Jack Valenti

This is just plain dumb. Why not burn a DVD for each individual screener with their name emblazioned on the bottom of the picture the whole way through (or at irregular intervals?). That way, if the disc gets out into pirated hands, you know precisely who it came from. And it's not like they're distributing a million copies for chrissakes...

Baseball Playoffs: Entertaining, but Mostly a Waste of Time

It's a little known fact that they are basically a waste of time. The difference between the teams is so minimal that a sample size of only 7 games is not enough to accurately represent which team is truly better. So, in the end, the playoffs do prove something: you can show some really exciting games on TV. But they are not representative of who has the best team: the season records prove that.

If you take a look at the final league standings (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/standings), the best teams in the league won barely 62% of their games. The worst teams (if you don't count the hopelessly futile Detroit Tigers who won on 27% of their games) fared no worse than a 39% winning percentage. The spread between these teams is so small that a 5 or 7 game series does it little justice.

Consider a series between the Tigers (who beat the Yankees in 5 out of 19 meetings this year) and the Yankees. What % would they win each series, assuming they are likely to win 5/19 (26%) of each game against them? (This calculator is nice to run through the prob's: http://www.stat.umn.edu/geyer/playoff.html . I modified it to work for longer series as well.)

5 game series: 11%
7 game series: 8%
9 game series: 6%
11 game series: 5%

Not so bad. The worst team in baseball will likely win 11% of the time in a Best of 5 against the best team in Baseball.

Things get ugly when you take a team like Toronto and compare it to the Yankees in 5, 7, 9 and 11 game series. During the year, Toronto won 53% of their games during the regular season. They beat the Yankees 9 times out of 20 meetings, for a win percentage of 45%.

Given they have a 45% chance of beating the Yankees on a given day, what's the probability that Toronto would win a...

5 game series: 41%
7 game series: 39%
9 game series: 38%
11 game series: 36%

It's ugly! The series are toss-ups. They don't really prove much at all.

The counter-argument to this logic is that "it's a different game in the post-season" and you can't use the winning percentages of each team during the year to predict the play-offs. Fair enough. (And there isn't really a good set of data to disprove or prove that explanation, though my belief is that it's rubbish -- see my rant on luck below.)

Even if the play-offs are different from the regular season, it begs the question: What are the playoffs then really proving? Who is the better team in a seven game series? If so, why is the selecting mechanism for the playoffs the best record in a given season? The teams with the best season-long records go to the playoffs. But, the ability to win games over the span of a season has little to do with the ability to dominate a series.

My belief is that this whole dilemma there is just too much luck involved in baseball (as opposed to basketball for example where the better team is much more likely to dominate and win a series). For me, the role of luck in baseball is best explained by watching the games. Infinitesimal differences, such as those caused by a gust of wind, can change the entire outcome of a game. For example, a breeze causes a ball to drift two feet on an outfield fly, which causes the outfielder to miss it. Or, the example of the Cubs fan who caused the foul ball to be missed by the outfielder (and potentially sink the Cubs). And so on. This explains the real inability to win any more than 63% of their games...

Ed Felt

It's been a few years, but I remember the guy being one of the few "old-school" New Jersey techies who had patience for an aggressive young product manager for WLS. I searched for his name tonight and this came up number 1:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/business-transaction/200109/msg00014.html.

Whatever happened to...

http://girdley.com/stats/ORGANISATION.html

Looking at my website stats is fascinating. I asked Mark Griffith tonight: "who is bored enough to read my site?". Given the above link, you have to wonder! I wonder if BEA will reimburse me for taking up 20% of my site bandwidth... :D

Here are the full stats: http://girdley.com/stats/

Party in a Box

http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=170&xlc=1017936

Go Luke!

Blogging Mark Griffith and Flaming Lips

I was just asked to answer a 15 minute survey to help make blogger.com better. Sadly, they didn't leave any option to make comments/suggestions, so I couldn't suggest adding comments functionality! What's it called when the thing you want to complain about prevents you from actually complaining? It's like trying to get someone on the phone at Yahoo! to get help for your problem -- even if you are a paying customer. "Hello, I pay you $39.95 a month and no one there will answer the phone..."

On another topic, the thing I admire most about Mark Griffith is how work is just something he does in between vacations. That boy (Mark) has his priorities straight! I am sadly the opposite.

And finally, I downloaded some Flaming Lips off of Kazaa tonight. Forget this RIAA lawsuit crap -- I may actually buy one of their albums just because of Kazaa. And here is a band that never gets played on MT-freaking-V!

And double-finally, if the RIAA is going to sue me for downloading music, I am going to claim that my computer was hijacked by a super-virus into downloading music. Let's see a federal judge moan when I bring in that issue of Wired that shows how these viruses work and ask the RIAA to prove that I actually typed in search terms into Kazaa. Now that I think of this, I'm a genius! On the other hand, I'd likely just put the $1200 fine on a credit card (to get the miles) and go back to downloading again...

Politician's Records

Much like the plethora of books on baseball statistics published every year, someone should do the same for elected officials. What bills did they support? How many votes did they attend? From whom did they receive donations, and how much? Etc.

www.google-watch.com

Yes, there are people out there crazier than me: http://www.google-watch.com/. To add in my own two cents on google, I've switched to Teoma just because Google is a bunch of jackasses. Sadly, their ad system is skewed and really I think they are developing too much power. If google doesn't want to host your ad, you're screwed as a web business.

But, you have to take your hat off to them -- they are smart in a Bill Gates sort of way. They've found a "platform-play" that even Bill missed. And honestly, I hope he tries to buy his way into the search engine biz as well. It's better to have two sharks in the tank, rather than one -- especially if you're dinner.