Baseball Statistics - Steve C. Wang - Managers - New York Times

Links (11)

N.Y. Times: Schwarz: Professor Puts a Face on the Performance of Baseball Managers (RR)
Published 4/1/2008 at BBTF's Baseball Primer Newsblog
N.Y. Times: Schwarz: Professor Puts a Face on the Performance of Baseball Managers (RR) Either this is an elaborate April Fools gag...or Wooly Willy has a major lawsuit on its hands! Many of the numbers that measure the performance of hitters, pitchers and fielders are familiar to every fan. But now attention is being turned to a genus of baseball creature rarely examined through statistics: the manager, who sets the lineups, calls for hit-and-runs and otherwise turns the cranks of in-game strategy. Aside from won-lost records, few metrics quantify what these men actually do ...

Tuesday's Plastic Cup
Published 4/1/2008 by Jeff Sackmann at Brew Crew Ball: Front Page Posts
... I'm not sure I entirely get it, or the point of it, but a professor has come up with a way to visually represent managerial tendencies with illustrations of their faces.  I didn't read the whole article, and I'm guessing most of you won't want to either, but make sure to click on the multimedia link to see the pictures.  Ned looks about right! ...

Daily Roundup 4/2/08
Published 4/2/2008 by R.J. Anderson at Beyond the Box Score: Front Page Posts
... Putting a face on tendencies? That's what the a professor has done for managerial decisions. If nothing else the pictures are amusing, particularly Bruce Bochy's, I wouldn't blame him if his head explodes. ...

THT Live: Putting a face on managerial tendencies
Published 4/2/2008 by THT Staff at The Hardball Times
Putting a face on managerial tendencies by THT Staff April 02, 2008 Here's something we never thought of: graphing baseball stats as human faces . Do you have a general question or comment for one of THT's writers? Send it in to ...

Gallimaufry, Bitches!
Published 4/2/2008 by Ken Tremendous at FIRE JOE MORGAN
Ahhhhh, baseball! The crack of the bat. The sweet smell of dewdrops in spring. The checking of home/away splits. The improper substitution of a LOOGY just because the hitter is lefty even though the hitter has a like total reverse split. The whirring and clicking of massive Cray Supercomputers spitting out PECOTA Predictions. Swarthmore professors using something called "Chernoff Faces" to convert managerial tendencies into graphical/pictorial form ...

Manny Acta Is A Small, Asian Child
Published 4/2/2008 by Chris Needham at Capitol Punishment
Manny Acta Is A Small, Asian Child Today's WTF? story is courtesy of the NY Times. In an attempt to quantify manager's decision-making processes, some math profs at a college that obviously needs to have its federal grants taken away, has graphically illustrated them using something called a "Chertoff face". (I thought a ...

Bud Black is an emotionless automaton.
Published 4/2/2008 by pjbno4 at Gaslamp Ball: Front Page Posts
At least according to some wang. Actually that Wang is a professor at Swarthmore who used manger tendencies to create charicatures of each manager. It's really quite interesting to take a boring analysis of the current mlb managers and create funny-looking faces from it. Bud Black was really quite ordinary, almost identical to the league averages. But he is quite a contrast to Bruce ...

[JOE MADDON] Joe Maddon's Managerial Tendencies As A Chernoff Face
Published 4/2/2008 by The Professor at Rays Index
Believe it or not, that face represents everything you need to know about the managerial stylings of Joe Maddon...well almost everything. As a scientist in our day job, we reach our apex of nerddome every Tuesday when we rush to the newspaper stand to get our copy of the New York Times and their weekly "Science" section. So color us surprised yesterday when we see that one of the feature stories in the Science Times is a story in which a researcher used Chernoff Faces to evaluate the managerial styles of every major league manager including Joe Maddon of the Tampa Bay Rays. Aside from won-lost records, few ...

"My, Mr. Piniella, You Have Such High Hair!"
Published 4/3/2008 by Cubnut at A Hundred Next Years
The Hardball Times flagged this fascinating story by Alan Schwarz in Tuesday's New York Times, a description of the work of Swarthmore College mathematician and avid Yankees fan Steve Wang. Employing an analytical method called Chernoff faces, in which data are represented by varying heights, widths, and angles in images of human faces, Wang reflects the strategic tendencies of all 30 Major League managers from the 2007 season. If I understand the explanation of Wang's analysis, the Piniella Chernoff face suggests Lou's relatively frequent use of pinch runners (the upward swoosh of the hair), the disinclination to use the sacrifice bunt (the slit ...

Faces of the NBA
Published 4/4/2008 by rapidadverbssuck at The Arbitrarian
By now, you’ve probably seen the NYT article depicting MLB managerial styles as Chernoff faces. Well, I of course, could not let it go by without producing on of my own: NBA Chernoff Faces! There is a key included in the graphic describing what statistical factors impact which facial features, and I tried to assign these somewhat intuitively (which was hard: I actually just managed to make ...

Our Very Own Defector
Published 4/8/2008 by halejon at The Mockingbird
Overshadowed by the weekend’s sweep was a little excitement in Dunedin (which TSN evidently thinks is AAA). On Monday, B.J. Ryan threw 12 pitches to live batters as well as a bullpen session and said he felt “a lot better” (which of course is what he would have said as long as his arm remained physically attached to his body). He will be pitching in today for the first time in ...