Or, what to do with yourself now that the basketball season is over.
Now that the NBA season has ended and the Boston Celtics have been crowned champions, I find myself with little interest in pro sports. Baseball has long been my least favorite of the three major professional sports, even when my beloved Colorado Rockies came out of nowhere last year to claim the National League pennant. Their amazing win streak last year got me thinking, though - should we have seen this coming? Is there a way that we could have accurately predicted this?
Of course, the answer is yes. Just like I did for the NCAA tournament, I created a metric to gauge an MLB team's strength. And just like the SPI, I used scoring differential as the primary method of determining power. Like I argued before, scoring differential is a more reliable tool for determining a team's overall strength than wins and losses. A team winning a majority of its games by extremely slim margins isn't necessarily a good team. More likely, it's a lucky team having a lot of things go its way, which you'd expect to level off. A team with a high scoring margin - even over subpar teams - can be reasonably expected to be a quality team. Scoring differential also factors out two weaknesses that are hidden by a win-loss record - great offense and lousy defense, and vice versa. A team with great offense but no defense could score 12 runs a game, only to give up 11. That gives them a low scoring differential. Likewise, a team that has no offense but a fantastic defense maybe scores one run a game while giving up zero. Again, low scoring differential.
I compiled some data on the 30 MLB teams (home record, road record, and scoring differential) and created a simple formula. (I'm not telling you the coefficients I used. You want a formula, go make your own.) I then added 100 to each score to keep teams from going negative, and also because a score of 102.915 seems cooler than one of 2.915. ESPN.com keeps great records, so compiling all the data was pretty simple. And once I finished it, the results were, unsurprisingly, not what common wisdom would have told you.
The entire sports world has been crowing about how amazing the Tampa Bay Rays have been this year, and they're right. They've come off ten consecutive losing seasons to post the current best record in the league. That's pretty impressive. But I think it's wrong to crown them the best team in the league based on that alone. They've scored 70 more runs than they've allowed this year for an average margin of victory of 0.787 runs per game. That's pretty good - fifth in the league. But since four teams have a better differential, four teams find themselves above Tampa Bay in the standings - Philadelphia, Boston, and both Chicago teams. In fact, the Chicago Cubs have scored 36 more runs in their differential than Tampa, putting them easily in the top spot.
There's even more we can learn from this metric. Conventional wisdom holds that the American League is far better than the National League right now. A look at my metric (I hesitate to call this one the SPI as well, but I haven't got a better name for it) shows that seven of the top ten teams in the league are from the AL. Pretty compelling. We can also learn that there are some underachieving teams in the league, and some overachievers. By looking at the SPI, you can tell how many games a team should be expecting to win based on their scoring differential. (You can extrapolate that to see how many games they should win over an entire season, but that's not accurate, as it fails to take into account trades and injuries.) Based on that, we see teams like Atlanta (currently 43-48) sitting well beneath their ability. The SPI has them six games higher, with an expected win-loss record of 49-42 and cracking the top ten. (ESPN.com's Power Rankings have them currently at 21. At the same time, you have teams like the L.A. Angels, which ESPN lists at number 3. With a record of 52-36, they look like a strong contender. However, the SPI pegs them at 48-42, with a barely positive run differential of 24.
The difference, probably, is that the SPI measures a team's potential, while most commentators measure performance. And true, we ought to be concerned with what a team is actually doing rather than what they could be doing, but with half the season left, I think measuring a team's potential still has some use. And if you're complaining to yourself about my writing another sports statistics article, then too bad, because this is my blog and I can write whatever I want unless the editors fire me.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
How Cell Phones Are Killing America
It's not the phone. It's the attention span.
A law going into effect in California today prohibits the use of cell phones without hands-free headsets in cars. Violators will be fined $20 for their first offense and $50 for subsequent offenses. The law is even stricter for those under 18, who are prohibited from any cell phone usage at all while driving, including hands-free talking or text messaging. California is the first state to enact such a law, but it looks like many more states will follow suit, with legislation in the works in 33 more states. Legislators feel that cell phones cause a distraction to drivers and cause them to react more slowly to changing road conditions.
The question, however, is whether or not that's the major problem facing drivers today. Studies have been done proving that drivers talking on cell phones are as hazardous as drunk drivers. However, I'm willing to bet that slow to react drivers aren't nearly as dangerous as those who drive recklessly and impatiently, weaving in and out of traffic. And I'm equally willing to bet that increased cell phone usage has a strong correlation with such driving.
We live in a culture where nearly any information we want is at our fingertips. Want to know if your best friend really did kiss that cute boy in chemistry class? Why spend all that time dialing their number when you could just send them a text message? Tools like the internet, cell phones, text messaging, instant messengers, and others all us to get needed information quickly. But they also remove our need to wait. While patience was once a virtue, it's now an annoyance. I can be in a meeting and still check baseball scores. (Not that I'd want to, considering how this season has gone for my Colorado Rockies.) I can be having a conversation with someone while sending instant messages through Skype to someone else. We're always looking for ways to shave precious seconds from our schedule. Waiting is a thing of the past. You can see this in driving habits all the time. People fly around corners without looking. Drivers on the freeway blaze down the road darting between lanes. It doesn't save them much time - maybe a few seconds here and there - but it feels like they're going faster and more efficiently.
I dig some digging for statistics to back up my point. While I don't have exact statistics on reckless driving charges, I do have access to traffic fatalities from 1997-2005.
During that time period, fatalities rose by about 250 per year, or a rate of about 0.6%. That rate seemed small to me, so I compared it to the rate of population increase over the same period. (Logically, if there are more drivers on the road, there will be more accidents.) The U.S. population increased nearly twice as quickly - just over 1% yearly. It would seem that the increase in population more than explains the rise in auto fatalities, until you see the spike between 2000 and 2001. Fatalities increased by over 1300 in one year, for a rise of 3.6%. That's six times the average over that nine-year period. However, cell phones were not released in 2001, but rather in 1999. That means that cell phones probably aren't responsible for causing the spike. Is it possible that habits associated with cell phones created the spike we see? It's difficult to say without more data, but my guess is yes.
That's not to say that California's anti-cell phone law won't have a positive effect. It probably will. But it does suggest that maybe we're treating the symptoms rather than the problem itself. Correcting the American short attention span may be more difficult than just a $20 fine.
A law going into effect in California today prohibits the use of cell phones without hands-free headsets in cars. Violators will be fined $20 for their first offense and $50 for subsequent offenses. The law is even stricter for those under 18, who are prohibited from any cell phone usage at all while driving, including hands-free talking or text messaging. California is the first state to enact such a law, but it looks like many more states will follow suit, with legislation in the works in 33 more states. Legislators feel that cell phones cause a distraction to drivers and cause them to react more slowly to changing road conditions.
The question, however, is whether or not that's the major problem facing drivers today. Studies have been done proving that drivers talking on cell phones are as hazardous as drunk drivers. However, I'm willing to bet that slow to react drivers aren't nearly as dangerous as those who drive recklessly and impatiently, weaving in and out of traffic. And I'm equally willing to bet that increased cell phone usage has a strong correlation with such driving.
We live in a culture where nearly any information we want is at our fingertips. Want to know if your best friend really did kiss that cute boy in chemistry class? Why spend all that time dialing their number when you could just send them a text message? Tools like the internet, cell phones, text messaging, instant messengers, and others all us to get needed information quickly. But they also remove our need to wait. While patience was once a virtue, it's now an annoyance. I can be in a meeting and still check baseball scores. (Not that I'd want to, considering how this season has gone for my Colorado Rockies.) I can be having a conversation with someone while sending instant messages through Skype to someone else. We're always looking for ways to shave precious seconds from our schedule. Waiting is a thing of the past. You can see this in driving habits all the time. People fly around corners without looking. Drivers on the freeway blaze down the road darting between lanes. It doesn't save them much time - maybe a few seconds here and there - but it feels like they're going faster and more efficiently.
I dig some digging for statistics to back up my point. While I don't have exact statistics on reckless driving charges, I do have access to traffic fatalities from 1997-2005.
During that time period, fatalities rose by about 250 per year, or a rate of about 0.6%. That rate seemed small to me, so I compared it to the rate of population increase over the same period. (Logically, if there are more drivers on the road, there will be more accidents.) The U.S. population increased nearly twice as quickly - just over 1% yearly. It would seem that the increase in population more than explains the rise in auto fatalities, until you see the spike between 2000 and 2001. Fatalities increased by over 1300 in one year, for a rise of 3.6%. That's six times the average over that nine-year period. However, cell phones were not released in 2001, but rather in 1999. That means that cell phones probably aren't responsible for causing the spike. Is it possible that habits associated with cell phones created the spike we see? It's difficult to say without more data, but my guess is yes.That's not to say that California's anti-cell phone law won't have a positive effect. It probably will. But it does suggest that maybe we're treating the symptoms rather than the problem itself. Correcting the American short attention span may be more difficult than just a $20 fine.
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