Why Don’t Sports Teams Use Randomization?

Links (5)

Tuesday Bullets
Published 12/11/2007 at ESPN.com - True Hoop - Blog
... can get away with those tight rocker-style jeans. The rest of us are better off knowing we can't. In any case, with a few breaks in Game Five against Utah, the Rockets would have probably been playing the Spurs in the conference finals last June. But instead, they fire a fine coach for the sake of an 'uptempo style.' That's the thing with style ... it never really says anything substantive about the person who's fronting it." Sports teams could keep opponents off-balance by being more random. Ernie Johnson tells the Timberwolves' ...

Random Playcalling in Sports
Published 12/11/2007 by i-Maque at postgameheroes.com
... . What you may not know is that the NY Times hosts a Freakonomics blog to, in their words, “keep the conversation going.” They have a very interesting guest post today from Ian Ayres entitled “ Why Don’t Sports Teams Use Randomization? ” He wonders, But an even bigger puzzle is why teams don’t exploit the other powerful use of randomization. To my knowledge, no sports team in the history of humankind has ever run a random control trial to figure out which strategies work the best. (I make this extravagant claim in hopes of provoking you all into providing some ...

links for 2007-12-12
Published 12/12/2007 by billfer at The Detroit Tiger Weblog
... Why Dont Sports Teams Use Randomization? A Guest Post - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog A little geeky - okay a lot geeky - but boiled down in layman’s terms: why don’t sports teams uses randomized trials. ...

Something about randomization or something
Published 12/12/2007 by PostmanR at The Postmen // A Sports Blog // Chicago, IL.
... So people were linking this NYT Freakonomics blog post yesterday stating the case for sports teams to use randomization to figure out which strategies work best. Seemed cool. Seemed interesting. And, I mean, the guy that wrote it is a professor at Yale. (Yale! Wow!) It makes some sense; the arguement here is certainly not without merit. It also dips into that whole argument that football teams should always go for it on fourth down, which seems absurd but is backed up by a considerable amount of data and anlysis. ...

Randomization
Published 12/13/2007 by Tangotiger (tangotiger@yahoo.com) at THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball
Game theory: They could even have a randomized trial of randomization — they could randomly assign the pitches for half the at-bats to be called in the traditional way (by the coach or the catcher) and the other half could be called by a random strategy established in advance. It would be a double-blind study, because neither the pitcher nor the hitter would need to know which system called the pitch. If it turned out that the random strategy reduced the batting average of your opponents, that would be pretty strong evidence that it was a better ...