Less Stupid Use of Pitchers: Pitcher Fatigue

A while ago I wrote a post about one of the most unenlightened areas of baseball strategy: the use of pitchers.  I proposed eliminating the distinction between starting pitchers, middle relievers, and closers in favor of a system that just uses a set of pitchers, each pitching different total numbers of innings, but no single pitcher pitching more than a few innings in a game; in other words, a starter would now throw two innings every few games instead of seven innings every five games.

The advantages of this, as I see it, are four fold.

1) If you're an NL team, you can pinch hit for your pitchers whenever they come up.

2) Pitchers don't have to throw 100 pitches in a game.

3) Batters never get to see the same pitcher twice in a game, and so can't get used to their pitches.

4) You can get the pitcher-batter match-ups you want all the time, instead of being stuck with your same pitcher the first three times through the lineup.

In the first post I estimated the size of effect (1): pinch hitting for you pitcher every time would let you score about 0.2 more runs per game, translating into about 3.2 wins per season (the difference between a .500 team and a .520 team).

Now I'm going to look at effects (2) and (3).

Being a Utilitarian, Part 1

I've written a series of posts about the different types of utilitarianism arguing for aggregate, classical, act, one-level utilitarianism.  I haven't, however, talked at all about what it would mean to be a utilitarian in the real world.

In the real world, obviously, you aren't faced with a series of trolley problems or utility monsters.  If you don't think about it very much, you might conclude that utilitarianism isn't actually useful because you can't calculate the total utility of each possible action.

However, as it turns out, utilitarianism can be useful even if you don't know the exact state of the universe.

In future posts I'll examine thornier, more wide-reaching issues, but for now I'll just talk about one issue--the first issue that I actually thought about in utilitarian terms.  For people familiar with utilitarianism it probably won't be that interesting or revolutionary, but it's a good way to remind yourself that just because a theory is complicated doesn't mean approximations can't be useful.  (It also parallels an argument Peter Singer has made on the subject.)

Re-starting the blog, and results of the second contest

As you may have noticed, after a hiatus while the school year started, I'm back to blogging.

First, I never resolved the second contest.  No one solved the puzzle but Matt Nass made partial progress, so he gets 3 Shadow-points.  I'm going to leave the puzzle open and if anyone solves it they get one Shadow-point.  Here's the puzzle again, with a little bit filled in as a hint:

Instructions for the puzzle are here.

Also, I think that weekly was probably too frequent for the contests, so they're going to change to bi-weekly; I'll have another one out soon.

If there's anything you want me to write about, put it in the comments here.

Newcomb's Decision

This post is partially a continuation of my previous posts on utilitarianism, and partially on philosophy in general; mostly, it's my two cents on one of the odder parts of consequentialist debate: decision theories.

Newcomb's Paradox

You, a mere mortal, encounter P, some super smart alien.  Or maybe it's a supercomputer, or maybe a god; versions of the paradox differ on this.  P comes up to you and says: "I have a deal for you.  I'm going to give you two boxes--box A, and box B.  Box B is transparent, and you can see $1,000 in it.  You can't see what's in box A.  I'm going to give you two choices.  The first is to take box A--you get whatever is in it.  The other choice is to take both boxes--you get box A, plus the $1,000 from box B."

So, you ask, why don't you take both boxes, getting the free $1,000?  Well, says P, there's a catch: "I have predicted whether you will take one box or two boxes."  (Or maybe I've simulated all of the atoms in the universe, or maybe studied your psychology, or maybe something else--versions of the paradox differ in how P knows how many boxes you're going to take.  But however he knows it, you believe him; maybe he has, in the past, predicted everyone who's taken this challenge successfully.)  "So I know what you're going to do", says P, "and before you arrived I decided how much money to put in box A.  If I predicted that you were going to take only box A, I put $1,000,000 in it.  Otherwise--if I predicted that you were going to take both boxes--I left box A empty."

"So", says P, "How many boxes do you want to take?"

Elections and the Future

The Democrats' victory in the 2012 elections--primarily President Obama's reelection but also the Democratic caucus in the senate growing by three senators*--has caused a fair amount of hand wringing among conservative circles about the future of the Republican party--the new fashion in political circles seems to be guessing which of opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, opposition to gay rights, and opposition to tax hikes for the wealthy will have been felled by the 2012 election.  I agree in large part with the long term trend of American politics, but I think it's important to keep it in perspective.

Election 2012 liveblog

Welcome to the Measuring Shadows 2012 election liveblog!  We'll be live chatting on the widget to the right, and writing longer comments on this page.

Lame38, and liveblogging the election

I will be liveblogging the election tomorrow night on this blog, starting with some posts early in the day but picking up around 7pm.  But why should you follow this blog?

Because there is a crisis waiting to unfold tomorrow night: what if polls close have just closed in Virginia but Nate Silver hasn't updated fivethirtyeight yet?  How will you know if Obama's chances of winning the election have jumped to 92.5% or plummeted to 91.5%?

It is in the hopes that this catastrophe may be averted that I unveil Lame38: a shitty version of 538 that I promise to update frequently.  What is Lame38?  Well, I took all of the projections from fivethirtyeight, created a simplified model, and will run it with updated results--giving a real time projection of what Obama's chances of winning are, incorperating both states that have been called and the actual votes from noncompetitive states.




Q: Why is this better that 538?
A: Well maybe 538 will take like 15 minutes to update but Lame38 will only take 5 minutes.  That'd be pretty cool, right?

Q: So it's just a shittier version of 538?
A: That's kind of a rude question.

Q: What information does your model incorporate as the night goes on?
A: I incorporate not just what states have been called, but also popular vote results from each state to try to estimate biases in the projections.


Q: So how does Lame38 work?
A: I took the projected vote differences and errors for each state from fivethirtyeight, as well as the standard deviation of the national popular vote.  For each simulation I will sample a national popular vote, bias each state by its difference from the projected national popular vote (to estimate national bias), and then sample each state's vote.  I then run about 1,000,000 simulations.

Q: So, what are the odds Obama wins the election?
A: Well, 538 says 92.2*%, and Lame38 says 93.5%, so I'd say the answer is about 92.2%.

Q: What else will you be blogging about?
A: Senate races, the race for California's 15th congressional district, and whatever else is on my mind.

Q: Will this be a great liveblogging, or the greatest liveblogging?
A: I'm shooting for "worth reading".

I hope to see you there!



*When I ran the simulations; 538 has since updated to 92.0%.