SB Nation User Blog: El Payo

Fantastic Michael Lewis article on statistics in basketball

El Payo — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:22:51 -0000

I know this is far off topic for a baseball-centric site, but I got a huge kick out of this article which follows the Houston Rockets' Shane Battier and the connection to Bill James' statistical analysis of baseball and how much data has influenced sports. I think you will too:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Particularly interesting is how the seemingly intangible part of Battiers' game is so important. And yet might actually be quantifiable as well.

UPDATE: I didn't realize this had been DLD'd/discussed already, but I'll leave this up as some people are discovering the article through this post. Thanks for adding the hotlink Nico.

Represent! (photo thread)

El Payo — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 06:34:16 -0000

This photo is from a couple of weekends ago in Yosemite. A guy emailed it to me this morning while I was screaming my head off at Kots' ITPHR.

The first thing I noticed was my A's cap.

The background scenery is nice as well.

I probably wear an A's baseball cap 300 days out of the year.

It got me wondering where other AN'ers are showing the A's pride.
What do you wear/where do you wear it? Photos encouraged.

Excellent NYT article by Michael Lewis

El Payo — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 20:03:58 -0000

The author of Moneyball has a fantastic article on the science of football sabermetrics up on the New York Times site.

The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

I love using actual statistical analysis over 'received wisdom' in baseball, and to see it extend to other sports is like a dream come true for me.

The article covers the player 'rejection and redemption' phenomenon that A's fans are so familiar with and makes me secretly wish that my poor, put-upon UCLA Bruins would fire Karl Dorrell and find a wunderkind like Texas Tech's Mike Leach to replace him.

Read and enjoy the article. It made football suddenly intriguing to me again. If you need a password, I'm sure there's one at bugmenot.com