Aggressively Uninformed » Sports

A related, but less useful graph

Aerion — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:40:39 +0000

But seriously, all the consternation in the media about Tiger being in some sort of slump is dumb. (I don’t mean to say that anyone here is engaging in that.)

He’ll be back. Remember 2004-ish, when he wasn’t doing so hot? He hadn’t won a major in two years. What happened? Laser show. Relax. Specifically, he made top 5 in ten of the next twelve majors, winning five of them. (Never mind that one where he missed the cut.) He tied for 4th at the Masters and U.S. Open this year, so he’s clearly still Really Good At Golf.

Visualizing the 2004 Red Sox

harveyj — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:56:34 +0000

I love data visualization. I love baseball. Flip Flop Fly Ball is an amazing combination of the two. Inspired by what’s possible with Photoshop and baseball stats, I decided to see what I could do programmatically. My first results are below.

Free Tacos For America!

harveyj — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:39:34 +0000

According to Baseball Prospectus, Jacoby Ellsbury is second in the majors in baserunning, with his speed accounting for 4.2 extra runs over the course of the season so far. That’s about three home runs’ worth of extra offense.

Steroid accusations

harveyj — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:02:37 +0000

It doesn’t take long these days before a player having a career year starts hearing accusations of steroid usage. First of all, baseball is a game largely determined by luck. Second of all, unless your name is Madoff, any endeavor with small sample sizes will show some natural variance in your performance.

But we really need to step back here. The canonical steroid-whisper career year is Brady Anderson’s 1996. Suppose that steroids are effective enough to triple his home run totals. Shouldn’t he have gotten around to trying them before his ninth year in the majors? Furthermore, were they just so darn effective he decided to not take them for the rest of his career? There are probably still many MLB players taking PEDs, given past permissive attitudes, the fierce competitiveness of the majors, and the fact that being caught doesn’t seem to be a career ender anymore. We likely aren’t done hearing about the lengths the game’s greats have gone to be the greatest, but trying to ferret the users out by looking for single year performance spikes is asinine.

Multithreaded Liveblog

Aerion — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:14:32 +0000

We’re using separate threads because we don’t have the technology to solve race conditions.

(No, no, we’ve already agreed in advance we’re not making the obvious race joke here.)

12:20pm The room applauded at “and non-believers”. We’re all proud heathens here
12:09pm Bio-units, terminate noise exchange! It is time for you to ingest inaugural addresses from my compartment!
12:03pm I love Yo-Yo Ma. (And it’s not just that I love Asian people. But that’s probably part of it.)
11:58am VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN! DARTH CHENEY IS DEAD, LONG LIVE DARTH CHENEY
11:50am Warren: “Everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of [God] alone.” ….. Does that include gay people?
11:48am Rick Warren hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
11:37am That’s a lot of people.
11:21am Holy fucking shit balls what the fuck we elected a black dude. Awesome!
11:19am Jimmy Carter, from downtown! YES!
11:16am Bill and Hillary walking in with a “…. *sigh*” look on their faces.

AFC East Three-way

Aerion — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:29:40 +0000

Today’s closer-than-it-should-have-been win by the Patriots over the Seahawks, the loss by the Jets to the 49ers, along with the Dolphins’ win over Buffalo (which apparently took place in Canada of all places) brings all three teams to a three-way tie atop the AFC East.

I don’t really have any analysis of the situation, or any informed opinion about who is likely to prevail other than two gut feelings:

There’s no way TWO Florida teams can go worst-to-first in one calendar year, is there?
That Brett Favre dude is old.

Actually, this whole post was just an excuse to post a picture of Cincinnati-style chili.