Thursday, May 23, 2013
FanGraphs: Cameron: The 2013 Cubs: Better Than We Think
(www.fangraphs.com)
Light at the end of the ridiculously low-ceilinged tunnel.
Read More...The Cubs have actually played pretty good baseball when sequencing is not considered. By wOBA differential, they’ve been a well above average team. Their record is almost entirely a reflection of the power of the timing of various events.
In our Win Probability section, we track a stat called “Clutch”, which basically looks at the wins a team has gained or lost due to the leverage of the game when their positive or negative ...
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
Page 1 of 2 pages
1 2 >Also, the Raven poster at this link is almost certinaly a Ralph Steadman production.
Maybe it's been a while since I've seen one, but I'd have to figure anything that isn't just the two main characters posing in front of the title has to be an above average poster doesn't it?
Wow. I count the ringzzz argument. How original.
I read an article that compared movie posters with DVD covers. I think it was in McSweeney's, the fake daily newspaper edition, which makes it the rare piece of media that cannot be found via Google. Anyway, it exposed a trend that now seems obvious to me: movie posters are often terrific, DVD covers are often terrible. The movie poster may have an attractive design, and is kind of mysterious. But when the same movie comes out on DVD, even if the movie poster had the chance to become a kind of iconic image for the movie, the cover is switched to lowest common denominator stuff. Typically it just shows the heads of the famous actors.
I found this great example on a blog that discusses the same topic:
The Prestige poster
The Prestige DVD cover
I mean, I'm sure this is mostly true of artistically ambitious movies. I doubt that Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 has a mysterious, attractive poster. But when I checked the Transformers movies, the pattern held up there. The Transformers 1 posters are mostly images of a single robot each, staring over a landscape or cityscape. One is just a dark horizon with menacing robot eye behind it. But the DVD cover has the heads of 3 robots on the top, Mount Rushmore style, and the three human actors below.
Vertigo poster
Vertigo DVD cover
Obviously I can cherry pick, but it seems like the trend is real. In this case they take an iconic poster design, but decide that isn't enticing enough for the consumer, so they paste Jimmy Stewart's head on top of it.
Zero word movie reviews. As the site says, "You don't 'read' movies. Why read reviews?" He just takes a picture of himself after he watches the movie. Pretty funny stuff.
When Moneyball comes out, I'll ask him to "review" it.
My 2 cents is that for the cinema version the producer is trying to build some intrigue and get you interested enough to seek it out. With a DVD the presumption is that you know what you are getting and the desire is to draw your attention that yes, this is the movie you are looking for.
Book covers have become frequently awful--with enormous, samey text treatments--in recent years for basically this same reason.
Just making a point. Lack of championships doesn't mean a movie isn't warranted. Hell, I got a magazine cover just a few months ago.
Ok, that might be the cutest thing I have seen in a while.
*crosses fingers, hopes this leads to a BBTF lolcat thread.*
...just to get started...
Or Gerald Scarfe.
...just to get started...
Hell never make it as an ump, interfering with the runner like that. Terrible positioning...
Not lolcat per se, but I like this one
Lolroyals
Yes, Larry! Yes!
The more I see and hear about it, the more I think it won't be. I think the big thing is going to be taking it as is rather than taking it as gospel.
No chance. Hollywood spent 5 years developing a movie about a baseball front office because it's guaranteed to suck.
There is really no counting going on -- stuck on zero.
...is TrollFace the M's manager?
EDIT: Royals fans :/
Oh heck you don't do that. Losing in the World Series is the perfect ending. Or do you not know Setting Up For The Sequel 101?
Sorkin might be a brilliant screenwriter, but it seems borderline impossible to take Moneyball and convert it into a movie that has both mass appeal and passes critical muster with, e.g., the BBTF crowd. But I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm glad it didn't die in pre-production, which had seemed likely at several points in the process.
The poster for The Raven is pretty cool too.
"Major League" and "Rookie of the Year" were fantasies, and "Moneyball" is, at least in theory, based on reality.
Of course, the main thesis of the movie and the book it's based on have since been proven to be more fantasy than reality, so maybe you do have a bit of a point there; perhaps most of the moviegoers won't care much that the story is a myth.
I foresee rioting at the San Francisco theaters playing "Kung Fu Panda 2."
Where is the proof? Just because you think that there is proof out there, doesn't mean that there is actually proof that the concept of moneyball has been proven false. In fact most evidence supports it.
That's cute, but you know darn well that I'm not talking about the general idea that statistics are important and that some statistics are much better than others.
I'm obviously talking about the Lewis-created myth that Billy Beane is the Warren Buffett of baseball front office men; some kind of ahead of his time visionary who is much smarter than all of his competitors.
Everyone who follows baseball closely now knows that it's a bunch of total bunk, that there's nothing special whatsoever about Beane or the A's. Even most of the guys who were still trying to gamely defend him three or four years have given up the ghost at this point.
Well, even if this was the point of the book that doesn't mean what is happening proves what was written then was false. Billy Beane could have been the best GM over some 5 year period during which Lewis wrote his book. Even Buffett loses money every now and then.
I don't think anyone has ever really thought that, they just thought that when you are dealing in a system that is set up where the resources of one competitor is vastly superior to another competitor, that finding ways to figure out what is undervalued that produces results would help you out more than relying on old school superstition.
Beane was successful in a system that generally rewards teams for spending a ton of money. He's not the only one, other teams could make a similar claim. You have the spend and slash method of the Marlins, or the be lucky to be in a crappily run division like the Twins etc.
The anti-stathead crowd has taken this book to be about stats, which is only part of the story. The point of the stat reliance is that at the time many organizations were relying on the equivalent of using leaches for modern surgery. The stat point is realizing that something so simple as just understanding what produces win on a seasonal level wasn't being exploited by their competitors. Another thing the book briefly touches on is that a short series is completely unpredictable in baseball, and you don't build for the post season.
Which ironically enough, had been conventional baseball wisdom for about a century before Billy Beane made his infamous crapshoot comment. Yet Bobby Cox never got any crap for saying "anything can happen in a short series" for a decade and a half of his Braves teams getting beat in the playoffs. Getting the breaks one time changes everything, I guess.
Page 1 of 2 pages
1 2 >You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.