St. Louis Cardinals have the formula to beat the Texas Rangers

In most cases pitching wins a series. That is especially true for the World Series. This year the St. Louis Cardinals are in the World Series against the Texas Rangers not because of their pitchers, but because of how they have managed their pitchers. However, in order to beat the bats of the Texas Rangers, the St. Louis Cardinals are going to have to take their approach to pitching to the next logical level. The problem is that tradition will be standing the way.

Baseball has a long tradition of honoring the starting pitcher. In fact the idea of relief pitching is a relatively new concept. These traditions are so deep in baseball that a starting pitcher only earns the win if he pitches five innings while that rule does not always hold true for a reliever. In some cases a starting pitcher's compensation is even tied to the number of wins he has. However, maximizing starting pitchers wins may reduce the overall wins for the team particularly in the St. Louis Cardinals' case.

It has long been known that relief pitchers have an average ERA about .5 better than starting pitching. Often the reasons given for this is that starting pitchers must pace themselves while relievers do not. If pacing themselves results in the better pitcher having worse numbers than the weaker pitcher why is this a good way to play the game? Over the course of the season this difference would account for roughly 80 additional runs being allowed or according to Bill James's Pythagorean expectation 9 fewer wins in a season. That is a significant impact.

Throughout this year's MLB playoff season the St. Louis Cardinals have been most successful when they have used a lot of pitchers for a few innings each in a game. Yes, there is the notable exception of Carpenter's  innings which was impressive but not the most likely path to victory.

Below is a quick breakout of the ERA of the Cardinals when their pitch 3 innings or less versus when pitchers ERA in the fourth inning or greater.

Series	ERA <=3 Innings	ERA >3 innings
STL V PHI	3.64	6.5
STL V MIL	3.66	10.5
STL V TEX	2.16	6.3

To me this analysis would indicate the best chance the Cardinals have of winning the World Series is to never pitch a pitcher more than 3 innings against the Texas Rangers. 

The best talk at Predictive Analytics World NYC 2011 happened at night

I have enjoyed my week at Predictive Analytics World in New York. There have been some good talks, but I was missing the samples of code and concrete examples that I am used to from the simply outstanding geek gatherings ( called Meetups) that I go to in New York City all the time.

Professor Jay Emerson, Dr Awesomeness, satisfied that need with a simply outstanding talk last night to around 300 hardy PAWs members who finished off a 14 hour day with Jay's talk. It was worth it.

Jay's talk had everything from humor, to examples, to sample code, to usable advise. I just want to thank Jay again for making the effort to entertain and educate us all.

Link to Dr Jay Emerson's slides

Floop, the iPhone polling App, appears on ABC news in advance of Presidential Debates

Today on the ABC News show Topline they did an interview with Richard Schultz on the iPhone polling App, Floop. Why is a Politics show covering Floop? The answer is simple. There is a Presidential Debate in Las Vegas tonight, and what better way to participate in it than with Floop?

ABC News Topline video interview on Floop

When I have watched debates in the past I viewed in disbelief after debates as the talking heads on television totally missed the boat on what just happened, and what was important. The next day is rarely better when the canned polling from people like Quinnipiac University release their polling results that cover topics that are either too broad or uninteresting. Now I do not need them. With Floop I can do my own polls, and see the results from real people in real time. Their opinions are given in both quantitative and textual feedback.

Now is the time for the people take back our government. We will do this by communicating directly with each other on social networks and cutting out the talking heads and spin doctors who tried to shape our opinions in the past. Thomas Jefferson said a little revolution every now and then is good for a democracy. Well a revolution had arrived. An election process truly driven by the people with social networks. Tools like Floop lead the way.

MLB playoffs format gives the worst teams best shot at a World Series title?

I was going through the chat sections of my linkedin groups, and there was a thread there that talked about making the MLB playoff games a best of seven series and the World Series a best of nine series. The argument being that longer series will yield more wins for the superior teams.

I have to admit I never understood why baseball does the playoff to World series the way that they do. First they play a 162 game season to determine the eight best teams which given the number of games there is a high probability they are really the best eight teams. Then they playoff in the first round in a best of five series which gives the weaker team a better shot of winning than a seven games series. Then MLB finishes off the playoff with two rounds of a best of seven. It is an illogical progression.

If the goal is to give the best team the best shot without increasing the number of games in the playoffs the best way to do that would be to make the first two rounds a best of seven series and the World Series a best of five.

To give you an idea of the difference between a best of five series and a best of seven series lets run some numbers. In a typical MLB season the best teams win about 60% of the time while the worst teams win about 40% of the time. Using that as their excepted chance of wining a game, the chances of the weakest team in baseball beating the best team in baseball in a best of five game series is roughly 32% while in a best of seven series that team has roughly a 29% chance of winning. Yup, that is a staggering three percent improvement in the chances the better team wins the series. Interesting to the statistician but irrelevant to the typical baseball fan. 

Personally I think the playoffs should be switched to a best of seven series all the way through mostly for uniformity reasons than anything else.

Theo Epstein to leave Red Sox for Cubs. Welcome to the new age of Baseball

The rumor is that Theo Epstein, current general manager of the Red Sox, has agreed to a $15M deal to become President and General Manager of the Cubs. This is another step by the Chicago Cubs in building a world class sabermetric based front office in hopes of building a contender on the field. The Chicago cubs already added a major piece to this puzzle last year when they added Statistician Ari Kaplan to the front office. Ari's stuff is brilliant. The first Sabermetric book I ever read was one he co-authored called Baseball Hacks. I like the way the Chicago Cubs are heading here and wish the best  of luck to them in the future. Of course, statistically speaking is there really such a thing as luck?

Going to Predictive Analytics World NYC for Big Data and Rstats

For the week of October 16th I am going down to NYC to immerse myself in more cool classes, speakers and forums at Predictive Analytics World (PAWs). This conference brings together some of the people whose work I just love, and I know very well in some cases and not at all in others. Below are some of the highlights of the conference in my eyes which follows pretty closely to the talks and class I will be going to.

Max Kuhn, an heavy R user, will be giving an R bootcamp and a predictive analytics in R class. I will be attending at least one of these. Max has created some heavily used R packages including Caret and ODFweave. Every presentation I have seen covering the use of R in analytics competitions like Kaggle.com start with using Max's Caret Package.

Matthew Flynn who is the Director of Claim Research at Travelers in Hartford is giving a talk on creating more analytical bandwidth with R. I believe Travelers is a big SAS user which seems to match up with Matthew's bio so it will be interesting to hear his views on R particularly if it has to do with using the R connector to SAS. However, I am always excited to find another R user in Connecticut! In that light here is an open offer to Matthew or any other R user in Connecticut to join the Connecticut R users meetup, and I promise the first round will be on me.

Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, is giving a talk on Predictive Modeling Competitions. I have been to a number of Anthony's talks, and they are great fun. I have also been to a number of talks by people who have competed in Kaggle competitions, and the approaches and results are simply mind blowing. Kaggle has helped take Predictive Modeling to the next level. It provides a fun environment where Data scientist can push their art and skill against other talented people. Truely great stuff.

Usama Fayyad who is the CTO of ChoozOn is giving a talk on Predictive Analytics and Big Data. Given that Usama was the Chief Data Scientist at Yahoo, and I am sure that he still plays in the REALLY big data pool, I am dying to hear his approaches and views on attacking the various problems.

John Elder of Elder Research is giving a talk on the best and the worst of Predictive Analytics. I love these types of talks. When the mistakes are presented to us they are amusing, but I promise you I will not make those those mistakes in the future because I do not want to be in one of John's talks.

Robert Broughton will be giving a talk on Predictive Analytics and law enforcement. I have seen more on more articles and blog posts on this area in the last year. I believe it has huge potential to reduce crime and make the world a safer place. I am eager to hear this talk.

The are more great speakers that may interest you more than the ones that interest me, but my dance card is full and I am tired of typing so I will just give you the link to the list of speakers.

Echoing the call to help Data Without Borders

While the job of the data scientist can include increasing web traffic, clicks, and maximizing revenue. I have always found this area of application to be unsatisfying. When we first formed Revolution Computing our slogan was "we cure cancer". We wanted to run a profitable business, but it was also critical to us that the business result in positive impacts on peoples lives and on society in general.  I like to think that the Open Source community and particularly the R community keeps that idea as one of its driving motivations.

At Strata NYC 2011 Robert Kirkpatrick of UN Global Pulse asked for help from the Data Scientist community to make the world a better place, and offered examples of how our community could help the world community.

I enjoyed this talk, but it was a request for help.

On the final day of Strata NYC Drew Conway and Jake Porway launched Data Without Borders and went into action. They are going to run DataDives with some of the best Data Scientists around as volunteers to provide value and insight to NGOs and nonprofits to improve all aspects of their operations. Here is a video of that presentation:

The results so far is an oversubscribed DataDive in NYC and another DataDive in San Francisco filling up fast. That is what I love about this community. They give freely of their time and knowledge to better the world around them. The best people are people of action not words.

Another article on Data Without Borders. It is also good to see that David Smith and Revolution Analytics continues with the idea of supporting efforts for the betterment of society.