Fives In Quintuplicate

No one in the history of the NBA has ever had a quintuple double.*

I have recently become interested in the next best thing to a quintuple double: the 5-by-5 stat. Current players who are threats to get 5-by-5 include: Gerald Wallace, Ben Wallace, Josh Smith, Kevin Garnett, Andrei Kirilenko, Marcus Camby, and Shawn Marion. Tonight, for example, Josh Smith was one block short of his first-ever 5-by-5: 18 points, 7 rebounds, 6 assists, 5 steals, and 4 blocks.

I postulate that the 5-by-5 stat has a high correlation with Ex-Factor.

Sinkhole Poll: Who do you think will be next NBA player to get a 5-by-5?

*This is not exactly true: steal and block statistics have only been kept since the 1973-74 season.

Ask An Expert: A ball is hit sharply at a runner on third base. What should the baserunner do?

Expert Answer:

I will answer your question with a series of questions: Is the game being played in a dome? Are there fewer than two outs? Does the manager like to hit and run? How flexible is the baserunner in his midriff area? Is the baserunner's uniform made of a synthetic polymer? Additionally, this question presupposes that the baserunner does not bruise easily.

Here is how I envision the scenario: It is a night game, the ballpark lights use halo-reducing technology, the always-solid Jerry Layne is the third base umpire, Jose Reyes is dancing off third, and a barely-healthy Cole Hamels is pitching and has an Effective Pitch Count (EFE) of 27. Obviously, it is the third inning (EFE = inning * 9).
Reyes is taking a 90% lead, meaning if the pitcher threw over, he'd only be able to get back to third 9 out of 10 times. The hit and run is on, but David Wright misses the sign. The ball is hit right at Reyes with 80e velocity (where e = .001 seconds) down the third base line. Umpire Layne is watching (professional that he is) but 73% of his thoughts are dedicated to a former girlfriend of his that he'd seen on the subway while commuting to the game.

What should the Reyes do? Try to get out of the way but get hit anyway. There is no way for a human, even a Reyes human, to get out of the way of an 80e line drive if it is hit directly at Center Of Gravity (COG). Still, because Reyes is so fast, the ball merely glances off his thigh.

Under normal circumstances, a batted ball that hits a baserunner relegates the baserunner to the bench in the form of an out. But Reyes, being a smart ballplayer with a Measurable Baseball IQ (MBIQ) of over 203, has taken his lead in foul territory. Upon the batted ball's contact of Reyes' muscular thigh, Umpire Layne correctly signals a foul ball. When play is resumed, Umpire Layne resumes thinking about the auburn hair his ex was sporting. It flowed like vino la naranja.

Go Grandy Go

The A/V Club Will Save Us from Ourselves

The anger and melancholy that this blog is lately fomenting reminds me of a comment war that flared last year on the Tigers blog I frequent. People were posting thousand-word diatribes at 3 AM about the relative merits of Craig Monroe and Marcus Thames, and in the end the administrator had to ban some of the commenters for vulgar and threatening language. It was like witnessing road rage in an adjacent lane of the highway.

After a Tigers game, that same blog occasionally reproduces the game’s FanGraph. These show how likelihood of victory varied over the course of the game:

I can’t think of anything that’s less like a baseball game than one of these graphs. Of course, some future human who grows up poring over these graphs in the e-paper every morning might say the same thing about box scores.

The graphs remind me of Kurt Vonnegut’s unsuccessful anthropology dissertation at the University of Chicago, where he tried to graph stories in order to compare and contrast them. That didn’t work, but I do think that the guys at FanGraphs could make a positive difference in the world. Maybe we could graph political campaigns. Or international conflicts. Or romantic relationships. Then, when you break up with someone, you can find out if it’s fairest to compare your two months together to the 1984 Democratic primaries, Mark Buehrle’s no-hitter, or the Galveston Flood. We will put an end to bad analogies. No one will be unfairly smeared, and my boss’s secretary Hannah will have to stop telling our coworkers that my innocent invitation to coffee was “reminiscent of the Bay of Pigs invasion.”

The sunsets in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea are pretty

In December of 2006, I made the following statement:

“I also publicly predict that the Bobcats will end the 2006-2007 season with a better record than the Knicks.”

With one game remaining in the regular season, the Bobcats have a one-game lead over the Knicks. And guess who the Bobcats play for their final game of the season? The Knicks.

I once met Bill James, that baseball stat guy that every baseball blog writes about. I have a friend whose mother is lead engineer on the Hubble telescope, and through her work she is able to get tickets in one of those baseball luxury boxes. I sometimes join them for a game when they have an extra seat. One night, Bill James was in our box. I introduced myself while we were standing over the ballpark frank bin at the buffet line in the back of the luxury box. After exchanging pleasantries, I said, “I’m currently creating a model that predicts the winners of NASCAR races. It has been successful so far (a .56 correlation rate), but I wondered if you could help me take it to the next level.”

He glanced at me, selected a hotdog from the bin, looked back at me and then said, “what is your math background?” I told him. He said, “You are math deficient. After you improve your math skills, I’d be happy to go over it with you.”

And that’s Bill, as far as I can tell: blunt to the bone, maybe to the point of being arrogant, but ultimately willing to be generous with his time.

Switching gears, I have been eating larger quantities of fruit and vegetables. The effect on my bowel movements has been marked. They now feel more like they are being squeezed from a tube. Previously, each episode was like giving birth to a small collection of miniature hairless bear cubs. My latest movements are more like the healthy droppings of a nervous greyhound before he’s pushed into a dog track’s starting gate.

"I don't even try to figure out this game anymore”

Brandon Inge said that the other day. He’d started off the season 0 for 20.

I should not have left Bill James off my list of people who would enjoy World War Z. I grew up reading his books, and I think he’s one of the most influential people in the past quarter-century of sports. His Historical Baseball Abstract is the best sports book ever written. I still remember that in his 1990 Abstract he predicted John Smoltz would win 200 games in his career (he had 14 wins at the time, he now has 194).

James was recently interviewed by a Mets blog, and some of his answers were exquisitely left-brained. When asked if he might start his own blog or web site, he replied, “Not a blog, no, but a web site, yes. Based around information.” He got a question about player development that rambled a little and informed the interviewer, “You're mixing up several issues in a jumbled question.” When asked about Mark McGwire’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame: “He isn't being judged by the standard that I would choose for him, but then, it isn't my choice, and there is no logic to admiring athletes, anyway. It's just arbitrary. It's like admiring people who won the lottery.”

Beep-boop. Beep-boop-bop.

But he’s right, as always, and, more impressively, unafraid to reveal an unsightly truth about the underpinnings of his life’s work.

James works for the Red Sox now, and he was asked about how that’s changed his perspective. “A lot of decisions in baseball are made on the basis of things that you never think about as a fan,” he said. “The internal discussion of the front office is vastly more sophisticated than the discussion that takes place in the public arena, more subtle, more layered, more complex, and with hundreds of times more information.” This from a guy who’s charted types and locations of pitches at hundreds of games, just so he could better understand what was happening on the field and why.

This brought to mind a conversation I once had with a friend whose father was a coach for the Michigan State football team. I asked her about the coaching changes that took place in the nineties. “The real reason [one assistant coach] didn’t get the job,” she said, “is that he was sleeping with the head coach’s wife.”