Is Ringolsby the Sean Hannity of sports journalism?

That would seem to say that just because a formula can't be devised, fed into a computer and spit out the award winners doesn't mean the value of an MVP is tarnished.

See, this why we'll always be at an impasse with the BBWAA. They think we need a computer to tell us Albert Pujols is more valuable than Ryan Howard.

Boswell remembered devising his total average

I'm surprised that Boswell remembered devising total average, since all he really did was steal the concept from Barry Codell (who called it BOP, or base-out percentage).

See, this why we'll always be at an impasse with the BBWAA. They think we need a computer to tell us Albert Pujols is more valuable than Ryan Howard.

That's quite disingenuous of you Shooty. I'm disappointed.

As Tracy will attest, my beef is on the subjective nature of "valuable". I say that <sticks finger in the air. checks the wind> Ibanez is the MVP because, doggonit, he's great in the clubhouse. With the criteria being wide open, "character" can often times be used as a weight higher than performance on the field. That's what's wrong with the MVP awards.

That's quite disingenuous of you Shooty. I'm disappointed.

Yeah. I've been staring at BBTF too much today. Since we sold off the portfolio I've had literally nothing to do at work. 8 hours a day of BBTF and you start to get religious about it.

I assume he means Allan Roth. And if a computer had existed, I'm sure he would have used one to calculate an on-base average and isolated power.

Is Ringolsby the Sean Hannity of sports journalism?

Isn't Ringolsby the one who posts here occasionally under ballfan, or some similar name? I doubt that Hannity would have the guts to show up on KOS to argue with the denizens.

shooty - good luck surviving, i know too many ppl in nyc who are concerned about their future...and the spoos broke key levels today...i'm just glad as an individual, i can sit back and wait for setups.


i have a sneaking suspicion that if someone studied the on-field impact of a grand slam, it wouldn't be more substantial than expected....

Grand slams are rally killers.

Yeah, but they don't clog up the bases...

shooty - good luck surviving, i know too many ppl in nyc who are concerned about their future...and the spoos broke key levels today...i'm just glad as an individual, i can sit back and wait for setups.

Thanks bob. So far so good. It's all up to the fund owner now. He's got the cash to wait this out but I wouldn't blame him if he just took his ball and called it a night. It amazes me how consistently wrong a lot of supposed geniuses have been this year.

BTW, Michael Lewis has an excellent article about the subprime mess on portfolio.com if you guys are interested. I've been spending a lot of my down time trying to piece together what happened. It's an amazing story and complicated as hell and very far from over, sadly. Still, it's some kind of comfort to me that even seasoned pros are at a loss to describe what some of these companies were doing with CDO's and mortgage backed derivatives. There are CEO's of giant companies that have no idea what happened to their companies. I don't feel like such a dolt anymore for being flummoxed by it all.

Is it really that complicated?

Lots of emerging markets making cash hand over fist, needing a place to park the money. Oh! I know! US housing! Can't go wrong there! Let's securitize mortgages and sell them to these markets!

Uh oh. We ran out of mortgages to securitize! WTF do we do now? I suppose if we tweak down the lending requirements we might be able to bundle those up and sell those. And then there's this comical race to the bottom. Initially we need actual proof of income and assets. Then we just have people state what kind of employment they are in and their income and we hire a professional to decide whether a person in that kind of employment could theoretically make that much money in a year. And later on we cut that guy out of the mix and just have people state their income and assets without verification. This stuff actually happened. The guys out there selling mortgages hear that Investment Bank A is buying mortgages with ever reduced proof of income/assets, they ask Investment Bank B why they aren't buying them too -- and then suddenly Investment Bank B is buying them!

And then the market plays with these securitized mortgage bundles, splitting them up assigning the income flow (based on risk) to different people. And then these get traded/split up and on and on and on. Derivatives on top of derivatives on top of derivatives.

The only crime in this scandal is capitalism wasn't allowed to work. Ideally all those investment banks would have been liquidated. It's a shame these companies got so big they couldn't be allowed to fail.

Is it really that complicated?

Yes and no. At a macro level, it's easy to wrap your mind around, but I'm trying to understand it at a nuts and bolt level, which is where it gets really complex. There are so many moving pieces going in so many different directions. I want to understand the history and the mechanics of it. I feel like I'm in the middle of one of the greatest stories of my lifetime and I want to be able to wrap my mind around it more than I can now.

"The image of teams relying solely on the gut-feeling of a scout to make a major decision is a stereotype created by a new generation of numbers crunchers that shows little regard for the evolution of their area of interest."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
He has this exactly backwards. It is the sabermetricians who are at great pains to point out that stats have always been used for evaluations and are constantly evolving. Read Alan Schwarz's "The Numbers Game" to verify the point. Rather it is traditionalists who claim that stats don't tell the story only to then misuse them or use irrelevant ones to make their own points.

As for the distinction between valuable and best, or the claim that a great season on a poor team is not valuable, that is certainly debatable, and there are numerous examples of players on non-contending teams who won MVP awards. But the key point is that just as it is not legitimate to ignore non-statistical factors entirely in making a decision, it is even more foolish to ignore the value represented in progressive statistical analysis to at least begin thinking about evaluating worthiness for the award.

And then the market plays with these securitized mortgage bundles, splitting them up assigning the income flow (based on risk) to different people. And then these get traded/split up and on and on and on. Derivatives on top of derivatives on top of derivatives.

You left out the role played by the companies rating the risks and selling insurance for the risk. When it became clear the raters were part of the problem, and when the insurers stopped being willing to sell that insurance, and when it became clear what a liability the outstanding insurance was to the insurers . . .

Thanks for bringing the Lewis piece to my attention, Shooty. I really like Liar's Poker and it sort of made Moneyball a disappointment in comparison.

Ideally all those investment banks would have been liquidated.

Lewis suggested the ideal would've been the investment banks remaining in private hands. The standard objection to the bailout was moral hazard (well, that, and the bailout won't solve the problem), but the moral hazard of the agency problem made that a moot point.

it is worth nothing that statistical analysis has long been a part of evaluations in baseball.

Is this a Freudian slip on Ringolsby's part?

-- MWE

r the claim that a great season on a poor team is not valuable

I don't think I know anyone who thinks this. It's classic neo-stathead jibberish.

shooty - it's funny you mentioned that piece; i read it last week, and just a couple nights ago, borrowed (and re-read) liar's poker. and realized how the new and innovative *cough* stuff of the 80s is what happened now. even the stuff with the tranches, and splitting up the mortgages, that's what happened this time around.

you probably know this, but the stock price of these companies caused much of the collapse. some of the derivatives (the CDOs?) were specifically backed by stock / stock price, and if it broke the price, additional payments needed to be made, turning everything into a death spiral.

i've just started reading _bear trap_. the intro is a whiny bogus "everyone hated bear, and look what happened!" but the first 25 or so pages aren't that.

moody's, etc. were awful because they've given backwards-looking analysis, so the people who buy based off of AAA ratings are being snookered.

the longer-term leverage (30*, 40*) in thinly traded incestuous markets is what started stuff as well. some people will in the future blame the risk management teams, but i'm sure that even if they DID raise concerns (which some probably did), they were overruled. i wonder if ISDA will be able to stem the tide of "regulate swaps!" this time around, i'd think not; many of them have turned into commodities rather than profit centers by wide spreads, anyhow...


shooty - have you read some of the older books by wyckoff, neill, etc.? sobel's panic on wall street is good..there's one on forty years in wall street by worthington fowler (?) which is free on archive.org in their books section, based off of the late 19th century/early 20th. parts of it are good to read, and some of what's happening today is similar to parts of 1873, some late 1970s and late 1980s, some depression...e-mail me if you want some old books, generally stock-based, mainly technical stuff.

E-mail on the way, Bob. Yeah, Moody's completely screwed the pooch on this. I can't imagine anyone will ever take a AAA rating from them at face value again.

you probably know this, but the stock price of these companies caused much of the collapse. some of the derivatives (the CDOs?) were specifically backed by stock / stock price, and if it broke the price, additional payments needed to be made, turning everything into a death spiral.

And this is what will never cease to amaze me about this. What if housing prices go down? What of the stock market has a downturn? These were simple questions these companies had to ask themselves. My favorite part of the Lewis article is that one of the firms had a model for plotting the values of the dreivatives but the model wouldn't work if housing prices went down. And this didn't bother them! It's like signing Moises Alou, Ken Griffey Jr. and Chris Snelling and then getting rid of all other outfielders in your organization because, hey, you're set in the outfield now!

will reply later - but here's an interesting piece on lobster prices dead in portland, maine - because of the huge worldwide mess!

http://www.examiner.com/a-1651710~Lobster_prices_tank_as_diners_claw_back_spending.html

btw, in _bear trap_, one of the things the author states is how real estate prices don't go down...*cough*.

that lineup really would be angels in the outfield...

What if housing prices go down? What of the stock market has a downturn? These were simple questions these companies had to ask themselves.

And they did - begging for government handouts was no doubt baked into the decision-making cake.

Dan, I don't recall. Do you own a home? If so you got a Govt handout since it's very likely your mortgage was FNMA, of FHLMC.

Anyone, who tries to discuss the current market situation without mentioning levels of global rates is missing a huge component of it.

Anyone, who tries to discuss the current market situation without mentioning levels of global rates is missing a huge component of it.

I'm researching credit default swaps right now. Holy ####, man. Wow, just wow. My friends, hold onto your butts.

the claim that a great season on a poor team is not valuable



I don't think I know anyone who thinks this. It's classic neo-stathead jibberish.

I know people who think that, virtually every non-Sabr fan I know thinks that, just yesterday on of my co-workers even said that Pujol's year was valuable to him (my co-worker) in Fantasy baseball, but had no value for the Cardinals last year. (he thinks Lidge should have won)

I'm surprised that Boswell remembered devising total average, since all he really did was steal the concept from Barry Codell (who called it BOP, or base-out percentage).

Boswell is winning now on Wiki...
I think The Numbers Game tried to split the baby and claim that the two independently arrived at the same stat...
I've also read that the two "gentlemen" have publicly accused the other of lying...

Is there a difference between neo-stathead and neosabermetrics? I thought that one of the failings of neosabermetrics was the denial of context. This claim seems to suggest that context is all that matters.

Boswell is winning now on Wiki...
I think The Numbers Game tried to split the baby and claim that the two independently arrived at the same stat...
I've also read that the two "gentlemen" have publicly accused the other of lying...

Like Newton and Liebniz, but without doing anything important.

You left out the role played by the companies rating the risks and selling insurance for the risk. When it became clear the raters were part of the problem, and when the insurers stopped being willing to sell that insurance, and when it became clear what a liability the outstanding insurance was to the insurers . . .

I also left out the whole commercial paper side of things, which is really where things started to go bad. When Lehman Brothers went under and the Reserve Fund broke the buck... that's when things really went pear shaped.