Dubner worries a lot about whether people comment on our posts, which is definitely evidence that he doesn’t have enough important things to worry about. Every time I have made a post about baseball, it has unleashed a torrent of comments. So as an Easter gift to Dubner, here is my annual baseball post. I’ve been working for the last . . .
I was on an airplane yesterday, and when I landed I saw that there were about 4 million e-mails on my Treo. This meant, I figured, that Levitt had run some kind of quiz on the blog. And indeed he had — this one, asking what his wife and LeBron James had in common. The airport I landed at was . . .
The winner of the quiz is Willy, who had the 64th guess, correctly noting that LeBron James and my wife are both studying mandarin. My wife and four kids are all studying Mandarin, in part because we have two daughters adopted from China. (I tried learning a while back, but I had no talent for it and gave up.) LeBron . . .
In the U.K., there are plans afoot to charge a higher fee to park a larger car, even in your own driveway. Remember Swivel, the data mashup site we blogged about? Here’s another new data visualization site, called ManyEyes, run by IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. And here’s a thoughtful review of ManyEyes vs. Swivel. Standardized test scores in Illinois are . . .
Barry Bonds‘s baseball career, and his life in general, have been equal parts accomplishment and tumult. I won’t rehearse the details here, since anybody who cares at all is already familiar with them. The most interesting question to me is: Now what? It seems quite likely that if Bonds really wants to break Hank Aaron‘s all-time home run record of . . .
I agree with almost everything in this opinion piece by Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today: Super Bowl betting spotlights silly laws Plain Talk By Al Neuharth USA TODAY Founder More than half of all adults across the USA, about 112 million of us, will bet on the Super Bowl this weekend. Most of the wagers will be illegal. . . .
On the first day of class, I tell my undergraduates that if they only learn one thing in my course, I hope that it will be to recognize and appreciate the difference between correlation and causality. Most of the students laugh smugly, thinking they already know the difference. It never ceases to amaze me, however, when a cleverly designed exam . . .
The February 5, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine isn’t really a Freakonomics column, and it’s not really in the New York Times Magazine, either. This blog post supplies additional research material.
Big poker tournaments are a zero-sum game. The competitors pay to enter and those entry fees are returned as prize money. It is common practice for a player to be sponsored by someone else, i.e. a third party pays a player’s entry fee in return for a share of the profits earned. This is true in professional golf as well. . . .
According to this story on ESPN.com, Pat Riley is thinking about bringing in some sumo wrestlers to help improve his game. Riley’s hope is that the battering they give him will better prepare Shaq for game conditions. Let’s hope the sumo wrestlers don’t introduce Shaq to the fine art of cheating to lose. As poorly as Shaq shoots free throws, . . .
Earlier I mentioned that my undergrad alma mater, Appalachian State University, was playing for the NCAA I-AA national championship. Well, they won, the first national title in any sport for the university. Congratulations to one and all. When I was there, they had a Top 10 soccer program, full of African and Irish and South American players. Thompson Usiyan, from . . .
I did my undergraduate work — which consisted mainly of playing in a punky/country/rock band called The Right Profile — at Appalachian State University, which is located in the mountain town of Boone, N.C. (Levitt probably would have gone there too, if he had gotten in, but he had to settle for Harvard.) A.S.U. is not well-known nationally but that . . .
And, actually, it isn’t Freakonomics either. It is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. My good friend Jimmy Golen, a sportswriter for the AP, forwarded me this interview with Joe Maddon, the new manager of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays Q: Are you doodling lineups, doodling rotations — JOE MADDON: You know what? No, not yet. We’re talking about that on the way . . .
Michael Lewis writes in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine about Mike Leach, the innovative coach of the Texas Tech football team. As Lewis describes it, Leach takes a totally different view of football and is on the cusp of revolutionizing the game. It is a very interesting article, and beautifully written. As usual with Michael Lewis, there is a . . .
According to this article in Wired, a man named Dean Oliver is trying to do for basketball what Bill James and Billy Beane did for baseball: create and exploit new metrics in order to better distinguish players who win from those who simply generate gaudy traditional stats. The Wired article is written by Hugo Lindgren, who is in some measure . . .
The winner of the New York Marathon last Sunday was Paul Tergat of Kenya. He ran a time of 2:09:30. The second place finisher, Hendrik Ramaala of South Africa finished 1 second behind in a time of 2:09:31. Over 26 miles and they were one stride apart. But that is not even the most amazing fact to me. It turns . . .
Football coaches are known for being extraordinarily conservative when it comes to calling a risky play, since a single bad decision, or even a good decision that doesn’t work out, can get you fired. In the jargon of behavioral economics, coaches are “loss-averse”; this concept, pioneered by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, holds that we experience more pain with a . . .
I guess there won’t be a sequel to Moneyball written about Paul DePodesta and the Los Angeles Dodgers. After a 71-91 season, DePodesta was abruptly fired this week. Diehard readers of this blog know that I have been a longtime skeptic of the stories in Moneyball (see, for example, here, here, and here). There is, however, a new academic paper . . .
The playwright August Wilson died a few weeks ago. He was a powerful and unique writer, and a powerfully unique man. Five years ago, I had the chance to interview him for a book I was writing, Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper. I was interested in Wilson because Confessions was about my childhood infatuation with Franco Harris, a football player with . . .
Most of the events described in Freakonomics took place, or still take place, in the continental U.S. — except for the chapter describing how sumo wrestlers collude to throw matches. We’ve gotten a surprising number of e-mails from readers in Japan with interesting sumo comments but most of us don’t have regular access to live sumo. At least we didn’t . . .
Emergency rooms serve as the front lines in the world of medicine. Many (most?) visits to ERs are not emergencies at all, but rather, routine visits by people with limited access to health care. As a consequence, waiting for hours to be seen is not uncommon. Forced to take all patients, the ER raises the “price” by making you wait. . . .
I love to gamble. Personally, I’m pretty content with the menu of bets you can find at the typical internet sports book: NFL, Nascar, the next winner of American Idol, etc. But for the deeper thinkers among you, there is a great “betting” site called www.longbets.com. The wagers there are a little more exotic. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, for . . .
On the surface, not much. The Kansas City Royals have lost 19 straight games and are threatening to break the all-time record for futility in major league baseball. My iPod, on the other hand, has quickly become one of my most beloved material possessions. So what do they have in common? They both can teach us a lesson about randomness. . . .
A question for the baseball experts: has any team in history ever been as bad as the A’s were early in the season and done as well as they are doing now? It has been an amazing run. Interestingly, the market at tradesports is still giving the A’s no respect. The bid-ask spread on total wins this season for the . . .
To all the Billy Beane fans I offended earlier this season: I have noticed that the A’s are now three games above .500. I’m too busy with other stuff to even try to say something intelligent about baseball right now. Plus my fragile psyche can’t take anymore of the kind of abuse that baseball fans hand out.
It’s nice to see that Astros third baseman Morgan Ensberg is planning to read Freakonomics — or at least he was until a last-minute call-up to the All-Star squad — but here’s the big question: can he help us tap into any data that might help solve the myriad mysteries of modern baseball?
My Preakness picks were not as terrible as usual – I correctly had Afleet Alex to win, but missed my exactas. I guess they were good enough that some readers wanted my Belmont picks. Well, actually only one reader, but I’ll take that as a mandate. Anyway, I like Afleet Alex. I think he will be an odds-on favorite, like . . .
It’s probably poor sportsmanship to do another Oakland A’s post at a time when the A’s have now sunk to a record of 17-31 and are ahead of only one team in the American League. But I feel like I am still misunderstood when it comes to what I have been trying to say about Billy Beane. So I keep . . .
On p. 39 of Freakonomics, we make a passing reference to the Chicago Black Sox, the name given to the Chicago White Sox after eight players were found to have colluded with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. A reader recently wrote: “The 1919 white sox were not known as the black sox because they threw the world series. . . .
What do the 100+ angry baseball fans who have posted livid responses to my earlier postings about Billy Beane have to say about the new data that has been assembled since I made my first claims? The A’s record is now 14-20. The chances of a team that wins 60 percent of their games going 14-20 in the first 34 . . .