New Links

Note that I've put some of my favorite baseball links on this site.

Baseball As Context (Part I)

This is the first installment of a multi-part blog that of an essay I wrote called "Baseball As Context". It's a bit of personal history mixed with baseball memories. I had started it early last season but was inspired to finish it as therapy after the Cubs loss in the NLCS. Enjoy...



"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."
– Educator and historian Jacques Barzun (God’s Country and Mine)

I am a failed baseball player. I’m pretty sure I lifted that line from George Will but it applies equally to me as to him and countless thousands of other American boys. Although I’m not yet considered archaic in baseball terms (being under 40) I have, through a slow and painful process, come to grips with the fact that I’ll never wear a big league uniform and never throw my southpaw overhand curveball in Wrigley Field before 39,000 screaming fans as Jack Brickhouse, Harry Carey, or even Skip Carey make the call to the myriads of fans listening and watching on WGN.

However, this realization has brought to mind how much of my own history, like that of the nation (as the character Terrance Mann played by James Earl Jones famously said in my favorite baseball movie Field of Dreams), has occurred against the backdrop of baseball.[1]

At its best baseball unlike any of the other major sports, in addition to just being a fun game to play and watch, connects us with the past and enables us to make comparisons across time. I believe this to be due to the fact that a) no major rule has been changed in over a century,[2] the closest being the abomination that is the designated hitter, but I digress, and b) the equipment remains (in the professional ranks anyway since lower leagues have succumbed to the financial advantage of aluminum bats), with some improvements and innovations to be sure, fundamentally that used by generations of ballplayers. And of course, while we are making those comparisons in the context of baseball, we can’t help associating the events of our own lives and our national life to feats performed on the field.

Having said that, I don’t subscribe, as the late Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould said to the notion that baseball "'imitates life' or stands as a symbol for larger truths in human existence."[3] In various ways I think many sports and other human activities imitate life simply because they are activities to which humans give a part of themselves and that therefore reflect at times both our best and worst inclinations. I do, however, prefer to think about baseball as context, and what follows is that context played out in my own life as the really important events; a loving family upbringing, time enjoyed with friends, a college education, a marriage to a wonderful woman, and the birth of one child and the adoption of another has occurred.



Notes:
[1]Jone’s character said in part, "This game..marks the times." The site where Field of Dreams was filmed lies roughly 50 miles from my small town and so both its baseball mythology and setting evoke special feelings. I now enjoy the film as a late winter ritual. "Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa".
[2]Baseball evolved in America from a variety of English games including “rounders” (which was sometimes called “base ball” as in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey) and cricket and was not invented by Doubleday in a pasture near Cooperstown in 1839. The year 1845 is the closest date there is to a birth for baseball when Alexander Cartwright laid out the diamond and rules that forshadow today’s. However, major changes involving strike outs, walks, number of outs, how outs are recorded etc. continued until late in the 19th century with the game essentially taking its modern form by 1893.
[3]"Baseball’s Reliquary: The Oddly Possible Hybrid of Shrine and University", an essay reprinted in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball, 2003. Gould, who was a lifelong Yankees and later Red Sox fan, wrote many interesting pieces on baseball, his most lasting perhaps his essay on the disappearance of the .400 hitter.

India Fights Back

India has gone on the offensive in terms of outsourcing. While the Indian official quoted in the article blames the US and Europe not allowing enough Indians to immigrate to the west for the growth of outsourcing, he's dead wrong. The reduced cost of labor is driving it. Bringing Indians here does nothing for the cost reduction efforts of US businesses.

I do agree that we have an aging population and so eventually a level of outsourcing will likely be required. Right now, however, that is not the problem and India is trying to reduce the backlash that might result.

Model Driven Development

Very interesting article on modeling languages and distributed applications that foreshadows what will be included in the next release of Visual Studio .NET.

Some would argue (correctly in my view) that abstraction is the most powerful productivity-boosting concept in Computer Science (and in many other aspects of life) and so tools that raise the level of abstraction result in less complexity leading to less grunt work and fewer defects in the code. This is surely the wave of the future.

After reading the article I'm still unsure as to where/if Microsoft's effort dovetails with the Model Driven Architecture of the OMG. Both ideas use models to generate code and attempt to keep the model as a living artifact in the project. However, the MDA/OMG approach is centered on UML and appears to be more focused on platform portability than on the reduction of complexity while the Microsoft effort looks like it is more domain-based, targeted at the Microsoft platform, and does not use UML. I could be wrong on all points of course, being a newbie here. However, Microsoft's document does say that "While abstraction can be used to hide platform differences, we find it much more valuable to use abstraction to reduce complexity of translating requirements into implementations."

The challenges to any model-driven development that I see right off are at least twofold:

1) How do you keep the generated code relevant to the model when changes are made to either end? This is the current problem with tools included in Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect and the previous tool based on Rational Rose in Visual Studio 6. Microsoft includes Code Model APIs in the .NET Framework that could help with this and of course the model would likely produce base classes, attributes, and delegates that are hooked to hand-crafted code although it would seem there would at least have to be some minimal interaction here.

2) How do you create models that are granular enough to support real business processes? I can certainly see broad models that support certain kinds of problems but can the models really be made specific enough to produce usable code? I suppose that the DSL approach would allow industries to create the models which would enable them to be very specific and more complex but this is certainly a key challenge.


Lots of food for thought...

Cubs Rumors

The Cubs are reportedly still talking with Kennry Lofton as a fourth outfielder and a deal with Grudzielanek has not been reached although it looks like the Cubs are pretty set on trying to sign him. I'd like to see them go after Vina at second instead since he could fill the leadoff spot. I also wouldn't mind them taking a run at Javy Lopez although his price tag may be a little high. Looks as if Cruz is now projected as the 5th starter. It would be nice to have another plan there as well. They may also resign Tom Goodwin since he is one of Dusty's favorites and did perform well last year. If they sign Lofton I would rather they looked at a reserve with more power.

MLB.com also noted that Hawkins turned down more money from the Yankees to play for the Cubs since he is a long time fan from the days of the daily-double, Leon Durham, and Jody Davis. Still, he'll get $11M over two years and has incentives that might raise it to $15M as well as an optional 3rd year.

Jackson, Sharpton, and Peter Pan

Well, the debacle that is Michael Jackson has now begun to unravel. There was a great editorial by Gerald Early in the 12/2 Wall Street Journal that made the obvious link from Jackson to Peter Pan as a man trying to stay forever young (the article is only available to subscribers online). I see that ABC news has done a piece in the same light from the medical/psychological perspective (he must be a victim, aren't we all?). The interesting aspect of the WSJ piece, however, was noting not only how Jackson has tried to transcend time by altering his appearance and recycling the style that brought him fame, but how he has tried to transcend race and gender as well in an apparent effort to appeal to everyone but in the end removing the core of his humanity and making him all but intelligible to real people. On the other hand maybe he's just weird.

Which of course makes it all the more hypocritical when his brother defends him by playing the race card ("a modern lynching" I believe was the phrase) and when Jackson played it himself several years ago accusing Sony of being racist because his records weren't selling. You would think that in a country hyper-sensitive to race (e.g. "hate-crimes" legislation, serious discussion of reparations, and campus speech codes) these kinds of baseless accusations would be revlealed for what they are. Unfortunately, bogus cries of racism from people in the favoured groups are almost never exposed and even more rarely condemned. As a great example, check out Ann Coulter's column from a few days ago where she correctly noted that:

"Sharpton libeled innocent men in the Tawana Brawley case. He inflamed angry mobs in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, leading to the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. He incited an anti-Semitic pogrom against a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem, Freddy's, ending in a blaze of bullets and fire that left several employees dead."

Sharpton is given a free pass by both the media and the other Democrats simply because he is black.

150,000 Software Jobs Lost in 2002

Here is some more disturbing news about software jobs and IT in general in the U.S. I guess the good news is that job losses in consulting companies and the like slowed in 2002 as opposed to 2001. While not all of the job loss (150,000 software jobs) can be attributed to offshore outsourcing with the economic slowdown, that has to be a major factor. It'll be interesting to see what happens if the economy continues to recover. The disturbing point in the article is the note that:

"the impact of high-tech manufacturing and services outsourcing to foreign countries remains extremely hard to gauge, as most companies refuse to detail how many positions they have shipped overseas. Until businesses are more forthcoming with those numbers or the U.S. federal government requires some form of reporting on employee outsourcing data it would be nearly impossible to estimate just how many jobs have been transferred offshore"

Hawkins

Actually, the Cubs signed Hawkins to a 2-year deal with a player option for a third year. He's in his low thirties so he should be ok for the next couple years barring injury.

Cubs pick up setup man

The Cubs today reportedly are set to sign LaTroy Hawkins to a three year deal. Great setup man the last 2 years. With Remlinger and Farnsworth they would be solid. With the Lee trade that sets up the Cubs as follows:

1B - Lee, Simon as backup and pinch hitter
2B - Grudz (free agent but likely resign although the Cubs appear to be going after Vina, which would be a good move)
SS - Gonzales (unfortunately but still has a contract)
3B - Ramirez (should try and lock him up for a couple years)
RF - Sosa (just exercised his option)
CF - Patterson (injury free and with some patience, who knows?)
LF - Alou (1 year left on contract)
C - Miller (should look hard at Rodriguez or someone else but it doesn't look like they will)

SP - Prior, Wood, Clement (Cubs picked up option), Zambrano, Need a fifth starter
RP - Borowski, Hawkins, Remlinger, Farnsworth, Cruz

Good News from KC

The Royals signed their top 3 free agents! Great news. So now the Royals look as follows:

1B - Harvey (might still be shopping for a platoon)
2B - Relaford
SS - Berroa
3B - Randa
RF - Guiel
CF - Beltran (for one more year)
LF - DeJesus (maybe looking at White or Jordan for everyday as insurance)
C - Nobody (Looking at Mayne as a backup and possibly Santiago?)
DH - Sweeney

SP - Anderson, May, Asencio, Appier, Snyder
RP - Affeldt (should be full time closer), MacDougal, Leskanic, Carrasco

Not a SABR Member

As a counter point to my previous post, the author of this article is certainly not a fan of sabermetrics. I thought it sounded just a wee-bit bitter. I especially liked "Clearly, the easiest positive statistic for mediocre hitters, one that requires keeping the bat glued to your shoulder, instead of the traditional hand-eye induced ball-whacking (which is far more exciting), is the ability to draw walks."

I think this reflects the underlying and non-thinking of so many traditionalists that walks are something the pitcher does and not something the batter has any responsibility for. I would argue that the reverse is really the case and that if you looked at the standard deviation of walks/per plate appearance for pitchers and hitters, the pitcher's spread would be smaller. Hmmm, I'll have to get to that someday....

Patience and Its Effects

Interesting article on patience on Baseball Prospectus. Basically, the author concludes that the difference between teams that take alot of pitches (Red Sox, A's) and teams that don't (Devil Rays, Tigers) doesn't really have much effect on wearing out pitchers and causing extra relievers to enter the game. Although this is the reasoning that you'll sometimes hear a manager use when talking about plate discipline. Two comments:

First, I was most impressed by the author's comment which hits the nail on the head:

"If a team's intent is to seize on the minor advantage of facing middle relief, it's important to realize that getting more pitches is never more important than hitting those pitches. And that's what good hitters do: work the count in their favor, so they can reach a favorable hitter's count and whack the ensuing fat pitch. The best-hitting teams are the ones that pile patience together with batting ability. Sounds simple, yet too many teams still struggle with the concept."

In other words, its not overall patience that matters but "patience with a purpose", i.e. to hit cripples. My brother brought this point to my attention last year when he noted that what impressed him most when sitting right behind the dugout at a major league game was the difference between good hitters taking bad pitches and bad hitters swinging at bad pitches. All major leaguers can hit pitches in the sweet zone, some hitters are simply better at getting the pitchers to throw those kinds of pitches. Ted Williams in The Science of Hitting was of course right on when he labeled the locations within the strike zone with averages ranging from .240 to over .400. Second to getting good pitches to hit (and in some ways simply a by product) is the extra walks piled up by patient hitters that serve to not consume outs and put more runners on base leading to more runs.

Second, while the overall effects of team patience don't support the idea of using it soley or even primarily as a means of wearing out a starter, the small differences between teams (3.9 pitchers per plate appearance for the Red Sox and A's versus 3.6 for the Devil Rays) are likely masked for three reasons. 1) Having some players who take alot of pitches and some players who don't take very many. 2) A high number of walks may not be that strongly correlated with seeing a lot of pitches. Some players who strike out alot see alot of pitches because of the number they swing through. For example, Jose Hernandez, who struck out 177 times this year and walked only 46 saw 3.95 pitches per plate appearance, a very high total. 3) Some patient hitters, who even though they walk alot, don't see an extremely high number of pitches since they don't run alot of 3-2 counts. Bonds of course is the extreme example since he gets intentionally walked so much and almost always puts strikes in play hard somewhere.

Isaac Newton

I recently read James Gleick's short (190 pages) biography of Newton simply called Isaac Newton. I thought it was perfect for giving you a capsule view of his life and his research that went into his two famous books, the Principia and Opticks.

Gleick paints a picture of Newton as someone who couldn't stand criticism and so hid many of his ideas about the nature of light and "the calculus" for many years. He also does a good job explaining Newton's other (and arguably principle) passions for alchemy, prophecy, and Arianism (the belief that the Trinity is an invention of the church and that God is not distinct in three persons) that were not widely known until the 20th century.

I liked the book because it didn't go into great biographical detail and doesn't try to do much psychology but concentrates instead on his research and relationship to the scientific establishment of the day (the Royal Society in England had just been formed during Newton's youth).

A couple of other things that were interesting to me included the fact that Newton was the first to propose that white light was the combination of the other colors that were separated by a prism or raindrop instead of the idea that the prism somehow created the colors. He also noted the various angles of refraction for the colors of light. I'm sure this information passed by me in some course somewhere but I had forgotten it if it did.

Also I didn't realize that the idea that the force exerted on an object was inversely proportional to the square of the distance was being discussed at the time although Newton derived it independently. But it was Newton who then generalized the idea to include planets and comets and therefore proposed universal gravitation.

Finally, Gleick lays out the controversy between Newton and Leibniz regarding the discovery of the calculus. Newton clearly had priority by over 25 years (Newton did not use calculus in his Principia even though he could have since he wanted the book to be understood based on existing and accepted mathematical principles) but failed to publish first. However, 2 small points that I found interesting were that Newton, in correspondance with Leibniz, and sensing that he was about to be scooped, wrote him a letter in which part was encrypted. Newton then took the code and dated it in a sealed letter so he could later decode it and prove his priority. Second, Netwon used totally different symbols than Leibniz but it is Leibniz's symbols (for integrals for example) that ended up winning the day by the 19th century and that we used today (another fact I probably heard before).

Now if I could just remember anything about calculus from college other than that you can use it to compute the area under a curve and rates of change........

Lee vs Choi

Well, the Cubs acquired Derreck Lee from the Marlins for Hee Seop Choi and a player to be named later. While I don't think the trade is terrible for either team I think the Marlins got the better of the deal.

Choi is younger at 24 than Lee at 28

Choi has the potential to be a 100 walk, 25 homerun player for the next 10 years

Lee is likely at or very near his peak production although his homerun totals should go up some in Wrigley Field

Lee walks a good amount which is great and is solid at 1B and to that extent the Cubs are getting a known quantity

Lee makes $4.5M and Choi $300K so what the Cubs are essentially doing is paying for a known quantity rather than taking the risk on a player that very well might be better

In the end, for the difference you're going to get between the two (Lee may outperform Choi the next year or two) it's probably not worth it in the long run. I would have stuck with Choi.

Royals Rumors

Ron Hostetter reports that the Royals may be interested in:

Brian Jordan (OF)
Robert Fick (1B)
Raul Mondesi (OF)
Matt Stairs (1B)
Rondell White (OF)
Todd Walker (if they fail to sign Randa)

I'm not too excited about any of these guys. Mondesi is overrated and Stairs can't hit lefities although he does get on base and might make a good platoon with Harvey. Fick might also be a serviceable platoon player but he doesn't walk enough or hit with enough power to make him valuable. Jordan and White are injury prone and are getting up there in years. Todd Walker is vritually the same player as Randa so I guess you would take whichever one came cheaper.

Two Slices of Bacon

In reflecting on the assasination of JFK I wondered what it was that caused people to believe in the conspiracies in the abscence of evidence. In the First Book of Francis Bacon's 1620 Novum Organum he identified several impediments, which he called idols (aphorisms 38-44), to human reasoning in the pursuit of a correct interpretation of nature. One of the idols he defined is "Idols of the Tribe" (idola tribus). These are impediments grounded in ways of thinking common to the human species. Of these Bacon says that they are "inherent in human nature and the very tribe or race of man; for man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the universe..." One might say that idols of the tribe reflect the way our brains are hard-wired to interpret our immediate environment. As a result, some things that may seem to be "common sense" may lead us down the wrong path.

One particular example of this kind of idol (discussed by Gould in several essays) is our inability to grasp vast distances and long timespans. Our minds are suited to deal in feet, miles, days, and years, not millions of miles and billions of years. As a result, we can't intuitively feel what these distances and time spans are like although our reason in some sense overcomes this deficiency and allows us to perform calculations and calibrations to deal with them numerically, for example, in space flight and paleontology. In another example, our inability to think intuitively about large numbers makes people ripe for believing in "Bible Codes".

Related to conspiracies, perhaps the most studied and well-known way that humans process information is to see patterns and make connections. My conjecture is that conspiracy theorists employ this particular idol and are trapped by it when they identify a causal relationship in a set of connections (a pattern) between individuals. For example, A) the Florida mob boss Carlos Marcello was known to have harboured ill will for the Kennedys, B) Marcello knew Guy Bannister who was an anti-Castro figure in New Orleans, C) Anti-Castro people were also generally disappointed with Kennedy for his failure to support the insurgents at the Bay of Pigs and subsequently, D) Guy Bannister knew David Ferrie, also an anti-Castro militant, E) Guy Bannister had an office in the same structure as the address printed on the flyers Oswald handed out on the streets of New Orleans (an alternate route is that Oswald was in the Civil Air Patrol at the same time as Ferrie was an instructor), F) Oswald killed Kennedy. Follow the chain and you come to the obvious conclusion that Marcello must have ordered the hit on Kennedy and Guy Bannister and David Ferrie recruited Oswald to do it since it coincided with their own hatred of Kennedy. There certainly appears to be a pattern here and common sense seems to dictate that we take the results of this view seriously. Should we?

While connecting causality with a pattern like this in a world of just a few individuals might make sense, it doesn't in a country will hundreds of millions of people. This is the so called "small world" effect that allows you to link any actor to Kevin Bacon in less than 7 films. The conspiracy theorists are thereby caught just where our idol (the ability to make connections and see patterns) runs into our inability to deal with large numbers and so a likely statistical artifact is mistaken for causality (see this site for a great version of the Bacon game for baseball players). Let me be clear that the pattern may indeed record a chain of causality. However, in order to show that it did we would need evidence. Unfortunately, there is no documentary evidence tha bridges the gaps between these facts in the case of the JFK assassination (see this excellent site for a clear thinking view of the JFK assasination.
). So we've gone from Bacon to Bacon. I wonder if my breakfast is ready....

Whidbey Enterprise Tools

Some good prelimanry information on the enterprise tools that will be going into VS .NET Whidbey next year.

Any tools that assist in writing boilerplate like code or that handle infrastructure issues are the wave of the future. Writing anything but business logic by hand is a waste of time.

Cubs prospect named AFL MVP

I see that Jason DuBois in the Cubs system was named AFL (Arizona Fall League) MVP after hitting .358 with 9 homeruns. Ken Harvey of the Royals was the AFL MVP last year. Not sure if DuBois will really get any shot next year since he is an outfielder and those spots are set. This also may just be a bit of an outlier for him since he was in AA last year and hit only .269. The AFL of course has a very short season along the lines of 35 games and so the statistics will always have a larger spread and therefore be more difficult to index.

Appier Still a Royal

The Royals signed Appier to a one-year deal for the $300,000 minimum. Not a bad deal and that still leaves room to go after Anderson.

Conspiracies, conspiracies, and not a thing to wear

Like most people I took in some of the retrospectives this week on the JFK assasination on this 40th anniversary. Although both the Frontline piece on PBS and the Unsolved History program on The History Channel were both solid and well documented, The Men Who Killed Kennedy series that the Histroy Channel ran was a farce. In Unsolved History they validated that:

A) Oswald could have gotten the 3 shots off in 8 to 8.4 seconds as the evidence now indicates was the time span (the Warren commission got the timing of the first shot wrong and was taken over 2 seconds earlier than first believed)
B) The shots were not as difficult as some believe. They had a marksman duplicate the shots and was able to do it everytime the gun didn't jam or malfunction (which was 23% of the time)
C) Oswald could have hidden the gun and proceeded down the rear stairs to the 2nd floor breakroom in 90 seconds without being winded where he was seen by a police officer
D) Oswald could have walked from his boarding house to the spot where officer Tippet was killed in under 15 minutes (they timed it at 11 minutes)
E) That other locations for the shooter were unlikely (the storm drain, the bridge) because of visibility and angle

The Men Who Killed Kennedy, however, has so many holes its hard to know where to start. In particular though I was struck by the treatment of Judyth Barker, the self-proclaimed mistress of Lee Harvey Oswald. Her story is so implausible, linking almost every character mentioned in any conspiracy theory, so as to be laughable. A quick web search produced this document that effectively debunks her delusions and adds to the list of incredible claims, many of which don't even relate to Oswald. This same filmmaker pinned the assasination on 3 french guys back in 1988 in earlier installments of the series.

In my reading Case Closed by Gerald Posner is still a great source that effectively debunks many of the leading claims of the conspiracy theorists. Many volumes would be needed to debuk them all but Posner makes a good start. Certainly, the book has been much criticized but its basic message remains intact. If just half the people were in on the murder of a sitting president as is supposed by most conspiracy theorists, then the conspiracy would have long ago been exposed and all would be known. On top of that no actual counter evidence to the lone gunman theory has ever been validated. One of the interesting facts that often gets forgotten but is documented by Posner as well as the Frontline piece is that no less than 3 people saw the barrel of the gun out the 6th floor window, one saw Oswald very clearly (he gave the description to the Police that was broadcast on the radio 15 minutes after the event), and two actually saw the gun fire. In addition, employees on the 5th floor clearly heard the shots above them as well. They were all interviewed within minutes of the assasination. Reactions of people on the Zapruder film also clearly show that the shots were coming from behind.

It makes you wonder at the psychological factors that lead people to believe such implausible theories on the basis of no evidence. In the case of JFK I've heard it said that for that generation anyway, it was hard to accept that a nobody like Oswald could kill a somebody like Kennedy without a vast conspiracy.

I don't think its quite so interesting why people like Judyth Baker and the step-daughter of John Ligget (the supposed mortician who reconstructed the Presiden'ts head in The Men Who Killed Kennedy) might make false reports. Their motives probably have to do with personal recognition, faulty memory (reading themselves into the story 40 years later based on fragmentary memories), and plain old mental problems. Its more interesting why otherwise rational people would buy into the theories and promote them (i.e. Oliver Stone). Does it simply make life more interesting? Does it fulfill a need to see larger forces at work in a world that is full of contingency? Can people not analyze and separate fact from fiction? Your guess is as good as mine.