Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Worse than chance

Writing about Jonah Lehrer's book on decision making in The Sunday Times, I didn't mention the findings of Philip Tetlock at Berkeley. He studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock's further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn't self-correct, presumably because they'd invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view.

Your early afternoon non-baseball post

Guys have a reason to high-five in Columbus and two other Ohio cities, named some of the manliest places in America.

A new ranking says Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo make the top 10 for manliness based on criteria such as the number of major league sports teams, popularity of tools and hardware and frequency of monster truck rallies.

Nashville, Tenn., comes out on top in the study by Sperling's BestPlaces and commissioned as part of a promotion for Combos snacks made by Mars Snackfood US.

Charlotte, N.C., is second, followed by Oklahoma City and then fourth-place Cincinnati. Columbus is seventh and Toledo 10th.

Dayton is manly enough for 15th and Cleveland ranks No. 19.

New York City finished last out of 50 major U.S. metropolitan areas.

The Rites of Spring

The grounds crew next door is in its usual pre-opening day fever. There is an armada of those little John Deere mule trucks zooming around all day updating and replacing signs, dressing the edges of landscaping and replacing garbage cans that they put into storage five-odd months ago. Baseball is in the air, my friend. It's a great thing. They really do a nice job with the stadium - it is beautifully maintained and the city works hard to keep the surrounding area in step.

Such greatness.

Sports Marketing and the Recession

In the midst of this public and political turmoil, Nielsen Media Research has released some figures that show banking companies have decreased spending by 10 percent over the last year, but have increased the amount that they are spending on sports advertisement by 36 percent in 2008, showing that these businesses see sports as great return on investment.

According to Nielsen, "Banks spent $122 million - or 18.7% of all its TV ad dollars - on sports event programming in 2008. In 2007, the banking industry spent $90 million on sports broadcasts, or 12.5% of the industry’s total TV ad expenditures."

New Shea

For those fans who hated Shea Stadium, fear not: Citi Field is nothing like its predecessor, the last bits of which lie in ruins a few hundreds yards away. The Mets’ new park, which will open its doors for a Georgetown-St. John’s baseball game March 29, is far more intimate than Shea and corrects some of Shea’s worst faults . . .

. . . Citi Field has many nooks and crannies that are nothing like Shea’s tired symmetry. The grandstand that hangs over right field, for instance, was inspired by the old Tiger Stadium, which Wilpon visited with his grandparents as a child. Fans in center field will get a bull’s-eye view of the bullpens, with Aaron Heilman only in the visitors’ half, which is on a slightly raised level, with some protection from fan saliva.

The 16-foot wall that rings much of the outfield means an Endy Chávez-like catch is unlikely, though.

Going for food or a bathroom break will be a lot easier. The concourses are far wider, bathrooms are more numerous and beer drinkers will not have to wander far for a microbrew. Gabila’s knishes will return thanks to convection ovens. (The old knishes were fried, which helps explain the heartburn they generated.)

Deep Thoughts

The WBC Begins

The Lansford Family

Jared Lansford is on the A's list to pitch today at Scottsdale against the Giants. The Giants' hitting coach is Carney Lansford, Jared's father. "I've been hearing about it the last couple of days," Jared Lansford said with a laugh just as a teammate began joshing him about how many hits the Giants might rack up.

If it hasn’t happened by now . . .

A vote on a new ballpark for the Florida Marlins is being delayed again.

City of Miami spokeswoman Kelly Penton on Wednesday said commissioners are not expected to vote on a proposal to bring a 37,000-seat stadium to the city's Little Havana neighborhood until March 19. The commissioners were scheduled to discuss most of the agreement Friday.

Earlier this week, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez instructed the county manager to stop working on the stadium plan until the city reached a final vote on the proposal. Alvarez also asked the county commission chairman to hold off on the county's vote on the deal.

Today at THT