Golf gets even dorkier

Pax Arcana

Baseball is famous for the volume of statistics used to analyze individual performance. Because there are a limited number of quantifiable results on any given pitch — and there are hundreds of thousands of pitches thrown every season — it is relatively easy to measure the success of a given player over the course of a season.

Other sports, like basketball and hockey, are harder to analyze via statistics. How do you measure the success of a forward whose coach insists he play point guard? Or the value of a hockey center whose would-be assists were wasted by poor-shooting teammates?

It seems funny that golf doesn’t get analyzed the way baseball does. After all, a golf tournament produces thousands of shots at a time — all on the same turf in the same weather. Why don’t the announcers talk about Tiger’s stroke-average when hitting from the rough? Why don’t they ever talk about Rocco Mediate’s sand average or Boo Weekley’s bump-run-rate? Actually, maybe they do but we’re asleep on the couch and don’t hear it.

Anyway, a group of researchers recently decided to rectify this situation by studying about 200 professional golfers from 2004 to 2008. The first breakthrough finding of the study: golfers are more likely to hit par putts than birdie putts of comparable difficulty. The reason? Something that can be best be described as “bogey aversion“:

Even the world’s best pros are so consumed with avoiding bogeys that they make putts for birdie discernibly less often than identical putts for par, according to a coming paper by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. After analyzing laser-precise data on more than 1.6 million Tour putts, they estimated that this preference for avoiding a negative (bogey) more than gaining an equal positive (birdie) — known in economics as loss aversion — costs the average pro about one stroke per 72-hole tournament, and the top 20 golfers about $1.2 million in prize money a year.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I blogged this story and chose that quote just so I could make a “stroke per hole” joke at the end of the post. Well, you’re wrong. I just thought it was a cool story about statistics and sports.

Plus I couldn’t think of a good one.

Putting Strategy Comes Up Short, Study Finds [NYT]

The most depressing baseball statistics ever

Pax Arcana

The arrival of pitchers and catchers is typically a big deal among baseball fans of every stripe.

But as a Mets fan, I confess I am still not emotionally prepared for the 2009 season. Two straight late season collapses — plus the ignomy of watching those Cheez Whiz slurping troglodytes in Philadelphia celebrate a World Series title — will do that to a guy.

Perhaps it’s best if I take a step back and take a rational view of what happened last year. These observations from Jayson Stark (via The Mets are Better than Sex) could be just what I needed — If what I needed were a horribly depressing litany of statistics that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the 2008 Mets were a very, very good team with a very, very, very bad bullpen:

Just consider the bullpen disaster that did in this team this season:

• The Mets were 13th in the league in ERA from the seventh inning on and 13th in bullpen ERA overall.
• They blew 29 saves — second most in the National League, behind St. Louis.
• They gave up 61 home runs from the seventh inning on, tied with the Giants for the most in the league.

And those aren’t even the most devastating numbers that defined the Mets’ season. Consider these numbers:

• If all games had ended after six innings this season, the Mets would have finished the year 11 games ahead of the Phillies (aka, the team that won the World Series).
• If all games had ended after seven innings, the Mets would have finished six games ahead of the Phillies.
• And if all games had even been just eight innings long instead of nine, the Mets would have finished five games ahead of the Phillies.

But the rules are the rules. And the rules say they had to play all nine. And it was those final innings that crushed the Mets. The Phillies lost no games they led after eight innings. The Mets lost seven of them — and lost 13 games they led after seven innings. That’s how seasons slip away. That’s how one fatal flaw can undermine everyone and everything. That was the story of the 2008 Mets.

Of course things look a bit better this year with J.J. Putz and Francisco Rodriguez on board. But still, I think I’m better off just closing my eyes in the seventh inning.

Mets now have terrific twosome in ‘pen [ESPN]
Jerry’s Angels [The Mets are Better Than Sex]

Nerding out on baseball at the Museum of Science

Pax Arcana

Pax Arcana and the luminous and courageous Mrs. Pax Arcana beat a path down to the Boston Museum of Science last night to hear Bill James, the grand poobah of baseball nerds, and his protege Rob Neyer hold forth on a variety of baseball related topics.

A few quick observations:

1) Bill James is legendarily difficult to figure out, and is clearly uncomfortable with people. He came across as pleasant and funny, but also had difficulty answering direct questions from the audience. It seemed as though he lacked the ability to bridge the gap between what the person asked and what the person meant to ask — a valuable social skill that most of us develop at some point.

2) If I bought into such theories — and I’m not sure I do — James seems to fit into that category of ultra-smart numbers geeks that are quite possibly on the autism spectrum somewhere. People have said the same about Bill Gates for years because of his social awkwardness, inability to remember names, and fidgety personal habits. James is articulate when discussing baseball statistics, but can’t remember anybody’s name, at one point transposing Leo Mazzone and Lee Mazilli. He also rubs his fingertips together constantly.

After the jump, why Bill James says Barry Bonds should go to the Hall of Fame.

You are where you eat

Pax Arcana

Here’s a quickie for your Tuesday morning.

Travelocity says 75% of Americans consider food an important consideration when selecting travel destinations.

That means one quarter of us travel for all the wrong reasons.

The New Trend in Travel Reviews: Increase in Food and Restaurant Reviews [BusinessWire]

Roger Clemens might just be lying about this steroid business

Pax Arcana

Last week, the brain trust of lawyers and agents representing distempered gorilla Roger Clemens defended the hulking mongoloid’s unprecedented late-career numbers by releasing a report aimed at proving that nothing unusual was going on.

In yesterday’s New York Times, a group of academics from the Wharton School dissected the numbers used to generate the report. What they found was something so shocking, so contrary to your preconceptions, and so utterly unexpected that you may just take a dookie in your pants when you read it:

The value of evidence is not measured by the weight of a report; when examined carefully, the Clemens report does not make a convincing case for his innocence.

WHOA!

The Clemens report draws parallels between his career and those of Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, and Nolan Ryan — three other pitchers who had awesome late career numbers. But the academics argue that those comparisons are not adequate because those three had great late careers after undistinguished early careers:

By comparing Clemens only to those who were successful in the second act of their careers, rather than to all pitchers who had a similarly successful first act, the report artificially minimizes the chances that Clemens’s numbers will seem unusual. Statisticians call this problem selection bias.

The Wharton guys take it upon themselves to crunch some numbers on Clemens’ career:

A better approach to this problem involves comparing the career trajectories of all highly durable starting pitchers. We have analyzed the progress of Clemens as well as all 31 other pitchers since 1968 who started at least 10 games in at least 15 seasons, and pitched at least 3,000 innings. For two common pitching statistics, earned run average and walks-plus-hits per innings pitched, we fitted a smooth curve to all the data from these 31 pitchers and compared it with those for Clemens’s career.

Relative to this larger comparison group, Clemens’s second act is unusual. The other pitchers in this durable group usually improve steadily early in their careers, peaking at around age 30. Then a slow decline sets in as they reach their mid-30s. Clemens follows a far different path. The arc of Clemens’s career is upside down: his performance declines as he enters his late 20s and improves into his mid-30s and 40s.

Reached for comment by email, Clemens disputed the accuracy of the statisticians’ conclusions.

“i aint won for fancy book larnin’ an i swere if i ever saw those guys from WHOREton at a bar i wood tare there fagit arms off”

Then he took a long pull of water from the toilet and ate the family cat.

Report Backing Clemens Chooses Its Facts Carefully [New York Times]