What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

Post by closed » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 1:18 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #15

legohead wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow baseball. Are you saying that a large part of baseball is luck, and you are bound to lose regardless of how skilled your team is?

Practically everything in the world more complex than basic physics is non-deterministic, especially who wins games of skill. Things occur or don't occur with probabilities. Even if you have a 95% chance of winning each game (unrealistic IMO), the probability of winning 81 games in a row is under 2%. This is less apparent in other sports than in baseball, not because the outcomes of those games are more deterministic…

Post by School-Cotton » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 1:22 AM UTC

closed wrote: post #21

School-Cotton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically everything in the world more complex than basic physics is non-deterministic, especially who wins games of skill. Things occur or don't occur with probabilities. Even if you have a 95% chance of winning each game (unrealistic IMO), the probability of winning 81 games in a row is under 2%. This is less apparent in other sports than in baseball, not because the outcomes of those games are more deterministic…

You are a bayesian analysis with strong priors on the chance of winning. I'm not objecting to your critique (as I don't know much about sports), I just keep thinking of P(data | model).

Post by largote » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 2:06 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #23

closed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a bayesian analysis with strong priors on the chance of winning. I'm not objecting to your critique (as I don't know much about sports), I just keep thinking of P(data | model).

Well, there is no sport or other organized competitive activity I can think of where the best in the world beats the second best in the world more than 95% of the time.

Post by allisthemoist » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 2:25 AM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #4

I like that this captures something very important about Data Science. The data may give the truth, but it's the story that makes people change. The story taps our emotions, which cause us to change behavior faster than hard data. The chief analyst at a prior employer once commented that he liked people "with degrees that suggest storytelling" in addition to their math/science/engineering pedigrees.

Post by markeroon » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 3:51 AM UTC

largote wrote: post #25

School-Cotton wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is no sport or other organized competitive activity I can think of where the best in the world beats the second best in the world more than 95% of the time.

Maybe sprinting?