A statistician rereads Bill James

Ben Lindbergh invited me to write an article for Baseball Prospectus. I first sent him this item on the differences between baseball and politics but he said it was too political for them. I then sent him this review of a book on baseball’s greatest fielders but he said they already had someone slotted to review that book. Then I sent him some reflections on the great Bill James and he published it! If anybody out there knows Bill James, please send this on to him: I have some questions at the end that I’m curious about.

Here’s how it begins: Continue reading

The paradox of replication studies: A good analyst has special data analysis and interpretation skills. But it’s considered a bad or surprising thing that if you give the same data to different analysts, they come to different conclusions.

Benjamin Kircup writes: I think you will be very interested to see this preprint that is making the rounds: Same data, different analysts: variation in effect sizes due to analytical decisions in ecology and evolutionary biology (ecoevorxiv.org) I see several … Continue reading

Hey wassup Detroit Pistons? What’s gonna happen for the rest of the season? Let’s get (kinda) Bayesian. With graphs and code (but not a lot of data; sorry):

Paul Campos points us to this discussion of the record of the Detroit professional basketball team: The Detroit Pistons broke the NBA record for most consecutive losses in a season last night, with their 27th loss in a row. . … Continue reading