About FGCU (and some bad analysis)

Deadspin has a fairly interesting article up today about Florida Gulf Coast University, this year's surprise entrant into the NCAA Tournament's Sweet Sixteen. Touching on some topics that I've previously discussed in posts here and here, author Jonathan Mahler puts a different spin on this Cinderella story.

Don’t waste your time wooing Nobel laureates to your faculty or trying to recruit National Merit Scholars to a college they’ve never heard of. Do what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do: Devote your resources to building a first-class Division I basketball program.

It’s not going to happen overnight, but FGCU pulled it off pretty quickly... The Eagles basketball program started in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and had to apply more than once before being accepted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association—at the Division II level. Even after being granted permission to move up to Division I, the team had to wait three years before becoming eligible for postseason play.

Florida Gulf Coast University won its first NCAA tournament game in the school’s second year of eligibility, a mere 16 years after graduating its first student. Harvard won its first tournament game this year, too—371 years after its first commencement...

Just how valuable is a strong showing in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament? As it happens, Butler, whose improbable run to the 2010 Final Four is still the stuff of legend, has studied this very question. Its near-championship run—it lost in the finals to Duke—generated precisely $639,273,881.82 in publicity for the university. That’s to say nothing of the increases in merchandise sales and charitable giving, or the 41 percent surge in applications.

Interesting stuff, although as I've pointed out in my previous posts, not all schools are as successful at this game as FGCU has been—many more have thrown untold millions at their athletic departments and had hardly any success at all on the field or as an institution. On balance, it's pretty much a zero-sum game—some win big, but many others lose just as much.

Of course, where the author really lost me wasn't in this conclusion, but in his odd insistence that this Cinderella run somehow should have been foreseen by all of us, or that it was somehow inevitable. Mahler writes:

[Head coach Andy] Enfield hasn’t exactly had to scrounge for talent at FGCU. His team’s point guard, Brett Comer, grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers, a current starter for the New Orleans Hornets and the son of former NBA star Doc Rivers. The father of one of Enfield’s bench players, Filip Cvjeticanin, played alongside Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic on the Yugoslavian national team that won a silver medal in the 1988 Olympics.

These are some pretty tenuous links here, my man. I, for example, grew up playing baseball against this guy, in games umpired by this guy, and I coached this guy at a baseball camp when I was in high school. My father, meanwhile, shared a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1983, when I was two years old.

Do these connections alone make me a top-tier athletic talent, or a budding superstar journalist? Of course not. All they do is illustrate what we already know about the world, which is that it can be a pretty small place sometimes. If you play sports for long enough, you're pretty much guaranteed to line up with or against somebody who's pretty talented—and if not, you've probably got a relative who did (hey, come to think of it, my uncle did play hoops against Patrick Ewing in the Boston city championship way back when... maybe I've got more of a future in basketball than I'd realized).

As for FGCU, if they had really figured out a way to somehow magically attract top athletes to their school, they wouldn't have been recruiting kids who "grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers", they'd have been recruiting Austin Rivers himself. This isn't to say that these FGCU kids aren't talented—in fact, they are. I've been amazed by what these guys have done, and it's no fluke. I can't wait to watch them continue their run tomorrow night against Florida (late game, eh, CBS? I see what you did there...), and I hope they take this thing all the way to Atlanta for the Final Four.

But to pretend as though FGCU was some sleeping giant—with tons of top talent that nobody bothered to talk about—obscures the real lessons that we could be learning here. Namely, that a coach and a team playing incredibly well as a unit while having fun and playing with reckless abandon can do some pretty special things on a basketball court (and that the NCAA probably screwed up a bit with this year's seeding of the tournament). Not to mention, this isn't exactly a unique story in recent years—George Mason, VCU, and Butler all preceded (and exceeded) FGCU in this regard. Sure, FGCU reaching the Final Four would be unbelievable, and I'm certainly rooting for it, but we're not there yet.

When a big sports story like this one comes along, a lot of bad journalism is bound to be written, so this particular article is hardly a surprise. I just wish that, for once, we could all just enjoy an awesome story on its own merits, without having to draw some bigger (nonsensical) lesson about it all. Unfortunately, that's just not what we in the internet age like to do.

[Deadspin]

Clip of the Week

Time to go into the weekend strong with a couple of posts. First up is your Clip of the Week, which was basically uncontested this week.

We did have a bunch of cool videos shared by Barry Ritholtz, including this clip from Switzerland (anyone wanna go there with me? It looks pretty awesome and I hear they've got universal health care...), this compilation of a cappella theme songs, this very cool presentation of time-lapse photography, and this collection of some of the greatest soccer goals ever (my vote goes to Zidane... ridiculous).

But my favorite clip from this week was most definitely this extended advertisement for The Guardian (the U.K. media outlet), which borrows from the Three Little Pigs to illustrate a point. This is amazing, and it honestly comes across as almost a self-parody of the media industry and its role in society. For better or for worse, this is what today's media world is, and how it operates. Enjoy.

Statistical significance vs. significance

Alright, it's time to start plowing through some of my unfinished drafts here, in no particular order. I've been sitting on this one for a while, and it follows in the theme of this post and this post, both of which discussed the questionable validity of study results. From the Freakonomics blog... 

A new paper by psychologists E.J. Masicampo and David Lalande finds that an uncanny number of psychology findings just barely qualify as statistically significant.  From the abstract:

We examined a large subset of papers from three highly regarded journals. Distributions of p were found to be similar across the different journals. Moreover, p values were much more common immediately below .05 than would be expected based on the number of p values occurring in other ranges. This prevalence of p values just below the arbitrary criterion for significance was observed in all three journals.

Alright, yeah, I know that's a little stat-wonky/jargony, but the basic point is that a large number of clinical trials that report "significant" results are in fact barely scraping by on the statistical validity scale.

In any statistical study, the "goal" is to show a result that is too extreme to have occurred simply by random chance. A "p-value" of .05 means that there is only a 5% chance that the study result could have occurred simply by chance—low, but not impossible. What we're seeing here is that a large number of "statistically significant" studies are scraping by in this little margin-of-error window just on the "right" side of that 5%. Hence, there's a pretty decent chance that at least some of those studies are reporting something as significant that is actually dumb luck or chance—indeed, probably about one out of every twenty is reporting a significant result when none in fact exists.

Now, I don't really want to go too far down a road talking about bell curves and standard deviations on normal distributions, so I won't. But the point of the matter is, the incentives to report a "statistically significant" result are typically pretty strong, and so we should take a lot of the study results that we read (you know, stuff like "Coffee causes cancer! Also, it prevents cancer and cures cancer, but only when taken in specific doses at pre-determined times over several decades! So drink coffee, and also, don't drink coffee!) with an enormous grain of salt.

A lot of the time, the stuff we're reading is just a reporting of statistical noise and random chance, with a catchy headline attached. So please, people, don't fall prey to the people who want to confuse us with numbers—they're seriously everywhere these days, especially in an election year. Know the statistical background, and you'll be better able to determine for yourself whether a study result is actually significant, or just statistically significant.

[Freakonomics]

Phil Rogers gets the FJM treatment

One of my favorite blogs of all time was the Fire Joe Morgan blog, written in part by The Office/Parks and Recreation writer Michael Schur. FJM is one of the sites that got me reading blogs in the first place, and that inspired me to start one of my own. The FJM formula was simple: find bad sports journalism, tear said journalism apart line by line.

Today, I came across an article in the Chicago Tribune (h/t Red Cowboy) that was simply screaming out for the FJM treatment. Since the true American heroes at FJM are no longer in operation, I'll have to take over for them. Let's see what you've got, Phil Rogers...

Lots of people out there are just waiting to see Theo Epstein fail.

They are? What are their names? Larry Lucchino? Ben Cherington? Paul Sullivan? Not-Theo Epstein? This guy? Please provide examples. It should be easy, given that there's lots of them.

They think he gets too much attention, that his deal with Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts is too sweet. They think he should have received more criticism for a run of failed free-agent signings in Boston that contributed to the Red Sox's 2011 collapse. Heck, maybe they just don't like a baseball man who plays guitar.

Those are reasons, not examples. Actually, you seem to know quite a lot about what these "people" think. Suspiciously so. As though you have some kind of personal, inside information into what these "people" think. Either way, these people must hate Peter Gammons, too. And Bronson Arroyo. And Bernie Williams.

Who knows why people think what they think?

Awesome point! "People" are crazy, right? I'm always telling people that, and people totally agree with me, too. People are weird.

But all of those people have to love Albert Almora, don't they?

Who?

The high school senior from Mater Academy in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., verbally stuck it to Epstein and the Cubs after they grabbed him with the sixth pick of the draft Monday.

Oh.

While the Cubs paid as much due diligence to Almora as anyone else in the 2012 draft — Epstein, general manager Jed Hoyer and senior vice president Jason McLeod visited him and his family in his home — they apparently missed one or two factors.

The color of the drapes? Whether he wore boxers or briefs? This week's episode of Fear Factor? Waldo?

Either Almora doesn't want to play for the Cubs or he doesn't care how he comes across to Cubs fans, and neither is a good thing.

Weird. Seems like that would've come up in conversation. I wonder what they talked about instead. Probably the European debt crisis.

Asked on a Tuesday conference call with Chicago reporters if he felt any particular significance about being Epstein's first Cubs pick, he shrugged and said he was "just happy to be picked by a major league club.''

If it was a conference call, how could you see him shrug? Was it a video conference call? Either way, shame on this kid for not caring as much about Theo Epstein's legacy as he does about himself. This kid sounds like a real jerk.

And he insists he's strongly considering his scholarship to the University of Miami.

"My main priority now is college,'' Almora said. "I just graduated high school, and I have a full scholarship to the University of Miami. That's all I'm looking forward to right now.''

I'd be looking forward to that, too. Sounds pretty cool. So does playing for the Cubs, but the Cubs haven't offered him a contract yet. So I guess that's really all he can be looking forward to, for now. Until the Cubs offer him a contract. Which they will. Are we done yet?

His agent? Scott Boras. Of course.

Ohhhh, I've heard of him. He's the guy who used to be a pharmacist or something, right? I bet Theo didn't know that Almora's agent was Scott Boras. What an idiot that Theo Epstein is. "People" are right about him.

Playing the Miami card is straight from the textbook for the class "Boras 101, the Art of Negotiating the Best Deal You Can Get.''

Awesome class. I think they teach that at Miami. It's right between recess and lunch. Too bad Almora hasn't gotten there yet to take it. He'd be able to learn a lot about himself.

I don't think anyone should overreact, because Almora almost certainly is going to sign with the Cubs before the July 13 deadline.

Oh. So then why are you writing this article? Is your editor even paying attention?

That's what I think, anyway.

But what do "people" think?

But it's always smart to listen when Boras — or, in this case, a Boras client — is talking. Almora has taken the first step into the territory of J.D. Drew/Philadelphia Phillies, circa 1998, and nobody wants to go there.

Oh, J.D. Drew, yeah I remember him. I'm pretty sure he signed a big contract with the Red Sox once, with that jerk Scott Boras as his agent. I can't remember who the Red Sox GM was then, but man he sure did get fleeced by that wily Boras... I'm sure that GM (whoever he was) will think twice before dealing with him again. Glad you brought that up, awesome point.

Except... that J.D. Drew was drafted out of college, not out of high school, and so he and Almora really aren't comparable at all, because Boras potentially stands to lose a ton if Almora goes to college, because then he can't be drafted again for another 3 years, and there's no guarantee that Almora will still want Boras as his agent then (or that the world will still be standing), so really this is a lot more like the Daisuke Matsuzaka negotiation, which was negotiated between Boras and that guy who used to be the GM of the Red Sox whose name I can't remember, and oh screw it let's just see what other nonsense you feel like writing.

The thing to keep in mind here is that Almora has taken only baby steps so far, and somewhat predictable baby steps at that. Let's see how this plays out before declaring that Epstein fell into a huge trap in passing up one Boras client, Stanford ace Mark Appel, and then staking his first Chicago draft on another one.

Okay, I'll see how things play out. I guess that must be the end of this article then, right?

While I never would question the sincerity of a Boras client engaged in a contract negotiation — well, actually I would do that just about every time

Weird, you're still writing. Wait, why did you say that you wouldn't do something, and then say you'd do exactly that? You didn't need to write either of those things. They canceled each other out. We ended up in the same place that we started. Your editor must still be asleep. This article is retarded.

— the reality is that Almora has spent his childhood training to be a pro baseball player, not unlike Alex Rodriguez.

Also not unlike these guys, who were all drafted in the 4 millionth round of the draft. In fact, it seems hard to believe that anyone could ever get drafted by a Major League Baseball team without spending their childhood training to do so. Except maybe this guy. Wait, what are we talking about again?

And while A-Rod would become such a financial supporter of the Hurricanes that the baseball stadium is named for him, he didn't say no to the Mariners so he could bang the ball around some more with aluminum bats.

I read that sentence 15 times and I still don't get what you're trying to say. Or why it's relevant to this kid or to Theo. Wake your editor up so that he can make some sense of it.

I don't think Almora will say no to the Cubs.

You already said that. I was pretty sure it ended the article, but somehow it didn't.

Not unless …

A: Crane Kenney involves himself in negotiations and the Cubs do something stupid, allowing the talks to become personal.

B: Or Almora's parents get sucked into allowing Boras to use their son as part of a holy war against the draft spending limits contained in baseball's new collective bargaining agreement.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I officially don't blame your editor for sleeping. This column is terrible. I thought this was about Theo not doing his homework on Almora. Or playing the guitar too much. But now it's about a holy war? I'm confused. Is this kid al-Qaeda?

It's the last point that bears the most consideration.

THEN WHY DIDN'T WE START THE ARTICLE THERE? Why did we have to waste all that time talking about what "people" think and Alex Rodriguez and J.D. Drew and Crane Kenney?

So, you think that Boras might use this kid as a pawn in a fight between himself and Major League Baseball, and that therefore the Cubs should be careful. Nevermind the fact that if Boras is looking for a pawn, the more likely candidate is Appel, who you JUST MENTIONED A COUPLE PARAGRAPHS EARLIER, and who is a college kid who Boras could more easily control, like he threatened to do with Stephen Strasburg three years ago.

You see, there are two Scott Boras clients here, one of whom is straight out of high school and one of whom is not. That matters a great deal, and it just might help explain why Theo would be wary of drafting one, but not wary of drafting the other. Theo has dealt with Boras more than just about any GM in the league by now, including in some very high-profile cases like the Matsuzaka case. He knows how Boras thinks, and he recognizes that his interests and Boras' interests are mostly aligned in the case of Almora, but not in the case of Appel. Theo is not a moron. There is a method to his madness. THESE MEN KNOW EACH OTHER VERY WELL.

Your article is useless. It's just a thin facade for your obvious Theo hatred (I'm sorry, "for people's obvious Theo hatred"), written in the most passive-aggressive, non-accountable way possible.

Boras was beside himself after the draft spending limits were announced in November. He said they would ruin baseball. So how far will he go to challenge the changes the players union, long under the influence of the most powerful agents, signed off on?

I don't know, but I bet that uncertainty explains why Appel fell from the first pick to the eighth pick. Remember, a lot of GMs have negotiated with Boras before. Theo isn't the only one.

Will Boras engage the Pirates in a serious effort to sign Appel, who fell all the way from a chance that his hometown Astros would take him first overall to the eighth pick, or will he see if Appel is outraged sufficiently to challenge the CBA?

Oh hey, you noticed that too! Maybe you really are paying attention.

If it's the latter, dragging Almora into the battle would seem to be a possibility.

Opposite of true. Only an idiot would engage both of his high-profile clients in the same "holy war" in the same year. Boras is no idiot.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Way, way ahead.

Yes. You mentioned that when you said that we should "see how this plays out" before jumping to any conclusions. But then you kept writing for some reason. And jumping to conclusions.

What we can say after Major League Baseball wrapped up its first draft with spending limits is that the CBA seems to have worked almost exactly as Commissioner Bud Selig and some in ownership (including White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf) hoped it would.

Talent was spread around more evenly, as evidenced by the White Sox diving back into the deep end by taking high school players with their first two picks — something they hadn't done since 1984, in large part because they feared Boras or another agent would try to play a shot at college into super-sized bonus demands.

Counter-argument.

Now we will see how all the parts fit together. And if Almora was just taking his agent's advice to sound like he never had daydreamed about being one of Epstein's curse-busters.

Almora really, really, really doesn't care about Theo Epstein or his legacy. I promise. He just wants to play baseball, and presumably to get paid to do so. You're the only one who cares about these things, and your analysis is colored by your obvious anti-Theo bias. Please go away.

[Chicago Tribune]

Catching up on old drafts (a link dump)

I recently promised you all that I had a huge backlog of post-worthy material that I hadn't yet gotten around to writing about. Well today, I took a look at my unfinished draft posts... and it turns out I've got 17 of them, just from the last six weeks. Yeah, I may have the best of intentions, but there's no way I'm going to make it through a 17-post backlog without doing a link dump. So... here goes nothing.

Why Don't Women Patent?
Alex Tabarrok; Marginal Revolution

In this blog post, Tabarrok passes along a recent NBER paper that argued that if women studied science and engineering at the same rate as men, our total number of patents would increase by 24% and GDP would increase by 2.7%. Tabarrok points out that this argument is incredibly specious on multiple levels, and he mocks the finding by suggesting that if we churned out more female construction workers, the construction industry would boom and we would be building tons more houses.

While gender inequality is a serious issue that requires deeper discussion, doe-eyed (and naive) estimates like these only cheapen the argument. I'm reminded of Rob Reid's brilliant TED talk on the "$8 billion iPod", which points out the absurdity of "Copyright Math". This NBER study seemingly suffers from many of the same statistical shortcomings, and Tabarrok and I think it's another clear example of bad math.



Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews, Here’s How You Fix It 
Justin Vincent; justinvincent.com

Justin Vincent passes along his personal story about how Yelp's user reviews caused him to make a terrible decision when choosing a moving company, largely because the site's algorithms had blocked a number of negative user reviews that were, in fact, genuine.

I think this is an interesting follow-up to my previous post about "astroturfing" and the difficulties of determining which web product reviews are legitimate, and which aren't. I think we're all still figuring this puzzle out (both as companies and as consumers), and until we do figure it out, our best bet is simply to rely on good old word-of-mouth marketing. Yes, I mean word-of-mouth from real actual people that we know and talk to, not faceless "people" on the internet...

For Regulars and Restaurants, Many Happy Returns
Richard Morgan; Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal's Richard Morgan shares a feel-good story about a loyal New York City man (Bruce Davis) who sits down at the same bar stool at the same Greenwich Village restaurant every night of his life, racking up an average of... wait a minute, $4,000 a MONTH in charges? Are you serious?

If ever there was an article that displayed the obvious gap in our country between the haves and have-nots, this article was it. Recall that median HOUSEHOLD income in the United States is just a hair over $30,000 (in pre-tax dollars, of course), while Mr. Davis spends nearly $50,000 in after-tax money at one restaurant alone. Yes, Mr. Davis' America is not most people's America, but then again, the Wall Street Journal is not most people's newspaper. It's been making that fact abundantly clear in recent months...

Joey Votto's New Contract Is Like a Mortgage-Backed Security
Jack Dickey; Deadspin

This post from Deadspin almost certainly deserves better than to be buried here at the bottom of a link dump, but so be it. In discussing Joey Votto's monster contract extension from the Cincinnati Reds in early April, Dickey made the comparison to a mortgage-backed security. I didn't see the parallels at first, but he did a terrific job of laying them out, and I think that the whole piece is worth a read, especially if you're a cable TV subscriber (yes, this impacts you whether or not you're a sports fan).

This just may be the best piece of sports-related journalism I've read so far this year--it in fact crosses over into financial territory, and it makes a whole lot of sense (it's also sort of terrifying). Given that the recent eye-popping $2 billion purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers by a Magic Johnson-led group used similar modeling assumptions (and we know those are never wrong, right?), it's clear that the math around cable rights fees is a very pertinent topic. Read this piece and you'll understand how you're footing the bill for Joey Votto's contract, even if you don't know who Joey Votto is.

(Belated) Quote of the Week

Yeah, I know, I've been slipping lately. I've been busy with work (for once), and I haven't paid full attention to the blog lately. So be it, I promise I'll make it up to you (seriously, I've got a ton of backed-up material that I've been itching to write about, but haven't gotten around to yet... stick around). Your Quote of the Week this week comes from the Chicago Tribune's Rex Huppke, who penned a clever obituary for "Facts".

The ostensible topic/target of Huppke's column was Florida Rep. Allen West, who recently made waves by claiming that at least 80 House Democrats were, in fact, Communists. Glorious. But obviously, Huppke is just picking up on a trend that's been going on for years now, which I've talked about here before a million times (come to think of it, it's basically my favorite topic). Simply put, honesty and integrity are in short supply these days in politics and journalism, and it's now reaching ridiculous levels (as Stephen Colbert so brilliantly points out in this video).

Get ready for more, because it's an election year, and campaign season is upon us. Remember, 96% of statistics are misleading and made up on the spot. Approximately.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet... Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion. Services are alleged to be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners make a donation to their favorite super PAC."
                        - Rex Huppke, Chicago Tribune

I highly recommend you read the entire "obituary". It's good stuff.

[Chicago Tribune]

Quote of the Week (cartoon edition)

It's been a little while since I turned my Quote of the Week over to the land of the animated, and this week seems like as good a time as any to renew the practice. If you've read me often, you'll know that the flagrant misuse of statistics (particularly for political gain) irks me like nothing else. That's why this cartoon made me chuckle. Okay, fine, laugh out loud, whatever, I'm a nerd, at least I own it.

Happy Tuesday.

Bad science from the New York Times

I'm always on the lookout for bad science/bad math (and the terrible journalism that it produces), and this week I came across a real gem. This one was noteworthy because it came from the New York Times, the "paper of record" that's obviously not struggling with its business model at all. In an article entitled "For 2nd Year, a Sharp Drop in Law School Entrance Tests", author David Segal writes the following:

Legal diplomas are apparently losing luster. 

The organization behind the Law School Admission Test reported that the number of tests it administered this year dropped by more than 16 percent, the largest decline in more than a decade. 

The Law School Admission Council reported that the LSAT was given 129,925 times in the 2011-12 academic year. That was well off the 155,050 of the year before and far from the peak of 171,514 in the year before that. In all, the number of test takers has fallen by nearly 25 percent in the last two years. 

The decline reflects a spreading view that the legal market in the United States is in terrible shape and will have a hard time absorbing the roughly 45,000 students who are expected to graduate from law school in each of the next three years. And the problem may be deep and systemic.

Segal goes on to write a long and sometimes-rambling article about how law school may be entering a serious long-term downward correction, as students begin to shy away from high levels of debt and uncertain long-term income prospects.

For what it's worth, I happen to agree with some of the overall conclusions that Segal draws--student loan debt is reaching frighteningly unsustainable levels, and the positive "return on investment" that so many in my generation have taken on faith is no longer quite so clear. There's only one problem--the tipping point hasn't yet arrived (though it will), and the data that Segal presents to "support" his thesis in fact does nothing of the sort. Rather, this is just one more example of a journalistic outlet massaging the data to fit its argument, rather than the other way around.

The statistical crime that Segal has committed here is in his failure to provide enough context to give his data any real meaning. His statistics regarding the LSAT provide only the last three years of data--he tells you that the 2009-10 LSAT was a "peak" for total tests administered, but tells us nothing about the overall trend that led to that "peak". Luckily for us, the generous folks at LSAC make those statistics available for the public, so we can do a little bit of fact-checking on our friend Segal.

When we look at the overall data series (dating back to 1987-88), we see a pretty different story. Yes, tests taken are at their lowest level in three years, but the number is nowhere near the trough that we saw during the economic boom years of 1995 to 2000. Generally speaking, LSATs administered spike during recessions, then recede during recoveries, a trend that makes intuitive sense. Let's look at this graphically, using some more publicly available data (for this chart, I plotted the annual change in LSATs administered against the annual percent change in the unemployment rate--hence a change from 4.0% unemployment to 5.0% unemployment represents a 25% increase in unemployment):

Viewed another way (just using gross numbers rather than % change, and plotting on dual axes):

That's a pretty obvious strong relationship (for the math nerds among you, that's an r-squared of .486 on the first chart, .666 on the second), but Segal and the Times don't bother to show you that part of the picture. They have a story to tell, and dammit they're gonna make the statistics fit that story.

This trend is troubling, because it takes advantage of the innumeracy that plagues America--most people don't know how to tell when statistics are being manipulated, so they take the authors/researchers' conclusions largely on faith. That's fine when the authors are operating in good faith and using proper statistical analysis, but in the Times' case that's clearly not what's happening. Segal has used a dramatic two-year decline in LSATs administered and pretended that it's the only thing in the data series that matters. For the purposes of his story, it's completely irrelevant to provide any sort of context for his data.

What I actually find most interesting about the data (when looked at in full) is that LSATs occasionally have a tendency to creep higher BEFORE the unemployment rate follows in kind. In other words, the number of people taking the LSAT could actually be seen as a leading economic indicator--people start taking the LSAT in anticipation of being laid off, because they see business conditions beginning to deteriorate.

Am I actually suggesting that such a thesis is reasonable, and worth writing about? No, of course not, there's not nearly enough data to support my thesis, so it's mostly just me spitballing some ideas--without statistical justification, proposing that thesis doesn't meet my journalistic standards. But then, I don't write for the Times, do I?

[NY Times]

The lunacy of Dow 116k (or, why all our pension funds are screwed)

I'm going to try to make this one as quick as I can, because I could really rant about it for days. I've talked here before about how the only market analysts who get publicity are the ones making outrageous calls (Dow 3,000! Dow 25,000 by August!), and how this has everything to do with the severely skewed incentive structure surrounding punditry.

Now, with the market nearing multi-year highs, we're in prime territory for these kinds of silly calls, on both sides of the bear/bull debate. This one just happens to be the most absurd, and for those of you who follow me on Twitter, you may already have seen my teaser of this issue. From MarketWatch's Chuck Jaffe:

My favorite market forecast of all time came in the fall of 1995, when mutual fund pioneer Bill Berger came to Boston and predicted the Dow Jones Industrial Average would rise to 116,200.  

He didn’t think it would happen overnight. In fact, the 70-something founder of the Berger Funds figured the market would need until the year 2040 to reach it. (He wryly suggested that if he was proved wrong, people come find him to discuss it; sadly, he died a few years later.) 

Of course, Dow 116,200 would be a far more ridiculous thought than even, say, Dow 36,000, the title of a popular-but-wrong-headed book from the bubble days of the late 1990s, were it not for one thing: As the Dow touched 13,000 this week (and the Nasdaq Composite flirted with 3,000), it’s actually stunningly close to being on track toward making Berger’s prediction come true.

Stunningly close, eh? Let's unpack this one for a minute. Jaffe goes on to extrapolate the annual return over the last 17 years (a completely arbitrary time period that is only relevant based on the exact timing of the prediction he's attempting to analyze), assuming that it will persist at exactly this same rate (7.2% compounded--he actually uses 6.75% because he's starting in June and not March, whatever) over the next thirty years. Using that compounding, the Dow will be well above 100k and on its way to 200k by 2046.

The problem is, this compounded annual rate is absolutely an accident of the time period he's using. For the first five years following Berger's Dow 116k call, the market went on an unprecedented vertical run-up, fueled by an influx of Baby Boomer cash and the dot-com bubble frenzy. The compounded annual return between 1995 and 2000 was a staggering 21%, leading the stock market to more than double over those five years.

Unfortunately for Jaffe (and Berger), it's made basically zero headway since then. In the 12 years following that once-in-a-lifetime bull market, the market has simply lurched from one asset bubble to the next, treading water for a long enough time that just about any index with a continuous compounding assumption (like, um, a pension fund) now finds itself hopelessly behind the curve. The only reason that the Dow 116k call looks like anything resembling a reasonable prediction is the specific and arbitrary points that our author has selected for his analysis.

To show what I mean, let's use a couple of other equally arbitrary starting and ending points for our analysis, to see what kind of wildly different conclusions we can reach (we'll list the author's prediction first, for comparison's sake). You might want to click on the table to get a clearer view.

I'm a particular fan of the "Dow 26 Million" call that you could make if you extrapolated from the March 2009 bottom until today--that's a good one. And the "Dow Zero" call at the bottom of the table is a bit harsh--the Dow would actually hit an asymptotically small level of nine cents by 2046 under that projection, so you wouldn't be totally wiped out.

The point is, any time you try to extrapolate too far based on arbitrary data sets, you're completely a slave to your small sample. Yes, I recognize that the 1995 to 2012 time horizon is the widest range of the bunch, and therefore your biggest and hypothetically least-random sample. But is the 12 years since 2000, where the market has eked out only a 1.9% annual return, meant to be ignored simply because the 5 years prior were so good? If 12 years isn't a significant sample, then why is 17? And if those 5 years from 1995 to 2000 are so important, why aren't the 5 years from 2007 to 2012--with their meager 1.43% annual gain, even after this year's ramp job--equally important?

You get my point by now, so I'll back off. The problem is, every single pension fund in the country uses exactly this kind of infinite compounding analysis in order to claim its solvency. These funds generally assume a consistent return of 7% to 8% (sometimes more) into perpetuity, in order to have enough funds to pay out their accumulated liabilities.

In other words, if the Dow isn't at 116,200 by 2046, these funds are gonna have one hell of a problem on their hands. So, you can laugh at this prediction if you want... but in doing so, recognize that your pension (if you've got one) relies on just this kind of mathematical lunacy. Gooooooooo Dow!!

[MarketWatch]

When statistics lie (NFL edition)

One of the primary reasons I started this blog back in 2010 was to shed light on some of the statistical tricks that politicians, corporate executives, and talking heads use (and misuse) so as to confuse, mislead, and otherwise divide the general population. There's any number of tricks that these individuals will use, but almost all of them rely on the same basic dynamic--highlighting one piece of data while ignoring or obfuscating another that would allow for a more complete and realistic picture. It's basic hand-waving misdirection that would make any amateur magician proud.

To see how widespread these statistical games have become, note that I've previously highlighted this dynamic with respect to cancer, budget deficits, oil prices, student loan debt, tennis, Rick Perry, apple juice, education, airlines, and investing. I've also poked fun at the issue here and here. Simply put, given the nature of the public discourse these days, I don't think you can be an informed person (or make good decisions) unless you fully understand statistics and the way that they can be manipulated. The most recent example of this is the GAO's recent takedown of the Obama administration's claim that TARP made money--in a nutshell, the claim is technically true, but only if you ignore a lot of other things that are also true. Pretty standard statistic-manipulating stuff.

With the NFL Playoffs continuing this weekend with a big game between the Patriots and Broncos, a couple of sports journalists have taken a few liberties with a similar statistic, one that allegedly speaks volumes about the Patriots. Here's the statistic, courtesy of SI's Kerry Byrne:

If there's a legitimate statistical and historical reason to doubt the validity of New England's No. 1 seed and 13-3 record, it's the fact that they faced one cream puff after another -- and then lost each time they faced something close to the iron of the NFL. New England did not beat a single team with a winning record in the 2011 season.

We track something over at Cold, Hard Football Facts.com called Quality Standings -- how well you perform against Quality Teams, or teams with winning records. It's an effective way to separate the contending wheat from the pretending chaff each NFL season. Super Bowl champs typically prove along the way that they can consistently beat Quality Opponents. And that historic fact is not good news for the Patriots.

Not only did they face fewer Quality Opponents than any team in football this year (two), but also they lost to both of them (Steelers, Giants). Would the Patriots have gone 13-3 had they faced eight Quality Opponents like the lowly 2-14 Rams? What if they faced the league-high 10 Quality Opponents who made the Peyton Manning-less season in Indianapolis such a daunting challenge?

Cool. Great statistic, right? The Patriots, as it turns out, didn't beat a "quality opponent" all year. The problem is, the meaningfulness of this statistic depends 100% on a completely arbitrary definition of what comprises a "quality opponent".

A deeper look at the Patriots' 2011 schedule reveals that Brady & Co. ended the season with a staggering 7 wins (and no losses) against teams that finished the season 8-8--including their next opponent, the Broncos. Not a single one of these six teams (the Pats played and won two games against the 8-8 Jets) counts as a "quality opponent", so the Patriots get no credit for the victories, despite the fact that every one of them had a winning record in games not played against the Patriots.

Of course, had the Patriots instead lost each of those 7 games against teams that finished 8-8, those teams would have finished at least 9-7, and therefore the Patriots would have finished 0-9 against "quality opponents". If a team is only a "quality opponent" if you lost the game, but not if you won the game, then clearly there's a problem with your definition of "quality opponent".

A closer look at the Gang of Six reveals that three of them (Chargers, Jets, Eagles) were preseason favorites to reach the Super Bowl, and that nearly all of them could have reached the playoffs had they in fact beaten the Patriots--one of them, the Broncos, made it (and won their first-round game--ironically defeating the "quality opponent" Steelers) despite their loss. It seems far-fetched and dishonest to refer to none of these teams as "quality opponents", because the statistic itself is self-referential and relies on circular references.

Ultimately, this is just another example of the way that people misuse statistics to show a slightly skewed version of the world. In this case, the authors are hoping that you won't notice the weird statistical anomaly that defined the Patriots' 2011 schedule. In the case of TARP, the Obama administration is hoping that you won't notice that the "profitability" of TARP depends entirely on the massive expansion of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet (the so-called "money printing" you've been hearing so much about).

It is exceedingly rare that the truth of the world can be easily distilled into one catch-all statistic, but that doesn't keep our favorite talking heads from trying. It's our job to know when they're telling the truth, and when they're using smoke and mirrors. More often than not, it's the latter. Go Pats.

[SI]

Our ridiculous news cycle

There are times when I look at the dynamics in our current news cycle and just throw up my hands and laugh. Since the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, there has been a steady relaxation of what constitutes "news"--there has to be, because at the end of the day, there's just not enough real hard news to actually fill 24 hours of TV and radio (not to mention internet) airtime.

As a result, more and more "rumor" and "speculation" is being reported as news, with little effort to retract those rumors on the back end when they prove to be false. To see how ridiculous this rumor-as-news dynamic can get, look no further than injured Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, who has been all over the news lately despite doing... exactly nothing.

With the Colts struggling mightily to an 0-10 record in Manning's absence, there has been wide speculation that the Colts may tank the season in order to secure the first overall draft pick, widely expected to be Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck--a potential replacement for Manning upon his eventual retirement. Given that speculation (remember, we're technically at two levels of speculation--or "expectation"--already), ESPN reporter Adam Schefter idly wondered whether the quarterback-starved Washington Redskins might then be interested in trading for Manning--you know, if the Colts indeed got the first pick, and indeed drafted Luck, and indeed thought he could start right away. You still with me?

Well, somewhat inevitably, the folks in the blogosphere took this one and ran with it, and before long we ended up with this:

Oh boy. Of course, this isn't the first time we've seen the internet run wild with an original item, turning it into something completely different. In fact, the internet version of "telephone" has a long and storied history, and I've remarked on it here and here. Even my main man Thomas Jefferson hasn't been able to avoid getting dragged into the mess that is the internet news cycle.

But of course, our news cycle wasn't done with Peyton Manning just yet. Not content with simply naming him as the next ex-Redskins quarterback, our friends on the internet also felt the need to link Manning with the recently-vacated Ole Miss head coaching gig--never mind the fact that Peyton has shown no interest in retiring, let alone starting a coaching career, any time soon.

All of this would be at least slightly less ridiculous if we hadn't also read--less than two weeks ago--comments from Colts owner Jim Irsay that indicated that Manning might even be able to return to playing this season. From returning this season, to being traded to the Redskins, to coaching his little brother's alma mater--all in the short space of two weeks, in which he did nothing but rehab. Yup, this is our news cycle.

More jokes in the mainstream media

It's getting a little crazy how the mainstream media keeps accidentally publishing articles that were supposed to run in The Onion, isn't it? First there was this article about the North Carolina governor's suggestion that we suspend Congressional elections so that our elected officials can keep doing the great job they've been doing. That was good for a laugh.

Now there's this article in Businessweek, discussing the Italian government's plan to begin drug testing the country's stock traders, because obviously their cocaine use--and not the government's excessive use of debt--is to blame for recent stock market volatility.

An undersecretary for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has proposed a drug-testing program for stock traders, citing studies that point to a “worrisome” link between substance abuse and market fluctuations.

Some Italians may have entrusted savings to people “not capable of making decisions” due to drug use, Carlo Giovanardi said in a phone interview today from Belluno, Italy.

Giovanardi, who’s responsible for the government’s family and drug-abuse prevention policy, said he plans to contact regulators and industry groups working with the stock exchange to discuss the drug-testing plan. The program could be developed without the passage of a new law, he said.

This is good stuff. It gets even better and more Onion-y, and I took the liberty of editing the next paragraph for Businessweek.

Giovanardi, who last year promoted a voluntary drug test for members of parliament, also cited “U.S. studies” suggesting recent market turmoil may have been amplified by “people politicians and central bankers who’ve lost touch with reality” due to drug use. The undersecretary said cocaine use has a “devastating” effect on individuals politicians, leading to “brain meltdown.”

There. That's better. Seriously, I'm getting really tired of the misdirection plays being employed by politicians around the world to distract from the core problem of too much government debt. It's not the debt that's the problem... it's CHINA! No, it's the IMMIGRANTS! No, it's those drug-popping stock traders, they're the real problem!!

When did our whole political process become an episode of The Simpsons? This is really rich stuff, guys. Keep up the good work, leaders of the free world.

[Businessweek]

Clip of the Week, revisited (plus, a bonus rant)

Alright, this week I've been bested. While I was busy scraping the bottom of the internet barrel for this week's Clip of the Week, the Red Cowboy over there was killing it with an amazing Lewis Black rant from The Daily Show. Yeah, I said that Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert clips made for "lazy" Clip of the Week fodder, but this is only technically a Jon Stewart clip. Really, it's Lewis Black doing what he does best--ranting. And that's something I can always get behind.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Good stuff.

(If you don't want to read my long-winded, super bitter, Lewis Black-inspired rant, you can stop reading now. Otherwise, come along for the ride...)

As the nurturing husband to a pregnant wife, I'm particularly aware of the absolutely amazingly awful "science" that ill-meaning quacks like Dr. Oz distort, overreport, and abuse for profit. Pregnant women (generally speaking) are hormonally unequipped to properly deal with the fear-mongering that these clowns spew out on a regular basis, and this changes only slightly when those same women become mothers of small children. It's the absolute lowest form of dirty business, and these "scientists" should be ashamed of themselves.

Time after time, I've been confronted with flawed scientific "studies" that either dramatically exaggerate a risk or, in some cases, completely fabricate one. If you boil down soy sauce into a concentrated syrup, then inject it into a pregnant mouse's heart in a massive dose, you shouldn't be surprised when you find out that hey, holy shit, that pregnant mouse's kid is seriously messed up--and you definitely shouldn't tell pregnant women to avoid soy sauce due to your "study results".

But that's essentially what a lot of these "scientists" are doing, and that's just disgusting. When their messages then get skewed and misreported by media outlets, these things of course often take on a life of their own. It's a dynamic that I'm harping on all the time here on the blog, and lately the effects of this bad journalism have become much more personal.

My recently deceased grandfather always used to tell me, "everything in moderation, pal"--for him, it was the highest form of sage advice. Well, Grandpa didn't always follow his own advice--he smoked for many years, he ate a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet, and he was overweight--but he did live to be 88, despite doing battle with several of the top-10 killers of man (including cancer, strokes, and emphysema). And these days, I'm increasingly convinced that there's a lot more wisdom coming from old Boston police officers like him than from scummy yet heavily-credentialed assholes like Dr. Oz.

Sorry--I had to get that off my chest. Thanks, Lewis Black, for the inspiration.

Media hysterics

With this week's earthquake now a distant memory as far as the media is concerned, we've turned our full attention to Hurricane Irene, which if I'm hearing the media correctly is going to turn Manhattan into an underwater wonderland, a la Waterworld (dry land is not a myth!).

Thanks to CNBC's Bob Pisani, I'm now comfortable with the knowledge that yes, the New York Stock Exchange will open as usual on Monday morning, with many of our treasured investment professionals prepared to sleep in hotel rooms in lower Manhattan over the weekend to facilitate its opening. What brave, hearty souls they are up in New York City, battling back against the expected havoc that will be wrought by Irene, which... might not even officially qualify as a hurricane by the time it gets there.

That's right, this beast of a hurricane that's bearing down on the east coast with all its might isn't a Category 5 storm like Katrina or Ivan, or even a Category 3 storm like Bob, the last major hurricane to strike the Northeast. As of this morning, Irene is a Category 2 storm, which hardly seems to jive with the media hysterics we're witnessing.

Now, don't get me wrong--I fully appreciate the damage that a Category 2 storm can do, having witnessed the aftermath of Hurricane Bob on Cape Cod, which was a weak Category 2 by the time it reached there. Because of that, I'd be particularly worried if I'm anywhere near the point of initial landfall--in North Carolina and Virginia. Some of the outer peninsulas and islands are particularly at risk, and I sincerely hope that they survive the initial force of this storm's landfall intact.

But I'm growing extremely tired of the breathless nature of the news coverage any time anything comes anywhere near the sacred island of Manhattan. Truth be told, "largest hurricane to hit Northeast in 25 years" is sort of a dubious distinction, similar to "largest earthquake to strike Virginia in a century", which provoked no small number of guffaws from our more seismically seasoned friends on the west coast. These incidents--while certainly rare and scary--are considered business-as-usual in other parts of the country, and most likely would barely raise an eyebrow. But put them in New York... and, well, that's a different story.



Perhaps I'm still just a little bitter at how this week's earthquake was covered (the Northeast earthquake? Really? Since when are Charlottesville and Richmond--the two cities closest to the epicenter--in the Northeast? I could've sworn I'd moved to the Mid-Atlantic, if not the South... but I digress), or maybe I'm just generally hard on the New York media ever since I've left the city... but it really does seem like the hysterics in this case have gone into overdrive.

For what is perhaps the first time in my life, I now fully understand what those in most of the country refer to as the "East Coast bias". While I appreciate the value of preparing for the worst and hoping for the best (and I, too, hope for the best, especially for my friends and family in New York and New England), it's also important not to lose perspective. Unfortunately, perspective seems to be something that's in short supply on that little island between Connecticut and New Jersey.

Welcome, campaign season

Yes, I unofficially introduced the 2012 Presidential campaign to the blog with last week's Clip of the Week, but let's call this post the Crimson Cavalier's official welcome to the 2012 Presidential campaign, beginning with the race for the Republican party nomination.

As always, that means we should get ready to hear all kinds of ridiculous platitudes and brain-dead oversimplifications of the world and the economy over the next several months. One theme that's already beginning to drive me nuts is the portrayal of Texas Governor Rick Perry as some sort of free-market-touting, job-creating wunderkind.

Let me spoil the surprise for you--it's bullshit. Jonathan Turley does a fine job of tearing down the Perry myth (in short, he shows that most of the jobs created are minimum-wage jobs with no health insurance), but Barry Ritholtz's guest blogger friend "Invictus" is the real champion here. In this chart, he shows that if you want to give Perry credit for this job creation "miracle", you must also hold him accountable for all of the other social dynamics in Texas. (Note: According to Invictus, "I ranked the 50 states in a manner where “1″ is the best score achievable and “50″ the worst (e.g., the highest high school graduation rate would garner a “1,” the lowest incidence of STD’s would also garner a “1.”  In other words, if you’re a governor — a state’s CEO, as it were — you always want to be #1 and, conversely, nowhere near #50)".

In other words, giving credit to Perry for the jobs picture without also mentioning the other side of the coin is--you guessed it--more bad science. It's extremely disheartening to see how often this kind of dishonesty is bandied about in the political arena, most notably during campaign season.

While I do recognize that Texas' high levels of immigration are in part to blame for some of those summary statistics, I'd remind you that immigration is a national issue, not just a Texas issue. Perry has done little to address immigrant-related issues in his time as Governor, so there's little reason to expect that his record would be any better as President.

So, if that's the America that you want to live in, then by all means vote for Rick Perry. As for me, I plan on throwing my vote away for that other crazy Texan, Ron Paul.

[The Big Picture]

This is too perfect

I'm always harping on bad science and the bad journalism that it produces--sometimes I feel like it's all I talk about. This cartoon sums up my feelings beautifully. I absolutely love it.

This is so stupid

Alright, this is getting out of control. You all know I'm a huge sports nerd--I think it's great fun, though some people apparently disagree. But lately, a number of people have just been trying way too hard to play the sports nerd game, and failing miserably. People like Josh Hamilton. And now, the New York Times' Karen Crouse, who spends 1,000 words arguing that at Wimbledon, "Left-Handers Have Edge in Slice and Singularity", whatever that means. I think it means that lefties have an advantage at Wimbledon. Let's find out.

An estimated 10 percent of the world’s population is left-handed, but in the men’s and women’s singles at Wimbledon, five of the 32 remaining players, or 16 percent, are.

Oh. Okay. So out of 32 not-quite-Wimbledon-quarterfinalists, we probably should have expected there to be 3 (9.4%) or 4 (12.5%) lefties. Neither of those outcomes would have raised an eyebrow. But instead, we've got a whole 5, which means that one lefty who was supposed to lose in the third round... didn't (we'll call him Feliciano Lopez). Meh. What else ya got?

According to the tournament’s Web site, in 125 years 10 left-handers — eight men and two women — have won a total of 26 singles titles.

Hey, you went to the tournament's Web site, that's great--puts you one up on Josh Hamilton's friends at ESPN. Unfortunately, your analysis sorta stopped there.

Because you see, 26 out of 240 total singles titles (we skipped a few years at Wimbledon while there were some wars going on) is a whopping... 10.8%. We'd expect to see 24, and we got 26. So, if one of our star lefties happened to lose instead of win a couple times, we really wouldn't even be having this argument, would we?

The point is, contrived statistical "studies" like these with naturally limited sample sizes are highly vulnerable to the occasional outlier. In this case, the outlier is of course Martina Navratilova, quite possibly the most dominant player on any surface, male or female, in tennis history. Miss Navratilova won Wimbledon NINE TIMES, including six straight from 1982 to 1987. Cut her down with an early-career injury (or, alternatively, give Chris Evert 1 or 2 victories out of the 5 Wimbledon finals she lost to Navratilova), and instead of being over-represented among Wimbledon champions, lefties would be fairly represented if not under-represented.

Really, this article should have read, "There have been a lot of great tennis players in history. Some of them have been left-handed. Sometimes, the really great left-handed players won Wimbledon. Other times, they didn't." Hey, this article kinda sucks, doesn't it? Yeah. I thought so. Instead, Ms. Crouse glossed over the statistical inadequacies of her argument, waved her hands a little bit and then started interviewing some people to make a qualitative argument instead of a quantitative one, because that's all she had.

The problem is, if you're a lazy journalist looking for a story, it's exceedingly easy to do this sort of thing. Take golf, for example. From 1934 to 2002, exactly zero of the 66 Masters champions were left-handed. Then, suddenly, 4 of the next 8 champions were. Holy crap, what happened? Clearly, something changed at Augusta that began favoring lefties... right? No, of course not. Phil Mickelson showed up, and won a few tournaments (yes, I know, Mike Weir won one of them). Mickelson is your new Navratilova. Does he change the underlying probabilities of golf and the advantages of being left-handed?

Honestly, don't answer that. I've already wasted enough words on this one, and I really don't want to get into a semantic argument over golf equipment manufacturers and whether they're making more left-handed clubs than they used to (they are). It's really not the point here.

Look, journalists, if you're going to dabble in the world of statistics and sports-nerdness, at least know your statistics, and recognize what's meaningful and what isn't. (Hint: be very wary of small sample sizes). Alright, good talk.

[New York Times]

Random idiocy

Sometimes my posts have no real rhyme or reason... sometimes I just feel like pointing out idiocy, and calling it out for what it is. Enter Josh Hamilton:

When it comes to hitting, it's been night and day for Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton this season -- and the reigning American League MVP has a theory as to why.

He has blue eyes.

Under the sun, Hamilton's numbers are dim. He is batting .122 (6-for-49) with no home runs, four RBIs and eight walks. He also has 17 strikeouts and a .429 OPS.

At night, it's a different story. Hamilton is hitting .374 (41-for-109) with six home runs, 28 RBIs, seven walks and a 1.076 OPS. And he only has 14 strikeouts while playing under the lights.

"I ask guys all the time," Hamilton told ESPN 103.3 FM's Bryan Dolgin when asked if he had any theories to his drastic splits. "Guys with blue eyes, brown eyes, whatever ... and guys with blue eyes have a tough time."

Oh. Okay. You talked to some guys. That's good scientific analysis, Josh. And congratulations, ESPN, for publishing this one as a headline without doing a modicum of background research on it.

Now, it's not easy to look back at all of the blue-eyed ballplayers in history to do a scientific test of Josh's theory (of all the millions of baseball statistics we have available for even minor league players, eye color doesn't happen to be one of those that we track), but we can at least take a look at a couple of obvious examples to see if it holds any water.

So let's start with the first two guys who came to my mind--Derek Jeter and Cal Ripken. Using OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage)--the same category where Hamilton has an eye-popping (pun intended) 647-point discrepancy in his day-night splits--we see that Jeter has, for his career, posted an .850 during day games and an .822 during night games. Better during the day. Ripken, meanwhile, posted an .800 during the day versus a .783 at night. Also better during the day.

Hall of Fame shortstops aren't your thing? Fine, let's take a look at J.D. Drew, a left-handed outfielder (like Hamilton) who's had a nice long career in the game. Drew, over 14 seasons with 4 different teams, has posted a .908 during the day, .864 at night. Once again, better during the day.

Let's keep this going. Jason Giambi, another veteran left-handed power hitter? .938 during the day, .924 at night. Jason Varitek, a switch-hitting catcher? .787 during the day, .772 at night.

Those five guys are literally the first five blue-eyed baseball players I could think of (not including Hamilton, who, incidentally, has sucked during the day throughout his entire career so far), and not a single one of them had trouble hitting during day games. In fact, if anything, they were better. Who, exactly, are these blue-eyed "guys" you've been talking to, Josh?

Clearly, there has to be something more going on here than just eye color. Is my study of blue-eyed ballplayers exhaustive or at all scientific? No, of course not--I just spent 10 minutes wandering around a stats website (journalism is easy, right?). But it's something, and that's way more than Hamilton or the hacks over at ESPN felt like doing for this piece. Nice work, guys.

[ESPN]