Home Field Advantage

With the Red Sox having their only wins so far this year at home along with their reputation of being tooled to perform better at Fenway, I decided to take a quick look at the American League teams Home versus Away wins in the Red Sox Bill James era (2003-2010). Listed below are the differences between home wins and away wins for each team per year in the time period along with their corresponding mean and Standard Deviation.

2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 Mean STD Tampa Bay 2 20 17 8 21 13 12 19 14.00 6.59 Boston 3 17 17 6 10 13 12 11 11.13 4.88 NYYanks 11 11 17 10 3 11 13 -1 9.38 5.71 Toronto 5 13 18 15 13 6 13 -4 9.88 7.10 Baltiore 8 14 7 1 10 -2 -2 9 5.63 5.93 Chi White Sox 2 7 19 4 8 -5 19 16 8.75 8.65 Minnesota 12 11 18 3 12 7 6 6 9.38 4.78 Cleveland 7 5 19 6 10 -7 8 8 7.00 7.13 Kansas City 9 16 1 1 6 7 8 -3 5.63 5.90 Detroit 23 16 6 2 -3 12 4 3 7.88 8.51 LA Angels 6 1 0 14 1 3 -2 13 4.50 6.02 Texans 12 9 1 19 -2 7 13 15 9.25 7.07 Oakland 6 11 11 4 5 -3 13 18 8.13 6.47 Seattle 9 5 9 10 10 9 13 7 9.00 2.33

It is no surprise that the Red Sox have a strong Home/Away Wins record (2nd),

but I was surprised that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were even better in this

statistic. Also note how dominate the AL East is in Home Wins versus Away Wins.

Now for the Red Sox in 2011 having all your wins at home is still bad.

The Most Boring day in the Last hundred Years

I was driving in to work this morning and listening to the radio because I feel that distractions make me a better driver. A news article comes on telling me that a Cambridge researcher has found out that April 11, 1954 is the most boring day in the last 100+ years. I had a good laugh thinking that it isn't only the US government that gives out silly grants for pointless research ( remember the which came first the chicken or the egg paper).

So I dig a little deeper. Turns out this is a software guy who just launched his "smart" search engine. I could not find any specifics on how the engine works which would have been cool, but then I thought this is maybe even cooler than another algorithm. Here is a guy who got this new web site rolled out as a news story in three major newspapers and NPR just by asking an interesting question about the most boring day.  It would be really amazing if the search engine gave him the question after he queried "the most likely answer to a question to be picked up by major news organizations".

The Most Boring Day Article
True Knowledge
Tunstall-Pedoe and his search engine