kottke.org posts about sports
While bumping around on the internet last night, I stumbled upon Alex Reisner’s site. Worth checking out are his US roadtrip photos and NYC adventures, which include an account and photographs of a man jumping from the Williamsburg Bridge.
But the real gold here is Reisner’s research on baseball…a must-see for baseball and infographics nerds alike. Regarding the home run discussion on the post about Ken Griffey Jr. a few weeks ago, Reisner offers this graph of career home runs by age for a number of big-time sluggers. You can see the trajectory that Griffey was on before he turned 32/33 and how A-Rod, if he stays healthy, is poised to break any record set by Bonds. His article on Baseball Geography and Transportation details how low-cost cross-country travel made it possible for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to move to California. The same article also riffs on how stadiums have changed from those that fit into urban environments (like Fenway Park) to more symmetric ballfields built in suburbs and other open areas accessible by car.
And then there’s the pennant race graphs for each year since 1900…you can compare the dominance of the 1927 Yankees with the 1998 Yankees. And if you’ve gotten through all that, prepare to spend several hours sifting through all sorts of MLB statistics, represented in a way you may not have seen before:
The goal here is not to duplicate excellent resources like Total Baseball or The Baseball Encyclopedia, but to take the same data and present it in a way that shows different relationships, yields new insights, and raises new questions. The focus is on putting single season stats in a historical context and identifying the truly outstanding player seasons, not just those with big raw numbers.
Reisner’s primary method of comparing players over different eras is the z-score, a measure of how a player compares to their contemporaries, (e.g. the fantastic seasons of Babe Ruth in 1920 and Barry Bonds in 2001):
In short, z-score is a measure of a player’s dominance in a given league and season. It allows us to compare players in different eras by quantifying how good they were compared to their competition. It it a useful measure but a relative one, and does not allow us to draw any absolute conclusions like “Babe Ruth was a better home run hitter than Barry Bonds.” All we can say is that Ruth was more dominant in his time.
I’m more of a basketball fan than of baseball, so I immediately thought of applying the same technique to NBA players, to shed some light on the perennial Jordan vs. Chamberlain vs. Oscar Robertson vs. whoever arguments. Until recently, the NBA hasn’t collected statistics as tenaciously as MLB has so the z-score technique is not as useful, but some work has been done in that area.
Anyway, great stuff all the way around.
Update: Reisner’s site seems to have gone offline since I wrote this. I hope the two aren’t related and that it appears again soon.
Update: It’s back up!
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance graph for the 2007 MLB season…it plots team payrolls vs. winning percentage. The Mets and Red Sox should be winning and are…the Yankees, not so much. Cleveland and the Brewers are making good use of their relatively low payrolls.
The sport of cheese rolling. A wheel of cheese rolls down a hill (at 70 mph), contestants race after it, and whoever crosses the finish line first wins the cheese. Here’s a video of the madness.
Clive Thompson on the invention of new sports. “Why don’t more people invent new sports? After all, we live in a golden age of play. The video-game industry is bristling with innovation.” When I was in the Caribbean a few months ago, some folks on the beach were playing this newish game that they called Golf Toss. It’s also called Ladder Ball and is kind of like horseshoes except your throw two golf balls on a rope instead of a horseshoe.
Tiger Woods is playing the best golf of his career (and possibly anyone’s career) and he’s not getting credit for it because he’s not winning huge against a vastly improved field. “Woods of the ’90s played against great talent hindered by a lack serious training; today, Woods plays against great talent enhanced by serious training. The slack is largely gone, as is the reasonable expectation of double-digit victory.” He’s also come back after slumps due to swing tinkering, marriage, and the death of his father.
Best-player discussions are commonplace, but who’s the worst player in the NBA? I’d vote Antoine Walker as well…I’ve always felt his game was crap. (via truehoop)
Due to problems off the field, defensive tackle Walter Thomas hasn’t played a lot of college ball. But his stats — 6-foot-5, 370 pounds, XXXXXXL jersey, runs the 40 in 4.9, can do backflips and handsprings, benches 475 pounds — guarantee that he’ll be drafted into the NFL this weekend. Shades of Michael Oher, Michael Lewis’ subject in The Blind Side. Also, this may be the first NY Times article to use the phrase “dadgum Russian gymnast”.
Last night, Ken Griffey Jr. hit the 564th home run of his career to move into 10th place on the all-time list. Reading about his accomplishment, I was surprised he was so far up on the list, given the number of injuries he’s had since coming into the league in 1989. That got me wondering about what might have been had Griffey stayed healthy throughout his career…if he would have lived up to the promise of his youth when he was predicted to become one of the game’s all-time greats.
Looking at his stats, I assumed a full season to be 155 games and extrapolated what his home run total would have been for each season after his rookie year in which he played under 155 games. Given that methodology, Griffey would have hit about 687 home runs up to this point. In two of those seasons, 1995 and 2002, his adjusted home run numbers were far below the usual because of injuries limiting his at-bats and effectiveness at the plate. Further adjusting those numbers brings the total up to 717 home runs, good for 3rd place on the all-time list and a race to the top with Barry Bonds.
Of course, if you’re going to play what-if, Babe Ruth had a couple of seasons in which he missed a lot of games and also played in the era of the 154-game season. Willie Mays played a big chunk of his career in the 154-game season era as well. Ted Williams, while known more for hitting for average, missed a lot of games for WWII & the Korean War (almost 5 full seasons) and played in the 154-game season era…and still hit 521 home runs.
60 Things Worth Shortening Your Life For. I’ve done a few of these things…I don’t really drink or smoke enough to have accomplished a lot of them. Surfing Teahupoo in Tahiti is #3…the waves generated there are short lived but insane (photo, more photos, video). (via megnut)
A list of possible Red Sox-inspired wines. Matsusake, Two-Buck ‘Tek, Coco Cristal, and Big Papinot Noir all sound delicious.
Matthew McGough tells the story of his first day as a NY Yankees batboy. “The game starts in about two hours and I need you to find me a bat stretcher.”
Pat Venditte is a switch pitcher for his college team, a rarity at baseball’s higher levels. “Against Nebraska last year, a switch-hitter came to the plate right-handed, prompting Venditte to switch to his right arm, which caused the batter to move to the left-hand batter’s box, with Venditte switching his arm again.”
Why are the records in swimming being broken at such a great pace while those for, say, track and field are more sturdy? More time and money is available for swimming now, meaning that its participants are improving quicker…as opposed to running, which hit its time and money growth spurt awhile ago.
If you’re running on a treadmill in Bismarck, North Dakota or Flagstaff Arizona or while orbiting the earth, are you really running the Boston Marathon?
LeBron James’ new house: 35,440 sq ft, 2200 sq ft master suite (with 2-story walk-in closet), theater, casino, barber shop, bowling alley, and a limestone bust of LeBron wearing a headband.
After a couple of surprising losses in the Cricket World Cup, the coach of the perennially mighty Pakistani national team turned up dead. It’s feared he was murdered.
The must-read item of the weekend: how a bunch of guys got themselves and two full van-loads of materials into the Super Bowl and distributed lights to fans to spell out a special message seen during the halftime show. This is in the hall of fame of pranks for sure. “Super Bowl XLI was a Level One national security event, usually reserved for Presidential inaugurations. We had to get two full vanloads of materials through federal marshals, Homeland Security agents, police, police dogs, bomb squads, ATF personnel, robots, and a five-ton state-of-the-art X-ray crane. It took four months and a dozen people to pull off the prank that ended up fooling the world. This is the Super Stunt.” (via waxy)
Crazy incredible shot by Roger Federer against Andy Roddick. He somehow gets to Roddick’s overhead slam and slips it by him on the baseline.
Daniel Coyle travels to Russia’s top tennis player factory in search of how to grow a super-athlete. “Deliberate practice means working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback and focusing ruthlessly on improving weaknesses.” The article starts off a bit slow but gets interesting a few paragraphs in.
Free throw shooting is one of my favorite topics. It’s the whole relaxed concentration aspect of it: can you focus enough so that the years of practice undertaken to train the unconscious self to shoot override the conscious self’s desire to take control of the situation at hand? To me, this battle of the two minds within the individual is the essence of sport: you know how to make the shot, you know you can make the shot, but will you make the shot? Free throw shooting lays this battle bare for all to see. It’s the same shot every single time (and the easiest way to score a point in sports), you don’t have to be in top physical shape to shoot it, and yet a surprising amount of professional basketball players can’t make more than every two out of three attempts.
So, as for Gene Weingarten’s assertion (via truehoop) that if an average person took a year to practice, he could beat the best free throw shooter in the NBA, I say “hell yes”. Maybe a retired podiatrist would be a worthy candidate: 71-year-old Tom Amberry shot 2,750 in a row in 1993. Amberry was a star college basketball player and was offered a contract with the Lakers after WWII, so maybe that’s not fair…but just look at the guy.
Dan Hill, who coincidentally is the director of web and broadcast at the aforementioned Monocle, has a thoughtful post about Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a documentary film that follows Zinedine Zidane through an entire soccer match.
I haven’t watched much professional-grade badminton so I don’t know if this is normal, but this point lasts far longer than I would have expected.
The only known copy of the Honus Wagner T206 baseball card in near mint condition was sold recently for $2.35 million. “The T206 Honus Wagner card has long been recognized as the most iconic, highly coveted and valuable object in the field of sports memorabilia.”
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