Moneyball, Starring...Brad Pitt?

Brad Pitt? Did anyone even bother calling Seth McFarlane?

For the record, I did read Moneyball and I enjoyed it a lot. But it bugs me when people talk about it like it's a book about the A's and how they'll always be successful. They'll look at guys who never panned out like Jeremy Brown and conclude that the A's were actually nothing special after all.

But the book was never really about how the A's had a secret statistic or some kind of magical way of evaluating players; it was simply about exploiting the inefficiencies of the system, wherever they were. In baseball it was scouting with your gut and the over-reliance on overrated stats like batting average. It's been interesting to see that as other front offices have started to populate their staff with advanced statisticians, like the Blue Jays and the Rays, the A's have been struggling mightily. The "arbitrage" opportunities are gone.

With all that said, let's judge the A's by their Moneyball draft picks because it'll be fun and less depressing than thinking anything substantive about the Orioles:

Jeremy Brown: It feels like half the book was about this guy and how he was going to rake despite being really fat. He actually did hit for quite a bit of power (caveat: he put up those numbers in the Texas League and PCL) and put up a .370 total OBP in the minors. DFA and retired after only 10 ABs in the majors, but can say he retired as a .300 hitter. Surprised he didn't get more of a chance - I'm not sure about his defense and he probably wasn't even as good a hitter as Kurt Suzuki, but he has to have been better than Adam Melhuse.

Nick Swisher: Flew through the system until he hit Midland where he put up some horrific numbers and an inability to control the zone which soured him on more than a few scouts. Was inexplicably promoted to Sacramento, where he proceeded to tear the cover off the ball. Has settled into a pretty good hitter/middling fielder groove good for about 3-4 WAR per season.

Joe Blanton: I seriously don't know what they expected from a guy who put up a 4.59 ERA in the SEC (yeah yeah, I know ERA isn't everything, but for some reason I can't find any of his peripheral college stats), but he's been an effective innings-eater. Did have one spectacular season in 2007, worth 5.6 WAR.

Mark Teahen: Pretty much the definition of "league average" player. Had one really promising season in 2006 and never flashed that kind of power ever again. Currently owns a career .327 OBP.

I don't remember who else they picked, but they I assume they all suck.

Now, while I am NOT faulting the A's for one second for not picking the following high schoolers, since hindsight is 20/20, I do think it is interesting that in the first 4 rounds they COULD have picked:

Cole Hamels
Joey Votto
Jon Lester
Jonathan Broxton
Brian McCann
Josh Johnson

I'm not sure if the 2002 draft was an outlier, but it seems like the high school picks experienced a greater level of success than the college picks did.

Not This Again...

Look, I can forgive someone for panicking about the economy or the stock market if he/she is a layperson and doesn't really know about the economic intricacies of the Great Depression or the Savings and Loan Crisis, or whatever. But Jesus, we went through this already IN 2008! Yet again, people are wringing their hands and wondering if they should take their money out of the stock market and hide it in their mattresses.

So let's go through this again:

1. If your stock market holdings drop in value, you don't actually lose money, UNTIL YOU PANIC AND SELL IT OFF. Then you've lost that money.
2. The surest way to lose money is to hoard it in cash. If your grandpappy stuffed a dollar in his mattress in 1920 (which could have bought an entire dinner at the time) and you found it today, it wouldn't even be enough for a bottle of water. Incidentally, that's what I'm counting on for my loan balances. Ahem.

For the record, priced at 11.5x forward earnings and collectively flush with revenue, the S&P 500 is very attractive right now. In fact, the greatest appreciation I've ever realized from the market was through buying shares during the last stock market crash. Granted, I'm not 60 years old so I can stomach some volatility, but regardless, I don't understand the constant obessession with wanting to buy into already-appreciated assets.

Don't get me wrong; I still think the entire market is a gigantic Ponzi Scheme, but you could do much worse than a Ponzi Scheme so inexorably ingrained into our society.

The Latest Obstacle to Progress: Voting

Good job, Texas.

I'm going to be perfectly frank: not all people should be allowed to vote, especially my parents. Since they are both now naturalized citizens, they have enthusiastically embraced and exercised their franchise in horrifying ways.

Let's back up a couple of years. During the 2008 election cycle when Obama was campaigning on universal healthcare, my sister was unemployed and had no health insurance, as she had just reached the age cutoff for my parents' insurance plan. She's still unemployed, but hey, she majored in Art, what are you gonna do. You'd think that healthcare subsidies, or expanded eligibility under their own plan would be something they would support, but they didn't. They voted Republican all across the board, because...wait for it...Republicans are opposed to gay marriage. They would rather my sister not have access to healthcare than let gay people have a nice ceremony with rings and flowers.

You see, my parents are what can be described as "religious wackjobs." They are what is wrong with religion, and America, and parents. Unfortunately, they are identical to a large proportion of this country's constituency - they zero in on one or two minor issues or emotions and that's it. They cannot tell you whether we should expand government spending or cut deficits, or whether Keynesian theory offers a more compelling path to economic recovery than a trickle-down economic policy. And that's because they don't know and don't care.

So how does letting complete ideologues vote on issues they know nothing about yield the best outcome for our country? Shouldn't there be some kind of qualification test? (Yes, yes, shades of disenfranchisement via the literacy test, but this is really out of control.)

To bring this around full circle, I was having dinner with my parents the other day and true to form, my mom says, "We hope Rick Perry wins because we heard he had a prayer rally." I tried to explain to them that if they wanted to draw on Medicare or Social Security someday, it's probably best not to pick a candidate who thinks the two programs are unconstitutional. But hey, that's okay. He'll pray for you, at least! That is, unless he's already blocked you on Twitter.

I want to be blocked by Rick Perry too! That's this blog's new goal.

Dan Uggla and Creationism

Lest you think (as I did) that this is the first page on the web with both "Dan Uggla" and "creationism," you will be surprised to know that there are actually 1,420,000 at this very moment.

Anyway, congratulations to Dan Uggla on his 33-game hitting streak, if only because I have him on my fantasy team and he was fucking killing me up to that point. I am ashamed to say that I only kept him in my lineup because I had no viable alternatives.

Unfortunately, whenever someone stitches together a long hitting streak, writers invariably scramble to throw up stories that convey the rarity of such a streak by multiplying the odds of a one-game outcome by however many games the streak lasted. This year's offender is Joe Posnanski, who crunches some numbers and comes up with odds of 3 million to one for a Dan Uggla 33-game streak.

That sounds like an incredible number. And indeed, Dan Uggla is one of the less likely candidates due to his lack of speed and poor contact ability. But looking back in hindsight and calculating the odds to come to the conclusion that we've witnessed some sort of millenial event seriously conflates a priori and post hoc probabilities. The a priori probability may indeed be 3 million to one, but the post hoc (observed) probability is one. To his credit, Posnanski does word it correctly ("The odds of Dan Uggla on July 5, 2011, beginning a 33-game hitting streak were more than three million to one against"), but then incorrectly uses that figure to justify his awe that it occurred. In short, yes, it's cool that it was Dan Uggla and nobody could have predicted it beforehand, but honestly, it's not that big a deal that it was achieved. Indeed, 55 players have had a 30+ game streak in baseball history - Andre Ethier did it just this year!

It's like winning the lottery - the odds of a given player winning are astronomically low. But SOMEONE usually wins. We correctly are not awestruck that Joe Schmo wins the Powerball jackpot, even though his chances were one in 100 million. It's easy to see whey we can't take those a priori odds and then use them to say "Wow, I can't believe someone won that lottery, it was so unlikely."

That seems like an academic distinction (and in many ways it is), but it has serious implications for a frequent argument I see bandied about in favor of creationism. It goes something like this: "The odds of all the wonderful things in the world arising through random mutation are so low, it couldn't have happened, a creator or designer was necessary."

Um, no. Another conflation of a priori and post hoc probabilities.

It's Not News, it's CNN

There's a lot of frivolous shit that runs on CNN, but the recent iReport handwriting analysis project has to take the cake for unabashedly and uncritically promoting the dubious practice of graphology.

But first, the science, and let's not mince words. Professional handwriting experts (graphologists) basically have a predictive ability of zero in comparison to an untrained layperson in determining personality traits. Handwriting analysis is of use in revealing some traits, such as gender and maybe age, but telling someone their own age and gender are somewhat less compelling parlor tricks.

Not surprisingly, the iReporters in the project (God, I hate that name) who had their handwriting "analyzed" were overwhelmingly convinced that the analyst had them pegged. And why not? Just like a horoscope, all the statements were vague enough to apply to anybody:

"Huge creative imagination and strong determination/powerful and unique personality/incredible honesty" - As opposed to a weak and generic personality. I got mine at the Apple Store.

"Strong knee-jerk reaction to silly rules" - Versus those of us who immediately embrace silly rules?

"Covertly subversive relating to authority" - So you secretly break rules sometimes, astonishing reach.

"Flexible attitude when it comes to deadlines and people" - We all have flexible attitudes. That's why deadlines exist.

Unfortunately, it is utterly predictable that people will think that their personal handwriting analysis (or horoscope) is spot-on; there is a human cognitive tendency to interpret vague, general statements as very accurate as long as they are told that the statement is tailored specifically for them. It's called the Forer Effect for the guy who described it, or alternatively the Barnum Effect (yes, the circus guy), because he once said something like "We have something at the circus for everybody." In the same way, in each one of the graphologist's statements, there is indeed something for everyone to grasp and apply to him or herself.

Mom and Pop Stores, the Shitstain on America's Underwear

And this is not a discussion of "what is the impact of supercenters with respect to wages vs. increased buying power?" etc. etc., for which I have no idea. I simply mean that all my worst buying experiences have been at small mom-and-pop type stores. They have the highest prices, the most draconian policies regarding everything, and the surliest customer service. I have no idea where the pervasive apotheosis of small business owners comes from.

Case in point: when I was a freshman in high school, I was really into comics. Yeah, a 5'3" freshman into video games and comics...I HOPE YOU BROUGHT A CHANGE OF PANTIES, WOMEN OF AMERICA. So I walk the 2.5 miles (I walked a lot in those days because my mother was useless) to this place I've heard has a great selection of obscure comics, the adorably named Hole in the Wall Books.

And it is indeed a treasure trove of great titles I've read about but have never seen for sale anywhere else. I'm eagerly flipping through the bin and circular rack and pulling out the issues I want to buy and setting them aside. I want to emphasize that that's all I was doing, though I might have opened a book here and there to quickly glance at the interior. I wasn't, like, opening a book and sitting down in a lounge chair with a coffee and a pipe.

I must have been there about 15 minutes, and then the douchebag behind the counter says to me, "Okay, you've just about hit your browsing limit." I was too timid back then to say what I would if it happened today. Sorry to take time away from your daily newspaper reading so you can watch me to make sure I'm not stealing anything, dickwad.

I meekly paid for the five or so comics I'd picked out and left. That was 15 years ago and I never went back. Other experiences at small mom and pop stores haven't been as overtly negative, but I strain to think of any that have otherwise distinguished themselves. For fuck's sake, I just want to go in, look around as long as I want in air conditioning, maybe pee, and then pay with a credit card. You're never going to compete with Wal-Mart's economies of scale selling Charmin toilet paper, so stop complaining and start selling something Wal-Mart doesn't carry.

Or get friendlier.

Curiosity: How Did This Show Get Greenlighted?

So the Discovery Channel is kicking off a new series called Curiosity, in which a series of guest hosts come on and tackle the universe's most inscrutable questions, such as "Why is sex fun?" and "Could we survive an alien attack?"

As banal as that already sounds, the premiere show is "Did God create the universe?" and is inexplicably hosted by Stephen Hawking - the same Stephen Hawking who is already on the record as stating that no, God did not create the universe. Are we supposed to feel any actual suspense about the outcome of this question? This is like having a show called Curiosity: Is Obama a Socialist?, hosted by Michele Bachmann.

But the one that gets me is the alien attack episode, hosted by Michelle Rodriguez. Of course, her credentials in science are impeccable - she's been expelled from 5 schools, drives drunk and once banged Vin Diesel - but at the risk of stepping on her toes, I would say that no, we have no chance of surviving an attack by a race of aliens advanced enough to build ships that can traverse thousands of light years.