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Posts Tagged joe morgan

Sunday Night Joe Morgasm: Batting AVG edition

Apr 18

Posted by SpeakerBoxxx in Uncategorized | No Comments

emo cows

Your witty insight from Joe Morgan for this Sunday night, regarding the quality of Ichiro relative to a hitter batting .300:

.340 is a lot better than .300.

That’s true Joe. I gotta hand it to you this time you wiley bastard. But do you know how much better? That’s right, 4 hits over the course of 100 at-bats. Put another way, 1 more hit per 25 at bats, or yet another way, about 25 hits better over the course of a MLB season. And note for the record that’s ABs, and not plate appearances. That’s just a couple of the reasons that batting average is not the best indicator of the quality of hitters. I hate to sit here and bore our dedicated readers by reciting the most basic mathematical realities of baseball, but until you stop being a total dumb-ass, or at least stop insulting the fans that write about this stuff, I’m gonna keep doing what I have to do. This shit is what kills me about you Joe. For all the condescending bullshit you spout about sabermetricians, you use statistics ALL THE TIME. You just use the wrong ones.

Editors Note: I was searching google images for the term “dumb ass,” and I saw this picture of an emo cow and I thought it was hilarious. Imagine Joe Morgan’s face photoshopped on there or something. I’m lazy.

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Joe Morgan is one of the greatest minds of the human race: a half-assed liveblog

Apr 11

Posted by SpeakerBoxxx in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Well Joe Morgan is pitching an absolute gem tonight. He opened with a staggering display of stubbornly willful ignorance by critiquing the Cardinal’s use of Ryan Ludwick in the two slot. To paraphrase, Professor Morgan said something incoherent about the two spot being reserved for guys that can bunt or hit and run, and not power hitters, cause that’s how it has always been and that’s how the game is supposed to be played. Yeah let’s sit around and second guess Tony LaRussa. That guy couldn’t win a baseball game to save his life. And that’s right…MLB managers should just ignore the decades of research that confirms that sacrifice bunting actually lowers the expected value you get from a baserunner. Christ Bill James figured this shit out in the early 1800’s or something. But that’s just a run-of-the-mill example of Morgan’s inexplicable vendetta against sabrmetrics and people that can count above ten.

Joe really turned in on in the mid innings with an absolutely incoherent hour of rambling about teams’ market size. From what I could tell, and that’s admittedly not much since my first language is English, Joe thinks that market size is something that teams can choose to invoke or withdraw according to how it helps them in the free agent market. Now I’m relatively ignorant on this subject myself, so correct me if I’m wrong, but market size should really be a pretty easy line to draw. And I’m pretty sure that Minnesota, barring some sort of natural disaster or terrorist attack that causes massive demographic changes, cannot choose to be a big market on Tuesday and a small market on Wednesday. It has a set population. And a relatively stable expected revenue. The big markets are NY, Chicago, LA, Philly, and Boston. It’s not rocket science. And thank god. If Joe Morgan ever had to muse on something really complicated, Orel Hersheiser would be picking brain matter out of his hair for weeks.

Benjamin Sisko facepalm

Hey Captain Sisko...if OPS is so important, then why isn't it on the scoreboard?

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Nerdy math guy predicts MLB season, Joe Morgan begs to differ

Mar 12

Posted by SpeakerBoxxx in Department of Mischief and Disinformation, MLB | No Comments

Bruce Bukiet, associate professor of mathematical sciences and associate dean of the College of Science and Liberal Arts at the New Jersey Institute of Technology has released the results of a mathematical model that predicts the results of the 2010 MLB season. Although his model has proven accurate six out of the last eight seasons, ESPN analyst and old school baseball guy Joe Morgan is dubious. When TYSOTB offered Morgan the opportunity to dispute Bukiet’s methodology, he jumped at the chance. Ironically enough, Morgan has contributed a “Fire Joe Morgan” style refutation of the New York Post’s report on Bukiet’s prediction.* The text is below.

Derek Jeter, Albert Pujols and baseball’s other greats have barely begun spring training, but a mathematician from New Jersey already knows what kind of season they’ll have, Fox News reported Wednesday.

MMM…Derek Jeter slurp slurp slurp. You can’t measure intangibles slurp slurp.

But the American League West is too close to call, with all four teams within five wins and the Texas Rangers, Oakland Athletics and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim expected to win 82, 81 and 80 games respectively.

I really don’t understand how you come up with those numbers. I mean there’s only 162 games in the season, and there’s four teams in the division so each team can’t win more than 80 games. And the A’s will lose every game because they don’t bunt or steal, so I predict they’ll finish at least 5 games below .500.

And if you’re a Mets fan, never mind what Yogi Berra said. It’s over and it ain’t even started yet.

The Mets are due for a great season. You know, that’s why we play the games, Steve. Steve?

according to Bruce Bukiet, an associate professor of mathematical sciences and associate dean of the College of Science and Liberal Arts at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

See this is the problem you have with guys who haven’t played a day of baseball in their lives trying to make predictions like this. These ivy-league professor guys are guys who are just sitting around in their mother’s basement playing with calculators and their opinions are just as valued as guys who have been around the game for 50 years.

Bukiet bases his predictions on a mathematical model he developed in 2000, one that computes the probability of a team winning a game against another team with given hitters, bench, starting pitcher, relievers and home field advantage. For this season, Bukiet has refined his algorithm slightly, incorporating a more realistic runner advancement model. Whatever that is.

You’re always going to run in to trouble when you base results on models and not on reality. Besides, there’s three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Since it’s possible to lie with statistics, it follows logically that everyone that uses statistics must be lying. He’s right about one thing, though. You have to advance the runners.

The professor claims to have beaten the odds in six of the eight years he’s been using the model.

There’s no reason to believe his success is attributable to anything but random chance. A sample size of eight seasons is really not large enough, statistically speaking, to generate reliable inferences. You see, according to the Central Limit Theorem, the efficiency and precision of an estimator increase asymptotically. The conventional wisdom is that a sample size of at least 30 is necessary to achieve a basic level of confidence in the estimated proportion.

The Pittsburgh Pirates will repeat as the worst National League team with 66 wins, and the Cleveland Indians will win 67 for the most futile effort in the American League.

I predict great seasons from these teams. They have great locker room guys and great chemistry. And you never know what’s going to happen in a locker room like the Yankees with all those egos. I mean if Derek Jeter wasn’t so classy and a consummate professional leader.

Closing remarks: We gotta play ‘em one day at a time. I’m just happy to be here…hope I can help the ball club. I just wanna give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out.

*Joe Morgan did not actually write this column, obviously.

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