Cause or effect

Among the biggest clichés in basketball, I think, is "rebounding wins games." I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that rebounding's link to winning is more correlation than causation — a byproduct of playing well.

We might try to calculate the direct correlation between total rebounding and winning to test the adage (to use a small sample, of the 16 playoff teams in 2011-12, 10 were in the top half of the league in total rebounding). Perhaps a better measure would be rebounding differential: of the 16 playoff teams, 11 were in the top half of the league.

I suspect, though, that using rebounding as a predictor of winning would, in an OLS-type regression, produce a biased estimate.* If we assume that defensive rebounding is much easier than offensive rebounding, or at least more likely, we should assume that rebounding is highly correlated with defensive field goal percentage (or, to be more accurate, rebounding differential is highly correlated with the disparity between offensive and defensive field goal percentage) — which would be either an omitted variable in a regression or, if included, a variable strongly correlated with another variable.

The basic idea I'm getting at here is that a team has a big advantage rebounding at the defensive end, so if it can get the other team to miss a lot of shots, it's going to get a lot of rebounds. Conversely, if the team simultaneously makes a high percentage of its own shots, it's going to limit the other team's opportunity to rebound, and it's going to be in good position to lead in rebounding differential — and on the scoreboard. My point isn't that rebounding won't show up in the win total; it's that there is so much other stuff getting caught up in that rebounding stat that it's not accurately describing the causes of winning and getting undue weight as a factor.

Yankee doodle

According to ESPN, the Yankees have the oldest team in baseball (average age: 31.3 years) — no surprise there. That figure is actually pulled down by the pitching staff; just taking into account position players, I found an average of 32.69 years. (On Aug. 26, Jayson Nix will have a birthday, and that figure will jump to 32.77.)

But this isn't really an accurate method of calculating. To get a real average, down to the decimal, we need to include the ages of the players with decimals, ages down to the day.

Ta-da!

Russell Martin (2/15/83): 29.51 years
Chris Stewart (2/19/82): 30.5
Robinson Cano (10/22/82): 29.83
Eric Chavez (12/7/77): 34.7
Derek Jeter (6/26/74): 38.15
Casey McGehee (10/12/82): 29.86*
Jayson Nix (8/26/82): 29.99
Mark Teixeira (4/11/80): 32.36
Curtis Granderson (3/16/81): 31.43
Raul Ibanez (6/2/72): 40.22
Andruw Jones (4/23/77): 35.33
Ichiro Suzuki (10/22/73): 38.83
Nick Swisher (11/25/80): 31.73

That gives us a more accurate average of 33.26 years**.

Now for some fun.

We can convert .26 years to 95 days, which would mean our "average" Yankee batter was born on May 19, 1979 (not taking into account leap years).

So what would the life of our Yankee look like? In the spirit of Beloit's "Mindset List," a look at some of his sports touchstones.

Peaceful coexistence

I don't mean to make a habit out of rehashing old school papers, but I recently came up with some kind of explanation for a phenomenon I once noted but couldn't adequately address.

The political organization Americans for Democratic Action provides a useful proxy for how liberal or conservative individual congressmen and congresswomen are. Basically, the ADA picks 20 votes in a given year that it considers important and assigns a score to each representative or senator, the score being the percentage of the votes with which the individual voted how the ADA would prefer; because the ADA is a liberal group, a higher score denotes a more liberal individual, whereas a lower score denotes a more conservative.*

We might expect a representative to largely align with the median voter in his or her district, in order to maximize the share of the vote; the same thought process would apply to senators, where their districts are the entire state (or, as a proxy for individual voters' preferences, the median or mean of the ADA scores of a state's representatives could be compared with the mean of the senators' scores). In layman's terms, an elected official should be somewhere in the middle of the voters in terms of how liberal or conservative.

Yet when I was looking for a economics paper topic in fall 2008, I noticed that several states had senators at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Missouri, for instance, the mean of the representatives’ ADA scores was 52.2 in 2007, while the median representative, Jo Ann Emerson, had an ADA score of 50. Missouri Senators Kit Bond and Claire McCaskill had ADA scores that same year of 25 and 90, respectively. 

Louisiana offered a particularly striking example: the mean and median scores of its representatives were 29.3 and 10 in 2007, while its senators’ ADA scores were 10 and 80 — the latter being an extreme outlier.

This was not a rare situation, either; other examples of wide deviation included Ohio, Virginia, Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Minnesota, Indiana, Florida, Colorado, Iowa and Pennsylvania. Significant ideological differences between a senator and a state's broader persuasion were, if not the norm, certainly common. I also found that of those 13 states, only four (Minnesota, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Oregon) had one senator who appeared to be moderate; the other nine had one staunch conservative and one staunch liberal senator.

Recognizing that this was a fairly fascinating discovery but not having any great method to explain it, I cobbled together an argument based on geography (and population density) that, frankly, was hogwash. I believe that recently I was able to come up with a more satisfying conclusion.

Honestly, Abe

For a paper in a Shakespeare class in high school, when tasked with describing (using textual evidence, of course) a necessary quality of a hero, I focused not on acts of fortitude or on bravery or on sacrifice or on contribution to the greater good. I wrote about intent — that a hero had to set out to do something heroic, less in a narcissistic sense than in the sense of having some noble aim or mind-set.

As I recall, I (comically) contrasted Mother Teresa with Michael Milken, the famous financier of the '80s. My point was that one could conceivably argue that a character like Milken, with the jobs he created and the effect he had on the economy (I ignored his contributions to charities), did more good than Mother Teresa, who, though she surely inspired thousands, helped a relatively limited number of people. (One could also argue — and I should point out, because I'm in danger of crossing into insensitive territory, that I'm merely trying to make an intellectual argument here — that the good she was able to do was fairly limited in scope because many of the people she helped were already dying.) Yet the quantity, so to speak, of the good was irrelevant because Milken was acting out of greed whereas Mother Teresa was attempting to ease suffering. Thus, she's a hero, and he's certainly not.

By the same logic, those who possess a certain purity of heart can be heroes even if they don't succeed (in life, anyway) at the task they've taken up — martyrs, for instance.

For the most part, I stand by this assessment. But it occurred to me the other day that it's an analysis best suited to literature, where characters' thoughts can be monitored moment by moment.

Catalogue (continued)

A fairly comprehensive list of memories that, for a variety of reasons, continue to haunt me:

• Somewhere around preschool, drawing on my brother's shirt from the hospital (with his consent), right before our parents asked us not to. 

• Somewhere around preschool, joking with a friend on my soccer team about how we were carrying the team and scoring all the goals. Later, I recounted this moment to my mother. Her response: "When did you score a goal?" I hadn't. (He had scored many.)

• While very young, at the JCCA's sports camp, during an explanation of the rules of our hockey game, raising my hand and asking how many innings we would play. I had recently learned the word "innings" in relation to baseball and assumed it applied to all sports; I thought I was showing off here. But everyone in the gym laughed, and after the laughter had died down, the counselor haughtily said, "They're called periods, and we will play three."

• While young, at perhaps the same camp, losing track, along with a few other boys, of our group on the way to the pool. One boy asked where we would change into our swimsuits, but we hadn't been to the pool before and didn't know where the locker room was (or even perhaps that we were supposed to go to one). I suggested we just change there on the deck, in the middle of a sea of people (both sexes, mostly much older). Everyone seemed to go along with this. We never were fully nude, but we had started to draw some looks when, at that moment, the counselor found us and shepherded us to the locker room. I can still remember the feeling of the rough bench, made of stone, against the top of my bare ass.

• In kindergarten, being bullied by a boy named Travis. 

• Somewhere early in elementary school, going with my mother to a computer store near our house after a long day of errands. I mentioned while we were nearing the store that I had to go to the bathroom. My mother asked if I could hold it. I said I thought I could. We went inside, and if I remember correctly, my mother asked if I could use the employees' restroom and was denied. Shortly thereafter, and without warning, I began to urinate in my pants (luckily while standing on a piece of cardboard on the floor, which was down because of some floor or carpeting replacement, I think). When I had managed to stop myself, with the cashier and my mother staring at me the whole time, an employee led me into the back to use the employees' restroom. Somehow, I managed to go some more. I can't remember if we continued shopping after this incident.

• In third grade, calling my friend a name because I felt left out of their comics-drawing club and then crying when confronted about it by my teacher.

• The summer after third grade, feeling as though I should be crying when I found out my grandfather had died but not being able to.

• In third or fourth grade, during a class sit-down about a war going on over multiple recesses between the boys and the girls, making a point and then saying no when my teacher asked, with a look of surprise, "But you weren't a part of this, were you?" She assumed I was telling the truth and moved on. Some girls shot me dirty looks.
  

BK vs. The World: SNL

Power rankings of SNL cast members* from Season 37 (2011-12):

1. Kristen Wiig

2. Bill Hader

3. Fred Armisen

4. Jason Sudeikis

5. Andy Samberg

BK vs. The World: Fruits

Power rankings of fruits by group:

1. Of the tree (peach, banana, plantain, cherry, plum, lime, nectarine, apple, orange, grapefruit, lemon, pomegranate, genip)

2. Berries (straw-, black-, rasp-, blue-)

3. Of the vine (grape, watermelon, kiwi, honeydew, cantaloupe)

4. Those which are considerably better or worse than their normal groups (mango, cucumber, avocado, cranberry, lychee, apricot, fig, pumpkin*)

5. Tropical (pineapple, coconut, passionfruit, papaya)

6. Dried (date, raisin, prune)

7. Vegetables masquerading as fruits (tomato, olive, pepper, zucchini, eggplant)

Nos. 1 and 2 posed a tough decision for which I may never forgive myself.

Nuts were not considered so as to avoid a botanical debate.

* - Advanced solely on the basis of its pies.

Civility

She used to punctuate sentences with "thanks." Never "thank you," either — "thanks." I didn't notice at first. There were pleasantries, first-date niceties:

"After you." "Thanks."

"Your drink." "Thanks."

"The best I've ever had." "Thanks."

The habit became more noticeable with time. I began to catalog the uses bit by bit, subconsciously at first, then facetiously and finally humorlessly, compulsively.

The courteous catchall: "Can you pass the spinach? Thanks."

The conspicuous reminder: "You remembered to pick up milk, yeah? Thanks."

The jab of irony: "You did all this for me? Thanks."

I even had a category of "other" for the times when, for the life of me, I could not decide where to begin, when any precise meaning had been trampled by this recurrent hiccup, when sentences were beyond diagramming and sometimes even the part of speech seemed a mystery.

"I need to clean. Thanks."

Was that a request for help? To be left alone? Was it merely a filled pause, or was some meaning there to be communicated? For that matter, was I to respond?

I went through stages after I first began to perceive the quirk, from annoyance to, eventually, not only acceptance but actual enjoyment. I looked forward to it — a real-life catchphrase, a beat to keep track of conversations. I must have smiled at each exceedingly polite mumble. From there it was only a short time before diversion gave way to preoccupation.

I was confused, then, of what to make of the message: What had been its root, what emotion had it leapt from, what reply was I to send? And each question pulled out another — most pressingly, was I being thanked for our past or futures?

But the questions came without answers, and the words continued to stare out from the screen.

"We shouldn't see each other anymore. Thanks."