July 27th, 2012: Tape Delay

It is 2012, and yet NBC Sports has decided that showing sports via tape delay is still the way to go. Just a couple of weeks ago, like every other year, we watched live a British Open champion. We were able to watch with modern technology in HD. Tomorrow though when Michael Phelps will square off against Ryan Lochte in the 100IM, it will be on tape delay. You can watch it live, on the internet, at much lower quality. The Opening Ceremonies, even worse, can’t see on the internet, tape delay only.
 

In today’s media age, it will be impossible not to know who won the Phelps/Lochte dual, unless you live under a rock. Between facebook, twitter, smartphones, texting and everything else. I mean I could avoid it, but I would have to basically not go online or talk to anyone who cares about sports and has. The solution is simple, NO MORE TAPE delays. Show Lochte and Phelps at 2:30PM EST battling it out. If you want, show it again in primetime. NBC not doing so is going to result in me watching a lot less Olympic coverage. Tape Delay is so 30 years ago. The action should be live, no matter what time it is. It is just that simple.

December 1st, 2011: My favorite live sporting event: D1 Hockey- Cornell 5 RIT 3 at Lynah Rink in 2006

May 18th, 2011: Indians to US Cellular for a quick 2

The Indians disposed of the Royals in a quick two game series and now face another against the Chicago White Sox. The Sox are trying to dig themselves out of a huge hole in the division 7 of their last 10 but still 18-25 and 10 games behind the Tribe. The tribe faced the Sox opening weekend and the sox took 2 of 3 games. The White Sox are in the bottom of the league both hitting and pitching but they are the worst team in the league hitting at home, a horrible 223 at US Cellular Field. The tribe is the 3^rd best team in the AL on the Road; though scoring 19 on Monday really helped move them up.
 

The Sox have been generating their power from mostly Paul Konerko. They need someone else to step up if they are going to make a run back up. Konerko leads the team with 10HR, 30RBI and 312 average. The  tribe has been getting hitting from all around and hope to keep it that way an riding high. Onto the matchups

 

Pitching Matchups
 

Wednesday- Masterson (5-1, 2.73 ERA), Peavy (0-0, 6.00 ERA)

Masterson is trying to bounce back from his first bad start of the season. The tribe has lost two in a row when Masterson takes the hill. Masterson did get the Indians their 1^st win of the season against these white sox.  Jake Peavy is starting only his second game of the season. In his first start against the Angels he allowed 4 runs in 6 innings in a no decision in which the White Sox won. The bookies have the sox as the slight -120 favorites in this one. I like the Indians here as I expect a Masterson bounce back.

Thursday- Carmona (3-3, 3.94 ERA), Floyd (4-3, 4.22 ERA)

Carmona worst start of the year was opening day against these White Sox. Overall Carmona has been good overall with 6 of 9 quality starts. He has been better on the road but the team wins more often when he pitches at home. A lot of the has to do with how horrible his first start was. Floyd has not been a good pitcher this season. He has 4 of 8 quality starts. He is bad at home, and the sox are 1-2 when he pitches at home. He does have a couple of quality starts though so he may be able to pull something out.

May 16th, 2011: Critical Series for Kansas City vs the Tribe

The Indians take on the Royals in Kansas City after two straight Rainouts vs the Mariners in Cleveland. The Royals just got swept by the Tigers in a rain shortened 2 games series. After the weekend it puts the Tribe at 24-13 and the Royals at 20-19, 5 games behind the Tribe. Thus for the Royals this is a very critical series. If they can win these two games they can get right back in the mix with the Tribe and the Red Hot Tigers. The Indians lead the season series 5-2 already. KC is much better at home than on the road, with the 2^nd best record in the league at home at 15-8, only behind the tribe. The Indians are just 9-9 away from home.
 

These are two of the best hitting teams in the league, the Tribe 2^nd in average and the Royals 4^th. The Tribe has more power but the Royals lead the league in Stolen Bases. The Indians are much better pitching than the Royals but let’s look at the matchups.
 

Pitching Matchups
 

Monday- Tomlin (4-1, 2.70 ERA) v Davies (1-5, 7.08 ERA)- Tomlin has a quality start in each of his 7 starts this season. He is much better at home than road though, the Tribe going 1-2 on the road when he pitches. This includes a loss on the road to the Royals already. The numbers on Davies look horrible but arnt as bad as they seem. Three of his last 5 starts as quality, but his worst start against the Tribe when he game up 8 runs in 3 and 1/3 inning. Davies has yet to be favored in a game he pitches.
 

Tuesday- Carrasco (1-2, 5.29 ERA) v Mazzaro (0-0, 4.50 ERA)- Mazzaro looks to follow up an impressive albeit short 4 inning debut at the Yankees. Carrasco has been the weak link in the Indians staff, with the Tribe going 2-4 when he pitches. Still the team did when the he faced the Royals at KC on April 18^th. I expect a lot of runs in this one.
 

While both teams would love a sweep this short two game series looks prime for a 1-1 split.

May 13th, 2011: Wedge Returns to Cleveland

My friend and avid Tigers Fan James suggested I do an Indians blog and I decided no because I would not be committed but what I am going to try to do is blog about the Indians by the series, not by the game.

This weekend the Tribe take on the Seattle Mariners. The Tribe enter the series 23-13 and 1^st place in the AL Central, on a two game skid which both the Royals and Tigers have taken advantage of by closing the gap to 1^st place by 3.5 and 4 games, respectively. The M’s are 16-22, 5 games behind the 1^st place Angels and currently on a 5 game losing streak.
 

This is a three game series that the Indians are favored at -180 to win (Bet 180, win 100). It is the 2^nd series vs the team with the Tribe’s former manager, Eric Wedge. The tribe swept Seattle in their only trip to the Emerald City in a 3 game series back in April. The tribe avoids the ace Felix Hernandez but must face young phenom Michael Pineda.

Seattle has a good Rotation and horrible hitting. The team average is a league worst .229. They have the 2^nd least home runs in the league with 19. They are in the middle of the pack in terms of speed.  The Indians hope to be able to score some more runs now that they get away from Oakland and Anahiem, two of the best pitching staffs in baseball.

 

Pitching Matchups
 

Friday- Carmona (3-3, 3.83 ERA) v. Fister (2-4, 3.4 ERA)- The Tribe Ace has been up and down, mostly up after a horrible Opening day start. The Tribe is 2-0 when he pitches as the Favorite as he is here. The M’s are 2-5 when fister pitches and he lost vs Masterson earlier this year. This matchup should be what the doctored ordered in order to get the tribe back in the W column.
 
 

Saturday- White (1-0, 3.75 ERA) v. Bedard (1-4, 4.78 ERA)- This is the Tribe’s 1^st round pick in 09 making his 3^rd ML Start. The Tribe is 2-0 with him pitching and he outdueled Jered Weaver in his last start, quite an achievement. It’s hard to see White having his 1^st bad start vs this lineup but baseball is a funny game. Bedard had a rough start to the season but he may be turning a corner as 3 starts he beat the Tigers with Verlander on the hill and followed that up by beating budding star Ogando for Texas. Last start was a small step back but he did have 9 K’s in only 5 innings of work.

Sunday- Toblin (4-1, 2.70 ERA) v. Pineda (4-2, 2.84 ERA): This matchup is by far the most interesting of the series. Toblin has been a model of consistency allowing 1-3 runs in 6-8 innings in each of his 7 starts. The Tribe is 4-0 when he pitches at home. Pineda continues to impress with 6 of 7 quality starts and Seattle is 4-3 with him pitching. It may come down to Pineda outdueling Toblin for Wedge to pick up his 1^st win vs his former employer.

June 14th, 2010: The vuvuzela

After 6 months off, I come back to blog about something that has the world up by storm, the Vuvuzela. Don’t know what it is, it’s a 130 dB annoying buzzing sound that you hear at every world cup game this year. The South Africans play this thing till no end in sight. The talk is that they are so annoying they ought to be banned. Well I just want to say that is a bunch of hogwash. This is the way they enjoy the game. Its not my thing, but its their thing. If you don’t like it, turn the sound down, or wear earplugs.
 

They aren’t hurting anyone. The argument seems to be. “They’re so loud we must ban them cause we can go deaf.” It’s true they are loud. 130 dB is a lot. Remember it’s a logarithmic scale, so something 130 dB is 10 times as loud as 120 dB. I hate when people aruge like this. No one wants these things banned because they are worried they are going to lose their hearing. Those who fear that are watching the World Cup at home. People want it banned because it annoys them or in the case of some players it even makes their job harder.
 

Go figure, a home field advantage.  To make Africa watch soccer the same way Europeans watch soccer is shameful. Thankfully FIFA seems to agree with me. Mike Huckabee drew some heat for once saying in South Carolina regarding the confederate flag: "You don't want people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole."

December 16th, 2009: Bill Plaschke’s Bad Writing

Bill Plaschke is a sports Writer for the LA Times. His recent Op-ed is “The Tiger Woods story grows bigger, and juicier”  Basically, is a horrible conjecture that Tiger Woods has been using HGH because he looks big. And why does Plaschke come to this idea. Because of Woods adultery, of course. The man believes we are now free to question if Woods is a cheater in Golf because he is a cheater on his wife. He claims that a while back he saw woods from the back and he looked a lot like the cheater Barry Bonds. Yet, at the time he could not write about it because the story was not believable. Not that this has come out, it is believeable.
 

Woods used a doctor who is involved in the HGH business after an injury and claims that everyone who deals with these kind of doctors ends up being found guilty. What is sick is that people are piling onto woods sins he may or may not have done just because he is hurt. Woods approval rating has fallen from over 80% to under 40%. Plaschke is a fraud just like Woods because he would not call out an 80% approval Woods, but now he will at 35%. Either make your accusations at the time you notice them or don’t make them at all.
 

Don’t use one tragedy to be an opportunist to be in front of another. The NY Times did some good reporting in finding this link between Woods and the Doctor, now don’t go make your own conclusions in order to make a buck.

September 22nd, 2009: Plaxico Burress Raw Deal

Plaxico Burress started a 2 year prison sentence today. Sadly, justice is not blind because Plaxico Burress got a raw deal as he was sentenced two years for a crime that would typically have been given very little, if any prison time. Burress had a gun which he ought not to of had. This was discovered after his firearm discharged in his own pocket and he injured himself. The NY authorities decided to make an example of Burress in terms of their strict gun ban.  So, instead of the typical light sentence to someone who did not intend to hurt anyone in his crime, the book was thrown at him. He had no prior record and this helped him none. Sure, the sentence was correct in the letter of the law, but not within the spirit of the law.
 

This whole idea of using a single person to make an example of absurd. Burress is no more guilty that the countless other who did the same crime. Yet, because of his celebrity status he was given a harsher sentence to be made an example of. You might remember this same injustice being made of Martha Stewart in her insider trading case. I would also point to the Michael Vick case, but that has less of an argument.
 

On the flip side, Celebrities either are on one extreme or the other. If the book is not thrown at them, then they get little at all. Dante Stallworth was convicted of DUI Manslaughter, yet he received only 20 days in prison. How can a man get 2 years for carrying an illegal firearm yet another get 20 days for taking a person’s life? In terms of celebrities, it is a very clear example that Justice on this earth is not just.

May 19th, 2009: The Zack Hample Regression Model

Who is Zack Hample? He is a really cool guy known for his ability to catch balls at major league baseball stadiums. He has caught 3,998 balls as of this post, and is expected to catch number 4,000 at his next baseball game in Los Angeles at the Dodgers stadium.  His ball hawking skills are so good that he even wrote a book on the subject, which I read when I was like 15, when I used to read dozens of books over the summer. I found his tactics amazing at the time, and I still do now. I recall him noting little things such as to pre-bend the perforation on the ticket stub, so it is easier for the gatekeeper to rip it off so you can get to the seats first. This does not matter now with all MLB stadiums using electronic readers, but it was thinking about these kind of issues that amazed me at the time. His most well known tactic is what he calls the glove trick, which is a contraption he invented using a baseball glove, string and a sharpie in order to retrieve balls on the field that you can’t get to because they are out of reach.
 

Last year, I found that Hample has a blog (which I now read religiously) where he recounts all of his games now and a personal website with info on him and his baseball collection. This site includes list of every game he has went to, how many balls he caught at that game (including game balls), if there was Batting Practice at the game, what stadium the game was played at and what was the announced attendance at that game.
 

As a statistician, I decided to make a model that predicts how many balls Hample will get at a given game. I took all of his stats and moved them into Microsoft Excel, and cleaned it up a bit so I could import that into Minitab, a statistical software package. I was able to import the necessary info on 649 of the 722 games that Hample has been counting balls for. He has no data for the first games he went to from 1990-92, and there is no official attendance number for rainout games he attended, so those got thrown out of the model.
 

Here is the Regression Model:

 

Balls is the number of balls Hample catches at a given game. Here are some basic statistics on how many balls he gets in a given game
 

 

So over his career, he averages about just under 6 balls a game. Let me go through the variables in the model and explain them:
 

Attendance- This is the paid attendance at the game. The average paid attendance at a Hample game is just a hair under 30,000 people. For about every 10k people at a game, hample is going to lose a ball, clearly as the number approaches zero, the amount of balls Hample gets goes up a lot more. For example, I am sure that the difference between a 10k filled stadium and a 20k filled stadium is a lot more than the difference between a 30k filled one and a 40k filled one. This is a simple linear regression model; I did not want to try fitting a different model because I have a real thesis to work on.
 

BPCode- Hample gets the majority off his balls from batting practice, so it helps when the guys are hitting them into the seats. If a team has batting practice, the model predicts hample grabbing 2 additional balls. I thought it would be more, but that is not the case. I assume that Hample is able to get that difference as low as he does because when BP is not happening, he is able to focus more on getting balls in ways other than off the bat.
 

Experience- If you look at the sum of Hample’s work, it is clear that he is much better at hawking balls now that he was in 1990. Every year that Hample gets older, he averages .369 balls more. This is his 19^th year of hawking balls (remember real mathematicians start counting at 0, so Hample is 19 this year), and that nets him just over 7 more balls a game than what he pulled in 1990 under the same conditions (his 0 year).
 

NYStadium- Hample lives in New York, so naturally he goes to more NY Parks. I created this variable but establishing “yankee” “shea” and “Citi” as one set, and all other parks as another. I was not sure there would be, but there is a statistically significant difference in going to a New York park not accounted for by the attendance number alone. Hample can expect almost 1 less ball a game at a 40k crowd at Citi field than he can under the same conditions at a park outside of the Empire State.
 

So, what does this prove? Well we already knew that Hample is amazing at catching balls, but we now see how he is affected by Attendance, Batting Practice, Age and where the stadium is. I just know I am happy I got my 1^st game ball on the fly at Nationals stadium last night off the Pirates catcher Cruz in the top of the 9^th inning. It was a great game, where I got 2 balls during BP, 1 thrown by Ian Snell and another off the bend in the wall down the 3^rd base line.  But hey, at a game with only 14,549 paid attendance with BP outside of NY, Zach Hample would have got on average 11.18 balls at Nats Stadium. But Zach knows that he got his record, 28 balls, in his one appearance at Nationals Park, last year. I guess the model don’t factor in things like “perfect for the glove trick”

 

For you real stat nerds, here is some additional regression model info:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 18th, 2009: The Love of the Game

Typically on opening day I like to write a post about how amazing baseball is. I missed that opportunity as opening day has come and past. In fact, my team, the Cleveland Indians, have been sucking it up for a month and a half. Still, while I am very excited about LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers run, baseball will always be my first love. I have been to dozens, possibly hundreds of baseball games in my young life. The biggest game I ever was at was the infamous “Bug Game” between the Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees in Game 2 of the American League Divisional Series in 2007. It is called the “bug game” because a swarm of midges took to the infield and were so annoying to Joba Chamberlin that they cause him to allow a run. Words can’t really do it justice, look at the picture on the right.
 

I have been to other big games as well. I saw a no-hitter where the pitcher who threw it lost back in 1992 in the old Cleveland Stadium. Mostly though, I just love being at the baseball stadium. I have been at the Cleveland Indians former AAA team, the Buffalo Bisons as well as their AA team, the Akron Aeros. I have seen their High-A team play the Potomac Nationals just 15 min south of me in Woodbridge, VA. I saw for the first time the A team, the Lake County Captains, at Municipal Park vs the Hagerstown Suns this year.
 

In terms of MLB Stadiums, I have been to the following:

In addition I have been to the following minor league parks:

I have a long term goal of getting to all the major league parks in baseball. I am driving back to Cleveland for a wedding early next month, and I plan on stopping in Pittsburgh in order to add 1 more MLB stadium to my list. I found a man who has kept such great track of all the places he has been that I wanted to show him to all of you here. He has been to 990 professional baseball games, including 340 different professional baseball stadiums. He in fact rates every single one, which is really neat. I saw his web site and decided I wanted to do the same thing, so even though I have not tracked all the games I ever saw, I start this year. Here are my 1^st seven this season.