This really kind of sucks, as it further sets up the inevitable Jimmer Fredette backlash, and I really like Fredette, who is a local legend as well as a great player. In their first game without Davies, BYU lost to New Mexico, a team with a fairly mediocre record, and this bodes ill for them in…
milhayser | March 1, 2011
Deservedly or not, jocks have a reputation for being less cerebral than beaker jockeys and bookworms. But when it comes to American football, brain damage can be all in a day's work. On The Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski highlights a recent article by Ben McGrath in the New Yorker, addressing "the effects of repeated brain trauma, which football players often experience during games and practice alike." Even if a player walks off the field, repeated brain-rattlings can lead to dementia and other long-term health problems. But thanks to journalists like Ben, the NFL is starting to pay…
drorzel | February 10, 2011Last night was Syracuse versus Georgetown in basketball, which is THE great historical rivalry in the Big East-- these are the teams that made the league great in the 80's, and while the Hoyas had a down stretch in the late 90's/ early 2000's, they're good again, so it's a huge game. Because of that, even though I'm usually the one to put SteelyKid to bed at night, Kate took her so I could watch the game.
So, of course, Syracuse lost. In the most annoying fashion possible, too: they had a small but consistent 4-6 point lead for a big chunk of the second half, and then right after SteelyKid…
drorzel | February 1, 2011the Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a profile of college basketball analyst Bill Raftery and how he prepares to call games. This would be nothing more than Links Dump material, save for the fact that bits of it appear to have been written for the benefit of visiting aliens who have never seen televised basketball before:
Over the years, the exercise evolved into the intricate system he uses today. On the far left side of the page, Mr. Raftery writes down each player's name and number. Next are the player's habits and tendencies, as few as three or as many as seven. This season's…