Thursday, February 21, 2008

Rox Talk

From the news that just won't go away...more steroids in baseball. Thought the Mitchell Report would end it all but it ultimately just opened a can of worms. At the NY Times Opinion Section featuring our friends, the Freakonomics, an article (including the graph to the left) tries to show that Clemens stats over the last 8 years of his career show something fishy. This was somewhat in response to Clemens legal staff that created a statistic treatise of Clemens careers showing how he didn't get a boost from any PEDs. All of this brings to light the world of sabermetrician's which I guess is good but also it brings to light that numbers and statistics can be a slippery slope. Stats can often show what you want by how you present data. In fact other analysis (here and here) show some other thoughts. Even reviewing the comments about this article seem to doubt the curve fitting that was done on the graphs to the left. Anyway interesting article and a decent follow up graph below using ERA+ rather than age vs WHIP.


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