Ah, yes…but the acreage wasn’t as green when Alf and Ralph Munro Elias owned The Elias Sports Bureau.
There is no doubt in my mind that stats and advanced metrics are about to become a big business. It really always was, despite what some of the sabermetricans claim, even Bill James showed frustration in “Moneyball” with the Elias Sports Bureau, the big fish in the stats game at the time, accusing them of “being out to make money, steal his ideas, and make disparaging comments about him.” It sounds like James had a legitimate claim, after all, he was the same type of startup that most new media types are today. Big companies are always trying to cut off the air supply of the entrepreneur types because they know their arrogance and bureaucracy can’t compete, but their money can.
This brings me to my point. I love the Bloomberg Software and applaud the work of the company. Incorporating someone like Jonah Keri only will give them more credibility within the blogosphere. Not many large companies embrace the thoughts of independent media, which they clearly did last Sunday. With that, the burning question that went unanswered is the engine behind their “B-Rank” system for players. Bloomberg, obviously, will not reveal the formula behind it. This would be equivalent to a consumer goods company telling its competitors what exactly is in the “special sauce” their customers enjoy so much. All we know, according to the companies latest press communication, is that it’s a “mathematical algorithm where they weigh a player’s performance in the key categories – homers, saves, etc. – over the past four years, with greater weight accorded to the most recent season, and so on down the line.” This ranking is used more for fantasy purposes, but isn’t the true value the profit behind it? To credit Bloomberg they have stood their ground, but embraced the demands by giving out enough information. They didn’t slander the critic who asked the question. They didn’t even behave like an arrogant Fortune 500 company. Wow what a concept!
...Did Bill James receive scorn for accusing Elias about being about money? Remember, they, not James, were the mainstream at the time. Probably not, but since the beginning of time, way before sabermetrics existed, people wanted to profit from their ideas. That is why I will continue to challenge everyone, big and small, when they claim absolute knowledge on a particular front because, to quote Bill James, “it’s about the money.”
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That is correct.
he doesn't have the ability to comprehend the difference between raw data (which is what Elias was holding onto) and analytical data (which is what Bill James tries to do with the raw data) Raw data shouldn't be held ransom by a company, it's just information, analysis has some dollar value though.
Disagree substantially. He interviewed me about my book a week and a half ago for a radio show or podcast or something (not sure -- it was 40 minutes of interviewing without a commercial break) and was very polite and fine the entire time. He seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say and gave me ample chances to plug my book. The interview was only supposed to last 20 minutes, but went on twice as long.
Didn't he have a dialouge with tangotiger about something not so long ago? If he doesn't always agree with everything said around these parts, that doesn't mean he's reflexively anti-stathead.
Apparently it was a little over two weeks ago. So much for my memory.
I should probably go look this up before I spout off, but I don't think Bill ever said Elias should give away their product for free. What upset him was that Elias was the sole gatekeeper of the information he was looking for, and either wouldn't sell it or would only sell it for some hugely exorbitant price.
He also was upset that they ripped off his ideas for the Elias Baseball Analysts, which came out for at least a few years back in the 1980s and pretty much cloned the format of the Baseball Abstract.
It's like he actively decided to be anti-stathead for the sole reason that it's the best way to generate reactions. He honestly seems like he knows the material, but will then be contrarian(sp) for the sake of being contrarian.
I have no problem with being against saber "doctrine" (as I actively debate and disagree with the value of steals and break even point that is acceptable) but his articles occasionally are designed to incite a stat based viewpoint into a frenzy, just because it generates hits
Or there is the reality: he doesn't always agree with you. You can know the material and still come to a different conclusion. And it is reactions like this that reinforce what I often see: Mike is always interested in learning more and evolving, while many of his critics, frankly, don't seem to want to have the discussion, so they attempt to disqualify him from the discussion.
If Mike were so interested in blasting sabermetric ideology, he wouldn't have had conversations with Chris, or Tom, or he wouldn't want me to write with a sabermetric bent, or frequently look to stats himself to get a sense of players, etc. Indeed, and I don't know why this is so hard to believe- he's passionate about baseball, and coming at it from a different perspective than many of us. Seriously. That's his whole thing.
I've known him for three years, had numerous conversations with him, and can tell you for sure that he believes what he argues. Nevertheless, people who have never met him continue to assert otherwise- obviously, the epitome of speaking with no evidence whatsoever. Obviously, as Chris (and Tom Tango on the article's comments) make clear, their experience with them reinforces this point-to meet Mike is to determine that such a point of view about him is nonsense.
There's a larger issue here, though- Chris's book is awesome, and I need to write about it already.
Essentially, imagine if your favorite pay web site, which charges you maybe $20 a month to see everything, changed their prices to $1,000 a month. Imagine if that site had a monopoly, and there were no other sites or even books. Then imagine that if anyone else set up a site, they would set up a counter-site to compete with the new site's particular format by stealing its methods, and then get the methods wrong. That's Elias. They are now a much smaller business, I believe, while STATS, Inc. has lot of the business Elias used to have. Elias has deserved every bit of this IMO. - Brock Hanke
Which led to a third data source.
Incidentally James had another substantial complaint about Elias. When they got control of both the Red and Green books they standardized on lowest common product. If something appeared in only one of the books they dropped it.
By the way, Brock's hypothetical reminds me of the whole SABR - ProQuest debacle a few years ago. Thank God for the Mid-Continent Public Library! I don't know where I'd be without those newspaper archives.
Bingo.
Now that is unequivocally untrue and you know it. Yes, he had the Q & A with Tom Tango, but that was only after months of people offering to explain the sabermetric concepts he was grossly misunderstanding and unfairly portraying.
I'm going to go with my own experiences with Mike, along with Tom Tango and Chris Jaffe on this one. I thought it was an interesting perspective, and the discussion that has followed here has been similarly interesting.
Now that is unequivocally untrue and you know it.
Very well, James. You somehow know what is in Mike's head without ever meeting him, and inside my own head without ever meeting me. Now that's intellectually honest debate.
Replace stathead with mainstream, and this sounds like the original idea behind Baseball Prospectus. From other descriptions here, it sounds like Silva's as bright as Huckabay.
Some people have time and energy for dealing with grandstanders. Some people don't, and I don't see anything wrong with those people that don't.
I can see where Howard and Nabbit are coming from - it may be that Silva is charming in person. But his ideas are crap.
I understand that John and Dick are both out of STATS, Inc. now, and I have no idea how that company now operates, but I assure you that, in the early 1990s, they were Heaven, Inc. to me and to pretty much everyone else I knew in the sabermetrics business. - Brock
As for being anti-stat, I don't understand how this piece could come across that. I was re-reading Moneyball a couple of weeks back and found it ironic that James was accusing others of being "about money", something I had talked about weeks earlier. I respect a great deal the work many are doing, and have nothing against BP, Bloomberg, etc. charging. I just think skepticism from the unknown is fair play as well. If Bloomberg touts a new revolutionary stat can I trust that it really is revolutionizing the game, or simply another repackaged version of "Cool Ranch Doritos".
Tango, on the other hand, as I learned, has been forthright with his information. My main critcism of advanced stats is the reliance on UZR and WAR, both of which I believe have huge faults. Not saying it should be banned, but they aren't "advanced", no pun intended, to use. Later today I am going to defend Luis Castillo since, I really don't think his defense is as bad as UZR makes him out to be.
I will say with F/x data, Bloomberg, and others coming into the foray, this should change and defensive metrics very well could be as accurate as the offensive stats we use today.
As for STATS. I tried to get some old Knicks boxscores from (pre-1990 games) them around 2002. They rudely dismissed me on the phone and said I would have to pay 6k and above just to start talking about the possibility. So I can understand where someone like James is coming from.
This is a very talented write who, for some reason, spends a great deal of time slamming sites (like mine) on Twitter, BBTF, and in the comments section. He is currently mocking another popular site the last couple of days. It flat out public bullying tactics that he should be above, but for some reason, gets enjoyment out of it. If I were still in high school or college (alas those days ended in the nineties), I might jump into the fray, but really don't have the time to get into a pissing match.
I personally don't care, because I have nothing against the guy. He has every right to not like my work or disagree. I met someone from his site, AA, last Sunday at Bloomberg and had a great conversation. Amazin Ave is one of the best NY Mets sites out there. I wish they wouldn't treat their positions like political ideology, but I still go there even when I disagree with their positions.
Not sure why he takes dialogue about advanced metrics personally.
If I am so anti stats, look at my "resources" sidebar. I add sites there to give readers a chance to reference other ideas. The whole goal of my site is to advance the dialogue of baseball in a diverse way.
I even had a gentleman on my show that runs a site called "Radical Baseball" - his ideas about the game are so far out of the mainstream I was mocked for even having him, but it was interesting conversation.
I could see if I was antagonizing, rejecting the stat, and then doing it again. I have learned so much since I started the show in 2007 from civil discourse that I believe others would benefit from this type of debate.
WTF does this even mean? What does the second sentence have to do with the first? Does "Probably not" refer to the second sentence or the first? What does the last sentence have to do with anything, or with itself?
The whole post is riddled with nonsensical garbage. "The disciples of James are sometimes behaving just like the entity that James himself criticized. How ironic is that?" Well, gee, I don't know. Maybe if you provided an example, I might be able to assess the level of irony.
Are you sure?
Just read the comments about writers who don't use advanced metrics to make a point, or their HOF ballot, and that all should make sense. Personally, if you don't see the nasty discourse by some in the advanced metric community, you quite simply aren't paying attention- with all due respect.
Clearly he is unfamiliar with Bill James' origins in baseball research. No one was more surprised than James himself that his audience would grow to the size it did.
There is no doubt in my mind that stats and advanced metrics are about to become a big business. It really always was
Well, was it or wasn't it?
Setting aside the numerous issues a high school English teacher might have with the essay, with regards to the numerous non-seqiturs and dubious grammar, it is unclear what points exactly Mr. Silva is trying to make. One would think that reading the work of a self-professed communicator wouldn't be such a challenging enterprise. If I wanted to work that hard, I'd stick with Finnegan's Wake.
Personal swipe aside, James could be surprised that his "hobby" turned out to be so big, but all along wasn't that what he hoped? Again, this wasn't a knock on James, stats, or anyone, but rather just simple irony. I happen to think James has a great point about Elias, FWIW
Howard, I understand your need to defend your friend/co-writer/benefactor to the bitter end, but I could provide a ton of examples of offers from the past few months to help Mike understand the advanced stats he was knocking (without even understanding them). That was always my biggest gripe -- writing about and knocking something that was not even understood in the first place. Then a stubborn refusal to learn about the concepts when offered.
I also find your comment entertaining given your friend/co-writer/benefactors subsequent comment on this thread. I never knock anyone who isn't truly worth knocking.
I am not denying that I wasn't obtuse about advanced metrics earlier in the sites tenure. Yes, indeed, you did reach out, no doubt about it. Some people come around slower than others in concepts. Also, some of the things I wrote were tongue in cheek, which you clearly took seriously. I still disagree with your reliance on WAR and UZR to make your points, although you have come around in that matter as well.
As for you knocking people that don't deserved to be knocked, I suggest you go read your Twitter timeline. You constantly are attempting to bully individuals who you disagree with. Quite frankly, and I think you know this by now, I am not afraid to stand up for what I believe and acquiesce to others.
I think your talented and have great ideas, but you need to channel some of your energy better.
It's the "batting average during night games with a full moon on a Tuesday" nonsense which does more damage to genuine sabermetrics than any blogger's screed or Murray Chass's (non) blog.
I hear you. I am old enough to have read Bill James from his very humble beginnings (photocopied, hand-stapled manuscripts) and to have seen how Elias tried to get into the same game once James' Abstracts had become popular. Elias tried, and failed, at mimicking Bill James' style, which was ludicrous because Bill James' strengths were always his writing and his ideas much more than his number-crunching. And they tried to portray their trivia as meaningful statistical research. They *had* access to tons of raw data and then flexed their muscles in embarassingly stupid ways (the whole "batting average when the moon is full" type of nonsense).
For his part, and despite the numerous transparent swipes at his work by Elias, Bill James encouraged his readers to the buy the Elias annuals, if only for access to the raw data.
The animosity between James and Elias took center stage during the clutch hitting debate of the mid 80's. James said he wasn't convinvced it existed (and of course, many years later he would move a little on this position -- his "Fog" essay) whereas Elias emphatically stated that it did exist. And they then used their statistical might to convince almost no one.
I don't see what is so difficult about the passage. Perhaps the second sentence should be a parenthetical, as the third sentence answers the question in the first. The point seems to be that Elias and James have switched positions, in a way; James seems unassailable now, but part of that is the fact that he's become the status quo in a way, so his positions seem natural. All of this is folded into a larger skepticism -- when someone flashes the knowledge card, there's usually a profit motive behind it. It's like in art -- you play po-mo if you think that's the con you need, or you play authentic artist if that's the best available con. To actually buy into the schtick is for suckers.
A larger cynicism perhaps.
My impression of James is that he wanted to write about baseball for a living, and his statistical angle was the novelty he thought would work in getting him commissions. He was right. But in building his better mousetrap, he also found himself examining and challenging parts of the conventional wisdom. In the process, he got angry with Elias, who probably should have employed him rather than shut him out, and that dispute was folded into the larger debate.
If you want to engage in a kind of reductionism, yes, James was all about the money. But that's like saying somebody who studies carpentry or welding is all about the money, because they want to make a living as a carpenter or a welder.
The people who shoved this into the realm of 'big business' were the third-generation sabermetricians, like the Baseball Prospectus crew. James published his formulae in the open, for the most part. He even 'broke the wand', famously, in the 1988 Abstract. Win Shares continued this tradition. By contrast, Baseball Prospectus have kept details hidden, because they can. We don't need to know the formulae any more because the fundamental concepts are now widely accepted. That's the change. That's what is different from the Bill James era.
Well, there's just a lot of confusion in such a claim, which indicates that the writer isn't so familiar with the history of the development of James's contributions or the sabermetric field as it entered the mainstream.
The first weakness is the lumping of Bill James and the commercial sabermetric field. If one bothers to read James' essay "Breaking of the Wand" in his '88 Abstract, one would know that James was *not* a fan of the commercial approach or the dogmatic approach which was already creeping into sabermetric discussions.
This should be basic reading and understanding before one tries to publicly criticize James or discuss the state of the current mainstream sabermetric approach. There are many here who can rehash the whole thing, but it's really not something anyone should have to do.
This thesis gets rehashed every few months, and there are many problems beyond this incorrect lumping of James and "statheadism," but it's not worth the time to dissect each fallacy.
All of this is folded into a larger skepticism -- when someone flashes the knowledge card, there's usually a profit motive behind it.
If you want to engage in a kind of reductionism, yes, James was all about the money. But that's like saying somebody who studies carpentry or welding is all about the money, because they want to make a living as a carpenter or a welder.
Good grief. No wonder James got frustrated with everyone during the early 90's. It's almost as if people never bother reading what he wanted to do with sabermetrics. James never wanted to be the final statement on baseball discussion - it's something he kept emphasizing every year, and yet this accusation keeps popping up. Now I can see what he meant by the double edge sword of success.
That was after STATS Inc had been sold to Fox -- it became a much different company then.
With regard to James, I think it misses the mark in great part because of the way he imagined his work as open to criticism. He showed his work, revealed his methods as plainly as possible, so that other people could build on them and critique them. I guess you could say that was all part of the con, but that would be one weird-ass con. There's always more money in keeping your #### proprietary.
Now, the analogy between Elias in the 70s and Bloomberg / BP today doesn't quite hold. The really big problem with Elias wasn't that they had secret formula and didn't show their work, but that they collected incredible data about baseball but refused to share it with the public, except at an exorbitant price. James' criticism was that this data ought to be free, and he helped form new organizations to aid in that process.
Now, I do think one can make a secondary distinction that James consistently left his methods open, while Bloomberg and BP are keeping their best #### proprietary. That seems a fair critique. It should be noted, however, that many of the best analysts and researchers around today - folks like Tango and Szym and MWE and Dial - consistently make their work available to the public in a manner similar to how James worked. So it can hardly be said that "sabermetrics" as a whole has made such a shift.
It's a further problem whenever people try to intimately tie in art with business. Inherently, there are always going to be problems with such an approach. There's nothing immoral about selling out art for making money, but those who do should not try to delude themselves. Of course, we live in an age where these contradictions are present in every aspect of our society.
I told them they need to incorporate many advanced metrics (WAR, FIP, etc)into their software. Right now most if it appeared, at least last Sunday, to be mainstream stats packed into different analytical reports.
Perhaps if MLBAM, which partners with Bloomberg, starts to embrace this stuff we will see it. I am sure Jonah Keri, who will write for Bloomberg Sports, is the right man to help get them where they want to go.
As for the B-Rank. Right now they are taking a position of working with everyone, except for that ranking, I guess I can't criticize them for wanting some sort of competitive advantage. Its more fantasy baseball centric so I doubt it would have much impact on how we look at things from a standpoint of advanced metrics.
On art: playing a post-modern or Romantic or authentic card, etc., is just to get the jackals of necessity off your back so you can do what you're driven to do. I'm a writer, most all the folks I know are writers, musicians, artists. The unhappiest are always the most self-deluded, who wrap up every step with some fixated sense of their self. The happiest I know are pragmatists -- they play whatever card is best available to buy themselves time and resources to do what they have a compulsion to do. It doesn't have anything to do with the content of the art, and everything with trying to create space/time in which you can make art. I just know writers who seem to assume that it's still 1890 or something, and hold firm to those standards (as to how to circulate their work, how to feed themselves, etc), and then get furious when they walk into the same walls repeatedly.
I think Bill James is a minor god. But it doesn't hurt to have skepticism/cynicism regarding an operating procedure behind the gestures. I haven't even read TFA, and don't know who in the hell Silva or these other people are -- I was just annoyed w/ the posturing that that one paragraph was somehow inexplicable.
Just to piss some gas on the fire, about the only people I know who don't work some kind of con (when it comes to appearances and such) are comfortably white middle-class people; everyone else I know is backed into a kind of existential shell game.
I agree that people uncomfortable with their heritage/race are often manipulative.
I think James' con was that he was actually protecting the pork and beans. I don't see that he attempted to con those purchasing his art.
Just to piss some gas on the fire, about the only people I know who don't work some kind of con (when it comes to appearances and such) are comfortably white middle-class people; everyone else I know is backed into a kind of existential shell game.
Balzac and Flaubert would disagree with this. In fact, Balzac consistently wrote on the theme of how it was the ambitions of the bourgeios class that led to many of the vices of post-industrial European society.
I think James' con was that he was actually protecting the pork and beans.
??
He was expropriating the expropriators. Now the road from the Finland Station to Win Shares is plain as day.
It is an obtuse paragraph. The fact that you interpret it by manufacturing your own interpretation -- the assertion that it is about James and Elias "switching positions" -- demonstrates this, since your assertion appears to be manufactured from whole cloth by you. There is nothing to indicate that the guns are aimed at James.
Taking out the second sentence as you suggest, it reads, in essence: "Was James scorned for accusing Elias for being about the money? Probably not, but then again, people have always wanted to make money from their ideas." So it says that James was probably not scorned for saying it is about the money, because it is about the money. However, he did not need the part about people wanting to make money from their ideas to prove that point. People want to make money, period. Everyone wants money. That's why they call it money.
The paragraph goes from "people have always wanted to profit from their ideas" to "I will battle against people who claim to have absolute knowledge, because it is all about the money". The second part does not really the first part -- the fact the Edison wanted to profit from his ideas has nothing to do with claiming absolute knowledge (although he was wrong about direct current).
The last part, by itself and shorn of the preceding commentary actually does make sense in a way, if you read "money" more broadly to include fame, power, and acknowledgement: People who claim to have absolute knowledge are probably doing so, because they have an ulterior motive -- unless of course they are simply (a) rabid fanboys or (b) paranoid schizophrenics, who really do have absolute knowledge, and are merely trying to warn the rest of us.
I didn't get the sense that the claim was that all white middle class are comfortable, only that the population of people who are comfortable and not running a con exist soley of a portion of the white middle class. Even still, it was listed to the people known to the poster.
Sports Illustrated
May 25, 1981
"He Does It By The Numbers" by Daniel Okrent
I believe it was Hormel plant.
EDIT: The New Yorker profile from July 2003 says it was a "Stokely Van Camp pork-and-beans plant".
Context matters. It'll be tough for a lot of people to relate to just how little information was available in 1987. James was reacting to a decision that meant even less would be available. The Red and Green books (the offical NL and AL stat books) had info that you just couldn't get any place else.
Here's what James said of Elias in the 1988 Abstract (in "Wake-Up Call" -- the article I referenced earlier about Elias taking over the AL's statistical publication).
"Now the problem with the Elias Bureau is that the Elias Bureau never turns loose of a statistic unless they get a dollar for it. Their overarching concern in life is to get every dollar they can from you and give you as little as possible in return for it -- like a lot of other businesses, I suppose, only with a more naked display of greed than is really usual. It was apparent to me, then, that this change would mean only one thing to the public: less information available for free.
Early last season I called the American League Office to ask whether the fact that the Elias Bureau was now doing their stats would mean that information would be disappearing from the official stat books. They assured me that the Elias Bureau had promised them that no information would be deleted from the official statistics, which would be better than ever. I knew that was ########, and sure enough it was. When the American League stats came out, hundreds of bits of information (well, thousands, I guess, if you want to be technical about it) had disappeared.
(list of a few feature eliminated)
To disguise the fact that thousands of pieces of information had been eliminated, the Elias Bureau switched to a slightly larger type and put more space on the charts, so they still have the 32-page booklet as before (clever bastards, you have to admit). If you don't need the information and you don't use it, you'll never know it's gone. If you need it, I'm sure the Elias Bureau will be happy to sell it to you at the right price.
As a special bonus for doing such a good job, they were able to get the American League statistics out just a month later than they have been before.
Hey! American League, wake up. The Elias Bureau is ripping you off. {...}
If you don't watch the product that's being put out with your name on it, I will guarantee you that product is going to deteriorate. Every year or couple of years, the Elias Bureau is going to find a corner to cut. [...} And you'll call the stat bureau, and they will tell you that it wasn't specified in the contract. That is not a generous woman you are in bed with, Dr. Brown. Keep an eye on your wallet.
Two things on this:
1. Benefactor? Really? I write for Mike's site because I think it is a worthwhile addition to the public discussion. It's a paid gig, but there are plenty of paid gigs I won't take on, and Mike's site isn't what pays the rent. More to the point, Mike has never discouraged me from disagreeing with him, and I've never shied away from doing so- on his own site.
2. You're getting him both ways. When he continues to disagree with you, you refer to it as a stubborn refusal, and when he agrees with you, it is too little, too late. Meanwhile, he continues to engage these ideas, while you ban him- and everyone else who writes at NYBD- from being linked at Amazin' Avenue. Who is the closed-minded one again?
and I disagree with you Howard about Silva, he does play up his dislike for stats to generate hits, to say differently is to ignore the facts. When he is supporting stats, he's very laid back in his tone and comments, but when he attacks stats, you get comments that are aggressive in nature. He is 100% right to bag on War and other stats (anyone that uses War for pitchers should be shot for stupidity anyway) that rely on theoreticals to generate their numbers. To bag on a particular stat isn't the same as writing inflammatory articles that distort the view/argument that Bill James was putting out there 20+ years ago. I doubt there is anyone on this board that will support 100% reliance on all advanced stats without looking at context or anything else. Those that would aren't really someone that should be listened to seriously.
And Brock, in response to an earlier post in this thread, you are right and wrong about left/right field advantages for a park should be considered. Right because it's useful as an analysis tool to gauge a players future value, wrong in that breaking it down that way doesn't help determine a players real value to the team. A homerun from a left handed hitter or a right handed hitter has the same value, it doesn't matter if the park makes it easier for the one side to hit it or not.
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