62 replies to this topic

[Dread Aidan]

Tactical Bear, on Saturday, September 3rd, 2011, 12:38 AM, said:

It takes a special kind of arrogance to believe -- based entirely on the supposition that paying attention to sports qualifies one to better handicap NFL lines than Vegas oddsmakers -- that one can beat the book.

I think my favorite theory of his is that the best time to bet on the NFL is the first few weeks because it takes the books a while to adjust their lines. That being said, I love his podcast with Cousin Sal.Hey BigD, do you listen to the Dameshek NFL podcast? Dameshek is one of those guys who "trusts his eyes," but he is still a lot of fun. Also, one of the Grantland Network podcasts was Keri and Dameshek debating Stargell vs. Raines.

[mk]

I just read his most recent mailbag entry while in the john, and I found his Jose Bautista:BlueJays:AL MVP :: Tom Hanks:Turner & Hooch:Oscar analogy amusing. Mostly because I love the movie Turner & Hooch.

[Poppy_Hillis]

I went to Grantland for the first time in a week or two hoping somebody wrote something about the Federer Djokovic match. It was the best thing I've read on that damn thing.

[BigDMcGee]

I do indeed listen to Dameshek. I think his sports takes are often retarded but they are presented humorously and I love his crazy pittsburgh accent.

[Dread Aidan]

Poppy_Hillis, on Monday, September 12th, 2011, 11:57 PM, said:

I went to Grantland for the first time in a week or two hoping somebody wrote something about the Federer Djokovic match. It was the best thing I've read on that damn thing.

That was good stuff.I liked this paragraph in particular:

We want athletes to be able to explain sports. Sport, at its most basic, is about physically realizing intentions — calculating the angle, plotting the spin, executing the shot. So surely the people who have the intentions, the people whose inner lives sport is expressing in some complicated way, are in the best position to tell us what really happens on the court. And to a certain extent that's true. But one of the reasons it's so scary to imagine going into the postmatch press conference as a loser is that it's not entirely true. What happens during a match may concern you to an emotionally devastating degree, but what happens can also turn on tiny fluctuations of chance so complicated that they are astoundingly difficult to articulate — minute physical differences that fall within any conceivable margin of error, emotional swings that could have gone either way and went against you, who knows why. These sorts of breaks are often monstrously unfair. And as with The Shot and The Confrontation, they tend to take on outsize importance in matches that are otherwise very close. Meaning that the greatest contests, the ones whose outcomes are most exalting for the winners and most devastating for the losers, are the ones most likely to be decided by infinitesimal turns of luck.

BigDMcGee, on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011, 10:56 AM, said:

I do indeed listen to Dameshek. I think his sports takes are often retarded but they are presented humorously and I love his crazy pittsburgh accent.

Totally agree. Which is probably the real problem with Simmons: he's not that funny anymore.

[DinkDonk]

Dread Aidan, on Tuesday, September 6th, 2011, 12:01 PM, said:

Here's what I believe: The best player on a noncontender shouldn't be considered "most valuable" unless (a) his numbers demolish everyone else's numbers, and (b) there wasn't a kick-ass candidate from a better team.Does this make any sense at all?I've had some thoughts about the MVP kicking around in my head that probably don't make much sense either. It seems to me that the goal of advanced metrics is one of two things: either better predict future success or to strip away all the things that players don't control to find out how well they did the things they do control. The first is meaningless in an MVP discussion, so let's focus on the 2nd.Hypothetical Player A gets 600 AB's and hits a single in every single one. Nobody is ever on base and nobody ever drives him in. His team loses every single game because they never score a run.Hypo Player B gets 600 AB's and hits a single in every single one. There is a runner on 3rd every time and his team wins every game and he is the only player on the team with an RBI. Advanced stats will tell you that A and B are the exact same player. They performed exactly the same way with what they could control. But isn't B pretty clearly more valuable to his team? I think it's a version of the clutch discussion. There's no such thing as a clutch player, but there are obviously clutch plays. Shouldn't that matter? When deciding who was MV, I don't want to know how many wins a player contributed all else being equal, I just want to know how many wins a player actually contributed. An RBI is highly contextual, but it still contributes to a win.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that Win Probability Added is calculated as an attempt to quantify what you're talking about.

[Dread Aidan]

DinkDonk, on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011, 1:48 PM, said:

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that Win Probability Added is calculated as an attempt to quantify what you're talking about.

Sounds right."Win probability added is a sport statistic which attempts to measure a player's contribution to a win by figuring the factor by which each specific play made by that player has altered the outcome of a game. ... Win shares would give the same amount of credit to a player if he hit a lead-off solo home run as if he hit a walk-off solo home run; WPA, however, would give vastly more credit to the player who hit the walk-off homer."AL LeadersJose Bautista (Blue Jays) - 7.43Miguel Cabrera (Tigers) - 5.9Jacoby Ellsbury (Red Sox) - 5.19Josh Hamilton (Rangers) - 4.49Adrian Gonzalez (Red Sox) - 3.35Bobby Abreu (Angels) - 3.24Alex Gordon (Royals) - 3.19Curtis Granderson (Yankees) - 2.8Alex Avila (Tigers) - 2.74Michael Young (Rangers) - 2.69NL LeadersJoey Votto (Reds) - 6.84Prince Fielder (Brewers) - 5.66Matt Kemp (Dodgers) - 5.26Ryan Braun (Brewers) - 4.83Lance Berkman (Cardinals) - 4.68Albert Pujols (Cardinals) - 4.01Ryan Howard (Phillies) - 3.86Aramis Ramirez (Cubs) - 3.42Shane Victorino (Phillies) - 3.2Carlos Beltran (- - -) - 3.03Kevin Millar on the BS Report: "Stats are ruining baseball."Edit: I forgot to include pitchers. However, Ian Kennedy (Diamondbacks) leads the NL at 4.81 and Jered Weaver (Angels) leads the AL at 4.50, so they would be in the discussion, but not at the very top.

[Dubey]

I know this is going to come off as terribly biased given my avatar, but I don't get why Bautista should be 'punished' for being on a 'bad' (I don't think the Jays are a bad team, fwiw) team. The turner & Hooch analogy from Simmons was beyond terrible. If we want to make retarded movie analogies, then Bautista is Heath ledger in The Dark Knight and Ellsbury is Robert Deniro in Goodfellas. Bleh, that's bad too, whatever.If anything, and SJ's numbers support this, a great player to a bad team is MORE valuable than the same player would be on a great team. Take Bautista away from the jays, and the impact would be much greater than taking ellsbury or Gonzalez away from the Bosox. Not that I agree with using garbage intangibles to decide who the MVP of the league is.

[uncooper]

How bout WAR/$?

[BigDMcGee]

I was listening to the simmons/sal conversation, and he was talking about cleveland, and he said something about peyton hillis that I found shocking. He said that he wasn't effective coming out of the backfield catching the ball? Really? This is the same peyton Hillis that McDaniels said was the best pass catcher on his team, not running back, but period.. and had 61 catches last season. Like, I understand that he's a big white guy, so you naturally assume he's a goal line back, but his pass catching is what makes him such an attractive fantasy player. I could understand like a regular schmo making that mistake, but a Professional sports writer, sports better and obsessive fantasy football player should know hillis is a pass catching runningback. FFS. I don't even know why it bothered me so much, maybe it was the authoritative way that the said it, like it was general knowledge or something that hillis was no good

[DJ Vu]

Bill Simmons had to withdraw his MVP vote because he bet on the MVP.Story

[YonYonson]

DJ Vu, on Thursday, May 3rd, 2012, 6:11 PM, said:

Bill Simmons had to withdraw his MVP vote because he bet on the MVP.Story

as though lebron isn't clearly the best player. he probably got 3/2 anyways.

[Poppy_Hillis]

DJ Vu, on 03 May 2012 - 03:11 PM, said:

Bill Simmons had to withdraw his MVP vote because he bet on the MVP.

Wow, what a clown.

[DJ Vu]

Poppy_Hillis, on 05 June 2012 - 08:19 AM, said:

Wow, what a clown.

To be fair, he bet on the MVP before the season before knowing he was going to get a vote. And he also bet on some other guys like Chris Paul. So if he was trying to use his vote for financial gain, he should've been trying to get the guy with the worse odds more votes.

[Poppy_Hillis]

DJ Vu, on 06 June 2012 - 10:29 AM, said:

To be fair, he bet on the MVP before the season before knowing he was going to get a vote. And he also bet on some other guys like Chris Paul. So if he was trying to use his vote for financial gain, he should've been trying to get the guy with the worse odds more votes.

Ok, that's not bad then.If you had to guess, and I'm asking you to do so right now, how much money a year do you think he loses betting on sports?

[DJ Vu]

I'd guess he risks mid five figures per year and guess he wins somewhere around 40% of the time. I mean, he does that weekly football picks column and even in his worst years, it's not like he's 50 games under .500 or something.

[DJ Vu]

Really enjoyed this Simmons column.

[BigDMcGee]

I've grown to dislike many things about simmons over the years. I feel like he mails in many, many articles. His gambling theories tilt the shit out of me. His anti intellectualism really gnaws on my tits. But he is at his very, very best in articles like that. No one captures fandom like he does.

[YonYonson]

http://www.grantland...st-immortallity

best BS article in awhile.

[Ron_Mexico]

BigDMcGee, on 08 June 2012 - 03:57 PM, said:

I've grown to dislike many things about simmons over the years. I feel like he mails in many, many articles. His gambling theories tilt the shit out of me. His anti intellectualism really gnaws on my tits. But he is at his very, very best in articles like that. No one captures fandom like he does.

How do you feel about him being on the NBA show? They want him to challenge Magic and Wibon and create some debate. I feel like he'll go full jock sniffer and be not better than Broussard. That show needed Stan Van