Funny

Is Nate Silver Funnier Than Steven Colbert?

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I’ve always thought that the virtue, if you want to call it that, of baseball prospectus’s PECOTA was a marketing angle. By defining confidence intervals it inverts the projection process. The projection is assumed right, and it is the player’s peformance that deviates. I met Nate a few years ago at a dinner and I was surprised by how much I liked him. We rode to Brooklyn together on the subway afterward and, while I wasn’t surprised by how much he knew about baseball projection, I was impressed by how open he was to other ideas.

Nate’s new venture is a website tracking and adjusting public opinion polls about this upcoming election we’re having. It’s called fivethirtyeight.com and it’s full of interesting facts, opinions ideas, and though avowedly nonpartisan, they’ve got Obama with a 90 percent chance of winning the election. That sounds good to me.

Nate was just on the Colbert Report and he’s really funny.

But probably not as funny as  Colbert, at least not for the long run.

Texas Rangers Slip n Slide

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It was raining like crazy here in New York last night, with massive lightning and thunder. Somehow it took the Mets a couple of hours to call things off, just enough time for some players to come up with a playful idea.

It’s nice to see the Texas Rangers having fun, but when your fantasy team (or if they were your Texas Rangers) you’d have to be a little alarmed to see the fragile Milton Bradley and thus far injury prone Josh Hamilton running in the rain on a slick tarp. No doubt Ian Kinsler owners had similar concerns.

On the other hand, isn’t it great to see the usually dour Bradley having fun?

Bill James shares his method to determine when a college basketball game is out of reach.

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Slate Magazine

A week or two ago I posted at pattonandco.com (Barry Bonds) that Bill James’ recent work seemed shoddy. The ideas weren’t fully thought through, and the execution was haphazard. But that was about his baseball work.

This story is good fun, even if Bill reveals himself as a Huckabee supporter, and has a bit of fun with figuring out who is going to win basketball games (which on a practical level might save someone wasted hours, depending on how many basketball games they watch).

The most excellent thing about this is that it doesn’t matter if the method works or not. Here is Bill James having some fun, and that’s fun for us. Bravo.