As in, don't read this if you have not watched the episode of Doctor Who originally aired on September 29th, 2012, and preferably all or most of the episodes prior to it in the revived series.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Team-Adjusted Wins in the 2012 National League
A while back I wrote a post detailing a proposed new baseball statistic called Team-Adjusted Wins, which involves adjusting a pitcher's win-loss record for the overall record of their team. The logic is that it's easier to have a winning record on a winning team, so, for instance, when Felix Hernandez went 13-12 the other year and won the Cy Young, that record was a lot more impressive than it looked because the Mariners were so awful in general. The hope with this statistic is that it preserves a lot of what people like about wins and losses while correcting for one of their chief deficits. No, it doesn't adjust for the randomness of when the bullpen blows a lead or a pitcher gets taken off the hook after leaving the game, but I think it's a major improvement.
So, in keeping with my interest in promoting the 2012 National League Cy Young Award candidacy of one Robert Allen Dickey, better known as the sun god Ra, let's take a look at the starting pitchers in contention for that award this year: Dickey, Clayton Kershaw, Matt Cain, Gio Gonzalez, and Johnny Cueto. Spoilers! Dickey comes out way the hell ahead.
Using the version of the statistic where you calculate a pitcher's expected wins and losses from their team's record in games not charged to that pitcher, we get the following numbers: Dickey, with 25 decisions, would be expected to have 10 wins, but instead has 19 wins, giving him +9 wins above team expectations; Kershaw, with 21 decisions, should have 10.66 wins, but instead has 12, for just +1.34 wins; Cain has 20 decisions, of which 11.04 would be expected wins given the Giants' overall performance, turning Cain's 15 wins into +3.96 wins above expectations; Cueto has 28 decisions, and his 19 wins are just +2.69 wins ahead of the 16.31-win expectation; and Gonzalez, with the same 28 decisions and 16.31 expected wins, has one more win, and thus one more expected win, than Cueto, at +3.69.
Dickey's way the hell ahead. The other four candidates combined have just 11.67 wins above team expectations, compared to Dickey's 9. All of the other contenders have worse numbers than King Felix did in his 13-win Cy Young season. Dickey, on the other hand, has a better score by this metric than Dwight Gooden did in 1985, when he went 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA. That's right: Dickey has improved the on the overall performance of his team by more than Doc Gooden did in one of the greatest years of pitching in the last half-century. He's been filthy good, in other words, racking up win after win for a heavily-challenged team. And, by the way, it's a team that's been mainly challenged not in its other starting pitchers but in its offense and its bullpen, the two factors that every starting pitcher has to contend with in each of their starts. (Well, okay, Dickey's thrown quite a few complete games, taking the bullpen out of the equation, but that's just part of why he's so awesome.)
Long story short, Dickey for Cy Young!
So, in keeping with my interest in promoting the 2012 National League Cy Young Award candidacy of one Robert Allen Dickey, better known as the sun god Ra, let's take a look at the starting pitchers in contention for that award this year: Dickey, Clayton Kershaw, Matt Cain, Gio Gonzalez, and Johnny Cueto. Spoilers! Dickey comes out way the hell ahead.
Using the version of the statistic where you calculate a pitcher's expected wins and losses from their team's record in games not charged to that pitcher, we get the following numbers: Dickey, with 25 decisions, would be expected to have 10 wins, but instead has 19 wins, giving him +9 wins above team expectations; Kershaw, with 21 decisions, should have 10.66 wins, but instead has 12, for just +1.34 wins; Cain has 20 decisions, of which 11.04 would be expected wins given the Giants' overall performance, turning Cain's 15 wins into +3.96 wins above expectations; Cueto has 28 decisions, and his 19 wins are just +2.69 wins ahead of the 16.31-win expectation; and Gonzalez, with the same 28 decisions and 16.31 expected wins, has one more win, and thus one more expected win, than Cueto, at +3.69.
Dickey's way the hell ahead. The other four candidates combined have just 11.67 wins above team expectations, compared to Dickey's 9. All of the other contenders have worse numbers than King Felix did in his 13-win Cy Young season. Dickey, on the other hand, has a better score by this metric than Dwight Gooden did in 1985, when he went 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA. That's right: Dickey has improved the on the overall performance of his team by more than Doc Gooden did in one of the greatest years of pitching in the last half-century. He's been filthy good, in other words, racking up win after win for a heavily-challenged team. And, by the way, it's a team that's been mainly challenged not in its other starting pitchers but in its offense and its bullpen, the two factors that every starting pitcher has to contend with in each of their starts. (Well, okay, Dickey's thrown quite a few complete games, taking the bullpen out of the equation, but that's just part of why he's so awesome.)
Long story short, Dickey for Cy Young!
Nationalizing the Race
At the time, a lot of people thought that Elizabeth Warren's fairly prime-time speaking role at the Democratic National Convention may have been designed to nationalize her race, to reduce the number of Massachusetts voters supporting both Barack Obama and Scott Brown. It appears to have worked, with essentially every post-convention poll has shown Warren with a non-trivial lead, despite the fact that Brown's approval and favorability numbers haven't really deteriorated and Warren's favorables haven't really improved. But a pretty solid majority of Massachusetts voters want Democrats to control the Senate going forward, so they're voting for Warren. Likewise, a recent PublicPolicyPolling survey of Connecticut shows the not-very-popular Chris Murphy (D) leading the not-very-popular Linda McMahon (R), basically because as with their northern neighbors, Connecticut voters want a Democratic Senate.
As someone who remembers being gleeful when Lincoln Chafee, the last Republican one could make a plausible case for calling liberal rather than just moderate, lost his 2006 re-election campaign to Sheldon Whitehouse, and who then also voted for Chafee for Governor of Rhode Island four years later, I find this trend very encouraging. Senate and Congressional elections are conducted locally, but they concern national governance, so voters ought to behave less idiosyncratically in them than in, say, gubernatorial races. At the end of the day, the single most important fact about a candidate to the national legislature is which party they'll caucus with, and which leadership slate they'll support. So it's nice to see these blue-state Democrats becoming more willing to vote blind partisanship, whether that means resisting the charms of an oft-moderate Republican incumbent in Massachusetts or holding their nose to vote for a somewhat scandal-tarred Democrat in Connecticut.
Of course, the flip side is that we've got several important Senate contests in Republican-leaning states like North Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and--particularly after the recent deadline for Todd Akin to depart--Missouri. There's been less polling in these red-state races than in the blue-state ones of late, I think, and there's a much less solid sense of where they stand. If the race is getting nationalized all around, one might expect to see Republicans moving into the lead. Of course, if what's really going on is just a generalized Republican collapse, that might not be the case. It'll be interesting to see, as it looks to me like these races are the ones that might let Democrats expand on their current Senate majority, rather than merely holding their position.
As someone who remembers being gleeful when Lincoln Chafee, the last Republican one could make a plausible case for calling liberal rather than just moderate, lost his 2006 re-election campaign to Sheldon Whitehouse, and who then also voted for Chafee for Governor of Rhode Island four years later, I find this trend very encouraging. Senate and Congressional elections are conducted locally, but they concern national governance, so voters ought to behave less idiosyncratically in them than in, say, gubernatorial races. At the end of the day, the single most important fact about a candidate to the national legislature is which party they'll caucus with, and which leadership slate they'll support. So it's nice to see these blue-state Democrats becoming more willing to vote blind partisanship, whether that means resisting the charms of an oft-moderate Republican incumbent in Massachusetts or holding their nose to vote for a somewhat scandal-tarred Democrat in Connecticut.
Of course, the flip side is that we've got several important Senate contests in Republican-leaning states like North Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and--particularly after the recent deadline for Todd Akin to depart--Missouri. There's been less polling in these red-state races than in the blue-state ones of late, I think, and there's a much less solid sense of where they stand. If the race is getting nationalized all around, one might expect to see Republicans moving into the lead. Of course, if what's really going on is just a generalized Republican collapse, that might not be the case. It'll be interesting to see, as it looks to me like these races are the ones that might let Democrats expand on their current Senate majority, rather than merely holding their position.
You Can't Talk About IVR Polling Without Talking About Rasmussen
It's often a major error to analyze some shift in American politics, especially in the demographics thereof, without asking first whether it's really a nationwide phenomenon you're observing or just a really strong Southern phenomenon. For instance, I recently saw some numbers showing that essentially all of Obama's national deficit with white working-class voters comes from the South. Surprise! Southern whites, including the not-terribly-rich ones, don't like Barack Obama. Who'd've thought?
I think this study suggesting that IVR polls, commonly known as "robo-polls" where there's no live human interviewer, just prerecorded questions that one answers by pressing buttons, are "copying" live-interviewer polls to get better accuracy struggles from somewhat of a similar situation. Their evidence is that IVR polls have really lousy accuracy when they're conducted in a race that no standard-methodology pollster has yet touched, but once a race has seen a standard pollster check it out, IVR polling is just as accurate as live-interviewer thereafter. The people at PublicPolicyPolling, an intensely prolific and typically really accurate IVR polling firm, are naturally not thrilled with this. But I think the real problem with the survey is that, just as one errs by treating all of America, South and otherwise, as being one integral nation, one errs by treating all IVR pollsters alike.
Specifically, of course, I'm talking about Rasmussen Reports. Because here's the thing: we liberal polling junkies have been noticing for several years now that there's a distinctive pattern to Rasmussen's polling. Very early in a cycle, their polls look ridiculous. Specifically, they're ridiculously skewed toward the Republican candidates. Later in the cycle, if they continue to poll at all, their polls become much more sensible, and end up being quite accurate. What it looks like, given that it's pretty well-known that Rasmussen is a deeply partisan firm with a pretty substantial history of hackishness, is that early in cycles Rasmussen is engaged in polling-as-messaging, trying to create a buzz around Republican candidates that, perhaps, no one's ever given much heed to. That happened with Scott Brown, for instance. Then, since polling firms are basically only judged on the last batch of polls they release, later in the cycle Rasmussen starts using more sensible turnout models, etc., perhaps "copying" from the consensus of the polling to get good results and maintain their reputation, such as it is.
The result is that the largest chunk of robo-polling is conducted by a firm that is deliberately being inaccurate early in the cycle, when few of the traditional pollsters are yet at work, and deliberately making itself more accurate at crunch time, when most contests have already received a whole bunch o' polling. That would easily be enough to produce the kind of data that study found, I'm guessing, so I'd like to see the study run again excluding Rasmussen. I'd be pretty surprised if the result didn't change.
I think this study suggesting that IVR polls, commonly known as "robo-polls" where there's no live human interviewer, just prerecorded questions that one answers by pressing buttons, are "copying" live-interviewer polls to get better accuracy struggles from somewhat of a similar situation. Their evidence is that IVR polls have really lousy accuracy when they're conducted in a race that no standard-methodology pollster has yet touched, but once a race has seen a standard pollster check it out, IVR polling is just as accurate as live-interviewer thereafter. The people at PublicPolicyPolling, an intensely prolific and typically really accurate IVR polling firm, are naturally not thrilled with this. But I think the real problem with the survey is that, just as one errs by treating all of America, South and otherwise, as being one integral nation, one errs by treating all IVR pollsters alike.
Specifically, of course, I'm talking about Rasmussen Reports. Because here's the thing: we liberal polling junkies have been noticing for several years now that there's a distinctive pattern to Rasmussen's polling. Very early in a cycle, their polls look ridiculous. Specifically, they're ridiculously skewed toward the Republican candidates. Later in the cycle, if they continue to poll at all, their polls become much more sensible, and end up being quite accurate. What it looks like, given that it's pretty well-known that Rasmussen is a deeply partisan firm with a pretty substantial history of hackishness, is that early in cycles Rasmussen is engaged in polling-as-messaging, trying to create a buzz around Republican candidates that, perhaps, no one's ever given much heed to. That happened with Scott Brown, for instance. Then, since polling firms are basically only judged on the last batch of polls they release, later in the cycle Rasmussen starts using more sensible turnout models, etc., perhaps "copying" from the consensus of the polling to get good results and maintain their reputation, such as it is.
The result is that the largest chunk of robo-polling is conducted by a firm that is deliberately being inaccurate early in the cycle, when few of the traditional pollsters are yet at work, and deliberately making itself more accurate at crunch time, when most contests have already received a whole bunch o' polling. That would easily be enough to produce the kind of data that study found, I'm guessing, so I'd like to see the study run again excluding Rasmussen. I'd be pretty surprised if the result didn't change.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
R.A. Dickey and Median vs. Mean
The other day I saw an analysis of the various National League 2012 Cy Young Award contenders by average game score (excluding Craig Kimbrel, who being a relief pitcher doesn't get game scores). Game Score, by the way, is a metric devised by Bill James to evaluate the quality of a starting pitcher's performance on a given night, where 50 is average and up is good. (Over 100 is technically possible, and under 0 may be as well, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it.) Now, since this was a Mets fan site on which I saw this analysis, I wasn't surprised to see that R.A. Dickey came out on top by it. Good for him, and in my opinion he deserves to win the award. But I'd like to delve a little further into the data and look at median Game Score, and then possibly some other variations as well.
Broken Embassy Window Fallacy
This is going to be a bit more economics-y and a bit more snarky than I usually get, but apparently at the U.N. today (or recently) Barack Obama was giving a speech. Part of that speech was a segment where, addressing the people who engage in violent extremist-y protesting that's largely motivated by the fact that they live in an economically woebegone part of the world, Obama suggested that their protests aren't doing anything to help their economic problems, and that perhaps they should channel their energy into doing something more productive. Okay, fine, whatever. But he apparently said that "attacking an embassy won't create a single job." Now, my understanding is that in a normal economy, that's true. However, in a depressed economy suffering from a demand shortfall, attacking an embassy creates new demand for construction work, and because there's slack in the economy as a whole, the person who gets hired to fix the embassy is shifted not out of some other job but out of the "unemployed" sector of the economy. In other words, jobs! Of course, that's not the most socially-efficient way to create work that needs doing, and it probably doesn't scale in any meaningful way to become a relevant policy response to economic stagnation, but hey, you can't say destroying an embassy doesn't create jobs. Someone's got to rebuild it.
Rory McIlroy and the Ghost of Bobby Jones
During the final round of last week's TOUR Championship, Rory McIlroy was in genuine contention to win the 2012 FedEx Cup, the payout for which is $10 million. Then, on a certain hole, he was setting up to his approach shot when his ball moved. According to Rory, he put his club behind the ball, and then backed away for some reason, possibly because he was afraid the ball would move, and then somewhat more than 10 seconds later it did in fact move. He called an official over to ask whether he had incurred a penalty. In the course of this discussion he said very clearly that the ball had moved because he put his club behind it, though there had been a substantial time delay involved. The rules officials decided the time lag was the controlling factor, and declined to penalize him.
Now, the TOUR Championship is held at East Lake Golf Club these days, which is where the great amateur golfer Bobby Jones learned the game. Among other things, like being the most dominant golfer of all time including Tiger Woods, Bobby Jones was famous for his extreme devotion to following the rules of the game. More than once he called a penalty on himself for having moved the ball at address when no one else on the planet could've noticed the movement, in the heat of competition in major championships. So, being somewhat of a Bobby Jones fan, I commented at the time of McIlroy's ruling that Bobby Jones did not approve, thinking to myself that it would be poetic justice if McIlroy played poorly from that point on. Which he did, and Brandt Snedeker won the FedEx Cup. Good for Sneds*.
But now I'm not sure if I didn't have the angle on Rory's little incident backwards. After all, McIlroy himself was basically saying that he had moved the ball. It was the officials who overruled him on this issue. In my opinion it's wrong for rules officials to hear a player say something like, "it was definitely because I put my club behind the ball" and then conclude otherwise, and I have a feeling that Rory McIlroy might agree with me there, and that this might have been at least somewhat responsible for his poor play thereafter. During a certain practice round with my high school golf team, I hit a beautiful long drive on the second hole to a great position, only to find my ball sitting at the very bottom of a big ol' divot. Now, normally I'd have looked at that as an interesting challenge, but I happened to be playing with my in-general-really-cool coach, who instructed me in no uncertain terms to remove my ball from the divot and place it on some nice ground nearby, on the grounds that the shot out of a divot is not an important one to practice. Of course, I obeyed him, as he had formal authority over me, and of course I hit that shot badly and of course I played badly for the next nine holes. Until, that is, the next round, when on that very same second hole I again hit a really nice drive that again went into a divot. Only this time I played the ball as it lied, I hit a nice shot, and I was back to playing well again.
To those of us who have a deep internal commitment to the rules of the game and to the spirit of those rules, getting an unfairly favorable ruling can feel much worse than getting an unfairly unfavorable ruling. (This is one of the things that mystifies me about a game like baseball, where gaining an unfair advantage by tricking the umpires into thinking you were safe or the other guy was out or whatever is considered somewhere between acceptable and obligatory.) It can weigh on your spirit, and having something weighing on your spirit makes it hard to play good golf. In a way, then, it was the ghost of Bobby Jones that caused Rory McIlroy to play his last several holes of the 2012 PGA Tour season badly, but it was the ghost of Bobby Jones as internalized by Rory McIlroy himself.
*This is actually what he's called. His cap says "SNEDS" on it. The first time I ever heard of him, at one of the majors several years back, one of the announcers said that "his friends and family call him Sneds." I find that quite unlikely, but it's still an awesome line.
Now, the TOUR Championship is held at East Lake Golf Club these days, which is where the great amateur golfer Bobby Jones learned the game. Among other things, like being the most dominant golfer of all time including Tiger Woods, Bobby Jones was famous for his extreme devotion to following the rules of the game. More than once he called a penalty on himself for having moved the ball at address when no one else on the planet could've noticed the movement, in the heat of competition in major championships. So, being somewhat of a Bobby Jones fan, I commented at the time of McIlroy's ruling that Bobby Jones did not approve, thinking to myself that it would be poetic justice if McIlroy played poorly from that point on. Which he did, and Brandt Snedeker won the FedEx Cup. Good for Sneds*.
But now I'm not sure if I didn't have the angle on Rory's little incident backwards. After all, McIlroy himself was basically saying that he had moved the ball. It was the officials who overruled him on this issue. In my opinion it's wrong for rules officials to hear a player say something like, "it was definitely because I put my club behind the ball" and then conclude otherwise, and I have a feeling that Rory McIlroy might agree with me there, and that this might have been at least somewhat responsible for his poor play thereafter. During a certain practice round with my high school golf team, I hit a beautiful long drive on the second hole to a great position, only to find my ball sitting at the very bottom of a big ol' divot. Now, normally I'd have looked at that as an interesting challenge, but I happened to be playing with my in-general-really-cool coach, who instructed me in no uncertain terms to remove my ball from the divot and place it on some nice ground nearby, on the grounds that the shot out of a divot is not an important one to practice. Of course, I obeyed him, as he had formal authority over me, and of course I hit that shot badly and of course I played badly for the next nine holes. Until, that is, the next round, when on that very same second hole I again hit a really nice drive that again went into a divot. Only this time I played the ball as it lied, I hit a nice shot, and I was back to playing well again.
To those of us who have a deep internal commitment to the rules of the game and to the spirit of those rules, getting an unfairly favorable ruling can feel much worse than getting an unfairly unfavorable ruling. (This is one of the things that mystifies me about a game like baseball, where gaining an unfair advantage by tricking the umpires into thinking you were safe or the other guy was out or whatever is considered somewhere between acceptable and obligatory.) It can weigh on your spirit, and having something weighing on your spirit makes it hard to play good golf. In a way, then, it was the ghost of Bobby Jones that caused Rory McIlroy to play his last several holes of the 2012 PGA Tour season badly, but it was the ghost of Bobby Jones as internalized by Rory McIlroy himself.
*This is actually what he's called. His cap says "SNEDS" on it. The first time I ever heard of him, at one of the majors several years back, one of the announcers said that "his friends and family call him Sneds." I find that quite unlikely, but it's still an awesome line.
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