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Friday, February 01, 2013
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Tue, 3:00: Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, 2nd leg of Copa Del Rey semifinal, currently 1-1 with Barca holding the away goal
Wed, 2:30: Bayern vs. Dortmund, DFP Pokal quarterfinals
Fri, 2:45: Napoli vs. Juventus, Serie A possible scudetto decider
I'm assuming that all of these games are going practically untelevised in the US? The continental leagues / FAs really need to get their heads out of their asses on this.
re: Gus Johnson, I think overall we underestimate just how hard it is to announce a game. Talking for that long continuously just takes a lot of baseline skill and when you are talking about a sport you haven't been with your entire life it strikes me as incredibly hard. I suspect he is searching for more words than he normally would and just that little pause/uncertainty blows the whole thing.
How many basketball games would Ian Darke have to do before a native American audience found him passable?
But given that there are already a great many qualified basketball announcers why should I hire Ian Darke to announce basketball games? Fox seemed to be doing fine with the English announcers they had but now they're trying for the square Gus Johnson peg into the round announcing hole. NBC was able to hire Arlo White, ESPN hired Ian Darke, Fox hires Gus Johnson?
They then have made it worse by making him the lead guy. I'm fine with them trying to groom him. Maybe his work with the MLS team (San Jose?) was good enough but why put him at the top of the pecking order right away. To go from "promising talent" to "Real Madrid v. Man United" in about two weeks makes no sense. It is unpleasant for the listeners and is unfair to Gus who is probably being held to an unfair standard but if he's used as the primary announcer he is going to be expected to meet that standard.
Although in European games, I sometimes get annoyed when they refer to the player's on EPL teams by name, and the opposition by position.
Shoots: on Torino, did they return most of the players from Serie B, or is this a significantly upgraded roster?
They added a couple--Cerci for instance--but that's mostly their team from last year.
How confident are you Spurs fans for today? I'd like to see a Spurs tie or loss for purely entertainment reasons. Three teams fighting for two Champions League spots would make the Premier League a little more interesting unless United blows their lead again. I'm hoping Chelsea miss out because the schadenfreude would be epic.
To be confident in not to be a Spurs fan. Away to West Ham before the game of the year is a classic banana peel game.
Spurs are playing some really great defensive football recently, but West Ham's cross-and-clobber attack seems like exactly the sort of thing Spurs' somewhat more finesse heavy back line will struggle with. I'm wondering about whether a Dawson-Gallas partnership in central defense would be a good idea. Discipline above all. It's not like West Ham will be throwing any significant pace at the opposing center backs.
I am reasonably confident in that Spurs will score goals, but I might be crazy. I expect West Ham will overload the defense to cover Bale, and Spurs in theory have too much attacking talent for that to be a good 90-minute strategy.
No doubt. I'm not defending Fox's decision here, I'm just saying that Johnson could have been working his ass off for 9 months to prepare for this and not be any better than he is right now. I suspect a better approach would have been to look hard for American born talent with 10+ years of experience in soccer broadcasting to promote into this "voice of American soccer" position. Do a little work to find the next guy rather than try to "fit a square Gus Johnson into a round announcing." It smacks of trying to convert your center fielder into a shortstop because he's a really good athlete. It might work, but probably it's going to be ugly.
Why would a Spurs win be bad for the three-team fight? They would be only 2 points ahead of Chelsea and 4 ahead of Arsenal in that scenario.
That might very well be possible if you give him a sabbatical and that's all he's doing. But that obviously wasn't the case. I don't doubt that Johnson has been spending a ridiculous amount of his free time watching games, but when you are still working announcing gigs in multiple sports, there is only so much studying he is going to be able to do.
And that ignores the complexity of European soccer. If he were to become the lead announcer for MLS, he needs to learn the teams and rosters for 19 teams. To get the main Fox gig, he needs to be aware of dozens of teams and rosters that are constantly being turned over with an influx of players from around the world. The idea that he can learn all of this while still doing other announcing work is just silly.
Subs: Friedel, Assou-Ekotto, Gallas, Naughton, Carroll, Livermore, Sigurdsson.
Supposedly this is Tottenham's lineup today. Is Dempsey hurt? It seems kind of early for an official lineup to be released so maybe this is just speculation. Vertonghen at LB against the Hammers giants makes sense, though.
Spurs: Lloris, Vertonghen, Lennon, Parker, Adebayor, Bale, Dembele, Dawson, Holtby, Walker, Caulker. Subs: Gallas, Naughton, Sigurdsson, Friedel, Livermore, Assou-Ekotto, Carroll
Full teams. Dempsey picked up a calf injury, I guess.
Why do West Ham keep letting Bale get the ball on his left? That is defensive suicide.
Also, Lloris is good.
It's been remarkable.
Edit: Carroll, Nolan, they all look alike.
Hey, Darke/McManaman are confused too, in the past couple of minutes they've kept saying Parker slid in on Nolan for the penalty.
Lloris really is super quick off his line.
Ha. I wrote Carroll first, but they managed to convince me I was wrong. Never again!
That's exactly why they are booing him.
I meant in this game.
HOW THE #### DO SIGURDSSON'S SHOTS KEEP BARELY NOT GETTING IN
Edit: #### me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_BEWILNiA&noredirect=1
That boy's good!
One small stat note - in the month or so leading up to this insane explosion, Bale was leading Premier League midfielders by a significant margin in shots on target and the like, without putting up big goals scored numbers. It's anecdata, but it suggests that utility again of SoT numbers for predicting goals.
That was nuts. Lloris was so calm. Taylor gets put through. Lloris has a quick peek to see where the runner (Carroll) coming from his right is. He knows if he charges out now, Taylor only has to square it for Carroll for a simple tap-in. So he waits. Taylor drops his head and shapes to bend it into the far corner. In the time it takes him to do that, Lloris covers about five yards and smothers the shot as it's barely left Taylor's boot. Sensational.
Also, Benny is awesome even when he doesn't play:
Exhibit A: Gareth Bale
Exhibit B: Scott Parker
Exhibit C: Bale again
He's just happy that he finally found players willing to celebrate with him on the sideline (to be fair, the Parker hug looked only semi-consensual).
No idea how Opta rules that. I will try and determine next game I watch. My guess is that would not be a SOT.
Am I just buying into EPL/recent events hype or has Bale been THAT good? Because to me the way he carries that team seems like he has been that good.
Bale is likely to win both the writers' and players' Footballer/Player of the Year award in England, though (as Van Persie did last season).
If it's like every other sport I'm familiar with, it's a random distribution. And varies by home ground if the stringer is based locally.
Damn straight. Do you have any idea how much work went into the celebratification Powerpoint presentation?
Bale is likely to win both the writers' and players' Footballer/Player of the Year award in England, though (as Van Persie did last season).
The van Persie analogue is a good one, I think. However, I have to say that as much fun as it's been watching Bale take his game to the next level, he's only really been at that level for about six weeks. He was having a fine season before that, of course, but this Roy of the Rovers business is a more recent development. Let's see if he keeps it up over the next couple months, because unless somebody else steps up for Spurs that's when some more Bale magic is going to be needed. Here is Tottenham's fixture list for the next couple months:
Arsenal
Inter
@Liverpool
@Inter
Fulham
@Swansea
Everton
@Chelsea
Man City
That's some pretty tough wheelin'. Spurs could very conceivably play quite well over that stretch and only come away with about 7 points from 21 in the league and a who knows what result against Inter.
It's all down to Lloris. Well, not really, but the addition of Lloris to Spurs has fascinated Wilson all year. I think this is the 3rd or 4th article he's written about how Lloris has changed the shape of the team.
I think he's pretty clearly Tottenham's best signing of the season now. Which is saying something when the competition is Dembele and Vertonghen.
Through 27 games this season, Spurs have scored 47 and conceded 32.
Going to extra time with Mainz down to ten men.
Quite an impact substitution of "The Great" Santini there. When he came on in the 84th minute, they were 2-0 down. He scored within two minutes and then drew the penalty that allowed them to equalize.
Penalty converted, and Madrid lead on aggregate.
Freiburg are through to the semis.
That's a great movie, sports fans.
Yeah, the more I have looked at the schedule the more I need to back track off my earlier prediction regarding UCL qualification. Both Chelsea and the Spurs have a hell of a run while Arsenal will be favored to win in all but maybe four games the rest of the way. Plus, the Spurs offense has really hit a snag without Defoe and seem 98% reliant upon Bale magic. That can work for awhile, but at some point they are going to need contributions form someone else.
I still think the Spurs qualify but I am not as confident as I once was.
Now 0-3.
Will be interesting to see if there is any reaction in the rematch in the league, and how much the team is changed before the second leg against Milan.
The popular explanation seems to be that fielding Cesc and Iniesta together on the left is a major bungle, which is what Barca did against Milan as well. This is, I believe, the exact same team (save Valdes) that had its pants pulled down by Max Allegri last week. Lesson learned now?
The steadfast refusal to buy a real center back probably doesn't help either.
All that said, credit to both Milan and Madrid for taking full advantage of the situation.
You mean Halbfinale.
-I based it off my team ratings I've been posting here, using 2/3 team quality based on expected goals, 1/3 team quality based on actual goals. (I chose those weights entirely arbitrarily).
-This is where the modeling gets moderately poor. If you fudge the normal distribution a little this way and a little that way, you can get a curve that looks a lot like actual goal scoring, so I did that to model goal-scoring. (I can write up the model in more detail if anyone isn't bored already.)
-One problem here, beside the fact that this curve is non-identical to the actual incidence of goal scoring, is that goals scored and goals allowed in a game do not appear to be independent, but have a tendency to converge. My model treats them independently, because it would have been much harder otherwise. (I basically broke Excel as it is.)
-So I did not model that, and so I'm getting a few too many results, a few too few draws. (I should be getting ~30% draws, I'm getting ~25%).
That all said, here are my results. Nothing particularly shocking, but I like putting numbers to things.
Team W D L Pts %Title %Top4 %RelMUN 28 4 6 88 96% 100% 0%
MCI 22 10 6 77 4% 99% 0%
TOT 20 9 9 68 0% 76% 0%
CHE 19 9 10 66 0% 66% 0%
ARS 18 10 10 64 0% 45% 0%
EVE 15 14 9 58 0% 7% 0%
LIV 15 12 11 58 0% 5% 0%
WBA 16 7 15 54 0% 0.5% 0%
SWA 13 13 12 51 0% 0.1% 0%
STO 11 15 12 47 0% 0% 0.4%
FUL 12 11 15 46 0% 0% 1%
NOR 11 14 13 46 0% 0% 2%
NEW 12 9 17 44 0% 0% 3%
SUN 11 10 17 43 0% 0% 6%
WHM 11 9 18 43 0% 0% 6%
SOT 10 12 17 42 0% 0% 9%
WIG 9 9 20 37 0% 0% 48%
AVL 8 12 18 37 0% 0% 51%
RDG 8 10 20 34 0% 0% 78%
QPR 5 14 19 30 0% 0% 94%
-I'm not showing things that happened less than 5 times in 10000 runs - there three Tottenham and two Chelsea titles, once Swansea got relegated, and once Stoke made the champions league.
-This system thinks there are non-zero chances of an upset in either the top-4 race or the relegation battle. In 37% of seasons, either at least one club from outside the top 5 made the champions league, or one club from outside the bottom four was relegated.
-Or you could say, two-thirds of the time, the entire middle of the table ended up still safely in the middle of the table.
-Points don't like up exactly with W/D/L because of rounding issues.
Anyway, they have pretty much the same results, the most noteworthy difference being Tottenham vs. Chelsea, I'm assuming because Spurs have better shots ratios but worse goal ratios. Or maybe it's SOS. Here's your and their results side-by-side, in your order, and their rank at the end.
Team %Title %Top4 %Rel | Title % CL % Rel % SCS RankMUN 96% 100% 0% |Man United 97.1 100 1
MCI 4% 99% 0% |Man City 2.8 98.9 2
TOT 0% 76% 0% |Tottenham 0 67 4
CHE 0% 66% 0% |Chelsea 0 73.4 3
ARS 0% 45% 0% |Arsenal 0 53.2 5
EVE 0% 7% 0% |Everton 3.4 7
LIV 0% 5% 0% |Liverpool 3.3 0 6
WBA 0% 0.5% 0% |West Brom 0.6 0 8
SWA 0% 0.1% 0% |Swansea 0.1 0 9
STO 0% 0% 0.4% |Stoke 0 0.3 10
FUL 0% 0% 1% |Fulham 0 0.9 11
NOR 0% 0% 2% |Norwich 0 2.5 12
NEW 0% 0% 3% |Newcastle 0 3.5 14
SUN 0% 0% 6% |Sunderland 0 3.4 13
WHM 0% 0% 6% |West Ham 0 6.1 15
SOT 0% 0% 9% |Southampton 0 10.6 16
WIG 0% 0% 48% |Wigan 44.9 17
AVL 0% 0% 51% |Aston Villa 67.4 19
RDG 0% 0% 78% |Reading 62.8 18
QPR 0% 0% 94% |QPR 97.7 20
Of course, teams importing the entire population of France in mid-season calls the whole exercise into question.
At the risk of boring everyone to death, I would actually be somewhat interested in this <.<
Man, I hope this is the reality which actually occurs, just to screw with everyone.
Even The Guardian will be streaming it. Honestly, I do not give a ####. Wake me up if PSG get Zidane out of retirement. Boro and Chelsea or Dortmund and Bayern are better options to me anyway.
Suck on that, Balotelli.
You shouldn't do that, use the Poisson distribution ?^k*exp(-?)/k!. The ? is the scoring rate (goals per game) and the number of goals you're interested in is k, and it will give you the probability of that many goals being scored in a game (divide by the sum for all k, or more practically the ones before it becomes close to zero, or just plug it into Excel, it's a built-in function there).
Strictly speaking it is not exactly correct as goals can't be scored at arbitrary times (each attack takes some time), but it should be close enough for most purposes, especially if you're not interested in intra-match probabilities.
EDIT: Opera killed my lambdas!!!
EDIT2: Added the division by the total to get a probability :-)
EDIT: Reading your post over, it looks like you're saying I wouldn't need an inverse poisson. That'd be good. I'll look at it later.
Arjun - basically, goals scored look a lot like a truncated normal distribution. I already have a spreadsheet with team quality as a percentage of league average in goal scoring and goal prevention, as well as an estimate of home field advantage for GS/GA. So I created an expected goals for / expected goals against number for every remaining game. I then modeled goals scored using an inverted normal variation function - use expected goals as the mean, use the observed SD of the truncated normal distribution, input a random number, find that location on the curve, and round it to a goals scored number. If it spits back a negative goals scored number, try again with a new random number. I also modeled possible variance in team quality by running each simulation with team quality +/- a random amount, up to about 20% of league average. That's not terribly clear - does it make sense?
Yeah, I think I follow, thanks. What's the formula you used for expected goals for and expected goals against (at the beginning, I mean. I think you posted this somewhere earlier, but I must have missed it)?
Oh, okay, your post makes much more sense now, I was really thrown by the question marks :)
Use MATCH, just make a column with the cumulative poisson-probabilities for goals from 0 to 10, then MATCH(<your random number>, A1:A11, 1). It returns the position of the last row that was less than your random number (the position in the range, not the spreadsheet), subtract 1 to get goals.
In addition, if you have the (free) data analysis plug-in you can generate random numbers from a number of distributions, including the poisson. Although I don't know if the output format is workable for your needs.
Nathan Ake getting the start for Chelsea. In the Sky studio, Ray Wilkins busy explaining how he never wanted Torres at Chelsea.
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