4 ms·

Extremely long, but definitely worth the read.

by trun 16y ago

mncaudill 16y ago
It's hard to go wrong with anything written by Michael Lewis.
- bonsaitree 16y ago
  Actually, it is. Mr. Lewis can spin a fine yarn, but as with much of his first major work (Liar's Poker), a good deal of detail, and outright truth, is sacrificed to back-up the original thesis and offer a more compelling reader narrative. With hindsight, and much more data, long-term trending analysis of the Sabre-metrics examples given in Moneyball have not correlated with increased team, or even individual, performance in baseball. Basketball is an entirely different kind of animal. The data miner in me looks forward to seeing if this sort of analysis will offer genuinely useful predictive performance models this sport.
  - el_dot 16y ago
    Nay, basketball is not much different. Get the best players + good coaches and you'll win the most games. End of story. "a good deal of detail, and outright truth, is sacrificed to back-up the original thesis and offer a more compelling reader narrative." I think your comment is spot on, case in point: The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season, Battier was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48. In his first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then, last year, went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row. What Michael Lewis failed to mention is that in Memphis, Battier played with Gasol, the same Gasol who made the Lakers an instant contender and eventual champion. And in Houston he played with 2 perennial all-stars in Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. This year Houston did not have either Yao or Tracy and they sucked, Battier is still there...
    - ssharp 16y ago
      >Nay, basketball is not much different. Get the best players + good coaches and you'll win the most games. End of story. Almost every sport is like that. Sabermetrics was an attempt to find an optimal set of players using statistics. That will never work in the NBA (you could certainly argue that it hasn't worked in the MLB, either). Baseball is ultimately broken down into a series of 1-on-1 match-ups. A pitcher vs. a hitter, with a defense behind them. It's a team sport but the largest functions of the game are 1-on-1. No other major professional sport is like that. As such, major Sabermetrics stats like OPS and WHIP don't translate to basketball. You get something like Hollinger's PER rating, which is meaningful but not really telling. Scoring is largely out of context. A good player may score 20 points a game on a bad team and only 10 on a great team. Matchups change throughout the game and what your team does has a huge effect on what you do. In baseball, it's much more realistic to look at the statistics of a handful of players and figure out how you should organize your team. In basketball, crafting game plan strategies and rosters is still more of an art than a science.
      - maw 16y ago
        "Baseball is ultimately broken down into a series of 1-on-1 match-ups. A pitcher vs. a hitter, with a defense behind them. It's a team sport but the largest functions of the game are 1-on-1. No other major professional sport is like that." Cricket is a lot like that, actually. Its dynamics are different, though: whereas in baseball in a given matchup between a pitcher and a batter, the pitcher usually "wins", in cricket, between a bowler and a batsman, the batsman will usually "win" (or, at least, not "lose"). It's this difference that explains why cricket matches that aren't limited in overs or time last so much longer.
        pmccool 16y ago
        > Cricket is a lot like that, actually. Including the often very dicey performance metrics. My favourite example is batting average(total runs/total dismissals), which is skewed in favour of lower-order batsmen, who are more likely to record not-out scores. I'm more interested in their median score (or better yet, median partnership).
  - adamc 16y ago
    Link? If substantiated, you first paragraph would be interesting.
    - bonsaitree 16y ago
      Just one example: http://tinyurl.com/2739npb http://tinyurl.com/2739npb It's not that sabermetrics itself is without value, but the principles put forth in MoneyBall for "success" with sabermetrics in baseball have not held water for other teams in other markets. Even arguing the other side of the coin, it's easy to make the case that with resources like Baseball Prospectus ( http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/sortable/ http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/sortable/ ) available to all, any small sabermetrics arbitrage advantages which Beane & Co. may have once had are obviated.
  - jdminhbg 16y ago
    "With hindsight, and much more data, long-term trending analysis of the Sabre-metrics examples given in Moneyball have not correlated with increased team, or even individual, performance in baseball." Hmmm... what? The general principles Beane operated from have pretty much been adopted league-wide at this point. Of course, MLB is a zero-sum game, so once everyone adopts something, it's no longer an advantage. The Tampa Bay Rays are operating off the same statistical measurement philosophy (although they understandably don't share which) to make a small-market club operate efficiently, and they're pretty successful with it.
    - pwhelan 16y ago
      A corollary there is that you cannot leverage in baseball like you can in financial markets to play at ever thinner margins and thus the theory becomes largely useless unless you can augment it with better information. Also, people forget that "increased... performance" in baseball often means an increase in profit, not an increase in victories.
      - bonsaitree 16y ago
        True. In financial markets, even small inefficiencies and impedance mis-matches can be exploited due to liquidity, fine-granularity, high transaction volumes, and uniform standards of measurement. The same principles don't down-scale to the individual athlete or small-group (team) dynamics. Put another way, financial market strategies (in theory) can be constructed on matching/measuring against a continuous variance in capital efficiencies. Human performance is simultaneously less consistent, discrete, and difficult to measure. Put another way, think of matching the torque/horsepower vs. rpm curves for a typical family sedan's engine versus a high-compression race engine. The former can get good performance with an automatic transmission, the later requires a stick shift and an experienced hand on the till.
  - theycallmemorty 16y ago
    I'm not sure that the point of Moneyball was that sabrmetrics will always produce the most successful team. To me the point was that the team used statistical analysis to find undervalued players so they could compete with their opponents who often spend 2-3 times as much on player salaries.
- DilipJ 16y ago
  I agree. He's such a superb writer, that no matter how long or convoluted the article is, he can keep you enthralled right to the very end. His piece at the now-defunct Portfolio magazine was one of the best articles on the financial crisis that I have read: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...
- theycallmemorty 16y ago
  I'd highly recommend The Blind Side. Its nothing like the movie which seems to be targeted to middle-aged housewives.

Extremely long, but definitely worth the read.

by trun 16y ago

Extremely long, but definitely worth the read.

mncaudill 16y ago

It's hard to go wrong with anything written by Michael Lewis.

bonsaitree 16y ago
Actually, it is. Mr. Lewis can spin a fine yarn, but as with much of his first major work (Liar's Poker), a good deal of detail, and outright truth, is sacrificed to back-up the original thesis and offer a more compelling reader narrative. With hindsight, and much more data, long-term trending analysis of the Sabre-metrics examples given in Moneyball have not correlated with increased team, or even individual, performance in baseball. Basketball is an entirely different kind of animal. The data miner in me looks forward to seeing if this sort of analysis will offer genuinely useful predictive performance models this sport.
- el_dot 16y ago
  Nay, basketball is not much different. Get the best players + good coaches and you'll win the most games. End of story. "a good deal of detail, and outright truth, is sacrificed to back-up the original thesis and offer a more compelling reader narrative." I think your comment is spot on, case in point: The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season, Battier was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48. In his first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then, last year, went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row. What Michael Lewis failed to mention is that in Memphis, Battier played with Gasol, the same Gasol who made the Lakers an instant contender and eventual champion. And in Houston he played with 2 perennial all-stars in Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. This year Houston did not have either Yao or Tracy and they sucked, Battier is still there...
  - ssharp 16y ago
    >Nay, basketball is not much different. Get the best players + good coaches and you'll win the most games. End of story. Almost every sport is like that. Sabermetrics was an attempt to find an optimal set of players using statistics. That will never work in the NBA (you could certainly argue that it hasn't worked in the MLB, either). Baseball is ultimately broken down into a series of 1-on-1 match-ups. A pitcher vs. a hitter, with a defense behind them. It's a team sport but the largest functions of the game are 1-on-1. No other major professional sport is like that. As such, major Sabermetrics stats like OPS and WHIP don't translate to basketball. You get something like Hollinger's PER rating, which is meaningful but not really telling. Scoring is largely out of context. A good player may score 20 points a game on a bad team and only 10 on a great team. Matchups change throughout the game and what your team does has a huge effect on what you do. In baseball, it's much more realistic to look at the statistics of a handful of players and figure out how you should organize your team. In basketball, crafting game plan strategies and rosters is still more of an art than a science.
    - maw 16y ago
      "Baseball is ultimately broken down into a series of 1-on-1 match-ups. A pitcher vs. a hitter, with a defense behind them. It's a team sport but the largest functions of the game are 1-on-1. No other major professional sport is like that." Cricket is a lot like that, actually. Its dynamics are different, though: whereas in baseball in a given matchup between a pitcher and a batter, the pitcher usually "wins", in cricket, between a bowler and a batsman, the batsman will usually "win" (or, at least, not "lose"). It's this difference that explains why cricket matches that aren't limited in overs or time last so much longer.
      - pmccool 16y ago
        > Cricket is a lot like that, actually. Including the often very dicey performance metrics. My favourite example is batting average(total runs/total dismissals), which is skewed in favour of lower-order batsmen, who are more likely to record not-out scores. I'm more interested in their median score (or better yet, median partnership).
- adamc 16y ago
  Link? If substantiated, you first paragraph would be interesting.
  - bonsaitree 16y ago
    Just one example: http://tinyurl.com/2739npb http://tinyurl.com/2739npb It's not that sabermetrics itself is without value, but the principles put forth in MoneyBall for "success" with sabermetrics in baseball have not held water for other teams in other markets. Even arguing the other side of the coin, it's easy to make the case that with resources like Baseball Prospectus ( http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/sortable/ http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/sortable/ ) available to all, any small sabermetrics arbitrage advantages which Beane & Co. may have once had are obviated.
- jdminhbg 16y ago
  "With hindsight, and much more data, long-term trending analysis of the Sabre-metrics examples given in Moneyball have not correlated with increased team, or even individual, performance in baseball." Hmmm... what? The general principles Beane operated from have pretty much been adopted league-wide at this point. Of course, MLB is a zero-sum game, so once everyone adopts something, it's no longer an advantage. The Tampa Bay Rays are operating off the same statistical measurement philosophy (although they understandably don't share which) to make a small-market club operate efficiently, and they're pretty successful with it.
  - pwhelan 16y ago
    A corollary there is that you cannot leverage in baseball like you can in financial markets to play at ever thinner margins and thus the theory becomes largely useless unless you can augment it with better information. Also, people forget that "increased... performance" in baseball often means an increase in profit, not an increase in victories.
    - bonsaitree 16y ago
      True. In financial markets, even small inefficiencies and impedance mis-matches can be exploited due to liquidity, fine-granularity, high transaction volumes, and uniform standards of measurement. The same principles don't down-scale to the individual athlete or small-group (team) dynamics. Put another way, financial market strategies (in theory) can be constructed on matching/measuring against a continuous variance in capital efficiencies. Human performance is simultaneously less consistent, discrete, and difficult to measure. Put another way, think of matching the torque/horsepower vs. rpm curves for a typical family sedan's engine versus a high-compression race engine. The former can get good performance with an automatic transmission, the later requires a stick shift and an experienced hand on the till.
- theycallmemorty 16y ago
  I'm not sure that the point of Moneyball was that sabrmetrics will always produce the most successful team. To me the point was that the team used statistical analysis to find undervalued players so they could compete with their opponents who often spend 2-3 times as much on player salaries.
DilipJ 16y ago
I agree. He's such a superb writer, that no matter how long or convoluted the article is, he can keep you enthralled right to the very end. His piece at the now-defunct Portfolio magazine was one of the best articles on the financial crisis that I have read: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...
theycallmemorty 16y ago
I'd highly recommend The Blind Side. Its nothing like the movie which seems to be targeted to middle-aged housewives.