Bloops: Andrew Gelman on Statistics
Posted by Neil Paine on January 7, 2011
Good read here from The Browser:
Interview: Andrew Gelman on Statistics
Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. He mentions Bill James' Abstracts early on as one of his influences when he was growing up, and then goes on to talk about four other books that also deal with uncertainty, variance, and finding patterns in data.
When discussing these matters, most people point to Mark Twain's famous "lies, damned lies and statistics" quote (which, incidentally, may have actually been coined by Benjamin Disraeli or Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke), but Gelman has another great Twain quote in mind: "It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know." Statistics happen to be a great way learn about "what you don’t know you don’t know."
(Special hat tip to Chase Stuart of the PFR Blog for the link.)
January 7th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
"He also studied – and baseball fans will care about this – the Chicago Cubs, who traditionally perform very badly, and whether that was because they are the only team that still plays a lot of day games. Was that hurting them? Most teams now play at night. Were the Cubs tired because they were playing a lot of day games? "
Except
1) The Yanks wouldn't stink just because they played day games
2) The Pirates and Royals don't play a lot of day games.
3) The Cubs were playing a lot of day games in '69 & '84
4) Since they started playing more night games in '88, they've still finished in the second division rather frequently
January 7th, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Jeff J.,
He is talking about something James said in one of the Baseball Abstracts, which were broadly published after each season 1981-1987, so all of your objections are irrelevant. One theme about the Cubs, (and Red Sox), I think I remember from those books was that James thought that teams that played in good offensive home parks often did poorly because they thought they had good batters when that was mostly an illusion caused by park factors. So these teams would not try to improve their hitting when they should have.
January 7th, 2011 at 8:33 pm
@2
"He is talking about something James said in one of the Baseball Abstracts, which were broadly published after each season 1981-1987, so all of your objections are irrelevant."
I'm not sure why the first three are, but whatever
It doesn't explain the 2004-2007 Red Sox.
Also, wouldn't they try to improve their pitching then? (which may be more helpful)
January 7th, 2011 at 9:25 pm
Because the 2004-2007 Red Sox were aware of this and did not make that error, partly because they had Bill James working for them. Teams that made this sort of error may have made other errors, such as not selecting very good pitchers. Also, James notes that if they have average RS and RA in a good offensive park then they already have good pitching, so it will be difficult to improve, and they may take actions that they think will help but will actually hurt because of the park factors and other things they ignored. He concluded that historically, before the time he was writing, that this seemed to be a common bias, and had more than a little to do with the long championship droughts of the Bosox and the Cubbies.
January 7th, 2011 at 11:51 pm
@1
Regarding point # 3, the Cubs did play all their home games during the day in 1969 and 1984, but including a few years before and after 1969, those season represent pretty much the sum total of the Cubs success in the 4 decades or so where the Cubs were the only team without lights. The overall record of the Cubs after 1945, the last year they won the pennant, and up to 1988, the year they installed lights, is rather bleak.
Regarding point 4, the Cubs to this day still only play a limited number of night games. Over the last two decades they have gradually added more and more night games at Wrigley, but the majority are still played during the day.
I'm not saying I completely agree that day games are what kill the Cubs year in and year out, but it cannot be denied as a factor.
January 9th, 2011 at 9:31 am
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January 10th, 2011 at 1:51 am
As for the Cubs and day games: the general opinion among most people I know is that the Cubs were terrible from the 40s through the 80s because they didn't have good players, and they didn't have good players because the front office was crummy and the ownership basically apathetic. To test whether the day games had an effect you'd probably have to look at players that moved to and from the Cubs and whether they performed better or worse than expected as they moved teams... but back then players didn't move as much as they do today, so it would be hard to do.
January 10th, 2011 at 12:55 pm
I think the Cubs were one of the last teams to put together an organized system of minor league affiliates, so that hindered the big league team for a long time.
January 17th, 2011 at 8:26 pm
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