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What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

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Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#41

Post by ericdykstra »

legohead wrote: post #5
cortesoft wrote: post #2

The idea that a baseball team could ever go undefeated for even half a season is ridiculous. No amount of data analysis can make you do that. That would be like saying that a perfect poker player could win every hand. Even if your opponent was playing with their cards face up, sometimes he is gonna hit his inside straight on the river.

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?

Off the top of my head, here's a list of reasons that may tip the scale of an outcome in favor of the worse overall team in a baseball contest, whether luck or other factors. (the first two are by far the most important, and are in general order of how much variability each factors to a game):

- sequencing (3 walks, 3 strikeouts, and a home run in an inning can end with 1 or 4 runs depending on sequencing)

- ball-in-play luck (batters have little-to-no control over whether their line drive finds a glove for an out or a gap for a double)

- pitcher/hitter matchups favoring one team or another

- other luck over a single game (2+ errors in a game, 3+ home runs in a game, etc) that are well above the average for any team, but any team will have many of these games over the course of a season

- umpire strike zone favoring one team's pitchers

- umpire calls consistency

- park/weather favoring one team's players

If you need any explanation on any of these I'd be happy to provide it. I'll add more if I think of them, but this should give you a pretty good idea of why the best teams in baseball usually end up with a less than 60% win record.

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#42

Post by kriro »

cortesoft wrote: post #10
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?

Yes, there is a lot of luck. For one thing, the gap between very bad players and very good players is fairly small in an absolute sense; for example, a player who gets a hit 25% of the time would have trouble staying in the league, but a player who gets a hit 30% of the time has a good chance of being an all-star. A 5% increase in your success rate separates the very worst players from the very best. There is a great…

Isn't a 20% skill difference pretty meaningful in most endeavors? Maybe not the difference between unemployment and rock star but being 20% better at sales for example can be quite lucrative.

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#43

Post by chris_overseas »

phillc73 wrote: post #40
billforsternz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a proud New Zealander it pains me to point out that the All Blacks still fall way short of the benchmark set by the parent comment - i.e. beating the second best 95% of the time.

As an Australian, maybe it just feels that way.

[Edit: just realised the original point was talking about beating the world's second best, not any opposition, so the All Blacks still don't come close to the 95% in the context originally mentioned]

That made me laugh (I'm a kiwi), but it's not just a feeling, it's not far off the truth. With Steve Hansen as coach the All Blacks' have won a staggering 92% of their games[1].

There's plenty of articles talking about how their dominance has increased through the professional era[2]. I'm not sure how likely it is to last though given just how many of our key players have left since the world cup, and historically I've NEVER felt confident of the outcome any time we play Australia.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/international/ne...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/sep/11/all-blacks...

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#44

Post by ubernostrum »

legohead wrote: post #5
cortesoft wrote: post #2

The idea that a baseball team could ever go undefeated for even half a season is ridiculous. No amount of data analysis can make you do that. That would be like saying that a perfect poker player could win every hand. Even if your opponent was playing with their cards face up, sometimes he is gonna hit his inside straight on the river.

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?

cortesoft is on track by pointing out how small the gaps are (in absolute terms) between bad, average, good and very good in baseball. And just as importantly, the gaps have been shrinking. Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote about this in explaining why we don't see .400 batting averages anymore (that's a hit 4 out of every 10 times a player bats; it last happened in the major leagues in 1941).

The average major-league player of today is significantly better than the average player of seventy years ago, so there are fewer opportunities for the best player in the league to take advantage of large numbers of truly-outmatched opponents and achieve inflated performance numbers. The highest batting average in the modern era of baseball is .426 by Nap Lajoie in 1901. 2015's highest batting average in the major leagues was .338, and it was .341 the year before; even an average of .360 or better is now rare (only happened eight times since the year 2000).

And overall team performance is affected in the same way. The 1906 Chicago Cubs own the best win percentage in major-league history at .763 (116 wins out of 152 games played). That year the worst team (the Boston Americans, predecessors of today's Boston Red Sox) went 49-105, a win percentage of .318. Last year (2015) the best win percentage was .617 while the worst was .389. Only four major-league teams failed to win at least 70 games last year, and over half managed to win at least 81 games (81-81 being an even .500 win percentage with the season now 162 games long), while at the top there were seven teams with at least 90 wins, and four of them had at least 95 wins.

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#45

Post by vwelling »

For us nerds who want to effect change, and who are convinced data should be all you need, the book "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard" by Chip and Dan Heath is a highly recommended read. It'll tell you all about the story, or as they call it: the elephant.

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#46

Post by danieltillett »

pimlottc wrote: post #35
tempestn wrote: post #31

This is a great lesson for hackers in general. Many of us, myself included, have a tendency to expect data to automatically win arguments. I mean, if something is irrefutably true with the data to prove it, that's the end of the discussion, right? But just as in this case, in reality, it's not even the beginning. Whether you're trying to convince your manager to go in a particular direction, or you're trying to motiv…

The best manager I ever had was great at this. He was a former developer who understood the tech but knew how to speak the executives' language. You could convince him with a good tech story and then he'd turn around and sell to his bosses with a good business story.

Domain translators are undervalued. Anyone who can effectively translate the different needs and desires between groups is worth their weight in gold.

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#47

Post by phillc73 »

chris_overseas wrote: post #43
phillc73 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Australian, maybe it just feels that way.

[Edit: just realised the original point was talking about beating the world's second best, not any opposition, so the All Blacks still don't come close to the 95% in the context originally mentioned] That made me laugh (I'm a kiwi), but it's not just a feeling, it's not far off the truth. With Steve Hansen as coach the All Blacks' have won a staggering 92% of their games[1]. There's plenty of articles talking about h…

The last time the All Blacks lost to Australia, in New Zealand, was 2001. That's 18 tests at home without loss to the Wallabies.[0] Of course, Australia hasn't been ranked second best in the world that entire time.

Against the Boks it's six home games all won, since the last loss in 2009.[1]

Overall, home and away, not quite the 95% originally suggested, but still incredibly dominant in the age of professional team sport.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rugby_union_matches...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rugby_union_matches...

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#49

Post by ethbro »

danieltillett wrote: post #46
pimlottc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best manager I ever had was great at this. He was a former developer who understood the tech but knew how to speak the executives' language. You could convince him with a good tech story and then he'd turn around and sell to his bosses with a good business story.

Domain translators are undervalued. Anyone who can effectively translate the different needs and desires between groups is worth their weight in gold.

Agreed! I think this also cuts to the fact that data doesn't win arguments. Data + time spent studying and understanding data wins.

Most people can't or don't want to take time (it's inefficient). So they make decisions based on estimates / stories / approximations / biases / gut and the world keeps spinning.

Which means your goal should be to most accurately frame your data in terms of their stories (translating as much or little as they require).

Re: What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team

#50

Post by thaumasiotes »

tempestn wrote: post #31

This is a great lesson for hackers in general. Many of us, myself included, have a tendency to expect data to automatically win arguments. I mean, if something is irrefutably true with the data to prove it, that's the end of the discussion, right? But just as in this case, in reality, it's not even the beginning. Whether you're trying to convince your manager to go in a particular direction, or you're trying to motiv…

> the data will help you decide where to go, but you need the right story to get people to follow you there.

> And just because it's a "story" doesn't mean it's some BS you make up to get people to agree with you.

Maybe so. But on the other hand... http://dilbert.com/strip/2006-08-05

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