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Claims of untruth

Posted By Garth

Brian, At least twice on this board, Mike has stated absolutely that there is no built-in advantage to the robo. You are in fact asserting that he has lied to us. While I respect your attempts to prove your long-held belief, a am asserting that your statistical analysis is far short of proving that Mike lies.

First, you have not even proven that the visitors actually win more. Statistical flukes have been a very common subject. But they are just flukes. My citing this year's playoffs, and an entry last year citing Ankiel's 5 WPs in an inning, are evidence that flukes really happen.

Second, if you could somehow prove with high confidence that visitors do win more, there are other explanations. Most likely, it is that the robo calculates probabilities better than people do. Not only is he better at the math, he may have more inforamation. We people don't have a good understanding of the players ballpark adjusted stats. We may expect Helton to hit .354 vs. RHBs because thats the stats we see. But his internal stats will have been adjusted downward for Coors. If you play in Safeco, would you know that Helton will probably hit under .300? (I don't know how the adjustments are applied but I guess he would be at .294.) Do you keep track of how players should be ajusted? So if you have Garcia facing Helton, what are the chances he'll get a hit? Do you walk him? We should ask the comish to explain what information the robo has and uses. That's different than blindly asserting that there's an adjustment applied, when Mike has repeated said there's not.

You keep citing this 52% real advantage. But that is due to reasons that do not exist in PB. The fans, the knowledge of the field, and living at home are the biggies. And I have never heard of baseball teams staying in hotels at home. (Frankly, I haven't heard of that in football either, except that years ago many coaches thought that having sex before a game would dampen players anger. Thats just a wives' tail. ... Sorry.) Having "last licks" is probably a disadvantage to home teams also. The visitors are more likely to use their closer because they have one more inning to get ahead and create a save situation.

I realize that you saw this issue is just an open investigation into an interesting phenomenum. But you have attacked someone's intequity whether or not you were aware. There is more to get out of this board when we share ideas to make us smarter, rather than all this searching for ghosts in the computer. One guy once even went so far as to assert that PB cheated for their friends. Accept that 48% is half. Even if the home team would win 60%, you would see 48% very often in a test of 100 games.