OT: NBA Monthly Thread - May 2013

I estimate only 10-12 Primates care about straight NBA players, but with our own thread, we won’t detract from what this site is really about: gay NBA players and craft beer.

OT: NBA Monthly Thread - April 2013

I estimate only 10-12 Primates care about the NBA, but with our own thread, we won’t detract from what this site is really about: the Oxford comma and unspeakable criminal acts.

OT: March Madness Thread—

For some reason the OT: College Basketball Thread has been closed, just in time for March Madness.  So let’s use this thread for all of our NCAA Tournament discussion (and NIT, CBI, et al).

The title link goes to Ken Pomeroy’s 2013 NCAA tournament log5 predictions for each round of the tournament.

Tracy: Which sport is the most immune to Moneyball?

It ain’t baseball.  It’s probably soccer.

Each year, as ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz has noted, more and more people are coming to Sloan. That’s literally true, but could be said figuratively of sports analytics in general. The days are long gone when seemingly unremarkable players could be signed on the cheap by the few teams smart enough to understand the value of, say, a high on-base percentage. “You used to know how other teams operated,” complained stats-friendly Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at the opening panel. “Now you have to reverse-engineer what they did to see how they do it.”

Or, as Nate Silver put it on the same panel, “There’s not the low-hanging fruit anymore of having some teams that are totally stupid.”

Over the course of the two-day conference, I asked many people which sport—out of the four major U.S. team sports (baseball, basketball, football, hockey) and soccer—is least amenable to an advanced analytical interpretation, where little is to be gained by looking at the game from a new, maverick angle. In short: Which sport can’t be Moneyball-ed?

OT: NBA Monthly Thread - March 2013

I estimate only 10-12 Primates care about the NBA, but with our own thread, we won’t detract from what this site is really about: hunting and apostrophes.

Bill James Mailbag - 2/9/13 - 2/17/13

Seems perfect for the Red Sox.

Have you read My Baseball Diary by James T. Farrell? He wrote a ton of books, most notably the Studs Lonigan trilogy. His baseball memoir has a lot of great reminisces about baseball during the teens. Apparently one of his first literature essays was a high school paper called The Fall of Prince Hal, written in 1920 after finding out that Hal Chase, one of his favorite players ,had been involved in fixing ball games.

I generally dislike the genre. . ..personal reflections on my history of being a baseball fan.  There are a hundred books like that, and my friends often recommend them to me, but they always seem to me self-centered and precious.

So, if you became a baseball manager, what current orthodoxy would you go against. Use your closer like a 60’s closer? 4 man rotation? Chocolate donuts in the dugout?

... Let’s say that the manager brings in a lefty reliever to face a lefty 200 times over the course of a season, which sounds like a lot; I doubt that any manager actually does that 200 times in a year… A lefty hitter would typically hit. . .what, 30 points higher against a right-handed pitcher?  That’s six hits…

Six hits and some number of them extra base hits, yes, and maybe a walk or two, and let us assume that these tend to be high-leverage situations… Let us say, to be generous… By making that move 200 times, you save six runs.

But what do you give up?  You’ve shrunk the bench to where you can’t platoon.  I would argue that you can gain much, much more than 6 runs by platooning, in many cases…

Right or wrong, it is my opinion, until somebody can show me where I’m wrong, that carrying left-handers in the bullpen is a complete waste of time and resources.  You not only don’t need THREE left-handers in the bullpen; you don’t need one…

I would even argue that platooning SAVES more runs than using lefty relievers, because when you have platoons one of the players will usually be better defensively than the other, so when you have a lead late in the game you can go with the better defender. 

Another way to state my essential thesis is that you can control the platoon advantage much more effectively if you control it from the offensive side than if you try to control it from the pitching side.    But. ...I can’t convince anybody.

Just an observation, Bill, but sports fans have funny hot buttons. (Perhaps, it’s not just sports fans, but all of us.) Tell them Al McGuire doesn’t quite meet your criteria of “great”, and you get a wave of upset readers, at least, one of whom accuses you of denigrating him. In a Scoresheet forum, I mentioned Jose Altuve and Robbie Alomar in the same sentence (they both happened to be N.L. all-star second-basemen shortly after turning 22, then became Americans Leaguers the next year.) . . . and I get thrashed for saying Altuve is going to the Hall of Fame. I guess my question is, how do you keep yourself from getting totally discouraged with your public?

It is a challenge, and I actually appreciate your asking that exact question.  My audience includes many people who are brilliant, incisive and disciplined thinkers.  But DISCUSSIONS, by their nature, are rambling, incoherent events that wander backward and forward.  Discussions among groups of people, by their nature, tend to take sweaters and turn them into strings of yarn.  The challenge of leading is a discussion is to construct the discussion in such a way that it advances our understanding of the issue; in other words, to try to take yarn and make a sweater, rather than the other way around.    It’s very challenging, and I have to discipline myself, sometimes, to ignore very interesting things that people say, ignore them and not publish them, because, while the comment is interesting in itself, it unravels the discussion.

I think you are a proponent of baseball having non-standard dimensions for its parks. All the other major sports however have taken the opposite view of standardizing everything… would you support the idea that each team can set those dimensions as they want, within a league-imposed min/max range?

From the standpoint particularly of basketball, I wouldn’t think of it as one of baseball’s charms; I would simply argue that it is better.  It is better from everyone’s standpoint.  If you make the court wider, for example, you favor a smaller team with more quickness, and put a premium on ball-handling skills.  If you make the court more narrow, it favors big, burly guys, puts a premium on passing, and minimizes the importance of dribbling.

Allowing different teams to experiment with different sized courts allows the game to breathe, allows the game to search out the most satisfying combinations.  Mandating one size for all courts makes the game rigid, unable to adjust.

OT: NBA Monthly Thread - February 2013

I estimate only 10-12 Primates care about the NBA, but with our own thread, we won’t detract from what this site is really about: abstinence and William Howard Taft.

OT: College Basketball Thread

In case anyone’s interested in discussing collegiate-flavored hoops ...

OT NBA Monthly Thread—January 2013

I estimate only 10-12 Primates care about the NBA, but with our own thread, we won’t detract from what this site is really about: the fiscal cliff and Civil War generals.

OT: NBA Thread - December 2012

Since Jack Haley and Steve Scheffler were mentioned, it must be time for another thread.