Great minds think alike

I may have sorted out my computer problems, so I'm finally able to catch up with some blogs I read regularly.  One of those is that of sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who writes copiously among all the other work he does for the Kansas City Star and, now, Sports Illustrated.  (And he has a new book coming out 9/9/09, which I expect to be quite good, though it will have to go some to beat his last one.)

At any rate, he wrote last Friday about streaks in baseball, reiterating the evidence that there really is no such thing as a "hot hand," something that seems counterintuitive.  The most hallowed record in sports, the 56-game hitting streak of Joe DiMaggio, has been shown to be, actually, pretty likely (that is to say, someone in the history of baseball should have done it, not necessarily DiMaggio).

Coincidentally, that's pretty much the same thing I was writing about on Wednesday, that any specific occurrence might be quite unlikely, but that something of note would happen is very likely.  At a single point in time, for example now, it is almost certain that something interesting and improbable is going on, whether in sports or anything else.  Streaks and records are fun, I certainly enjoy them, but there is a kind of inevitability in them, if not any specific one.  So take a lot of what you read about improbability with a grain of salt.

[By the way, if you like baseball, go on to read the rest of Posnanski's post.  He talks about some amazing hot streaks in history, and any post that remembers Rico Carty is fine by me.]

Streaks and stats

On Baseball Musings, the fine summary site run by David Pinto, he quotes another site on the current winning streak (now at 17) of Milwaukee over Pittsburgh:

Let’s assume, for a second, that the Brewers have a 60% chance of beating the Pirates in any given game. The chances that they win two in a row at that rate would be 0.6*0.6, which equals 0.36, or 36%. A three-game sweep? The odds of that are 21.4%. The odds of the Brewers winning 17 in a row? The chances of that are 0.17%. Even if you assume the Brewers have a 70% chance to beat the Bucs, the odds jump to 0.23%. If we bump the odds of a Brewers win in any given game to 80% (which is pretty high, even for the Pirates and Brewers), this sort of thing only happens 2.3% of the time.

I wrote the following comment:

That analysis is fine, as far as it goes, but it's more valid to look at the probability that any matchup over a period of time might bring about that result, in which case the chances are considerably higher.

We are looking, right now, at a result that's caught our eye simply because it's improbable. But there are 30 MLB teams, and 435 possible matchups. A back-of-the-envelope calculation with the 60% figure shows us that there's actually a 52.3% probability that one of the 435 matchups leads to a 17-game streak.

I wrote that this morning, and time precluded me from doing a better job. So let me unfold that a bit more, and correct a big mistake I made.

The original quote incorrectly figures the probability of any one team beating another team 17 straight times given a single probability of winning (we know that's untrue, as the percentage should actually fluctuate quite a bit depending on starting pitchers, home field advantage, injuries, and what have you, but the overall unlikelihood is roughly correct). It gets off to a rough start, in that the probability of winning three in a row is 21.6%, not 21.4%. The probability of 17 in a row is actually (0.6^17), or 0.017%. (With 70%, it is 0.23% - drat, that's where the first number should have seemed wrong to me - I told you I was in a hurry earlier.)

As I stated in my original comment, there are 435 (30*29/2) possible matchups between two teams in a 30-team league, so, if you're looking for the probability that some two teams will feature a 17-game streak, you have to use that (unless for some reason you really are focusing just on the Milwaukee-Pittsburgh competition).

So, and here is where I revise my original comment, the probability that one of the 435 matchups will contain at least one 17-game winning streak will be (using 60% - I know that's wrong, I'll get back to it in a minute) 1 - (1 - 0.017%)^435, or 7.1%. At 70%, the number rises to 63.7%.

Now, it's obvious that not every one of those matchups can be at 60% or 70%; one would assume from symmetry that they should average out at 50%. While I could write a quick program to simulate the range of winning percentages, that's a bit more of a project than I would prefer to take on today. I'll just use 50% for all matchups, which puts a floor on the result (I should explain; any deviation from the 50% figure creates a higher probability of such a streak, and you can see that by considering the case where one team has a 100% chance of winning a game against the other team, where a 17-game streak, or longer, is self-evident).

At 50%, the probability that one team can beat another 17 times in a row is very small, 0.00076%. Even with 435 matchups, one would expect to see a streak like this only 0.33% of the time, about 1 in 300. But that's the number at one point in time, and there are numerous opportunities to see a streak of this type.

I won't essay the math on how often we should see such a streak over the whole of major league baseball; the noise threatens to overtake the real information after a while. I will offer a simplification to at least gauge a result, that this problem is analogous to that of any 17-game winning streak. In that case, we should see a streak of this length 1 in 131,072 times. But we have 30 teams, and the streak can start in any one of the 162 games in a season, so we might expect to see a streak like this every (131,072/(30 * 162)) seasons, which is right around 27.

In this light, that this is the longest such streak since 1970 would make us think that, just maybe, we shold have expected this before now. It certainly doesn't seem that this quote from the original article, "When one team loses to another seventeen straight times, it's not just a case of good vs. bad. It's a case of good vs. bad with a sprinkle of bad luck and an incredible rash of improbability" is true at all.

Walk on - McGwire/Noonan edition

Not to keep beating on Peggy Noonan (oh, why not?), but her unconscionable remark of last Sunday about prosecution of those who condoned illegal torture ("Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.") seems to engender ever more thoughts. I wrote some here, and Andrew Sullivan continues to follow up, this time by quoting Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:

If most people tried to make the case that prosecuting their criminal acts was just "looking backwards", or a sign that the prosecutor was motivated by a desire for retribution, they'd be laughed out of court. Imagine the likely reaction if your average crack dealer were to urge the judge not to dwell on the past, or if someone who used accounting fraud to flip houses told offered a prosecutor the chance to be "very Mandelalike in the sense [of] saying let the past be the past and let us move into the future", or if I were pulled over for speeding and, when asked if I knew how fast I was going, replied that "Some things in life need to be mysterious ... Sometimes you need to just keep walking." I don't think any of us would get very far.

And I'm reminded of Mark McGwire, baseball player. He is, famously, the player who hit 583 home runs (with 70 in a single season) who, after retirement, testified in a Congressional hearing investigating steroids in baseball:

I'm not here to talk about the past. I'm here to be positive about this subject.

That testimony made McGwire the poster boy for all that's wrong in sports today, and has made it highly unlikely that he will have a serious shot at the Baseball Hall of Fame in the near term. His attempt to erase the past was seen as evasion, and called all his accomplishments into question.

And, if the world were fair, we would do the same to Peggy Noonan. The contrast between her status as a journalist and her unwillingness to discover the truth of American-approved torture would be seen as disqualifying, and we would not only not grant her the honors she continues to receive, we would efface her from her role as leading light pundit. Her name should be just as much a joke as is that of Mark McGwire.

More than baseball

I've written about sportswriter Joe Posnanski before. He writes for the Kansas City Star, and, now, for Sports Illustrated. (He even has the SI cover story this week, a fine piece on Albert Pujols.) He also has one of the great blogs around, which you can see if you turn your head a little to the right.

Posnanski is, I gather, pretty self-critical; in fact, one of the positives about his blog is his self-deprecating tone that crops up every so often. So, if he says he's happy about something he's written, it's likely worth checking out.

Such a story is this one from the Star. It's about a baseball scout, but it really isn't about baseball at all, it's just a lovely story about a man. I can't excerpt it, you'll have to read it, and I urge you to do so.

John or Jobe?

I don't have a lot to say about yesterday's Hall of Fame announcement. Rickey Henderson was clearly going to get in, clearly belongs there, and I don't mind Jim Rice being there. He seems borderline to me, not sure if I'd vote for him, but he's no blot on the Hall.

There's been a lot of commentary about who should be in, who shouldn't be, and the amount seems to climb every year. I offer nothing unique, except to wonder how they exclude Bert Blyleven (and I'm not even going to start on the Veterans Committee and Ron Santo), and to wish that Andre Dawson hadn't developed knee problems relatively early in his career, as then this fine man would be a no-brain pick. (I also think Tim Raines deserves a lot more support, and Alan Trammell a bit more support.)

Bob Markus wrote for the Chicago Tribune for many years, and, while never flashy, was a solid writer, reporter, and columnist. In retirement, he has started a blog (My Life in Sports) to which he, unfortunately, only posts once a week. He weighs in today on the Hall of Fame voting, and makes his case for Tommy John, who, in his last chance before going to the VC, received only 32% support. It seems unlikely now that he'll ever get in.

Bob Markus saw a lot more of Tommy John than I did, and he makes the case well (though I don't quite think of John as a Hall-of-Famer), but he brings up one point that I've seen from quite a few other people the past month: that Tommy John deserves credit for the elbow surgery that bears his name.

I have a bit of trouble with that idea. I'm sure that there was a certain amount of pluck in Tommy John in willing to undergo an unproven procedure, but he didn't have a wide range of choices if he wanted to prolong his career. He also had to work hard in rehab to come back and win 164 games post-surgery, but a lot of athletes have had to do that.

If anyone deserves to get credit for this operation, it's surgeon Frank Jobe. He has been responsible for quite a few saved careers, and has had a real effect on the quality of play and players' lives. It seems to me that Jobe is as least as deserving of enshrinement (and isn't that term somewhat overblown?) in Cooperstown as the guy who laid on the table and received the surgery.

[I would love to have been first with this idea, but, as I searched for a link to information about Dr. Jobe, I found this article by Chris Isidore from 2007 in which he makes the same case. So call me a second vote for the good doctor.]

TMI

Rich Lederer is the main voice behind Baseball Analysts, a blog which produces some interesting articles about baseball. There is no consistent tone, you might read an analysis of the National League East followed by a trip report from a tour of ballparks. (This blog can hardly be critical of that.) This is a blog I quite enjoy, and I should probably add it to my blogroll.

That said, I'm going to be a little hard on an article from last Tuesday in which Rich, using as a pivot point the election of Joe Gordon to the Baseball Hall of Fame, argues for the induction of Bobby Grich. Both played second base, and had pretty much comparable statistics. Rich argues that, if Gordon goes in, Grich, with slightly superior stats and little difference in fielding, deserves to go as well. (For my part, I'd have to think long and hard before putting either in the Hall, I consider both borderline cases.)

Rich goes through a comparison of the two, and conducts this study in a sabermetrically-correct way; that is to say, he takes context into account, understanding that counting numbers like hits and home runs have field and temporal effects, adjusting them using modern thinking. He looks at the tried-and-true rate stats like BA, OBP, and SLG, then looks at the adjusted OPS+.

He then takes defense into the analysis, fielding percentage and Gold Gloves figuring prominently. What follows is a look at some of the newer stats, Win Shares and WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player). In each case, Grich does a bit better than Gordon in both peak value and overall accomplishment.

Here's the problem: We read through this, and we become convinced that Grich probably was better than Gordon, and deserves more consideration for Cooperstown. The very weight of the evidence says so. But, the crux, a lot of the evidence is cross-correlated. Win Shares and WARP, as measures of the overall ballplayer, are going to come up with pretty similar results. All the offensive metrics mutually support one another - but they don't really add anything to the argument.

If I tell you that Bill Gates has more dollars than I do, we can conclude that he's richer. If I tell you that Bill Gates has more nickels than I do, that doesn't really tell us any more than the first statement.

It could be that Rich believes his readers are sensitive to the nuances of these statistics, that we know their strengths and weaknesses, so there is a distinction between the arguments. But I think that credits him a little too much; perhaps he's hoping to hit on each person's favorite stat to make his case. Either way, as I've seen in many such contentions, piling up more facts doesn't really make the case stronger.

538

I didn't spend a huge amount of time during the campaign looking at fivethirtyeight.com, the political site started by the now-ubiquitous Nate Silver. I love the idea of it, that mathematical modeling can bring clarity and insight to the world of polling, allowing more specificity than the spate of polls that roll past us through the months. Probably the only reason I didn't visit the site more often was that other sites picked up on 538's work and made their most interesting results available, so, paradoxically, their very success meant I didn't actually have to go there. (By the way, if Puerto Rico ever becomes a state, Silver had better hope that it is granted eight electoral votes, because the domain fivefortysix.com is open.)

538 did an amazing job predicting the final outcome of the election, and the site has as many numbers as anyone would ever want. It also has featured some fine on-the-ground reporting from Sean Quinn, who travelled about the country reporting on the political effort in various states (which exposed the strength of the Obama effort).

And Silver, who remained anonymous until a fair amount of the campaign had happened, has received a lot of attention, in no small part for "overcoming" his past. Andrew Sullivan:

Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young guy with a background in baseball stats beat out the mainstream media in a couple of months. And he beat out the old web: I mean if you consider the total joke of Drudge's recent coverage and compare it with Silver's, you realize that the web is a brutal competitive medium where only the best survive - and they are only as good as their last few posts.

Now we might excuse Briton Andrew Sullivan for his somewhat dismissive and surprised reference to "baseball stats"; maybe he would have been more impressed if Silver had previously analyzed rounders or cricket. But to those of us who have followed the world of baseball statistical analysis (sabermetrics), we were already very familiar with Nate Silver. He developed the PECOTA system to predict the future value of players, and is a big part of the well-known analytical site and book, Baseball Prospectus.

Frankly, and I say this without the advantage of seeing the nuts and bolts of the work, I'm more impressed with Silver's sports work than what he has been doing politically. There are a lot of numbers in baseball, and since Bill James made the field popular, a lot of very smart people have used a lot of computer time to slice and dice the numbers of baseball. To accomplish something significant in sabermetrics is difficult now; it's just harder to find something instantly recognized as important (PECOTA and Voros McCracken's defense-independent pitching statistics [DIPS] are probably the two biggest in recent years).

So I don't find it amazing that Silver could translate an interest in baseball to the political world, I find it amazing that he was willing to turn his talents to elections. Even though the election is over, I'm sure he'll still have worthwhile stuff at 538, so go check it out.

RIP, 2008 Chicago Cubs

I have been a Cub fan for more than 40 years. My friend Paul and I would travel the mile and a half up Clark Street to attend games (by the way, is there any better measure of how times have changed, that our parents, certainly not neglectful in any way, would let young boys go to games by themselves?), and I got to see the beginning of the resurgence under Leo Durocher. Sadly, or perhaps happily, my family had taken our four-year Michigan residency at such a time that I missed the first magical, then tragical 1969 season.

No, we returned in 1972, the beginning of the end for the great Cubs teams; Ernie Banks had retired, Randy Hundley was pretty much done, and the second-place finish in the division only concealed some very real problems. The following season brought some decent individual stats, but the team never came together, and subsequent seasons brought teams that were almost laughable (not all games were as bad as a 22-0 pasting by the Pirates, but many of them felt that way).

There was a flurry of early-season excitement in a couple of seasons in the late '70s, but nothing really tangible until the 1984 division crown - the first postseason appearance since 1945, the Cubs won the first two games...then lost three in a row.

Four bad years, another division crown, eight more bad years, a wild card berth, four more bad years. The Cubs had their good years, but couldn't seem to build a consistent team, certainly not a consistent organization that could produce solid major leaguers that could put them in contention year after year.

And what was oddest was that nobody really seemed to care all that much. Due to a series of decisions made in the executive suite, Wrigley Field became a party site rather than a place to play baseball. And parties always attract more people than competitions. The deification of Harry Caray, a man with no Chicago connection, but an unshakable belief that the ballpark was about beer and babes and fun, a deification which continues now, more than 10 years after his death, was just a part of that. (By the way, I have it on good authority from a fellow who worked in a tavern at the time that Harry's pre-game fortification ritual involved stronger stuff than Budweiser.)

There became a perverse sense that the Cubs were "lovable losers," that we should all be content to enjoy the greatest ballpark in the world and the occasional victory, but keep expectations low on the field. The fan-unfriendly decisions continued: the extension of the bleachers, making it much less likely that fans could catch balls on the streets behind the stadium; the amazing rise in ticket prices, making it much harder for fans to go to games (unless they could wangle tax-subsidized corporate season tickets); the "authorized ticket reseller" that a court decided wasn't scalping; the movement in just a few years from 90% of the games telecast over free TV to fewer than 40%. (An extra note on this last point: spokespeople can get cavalier over these things, saying that only 15% of fans don't have cable, and the revenue model doesn't allow for old practices. But this excludes a lot of people who have been fans for years, older people living on a fixed income, or in nursing homes; it would be nice to see a bit more honest concern, and maybe some action.)

But then the company seemed to start spending money on the team. They won the division on 2003, were quite competitive in 2004, fell off a bit in 2005, had an injury-plagued awful season in 2006, but won the division in 2007 and 2008. Fans could forgive a lot of the infelicities if the team was actually winning, and everything seemed to point in the right direction.

But there is the regular season, and there is the postseason. In the 24 seasons from 1984 to 2007, the Cubs made the postseason 5 times, won only one series, had a 9-19 record (six of those victories coming in 2003). They were swept in 2007 by a good, not great, Arizona team.

2008, though, seemed to be the perfect year. The team had matured, added some good players, and many people felt that there was a beautiful symmetry in that it had been exactly 100 years since the Cubs last won the World Series (of course, if the God of Baseball has six fingers on each hand, fans shouldn't get excited until 2052...). And the team was strong, owning the best record in the league.

If you care enough to have read this far, you already know the result: A first round, three-game sweep by the (on paper) far weaker Los Angeles Dodgers. But it's not just that they lost, that happens, it's the abjectness with which they lost. Bad in every single aspect of the game, the Cubs were embarrassing.

I don't really have anything more to say right now. I'm not crushed, only a child feels crushed by the failure of paid mercenaries to perform as he would wish them to. But, in these tough times, it would have been nice to have something to cling to (I don't own guns, and I'm not particularly religious). Instead, it's just the usual sense of something lost, of excitement dampened, of hopes quelled.

Sports "journalism"

I know, I'm flogging a dead horse even to try to take seriously what goes on in the fun and games section of even a respected newspaper like the Chicago Tribune, but this is my last chance to criticize the "old' Tribune before their upcoming cool, compete-with-the-Internet redesign (coming Sunday, apparently).

Actually, the Tribune is only one of the many outlets that suffer from what I'm saying here, but I have higher expectations of them than I do of local sports news or the abomination that is sports talk radio. One assumes that their columnists are a little more considered and rational than the blowhards who make and take phone calls right after the game.

Of course, I'm wrong. Tuesday the buzz in Chicago was that the White Sox were going to wrap up the divisional championship with ease, that their 2-1/2 game lead made the title a cinch, that it was business as usual. I can't really convey to you the offhandedness with which these assumptions were made, but it pervaded every single story.

Let me say here that I am the unusual Cub fan who also roots for the Sox. My first baseball game was at old Comiskey Park, and the first pennant race I remember well was the 1967 American League, in which four teams, including both Sox, had a chance to win on the final weekend (I still have vague memories of the long list of playoff possibilities if 2, 3, or 4 teams all tied for the title). I don't follow the Sox as closely as I do the Cubs - I waste enough time on baseball every summer - but I have no animosity toward them, and I can never understand why that's considered so natural in Chicago (I think it has to do with pinheads, yes, pinheads).

Each day since Tuesday, though, has been a lesson in journalistic hysteria. The Sox lost all three games against the Twins this week, now trail them by a half game, and the attitude has turned 180 degrees. Now there's screaming, gnashing of teeth, calls for the manager's head, statements that the writer "knew it all along."

What a joke! Even within the strange rules of "sports journalism," this manic-depression is inappropriate. Try covering the games, gang, tell us what you see, explain why things are happening. I don't want a deep dose of your psyche every time a game goes the "wrong way." I'll decide what I want to feel, I don't need your hyper-overreaction trying to frame it for me.

The downside of prayer

Do you think there are a whole bunch of people sweating right now, people who underwent some crisis in their lives and, in the bargaining stage, said, "God, please just keep me alive until the Cubs win the World Series," then sat back, secure in the knowledge that they had very likely just become immortal?

Remembering Jack

Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of the great broadcaster, Jack Brickhouse. I say "broadcaster" rather than "baseball broadcaster" because, while Jack was best known for broadcasting the Chicago Cubs, he was one of those early-television guys who came in from radio and did everything. These are the people, of whom far too few are left, who built today's on-camera look and feel. They were pioneers in a medium that we can all agree is important and pervasive.

More personally, as a guy who grew up without a dad (it might not have made much difference; my father was apparently not much of a fan), I learned baseball from Jack Brickhouse. The Cubs played all day games at home, so Jack was on WGN when I came home from school or was inside during the summer. I don't know that Jack was a master of the nuances of the game, but he was able to convey, to a young fellow of seven or eight years old, just how special and fun and rewarding the game could be.

Unfortunately, in his later years, Jack was pushed aside in favor of the more bombastic style of Harry Caray, who seemed, rightly or wrongly, to convey the message that a baseball game was an excuse for having a good time (preferably with a beer in one hand and a blonde in the other). Jack was seen as old-school, maybe boring, certainly not the revenue generator that was the relentlessly commercial Caray.

But, to me, Jack was the uncle who takes you to the game, tells you old stories about people you've never heard of (but builds bridges to the history of the national pastime), loves and respects the game and teaches you to do the same. I had the pleasure of meeting Jack Brickhouse once, very briefly, and he embodied the word "gentleman." Today's broadcasters, who barely seem to fit the game in around promotional announcements and rock group worship, could learn a lot from this very professional broadcaster. I miss you, Jack, and I thank you for my lifetime of enjoyment from the great game of baseball.

Not living up to his potential

[Of necessity, short posting today. I'm still reeling from Citizen Carrie being marked as a spam blog by the benevolent algorithms of Google. While she was down and back up all in the time I was logged off, it was still a shock. If she can be tagged as having "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text," what hope is there for the rest of us?]

I'm going to wander into the recession thicket once again. I do so with trepidation, as it is likely that the ORSA (Optimized Recession Search Agent) employed by sbvor will bring him back to my site to engage in endless parsing of the "official" definition of a recession. Actually, he seems to have moved on to a better class of blog, so I may be safe this time.

At any rate, Kevin Drum at Political Animal writes today about how we may actually be in a recession:

It may not be the worst or deepest recession we've ever seen, but I'll bet it's going to last longer than your average downturn.

Most of his post quotes Brad DeLong on how the employment numbers are even worse when we look at the U-6 measure of unemployment, the one that actually tries to take into account part-time and "marginally-attached" workers.

There has been a lot written and said as to whether we're actually in a recession. I don't believe that question is the most important; the NBER still doesn't seem sure whether we had one six years ago, so it's difficult to care. There are no relief measures that kick in when a recession is officially declared, so it doesn't really matter.

Perhaps we're asking ourselves the wrong question in the first place. Most of the recession speculation takes GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as the proxy for the health of the economy. There are massive problems with this metric, most significantly that a change in the underlying structure of the economy can change the assumptions that are used to evaluate it.

How many people remember Cesar Cedeno? He was a baseball player who came up with the Houston Astros in the early 1970s, and was thought to have remarkable potential (his manager, Leo Durocher, compared him with Willie Mays). And he had a fine career, as can be seen here. But it was never quite what is was supposed to be, his great seasons pretty much over by the time he was 25. He had injury problems, and an incident in which his girlfriend was killed seemed to take its toll.

The site at Baseball Reference to which I linked above shows a Bill James statistic, Similarity Score, which evaluates each player as to how similar their statistics were to other ballplayers. Looking at Cedeno by age, he starts out being similar to Vada Pinson, a great player who also peaked early. Cedeno from 27 to 29 is most similar to Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski; after that, it becomes Johnny Damon, and finishes with Amos Otis. Cedeno was no slouch, but he was no Willie Mays, and there are still many who see him as a big disappointment given his talent.

And maybe we need to start looking at the economy that way. Not, how is it doing?, but, How should it be doing? I'm the first person to say that we still have amazing strengths, a well-educated workforce with an entrepreneurial bent, piles of existing intellectual capital, a regulatory framework that offers some protection to creators and workers alike, and an openness to new ideas and structures that dwarf what the rest of the world has. (And, yes, I well recognize that many of those things have been compromised, I write about that all the time, but we haven't given up all the good stiff yet.)

So what do we do? We take a seriously flawed measure, take even a slight increase as evidence that we're not in an "officially-declared" recession, and feel better. But we should be looking at how this economy should be doing. Why are we comfortable with tiny increments to GDP, when we should be charging ahead like a team of horses? Instead of looking at crude aggregates, someone should develop an underperformance index, and we should be able to see just how our policies and practices are getting in the way of making the best life for everyone.

Stan the Man

By the time I became a fan of baseball, Stan Musial had been retired for several years. Nonetheless, he was still a major figure in the game, talked about with reverence. Not only was he one of the true greats in terms of on-the-field performance, he was considered quite the gentleman.

Now, of course, Stan the Man is pretty much forgotten by baseball fans. Despite having statistics that remain high up the lists (get more detail here) even 45 years after his retirement, he gets nowhere near the recognition that he is due. He was both outstanding and consistent, never having a season below league average (not at the age of 20, not at the age of 42). Stan won 3 MVPs, finished second 4 other times, and was in the top 10 in voting 14 times (the last at age 41).

But I'm not going to go on and on about his statistics (OK, I'll mention that his career spanned the years 1941-63; he played against Johnny Cooney, who broke into the majors in 1921, and against Pete Rose, who was still playing in 1986). More importantly, he is still regarded as one of the finest men ever to have played professional sports.

It's as if we only have a limited number of spaces to remember retired athletes. In baseball, we have Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, who vie for the unofficial Greatest Living Ballplayer title, and maybe some regional figures, like Ernie Banks in Chicago, but that's it. You can actually make a case for Musial as the GLB, but there are fewer people who saw him play, he spent his entire career in St. Louis, and he didn't set that single notable record that someone broke.

Nevertheless, Stan Musial is a strong contender, and could well have been one of the 10-15 best baseball players in history. If you want to read more, I point you to a fine summary at FanNation, and, of course, to the post from the wonderful Joe Posnanski that inspired this one. (You can also vote at Joe's site for the Greatest Living Ballplayer. I wish Joe had used something other than single-choice voting, because I would have to pick Willie Mays first, as have 38% of the respondents so far, but I'd sure like to offer some support for Stan as one of my top 3 or 4. And who the heck was the one person who voted for Reggie Jackson - Reggie?)

It's only money

In an otherwise workmanlike account of Thursday's exciting Chicago Cubs game, Dave van Dyck of the Chicago Tribune begins:

On their first day without Alfonso Soriano, their $136 million left fielder, the Cubs won a game with two players they will pay about $600,000—combined—this season.

The implication is, of course, that $600K is just a trifle, that one could hardly expect players working for such a paltry sum to perform at a major league level.

But it's all relative, and I'm not taking van Dyck to task; the minimum salary in major league baseball is $390,000, so getting two productive players for $600,000 (they make the rest of their salary out of payments from their previous teams) is truly a bargain in the context of today's professional sports.

My point is, how remarkable that a reporter would toss this number in and count on every reader to understand the context. Salaries are so high, and so commonly accepted as high, that it's commonplace for a reporter to cite this as evidence of poverty - and we all read it and understand.

I don't need comments telling me what I already know, why the limited supply and insatiable demand for sports creates huge income streams and the players are just getting their due. There's a good chance I've read more than you have about the economics of professional sports.

I'm just making an observation as to how casual we've become about these matters; an athlete or entertainer makes millions, the Forbes Celebrity 100 draws quite a bit of interest, and it's ho-hum, just the way the world works.

I could go on and write something about the dubious power of Ashley Tisdale (#94) or the Jonas Brothers (#89), contrast it to the very real unseen struggles of the great majority of Americans, point out that three chimps could open for Miley Cyrus and make $12 million, but my readers are smart enough to fill in those blanks for themselves.

Th Th

I was listening to the Cubs game last night on WGN 720, and Pat Hughes, their fine announcer, said that Colorado Rockies outfielder Seth Smith was the only name he could think of that ended in two "th" sounds (he opined that an impaired person might say Garth Brooks that way).

I don't think he was trying very hard, since he forgot the undoubtedly vast population of Elizabeth Smiths out there. Faith Smith may also mind being overlooked.

Review - Stat One

Demonstrating once again that I am not just a political and economics blogger, I picked up a book at the library called Stat One which purports to rate "baseball's all-time greatest players." (I am deliberately omitting the author's name for reasons that will become obvious.)

I have been a baseball fan since I was a kid, which is curious since I had to pick it up on my own (my father passed away when I was young, not that he was a big sports fan anyway). My first teacher was the great Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse, too little-remembered today, even in Chicago. The advantages of daytime baseball and 144 televised games a year meant that the games were the only alternative to soap operas, and I picked up on it, and became a devoted fan (and how many young potential fans are being lost as the Cubs move to high concession-revenue night games and, now, only 60 games a year on free TV?).

My other passion as a lad was mathematics, so I was a natural stats-gatherer and -rememberer. I played table sports games, and derived just as much pleasure out of collecting the numbers as in playing the games. My first computer programs (heck, calculator programs) were written to collect and analyze baseball stats.

So when Bill James came along, I was ready to read what he had to say. Through his brilliant Baseball Abstracts I understood the game better, appreciated talents that were lost in the statistics we were given. (I don't mean to slight the few who were doing similar things before; in particular, Earnshaw Cook did some very early work which, while flawed, was trying to answer some of the same questions.) That you could find the true value of a player or a strategy, rather than accepting "conventional wisdom," was revolutionary.

Of course, there has been backlash against what has been perceived as the "geeks take over" mentality. Many people criticize James and those who have come after for an over-reliance on numbers. And there are those, but James has been consistent in using statistics as a tool to better understand and appreciate the game.

Let me steal from myself: the other day, Joe Posnanski posted one of his typically wonderfully long posts, something about wins earned by a pitcher. Along the way, in a footnote, he wrote

I want to point out that I got these statistics from the Bill James Website. I would also like to take a moment to say something about my friend Bill, something that he probably would not want me to say. But every couple of weeks, it seems I will see yet another person throw Bill out there as the essence of statistical evils and pajama-wearing baseball geekdom. It makes makes me pretty ill. True, part if it is because we are friends, but a much larger part is that if you read Bill’s work at all, if you look at his theories with anything resembling an open mind, if you consider at all what he’s getting at … you realize that the man LOVES baseball. I mean loves baseball, loves the game, loves the stories, loves the characters, loves the ins and outs of strategy, loves the moments, loves trying to figure out why things happen, and why so many people buy into stuff that is probably nonsense. I don’t mind people saying that Bill is full of crap — hell, we ALL have to deal with that (and Bill is never shy about saying that someone else is full of crap, including me). But the people who try to make it sound like Bill’s love and understanding of baseball are wrapped up in obscure mathematics and unworkable thoughts and cold data just don’t get it at all.

I wrote in a comment:

Not so much to say about true wins, it’s another way to see things, and that’s always useful (well, not always, but…).

But to pick up on the Bill James note, I absolutely agree. Those who blame him for “ruining” baseball with his consarned stats have not really read him.

There may be people now who love stats, and find baseball a good outlet (because of the massive number of numbers) for that love, and not really love the game, but one could never have that feeling about Bill James. Again, you have to read what he’s written, but his passion has always been apparent (and it is what made the Abstracts so popular).

I always got the feeling that statistics were simply a means to an end for Bill, that they provided the only way for him to get at truths about the sport he loved. And I have always admired the myth-busters, those people who advanced the outlandish simply because the facts took them that way. Bill fits into that group of inquirers.

If Bill is not considered seriously for the Baseball Hall of Fame simply because he challenged conventional wisdom, despite the fact that he changed the way in which we all look at the game, well, that would be one of the two greatest injustices perpetrated by that body (and we all know Buck O’Neil is the other). If they have room for Alex Pompez and Bowie Kuhn, then Bill absolutely belongs there.

To explain to anyone who doesn't know how influential James has been is nearly impossible. So to find a book that suggests that it will rate players in a new way, but whose author has clearly not read Bill James or any of the subsequent research, would seem to be impossible.

But Stat One is such a book. I won't beat the author into the ground, but he claims to have found, "a comprehensive statistic...to analyze and compare baseball players across history with one another and to help answer...countless [questions] that remain unanswered. To my knowledge, no statistic like this currently exists, or has ever existed for that matter." That statement is specious nonsense, many statistics to do this have been proposed (by the way, his list of questions include such perennials as comparing Mantle to Mays, Cobb to Hornsby, who is the greatest player in history?).

Then he proposes taking his P/E Average (for Offensive Production and Efficiency Average) and combining it with traditional statistics and subjective factors, then classifying each player as Category 1 through 5. Of course, if his new stat is really "the single best statistic available to measure a baseball player's offensive success and contribution," why does he have to look at other statistics? Why does he look at Most Valuable Player awards? How does he measure leadership when he hasn't seen many of these players? Why does postseason success matter so much, when that is so team-dependent? Why can't I find a new statistic to help me answer these questions?

There are two components to his average. The first is Net Runs, R + RBI - HR. This measurement has come up a lot over the years (I thought of it when I was about 10), and it has a certain appeal (for me, it was that you could calculate it off the back of a baseball card). The author explains why we subtract home runs: Willie Mays comes to bat with two men on, hits a three-run homer. The Giants lead 3-0. If you don't subtract the homer, Mays gets credit for four runs, but the Giants only scored three. So the author subtracts the home run itself.

But, wait. The two guys on base each get credit for scoring a run, so now you've given five runs for a 3-0 lead. Wouldn't it be better not to subtract the homer, but divide the total by 2? Then the two guys on base each get 0.5, Mays gets 2.0, and that seems a little more fair (after all, if the other guys don't get there, Mays doesn't account for 3 runs). But even that adjustment doesn't solve all the problems with this stat, which has been extremely well-chronicled. (We still have the issue that runs and runs batted in are poor measures of accomplishment, dependent as they both are on the performances of others.)

The other component is Complete Bases, which is total bases plus walks plus hit by pitch plus net stolen bases. This isn't a bad measurement of achievement, but it does mix together elements of on-base percentage and slugging percentage.

At this point the author goes off the rails, as he doubles Net Runs, adds it to Complete Bases, and divides the sum by plate appearances. Why does he double Net Runs? So it will be roughly equal to Complete Bases. That's it, he wants to value them both the same, so he arbitrarily doubles one.

At this point we're only at page 8. I won't take any specific examples (Babe Ruth comes out as the best player ever, what a surprise). None of his results is truly bizarre, though many of his comments are ("[Derek] Jeter is the pure embodiment of a winning ballplayer who rises to the occasion when the game is on the line....He doesn't think his team will win. He knows it."). This is pure emotional twaddle, and appears periodically through this long book.

What's worse is the author starts to believe his own self-hype, a common failing of books of this type. In his comment on Johnny Bench, he states, "Unfortunately for Reds fans everywhere, he's only second on my list." Oh, no, get the counselors out to Cincinnati, this writer has Bench second, watch for falling bodies.

This is the kind of book that came out in the early 1980s when Bill James proved there was a market for this. Most of these pretenders fell by the wayside quickly. How, with all the knowledge that has been accumulated, a book like this gets published, I can't begin to imagine.

And it's not out of a vanity press. It's published by McGraw-Hill. A major publishing company! And what's worse is that it was championed by (and the foreword was written by) Bill Madden of the New York Daily News, who says he's going to consult it before making his Hall of Fame selections. I'd give Ray Romano a vote before I'd give one to Madden.

You can spend $17.95 ($12.21 discounted) on this book, or you can look online for The New Bill James Historical Abstract. It's a little dated, but it is based on far more solid research, and each page has more entertainment value than the dry stat recital of Stat One. Agree or disagree with James' ratings, they come from the mind of someone who has done serious thinking about the game, and, more importantly, someone who loves the game.

A well-deserved award

Congratulations to Joe Posnanski on receiving the Casey Award for the best baseball book of 2007 for The Soul of Baseball. (His post about it is here, and the list of other books that have received this award testify as to its significance.) Just four days ago, I wrote about my respect for Joe's blog and the book, which stands as one of the finest baseball books I have ever read. Whatever your religious beliefs, you have to hope that Buck O'Neil has some consciousness about how much this chronicle of his life has touched people. Great, great book.