Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Granillo: “Rise of the Robot Umpires”
(www.baseballprospectus.com)
It troubles me that the world is just one big rip-off of Ferro Lad.
Read More...We’ve all thought it. Heck, many of us have even said it. Watching the exploits of Eric Gregg, Phil Cuzzi, Jim Joyce, and so many others, it’s hard not to believe it at least once. “We want robot umpires!”
A new project by Dan Levy is working to explore just what might happen if baseball ever heeded that call. Rise of the Robot Umpires is a graphic-style novel set in the not-too-distant future where the commissioner finally ...
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1. Eric Ferguson posted on January 03, 2013 at 04:27 PM # hit 0 | hit 0- Hulk Hogan
- Ric Flair
- Shawn Michaels
- The Rock
- "Stone Cold" Steve Austin
I hate to break it to you, but there have been cheaters in the Hall of Fame for decades. I mean, Gorgeous George was part of the inaugural class!
Ditto Wolf I'm with you!
Oh that!
Craig Biggio is going to need a surge
If by "surge" you mean 76% of the outstanding vote vs 71% of the counted vote, then yes.
Biggio is on track to finish about where Alomar finished on his first ballot (73%), just behind Dawson (78) and Morris (74). With three candidates around the 50s (Morris, Larkin, Smith), the 2013 election looks a good bit like the 2010 election.
- Hulk Hogan
- Ric Flair
- Shawn Michaels
- The Rock
- "Stone Cold" Steve Austin
Where is Bruno Samartino's name on this list?
He and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers should be at the top of the list
WON Hall of Fame
No, it varies. Raines' numbers in the Repoz count are typically higher than the final vote. Jack's have been below the last two years.
You can't have Hogan and Sammartino without first inducting Superstar Billy Graham!
Yes, that's what they mean by surge. I find your confusion confusing. Given 15% of the vote, it's pretty unlikely that the rest of the ballots would be weighted 5% more strongly in Biggio's favor. Not impossible, by any means, but not likely. Hence, there would need to be a surge in support.
No doubt, that original list went way too deep and they've since reeled it in. Going forward it becomes way more exclusive (Sting still not in being the biggest discussion every year). But yeah, it doesn't feature Pete Rose or Vince's limo driver, so there's that.
Oh yeah, but mainly his Mid-South incarnation. DiBiase & Dr. Death > Million Dollar Man & Virgil.
I'm sure you meant to say Blyleven was the one that finished five votes short. :p
The standard deviation on a sample of 85 votes is big enough to make a systematic surge unnecessary, random variation can do the job. Even though systematic effects isn't all that unlikely in themselves (the sample is self-selected, we know that voters without writing gigs are a different population with different values).
Not likely but hardly impossible -- it's about 10-15% ASSUMING a random sample.
In real terms though, it's really quite small. 71% of the published electorate (as of 85 votes) think he's an HoFer. He's currently 4 votes shy of 75%. Based on last year, out of the remaining voters he need 370 votes rather than 366 (75%) to make up the difference.
We don't know a lot about the unpublished other than they like Mattingly a lot more than the published. We tend to assume this is an older group and it must contain (nearly) all of the voters who don't cover baseball anymore. One would guess (and it's a guess) that population might be more impressed by 3000 hits and they might be less aware of Biggio "rumors" although we would also guess they are even more staunchly anti-roids (McGwire tends to drop a bit although I think Palmeiro went up a bit one year). I would guess Biggio will go up but probably not quite enough to make it.
I have no confusion, I'm questioning whether the author (and maybe some people here) realize that the necessary "surge" here is 4 votes out of nearly 500 outstanding votes? One could just as easily say is that all Biggio needs to do is barely surpass the 75% mark with the rest of the electorate and he's in. Or to put it another way, if Biggio was sitting on 75% right now we'd say "well, he needs at least 75% of the outstanding votes to make it." Instead he's sitting on 71% and we have to say "he needs at least 75% + 4 of the outstanding votes to make it." Those are not substantially different statements in my book, especially when we're pretty confident we have a biased sample. Whether it meets any individual's definition of a "surge" is not a question I can answer although that is an argument for writers avoiding imprecise terms like "surge."
No one can. That's because we can't see him.
I guess you could argue for removing Hogan on the converse logic, i.e., he was no good in the ring, but I would ultimately say drawing money is more important than in-ring work.
(Even given the humongous inaugural class I described, it took Michaels quite a long time to be elected to the Wrestling Observer HOF. I suspect that his second run, where he wasn't a backstage troublemaker and still performed at a terrific level, actually adds more to his case than the first run where he held the titles.)
Deacon White, Jacob Ruppert, Hank O'Day.
Yeah, when it comes to pro-rasslin there's really no way around that fact. A good worker can draw big money with proper booking, but some guys can draw despite terribly illogical booking and awful opponents and that's what the industry has to value. Too bad, any wrestling HOF that omits Les Thornton and Billy Robinson is the poorer for it.
As a complete aside, I haven't watched 'rasslin at all in about 10 years, but I happened to stumble on a show last night and who was in the ring but The Hulkster himself, working some angle with his gigantic daughter Brooke. She's dating one of the Dudley Brothers, from what I could discern before fleeing the whole morass.
Only if Jim wanted to be drowned in Nutritional Supplements advertising, but why would he ever want that? (/sarcasm)
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