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Crucial Situations
December 3, 2002 - jimd
Charts are always cool (when well done). No problem seeing them, but the shading doesn't print for me. Just pages of empty grids. Oh well.
Tango, how about other run situations? In some innings, does the blue shading bleed into the -4/+4 run columns (or even further)?
Relevancy of the Post-season (October 16, 2003)
Discussion ThreadPosted 7:25 p.m.,
October 20, 2003
(#17) -
jimd
I disagree with the first Jim (and RossCW). The Vegas betting line is not an opinion about team quality, but an opinion about the gambling public's perception of the teams. The opinions of both informed and uninformed gamblers are weighted proportional to the amount of money they are expected to bet.
As a practical matter, it's probably not too far off, but the odds will be artificially lower on teams the uninformed portion of the public wants to bet on (e.g. Yankees, California due to its geographic proximity), and higher on teams with relatively few visiting fans (e.g. Florida, Minnesota).
Relevancy of the Post-season (October 16, 2003)
Posted 1:52 p.m.,
October 21, 2003
(#19) -
jimd
We're in agreement RossCW. I don't know if there is enough uninformed money betting on the WS to make a real difference. I've read that it can be a real issue with the SuperBowl.
Win Shares, Loss Shares, and Game Shares (November 15, 2003)
Discussion ThreadPosted 10:24 p.m.,
November 18, 2003
(#31) -
jimd
Is it this simple?
Somehow, I don't think so. Remember, one of the goals of the original Win Shares was that the same (park-adjusted) stats should produce close to the same results whether the player is on a 100 win team or a 100 loss team. The player who is league average should come out near .500 no matter which team he is on, with a similar number of Win Shares/Loss Shares. That's why the Win Shares are based on marginal runs instead of absolute runs. Team wins are proportional to marginal runs, not absolute runs.
I don't think absolute outs will work for the Loss Shares for the very same reason. Teams make approximately the same number of outs whether they win or lose, so winning teams would have substantially less Loss Shares per absolute out than losing teams (if you use absolute outs). So the average player gets a lot less Loss Shares on a winning team than on a losing team. Not good.
Win Shares, Loss Shares, and Game Shares (November 15, 2003)
Posted 5:08 p.m.,
November 19, 2003
(#34) -
jimd
As I understand it, the goal of Win Shares was to model real teams, not hypothetical nearly undefeated teams. It has obvious problems at either end of the Pythagorean scale, just like classical physics has problems with relativistic speeds. (An example of Pythagorean effects on a good team: adding Barry Bonds to a .500 team will add more wins than adding him to the 1998 Yankees; on the latter team too much of Bonds added value contributes to bigger and better blowouts instead of converting losses to wins, so he can't receive as many Win Shares. The Win Shares of everybody on that team actually goes down when Bonds is added because that team is beyond the point of diminishing returns.)
Any system that can deal with the Pythagorean problems caused by hypothetical teams while coming up with similar (or better) answers with "real" teams is a theoretically sound improvement. So taken in that light, what you say makes sense. When a player (or team) is so good (or bad) that the Pythagorean effects become noticeable then something has to give, which includes the ideal of similar results from similar stats. How extreme do these players or teams have to be for the Pythagorean effects to become visible? (The offensive/defensive split is a separate issue; it has problems in the published WS system.)
I'm with you on the negative numbers. I understand them in the abstract (like complex numbers) but they don't convey any meaning to me.