Month: April 2005

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The New Discussion Group has been a great success, except that the hardware hosting the database side of it has been spotty of late and this afternoon seems to have crashed totally. They’re rebuilding the drive, apparently have backups and expect we’ll be operational this evening sometime.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. This new hosting service is so on the ball with customer service that I’m giving the benefit of the doubt for what has been a fairly nasty run of failures on this one server. If the pratfalls go on for too long we’ll have to change things again. Yuck.

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The New York Times > Sports > Baseball > Keeping Score: Baseball’s Leading Man of Math Has Some Second Thoughts About the Numbers

In February SABR’s Baseball Research Journal published a Bill James story called “Underestimating the Fog” in which he racants his previous assertions that there are no such things as clutch hitting and hot and cold streaks. His reasons are mature, humble, and well worth noting, especially because they illustrate all sorts of problems SABRmetrics have encounted because of small sample sizes and the “fogginess” of the baseball data.

James wrote: “We ran astray because we have been assuming that random data is proof of nothingness, when in reality random data proves nothing.”

If the intensely complicated calculations required to translate player performance in each stint in each ballpark is used to rationalize entire careers, but if much of that data (or the resulting translations) is actually noise, how conclusive can any conclusions be?

The NY Times link above will turn into an advertisement for you to pay to read the story in their archives in a couple of days. University of Nebraska publishes BRJ, but their website doesn’t seem to have a link to this edition. One reason to get quickly to the Times’ story is because David Leonhardt’s conclusion strikes me as right, in re clutch performance.

I think so because John McEnroe once said to me in an interview about rising to win the big points, “The best players win the big points, because they’re the best players.”

James is probably right about the fog, but oddly that really illustrates more of the problems with Win Shares than it does the existence of clutch hitting.

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Yahoo! Sports – Mulder Wins!

Mark Mulder fans and owners have to be pleased with the two hitter, but this bravura performance came against the punchless Pirates, and in his eight innings he walked more than he struck out (especially significant because he walked only three).

Strikeouts haven’t really been a big part of Mulder’s success in the past, so one can hope that this is the start of his recovery from whatever has been bothering him since last July, but he still has some tests to pass.

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The New York Times > National > Beyond Balco: How One Pill Escaped the List of Controlled Steroids

This is from the NY Times, so it will disappear into their pay archive in a day or two, but it tells the tale of a supplement (DHEA) that was once banned by the FDA but is now sold over the counter as a food supplement, and which isn’t on the list of banned PEDs. It was, in fact, granted an exemption from that January 2005 law that made testosterone precursors, like Andro, illegal.

Why? Political sway, it seems, though Utah Senator, who favored the examption for DHEA, says it has nothing to do with the fact that his son is a lobbyist for a trade group of supplement manufacturers and distriibutors. Nah.

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The New Ask Rotoman Discussion Board :: Index

Here is the new discussion board. There are forums for baseball talk and non baseball talk. These won’t be moderated in a strict sense, but while spirited discussion is encouraged, personal attacks will not be tolerated.

I wish it were possible to get phpBB to emulate the Boards2Go look, but this skin is as close as I could come. The advantage is that old posts will be archived, so the dumb things we say won’t necessarily go away in 300 messages.

Post accordingly.

I’m going to keep the Boards2Go conversation going, too. It won’t be censored in any way, and the link at the top of this page will continue to go there until next week.

Enjoy.