Archive for the ‘Nerdtron’s computer’ Category
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 by Prof. Nerdtron 3000
Is Clay Zavada…
- A reliever for the Arizona Diamondbacks?
- A bully who picked on Nerdtron in his youth?
- The Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the Year?
- Both 1 and 3
That’s right, in addition to putting together a nice 50+ innings in the desert, Zavada deservedly took home the Mustached American of the Year. The American Mustache Institute put out a press release, which included a curious claim about players sporting the ‘stache.
The mustache’s enhancement of a player’s skills has stirred controversy in the sport as an internal report produced by Major League Baseball reportedly said it believes Zavada’s mustache was responsible for at least 42 of his 52 strikeouts in 2009
Here at Nerd Central we don’t hide our affection for those who tout the lip sweater a bit less gracefully than Zavada. So we went about investigating whether a mustache truly could improve a baseball player’s ability.
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Tags: arizona diamondbacks, clay zavada, labia sebucula, mustache, Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the Year presented by Quicken®, statistics
Posted in Nerdtron's computer | 2 Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009 by I Love Nerd York City
As promised, scroll down to view the first known successful nerd-to-non-nerd conversion.
Brian Downing in the 1970′s
Brian Downing in the 1980′s
Tags: angels, brian downing, nerd to non-nerd conversion, white sox
Posted in Nerd Cards, Nerdtron's computer | 1 Comment »
Thursday, July 16th, 2009 by I Love Nerd York City
Tags: 1981, 1b, flat brim, fleer, glasses, hat placement, twins, white sky
Posted in Nerd Cards, Nerdtron's computer | No Comments »
Friday, March 13th, 2009 by I Love Nerd York City
After I addressed the price that several of MLB’s top players were paid for each WARP (win above replacement player) that they contributed, Prof. Nerdtron posed the question of which teams did the best job finding value through free agency. I tried to at least begin answering this question by looking at the entire free agent class of 2006/7 and 2007/8. So which teams have done the best job over the past two years?
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Tags: andruw jones, barry zito, braves, byung-hyun kim, chris gomez, concept of infinity, cubs, dave roberts, Dodgers, free agency, jason schmidt, juan pierre, ned colletti, nomar garciaparra, pirates, replacement level, rich aurillia, tony armas, value, WARP, wild pittsburgh nightlife, yosian herrera
Posted in Nerdtron's computer | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 by Prof. Nerdtron 3000
A baseball team has two jobs. One is to score runs, and the other is prevent runs. If we look at how teams score and prevent runs, then we can measure player’s values directly in the runs they contribute. Nerdbaseball has a model for run scoring, now we need a model for run prevention.
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Tags: defense, Diamondbacks, ERA is a bad stat and should die, Errors are meaningless, phillies, pitching, Rangers, regression, statistics
Posted in Nerdtron's computer | 2 Comments »
Friday, February 13th, 2009 by I Love Nerd York City
First off, happy spring training everyone!
While looking at some of the contracts given out this winter, I was wondering what some of the worst (and best) returns teams might expect from their investments. I decided to look at the top 50 player salaries for 2008, and compare this with their WARP1 (wins above replacement player, normalized for the season…this metric also rewards/punishes a player for their defense) performance. I chose WARP1 because I was only interested in 2008 salary/production. Read on to find out which players were a good value per WARP, and which player would’ve been more valuable for his team if he was playing for someone else…
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Tags: best, contracts, value, WARP, worst
Posted in Nerdtron's computer | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 by Prof. Nerdtron 3000
(updated to reflect Abreu and Dunn’s signings)
It turns out a simple linear model can explain team run scoring a little better than OPS. What’s nice about this approach is that by using this method to rank players, we’re also directly seeing how players contributed to their respective teams. So, who were the leaders last year?
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Tags: free agents, linear runs created, statistics, top 10
Posted in Nerdtron's computer | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 by Prof. Nerdtron 3000
No one has ever mistaken fantasy baseball for real-life baseball. Except for me. When I’m trouncing the nincompoops in my league, I want to feel like the victory has some greater meaning in life. My fellow nincompoops feel much the same way, which is why we set up a Sportsline league that allows us to set the stat values to whatever we so desire. This way, we don’t have to deal with the absurdness of a Yahoo! League where a SB is the same as a HR.
It also turns out that I’ve been tasked with learning R, an open source statistical package, for work. Namely, I need to figure out how to do a multiple regression. This is a statistical technique that allows you to model an outcome based on multiple inputs. So, to learn how to use the software, I decided to model offense in baseball, and finally figure out how good our league’s scoring system really is (for offense, at least).
Here’s a warning. It gets really nerdy from here on out, so if you’re just interested in the answer, here it is. Our method is pretty good. We overvalue walks. If you’re for some reason interested in R vs. SPSS, R is an adequate replacement.
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Tags: amazingly I'm not actually goofing off, fantasy baseball, modern nerdiness, R is good, SPSS is bad, statistics, willy taveras
Posted in Nerdtron's computer | 9 Comments »
(17 votes, average: 4.06 out of 5)
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Mr. Cubbage hit for the cycle on June 27, 1978. Mets fans may remember him as their interim manager for seven games in 1991, and Red Sox fans may remember him as their interim manager after Joe Kerrigan was fired in spring training of 2002.
(4.74 out of 5)