Fungible Convictions

It’s always struck me as odd: the whole minor-league system for professional baseball, compared to the developmental systems of other American sports. Football, you’d think, would need to offer a young player time to learn their team’s system, to grow much stronger, even to mature a little to stay out of trouble during the week (when the average day ends at 3:30pm). But by and large college football players are drafted as 21- or 22-year-olds and play in the NFL the next fall.

Yet baseball, drafting players at that same age, puts them in the minor leagues for years, spending enormous sums to train hundreds of young men, most of whom teams know with statistical certainty will never make it to the major leagues.

Are there tons more pro-level baseball players than football players? Is baseball harder to learn, even for someone who has played it for, say, fifteen years?

I don’t think so.

The only explanation that half-satisfies me is that drafting baseball players is much more of a crapshoot. For some reason, a college player who can hit a 90 m.p.h. fastball isn’t certain to hit a 95 m.p.h. fastball as a professional, and the whole system has to compensate for that failure rate; conversely, in football, a college wide-receiver who runs the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds will do so as a pro. Therefore baseball teams draft—have to draft—as many players as they (and the minor league system as a whole) can support.

But I say only “half-satisfies” because the crapshoot argument doesn’t explain why more training is needed. Why can’t the country’s best college pitcher as of June start for a major league team the following April when year in and year out, the country’s best college quarterbacks get drafted and command offenses in the NFL the next season.

So what is it about baseball?

Bain News Service,, publisher.

Fenway Park exterior

[between 1910 and 1915

1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.

Notes:
Date based on research by the Pictorial History Committee, Society for American Baseball Research, 2006.
Forms part of: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).

Format: Glass negatives.

Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.

Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

General information about the Bain Collection is available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.ggbain

Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.11857

Call Number: LC-B2- 2554-7

The last few days I, and a good chunk of my colleagues, and my wife, and my wife’s colleagues, have been at the Media in Transition conference at MIT. There’s lots available online now about the conference proceedings, including podcasts that I’ve posted at the CMS website, but right now I want to pass on a thought I had at the conference while in the hard-core thinking mode at the same time that I passed a TV with the Sox/Yankees game on…

The new Yankee Stadium is getting slammed for its field-level luxury seating, which in this economy is ridiculously overpriced and is thus largely empty:

What I’m wondering is, why hasn’t sports adopted an adjustable pricing system for their seats? There’s the now relatively common model of eBay-style auctioning—that seems like a no-brainer and could be easily implemented for buying those seats online.

But for the Yankees’ situation, and really for any event that’s running a risk of not getting a butt in every seat, what about a physical, in-person auction at the stadium ticket booths?

Here’s what I imagine…

Some of those empty seats at Yankee Stadium cost $2500. On gameday, the Yankees organization knows those seats will stay empty. So outside the stadium before the game, they should set up parallel lines based on how much people would be willing to pay for those seats.

Line 1: $2000
Line 2: $1500
Line 3: $1000
Line 4: $500
Line 5: $100

People then queue up half an hour before the game. Whoever is willing to pay the most—those in Line 1–get first dibs. Anyone who thinks, “Psh, I’ll just lowball the Yankees and stand in Line 5″ runs the risk of losing available seats to people who go ahead and pay more.

This system would also encourage people to pay what they’re really willing to pay—because it’s a line. Changing one’s mind would mean going to the back of another line.

I see this as a fair, progressive way to sell seats that would otherwise remain empty due to overpricing.

I just saw on SportsCenter that Mike Mussina is retiring. ESPN baseball “analyst” Tim Kurkjian made the argument that Mussina should go to the Hall of Fame thus:

Mussina has a career winning percentage of .638. All other pitchers combined, during Mussina’s career, only had a winning percentage of .501.

Considering every single baseball game has a winning pitcher and a losing pitcher, well. Thanks for your insight, Tim.

Though: where does he get that .001?

…has been arrested on child pornography charges.

You’ll recall from another post that Bob “The Great” Gamere broke the ice by coming over to our friends Christmas party, uninvited, with a Bud tall-boy in his hand, nodded to us, and then loudly said, pointing to the ornaments on the Christmas tree, I’VE GOT BIGGER BALLS THAN THOSE.

Kinda sad that this reads like an obit:

Former ‘Candlepins for Cash’ host faces child porn charge
October 23, 2008 03:03 PM

By Globe Staff

Robert Gamere, the veteran sportscaster who once hosted the local TV show “Candlepins for Cash,” has been arrested on charges of transporting and possessing child pornography.

Gamere, 69, of Brookline, is charged in a three-count indictment with transporting child pornography videos on two separate dates last year and with possessing child pornography on his home computer, the US attorney’s office said in a statement.

Federal agents who executed a search warrant at Gamere’s residence also allegedly found printed-out images in a locked drawer in Gamere’s bedroom.

Prosecutors said Gamere had sent multiple people emails with child pornography videos attached.

Documents unsealed in federal court today showed that the case began when an undercover agent received an email with a child pornography video attached. The agent was able to determine that the video file had been sent previously by someone with the screen name “GreatGamere.” That screen name was subsequently traced to Robert Gamere, prosecutors said in a statement.

Gamere is to be arraigned this afternoon in US District Court. If convicted, he faces a minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of 20 years on the transportation counts, and a maximum of 10 years on the possession count.

Gamere, a veteran sportscaster who worked at a number of local TV and radio stations, told the Globe a year ago that he was “semi-retired,” though he had been doing some announcing at Boston University track meets and was until recently calling horse races at the Brockton Fair.

Gamere said he still got stopped on the street by people who appeared on Candlepins, which ran from 1973 to 1980.

A week from tonight, Lindsay and I will be drunk. And also married. The last month—which included the start of my MIT job—has therefore left hardly a breath to be had. So I think it prudent to run through some highlights:

• We booked our hotel and a bunch of activities for the honeymoon in Juneau. Had John McCain chosen Sarah Palin before we chose Alaska, honestly we might not have gone. Which would have been a shame. But such is the election season: I could easily imagine this conversation having taken place if the timing was different . . . “What about Alaska for the honeymoon? Actually, nevermind. Not with all the hubbub about Palin.” That said, as relaxing as the honeymoon will be, I’ll still be the one asking people at the next table what they think about their governor.
• MIT gave me a digital SLR, a Canon. Because I didn’t yet have a safe place to keep it in my office, I kept it at home for a while and got a chance to play with it. The quality of its photos are pretty stunning:

  

• Lindsay and I have had to make about half a dozen trips to Paper Source, as we’re designing and printing our own wedding menus, donation announcements (we’re giving money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society rather than distribute favors to the guests), and the program:
Wedding Program – Upload a Document to Scribd

But one of these trips to Paper Source led to the awesome impulse buy of adhesive, re-placeable 8.5″x11″ pieces of chalkboard. We stuck one on our freezer door:



• I’m falling behind (again) on Identity Theory work. Typically I sit down for a couple hours on a weekend and read through all the fiction submissions and then distribute the better ones to assistant editors for their thoughts. But wedding planning has pretty much spoken for every recent weekend. That and home improvement—receiving wedding gifts has necessarily forced us to throw some old things out, pass along nice things to Lindsay’s sister, or generally reorganize
• MIT work has given me a really good opportunity (among other good opportunities there) to make good use of a ton of tools. Since I shuttle between different offices throughout the day, I use Brightkite so people know where they can find me. My colleagues and the grad students love to network, so that ramps up my use of LinkedIn. Evernote is becoming key to keeping track of links and documents, and now that it syncs with del.icio.us, I’m bailing on del.icio.us. And people have pointed me to some ridiculous design resources: CSS Beauty, Best Web Gallery, Most Inspired, Creattica Daily, PSVibes, Fuel Your Creativity, Tutorial9, Web Designer Wall, PSDTUTS, Online-Photoshop Tutorials, I Love Typography, Fontfeed, and Digital Photography School.
• Lindsay had her bachelorette party last weekend. The various husbands and boyfriends got together to play Rock Band all night while the wives and girlfriends took Lindsay out. It was far and away the worst hangover I’ve ever seen in someone. I shouldn’t have laughed so much.
• The Red Sox are in the playoffs again. And I’m sad to say I barely noticed. That fact is probably the best illustration of how I’ve lost track of time during the wedding planning and job change: I’ve always measured out the year with the rhythms of the baseball season—April through October is the meaty part of life, while November through March is just Christmas and cold—but this year it’s been about countdowns. The countdown to August 25th (my first day at MIT), the countdown to October 4th (the wedding), and of course the countdown to November 4th (the election).
• Speaking of the latter, another reason I’ve missed the baseball season is Countdown. At either 8pm or 10pm each night, we take a break and watch MSNBC, and now that Rachel Maddow has her show at 9pm, that’s two hours Lindsay and I are spending on politics. We may very well stop watching after the election—we’re very aware that Countdown, for us at least, is there for cathartic reasons, to watch Keith Olbermann call people out on lies because we’re so tired of being lied to by people in government. Being lied to isn’t new, and Olbermann very much plays favorites and distorts the truth himself, but the stakes are so much bigger this time of year and the lies come so much more naturally, disturbingly so, and are in some cases so petty, that at the end of the day just before bed we need to watch someone fluent in the language of indignation.

My guess is I won’t post again until after the honeymoon. So if anybody has questions you want me to take to Alaska, let me know. And when I post again, my left hand will be a few ounces heavier.

Special extra super happy thanks to the Erbs for putting together a weekend trip to Cape Cod. This month marks six years in Boston for me, but this was my first time to the Cape. We had lots of fun.

Friday night we took in a Cape League game, where you bring your own chairs (and dogs) and cheer on college players trying to make a name for themselves… Continue reading

At least two years ago, maybe three, I wrote a poem about some of my favorite days: waking up early on a Saturday morning at Paddy’s house, eating the enormous breakfast his mother would make, and being driven together to our baseball game. And those extra-great days when, after the game, my father or Patrick’s would drive us to an Orioles game. This must have been written around the time of my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, because there’s an idealized version of Catholicism in the poem—I’d always felt a little bad that I went through six years of Catholic school, which second to my family is the biggest definer in my life, only to switch teams in my 20’s. . . . Continue reading

From Rob Iracane:

Folks, the day Joe Morgan apologizes is the day Joe Morgan admits he’s wrong. That would require him to actually have a brain that processes binary information and produce an reasonable opinion. Not happening. It’s just not consistent with his history of foibles.

Link: “Joe Morgan Besmirches Ernie Banks, Is Completely Wrong”

Okay, so it’s the day after Jerry Remy Day, held at Fenway yesterday to honor twenty years of the former Sox infielder’s gig as the Sox television color commentator. Despite a smattering of fans who are tired of him–especially of his side job as official shill–most people love him. How could you not after watching this:

As someone who probably watches—between local coverage and ESPN Wednesday and Sunday games—over 200 games a year, I’d put Remy up as one of the best color commentators I’ve ever heard. John Lowenstein, from my first hometown team the Orioles, was up there. (Lowenstein once yelled “Holy mud!” after a great defensive play, and I’ve been chuckling about it ever since. He’s also famous as a player for faking being paralyzed after sliding hard into second, being carried off on a stretcher, and then, just before the medics got him to the dugout, jumping up to pump his fists in the air.) But the vast majority of color guys are terrible. Joe Morgan needs to be put out of his own misery. Ron Santo of the Cubs is cringe-worthy on an every-inning basis. Former players have such a tough time making the transition into entertaining, intelligent commentators.

What really sets Remy apart, besides his good humor, is how he understands the nature of the game better than anyone else on TV. Or at least one aspect that intrigues me as much as it intrigued Billy Bean and Theo Epstein: the fact that baseball is still decades behind other sports on employing meaningful statistics to evaluate its talent.

Remy brought up something during last night’s game, though the quote escapes me, that there’s currently no way to measure how—or whether—a single batter can carry his team. This question could be phrased this way: Which batters bat better when their teammates are struggling, and how could this be measured and put to use to improve a team, to better identify underrated players?

An easy example: a player would be worth a few $100k more if it could be proved that he’s a better batter when his teammates are struggling. We already have stats for “clutch” batters: batting average with runners in scoring position; runs batted in; batting average with two outs; and the closest to what I’m talking about: batting in late-inning pressure situations. But, as Remy talked about last night, it’s assumed in traditional baseball statistics that a single batter cannot have a meaningful effect on the performance of other batters. But what if we tested that? What if it turns out a .250 batter gets an unusual number of his one-for-four hits in close games, or when his team hasn’t scored yet, or in any other situation where a runner is desperately needed? How do we track the rally-starters?

Remy got me thinking about this last night, not in any of these terms, but in something much more straightforward: he noted a couple of Red Sox batters who seemed to pick one another up. (“Picking up” in baseball usually refers to batting in a guy on second or third, but not in this case.) What he meant was that some players seem to have a knack for snapping teammates out of slumps. From a rational point of view, that would be impossible. The guy at the plate can’t do anything for the guy on deck, except maybe if he gets on base and is a threat to steal. But it’s possible that statistics might prove it to be true: we define a rally as a string of hits, but a rally starts with one hit, and it just may be that some players’ first hits are more valuable than others. That would be a key stat to identify, or for an agent to push, or for an aging pinch-hitter to bring up just before the trade deadline.

So in a sport where “Ninety percent of the game is half mental,” might it be possible to identify players whose karma is worth more than others’?

Anyway.

Happy 20th anniversary, Remy.