Fouling a black guy would be racist

Leaving aside all the other dumbassery of the piece, isn’t this exactly backwards? Shouldn’t the joke be that the team needed to find a white player to foul a black player in order not to be racist?

the fact that it took them 13 years to do it

That’s because they collected the data in real time. Back when the professor was in college and the graduate student, in middle school, they began attending every NBA basketball game in order to see and record every single foul called. They did this for 13 years. What dedication!

isn’t this exactly backwards? Shouldn’t the joke be that the team needed to find a white player to foul a black player in order not to be racist?

I think he’s decrying a percieved invulnerability of the black players, saying that the Rockets were afraid to foul a black player but not a white player, because they are too afraid of looking racist. I think that’s the logic, if you can follow it.

And then I take out my trust short sword, Sting, and I’m like, “By the Shire, you shall have neither the Ring, nor me!”. But the wingnut Riders just laugh and murmur, “The ring.. the ring…THE RING…” in that crazy Ralph Bakshi reverb sound.

But who does Yao Ming get to foul? He’s not white or black!

I love the underlying assumption that white males are all running about in an tizzy for fear of seeming racist, when those that aren’t racist really don’t expend a lot of effort in not seeming to be what they aren’t.

What’re these words coming to me? Ah, yes: projection—and ESP, seeing as how he apparently read the minds of a whole basketball team.

hilarious DA. Just as good as FJM.

if only Boromir had had your nobility of purpose, I might have been spared Sean Bean being peppered with arrows.

This was quite possibly the dumbest thing printed in a major metropolitan area daily today, May 7, 2007. I really couldn’t say, because I don’t read a fraction of such dailies, but I’d encourage commenters to supply clips of anything dumber.

It’s not from a newspaper but I’m going to nominate Mickey Kaus since he’s also letting his fear of a black planet show. He approvingly links to professional race baiter Tom Maguire’s latest anti-Obama rant.

“Now, really. Is the phrase “at a greater rateâ€? really that difficult to understand?”

It really is. Any one hear Dan Patrick’s interview with Charles Barkley on Patrick’s radio program last week? It was staggering. Every criticism I’ve heard or read of this study totally ignores the glaring difference between “rate of” and “total number of.” Why? Why the incompetent reporting and gross obtuseness?

Why? Why the incompetent reporting and gross obtuseness?

Hate to say it, but, could part of the problem just be a public that is actually pretty bad at understanding statistics and numbers? Or do you think they are intentionally misunderstanding?

The Examiner is free, and not worth even that; it was bought out some years back by some out-out-town right-wing millionaire and is the venue for some of the worst editorial writing in San Francisco (though the Chronicle gives the Ex a run for its stupid money, especially with two blockhead “political reporters” named Matier & Ross).

Hearing that the Ex is printing atrocious shit is like hearing that a tourist got burned down at Fisherman’s Wharf–so, nu?

I think he’s decrying a percieved invulnerability of the black players, saying that the Rockets were afraid to foul a black player but not a white player, because they are too afraid of looking racist. I think that’s the logic, if you can follow it.

I think you’re right about what he’s talking about, but that’s not what the study showed — it had to do with who the foul was called on, not who the foul was committed against. He’s just freestyling on the idea that fouls have something to do with race. I’m just looking for a little consistency in the sportswriterly ignorance I consume.

Or do you think they are intentionally misunderstanding?

No, no, no. It’s much more than that. See, conservatives long ago realized that science – any science – is biased against them. Thus, they have absolved themselves from attempting to understand it in any way. It’s not just a case-by-case misunderstanding of certain inconvenient facts. It’s a movement. It’s why they have to make thier own Wikipedia, their own YouTube. Soon they’ll have their own SETI@Home-type distributed computing system where they’ll prove that the Earth is only 4,400 years old by networking 4,400 computers together. Each will contribute an integer – the integer 1 – and the whole thing will be added up and come to 15 billion at which point they’ll realize they coded the damn thing wrong and they’ll just angrily publish a paper showing how it would have come to 4,400 if they had done it right which just goes to prove their thesis that the world is only 4,400 years old.

The carefully cultivated notion that complexity itself is a kind of liberal conspiracy militates against wingnuts’ understanding things. Add to this the MSM meme that the public is uninterested in “complicated” stories like the US Atty firings, and you have the precondition for the NBA referee study clusterfuck.

But why listen to me. Listen to teh greatest American leader since President Jesus:

“They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is moral.”– Ronald Reagan

The headline: Unstoppable Objection Meets Immovable Arse

The body: Sports fan opposed to statistics.

“Hate to say it, but, could part of the problem just be a public that is actually pretty bad at understanding statistics and numbers? Or do you think they are intentionally misunderstanding?”

I think that the public is perfectly capable of distinguishing “rate” v. “total number. I really do think that the reporting is intentionally obtuse because if something more complex is distilled into something simplistic, the result is easier to attack when it conflicts with one’s prejudices.

I think it’s possible that Frantz didn’t actually read the NY Times piece on the study, but instead got his info from something like the Patrick-Barkley exchange cited above. I think it’s very probable that Frantz didn’t look at the study itself.

And I think it’s all but certain that numbers make his brain hurt. Also, that he dictates his column over the phone while doing Jaeger shots at TGI Friday’s in Foster City with his pals from 107.7 The Bone’s ‘Morning Zoo Crew’.

So once again, we are faced with a media jackass being one of the following: a) a liar or b) grossly incompetent.

D. Arisophanes said,

Do you actually have to type that every time or something?

Foster City! Now you’re just being cruel.

Cruel? He coulda said Milbrae…

mikey

At the risk of returning poo fire, I’d point out that unless the study tried to independantly measure the rate of fouls committed by black players vs white players, their numbers don’t tell you enough to draw any definite conclusion. And with a differential of 4% it ain’t going to be a very big one. A differential like that could simply be due to the contrast of players skin against the back ground.

That’s funny, it used to be that the white guys were the good foul shooters. You know, the Mark Prices and the Rick Barrys. So, according to this nudnik, you wanna foul the GOOD foul shooters to stay PC at the end of a close game?

At this point, the ghost of Naismith should pop out and bean old boy with a peach basket for flaming stupidity.

Man, what to do. This piece makes a conflict within me! I hate stat nerds because they’ve tried to very hard to ruin baseball — Baseball Prospectus being the web-sports journalism equivalent of the Weekly Standard (Karhl: “Tony LaRussa is a racist!”; Sheehan: “Economically-illiterate bitches!!”). Seriously, fuck these guys.

I think NBA basketball sucks, so I don’t care about stat-nerdery’s affect on it as much, and I’m a good liberal and so do care about racism, but…

Isn’t the number of whiteys in the NBA more heavily distributed among the small, point guard types who aren’t as likely to foul because they’re usually outside the lane? Conversely, aren’t blacks more concentrated among centers and big forwards who are always in the lane or around the basket? I dunno; maybe my assumption’s wrong — are fouls evenly distributed among all positions or not? Well, if not, that should be accounted for, before the racism card is played, right?

Because I can totally see a misguided robonerd saying, ‘a ha, NFL officials are 20 times more likely to call defensive pass interference on blacks than on whites — they are racists!’ (not giving a shit abotu the racial composition of the *position* against which most inference calls go, just because of the nature of the game).

Isn’t the number of whiteys in the NBA more heavily distributed among the small, point guard types who aren’t as likely to foul because they’re usually outside the lane? Conversely, aren’t blacks more concentrated among centers and big forwards who are always in the lane or around the basket? I dunno; maybe my assumption’s wrong — are fouls evenly distributed among all positions or not? Well, if not, that should be accounted for, before the racism card is played, right?

Exactamundo. And while the post indicates there are “controls” for player position, star status, etc., I don’t see how you can “control” for things like that.

While the good liberal in me wants to believe this study, the basketball fan in me thinks it’s a crock of shit.

I don’t see how you can “control� for things like that.

You compare white point guards to black point guards, white centers to black centers, etc. etc.

I don’t know that much about basketball or statistics, so there may be something wrong with this method, but it looks pretty simple.

Anyway, I thought the white NBA players were disproportionately centers. From the NYT article:

The economists accounted for a wide range of factors: that centers, who tend to draw more fouls, were disproportionately white; that veteran players and All-Stars tended to draw foul calls at different rates than rookies and non-stars; whether the players were at home or on the road, as officials can be influenced by crowd noise; particular coaches on the sidelines; the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.

quoth HTML Menken:

Isn’t the number of whiteys in the NBA more heavily distributed among the small, point guard types who aren’t as likely to foul because they’re usually outside the lane? Conversely, aren’t blacks more concentrated among centers and big forwards who are always in the lane or around the basket? I dunno; maybe my assumption’s wrong — are fouls evenly distributed among all positions or not? Well, if not, that should be accounted for, before the racism card is played, right?

….

The study actually breaks down foul calls by all-white officiating crews, majority-white crews, all-black crews and majority-black crews. It controls for player position, “star status�, playing time, calls against home teams vs. visiting teams and more. The methodology behind the study was found to be sound by three independent academics contacted by the Times.

These guys did their jobs well. They crunched the numbers right.

The temptation is to say “Meh, what’s 4.5%? You draw 21 fouls instead of 20. How big a deal is that?”

the team with the greater share of playing time by black players during those 13 years won 48.6 percent of games —

Apparently, black starters + white referees = poorer odds of winning.

The real merit of the story isn’t that there’s some cabal of white NBA officials (“Who controls the British Crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do!”) but that racism can be subtle & pervasive, making us see a white guy trying to drive to the hoop, but a black guy throwing an elbow. (or vice versa, depending on your own skin color)

HTML Mencken: Please read the original NYT article. Position, playing time, home vs. away, etc. were all accounted for in the study. To quote from the article (emphasis added):

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price spend 41 pages accounting for such population disparities and more than a dozen other complicating factors.

I would say 41 pages would cover most of your complaints.

Gibbon1: Actually, a discrepancy of 4% out of a sample size of almost 600,000 foul calls is ENORMOUS. That is 24,000 fouls. (Actually, a difference of 4% in a sample size of 600,000 in anything would be enormous to a trained statistician.)

Hmmm, ok then. Weird, I can’t think of a decent recent whitey center, but like I said, I don’t like the NBA and don’t watch it much.

Well, if that’s true then there ought to be a massive affirmative action implementation for NBA officials. It’s probably good idea in general that refs squads look as much like the players they ajudicate as possible.

I still stand by my anti-robonerd remarks RE: baseball. What a fucking bunch of counter-revolutionary asshelmets they are.

…that racism can be subtle & pervasive…

Exactly. Thank you, Rodeo. This study is valuable in that it helps shine a light on all of us who are fairly well convinced we are NOT racist in any way. If it can help us understand that there are prejudices inherent in our society, it can help us all do a better job of caring about each other.

So when you read about it, and your knee jerks, from David Stern on down, don’t see it as an indictment of basketball as a racist enterprise. In fact, as a huge corporate entity, the NBA has done a better job than most of flattening the culture and accepting a multicultural set of values. Rather, it’s a window into the dark little corners where racial prejudices can still lurk – and in that it does us all a favor…

mikey

Here’s the Price and Wolfers study. Here’s a brief updated analysis based on data from the last three regular seasons.

Both are pdf’s, by the way.

D. A., this post rocked my world.

That is a man who speaks to his audience.

Hate to say it, but, could part of the problem just be a public that is actually pretty bad at understanding statistics and numbers? Or do you think they are intentionally misunderstanding?

In my experience, the answers are yes and yes — meaning yes, the general public isn’t as good as it should be, overall, at understanding things like statistics; and yes, reporters/pundits are intentionally misunderstanding the stats, either out of bias or laziness. But I think it goes beyond this: the bias/laziness of those who report the “facts” has a direct bearing on the level of understanding of the news-consumer public.

I teach college students for a living. Overwhelmingly, when I meet them they don’t get basic reasoning, let alone stats as evidence. I try to teach them how to be skeptical about data, how to question mutually exclusive claims and reason out the most likely explanations . . . and then, like good little learners, they consult authoritative sources (like guys who are paid to publish their “analysis” in big newspapers and magazines). Is it any wonder that they have a hard time demonstrating a capacity for rational thought? They have precious few models of it in contemporary mass-market publications.

Do you actually have to type that every time or something?

Where’d I put that deuced ‘t’? Whoops, found it. Damn you, ghost-in-teh-machine! My fingers are tired.

“I still stand by my anti-robonerd remarks RE: baseball. What a fucking bunch of counter-revolutionary asshelmets they are.”

Yes. Not only did they drive baseball’s year-to-year attendance figures up by making it more boring than it already was, they injected dozens of players with experimental drugs that made them superhuman. They wrote a book about how awesome Billy Beane is. Oh, and they fired Dusty Baker, the greatest manager of all time! And I won’t even mention what they did to kittens. Those bastards should be made to suffer for what they’ve done.

Rufus, you forgot the part about how the robonerd’s made the Cubs’ 2006 on-base percentage (.319, 16th in the NL) more important than their batting average (.268, fifth in the NL). If Baseball Prospectus didn’t exist, the Cubbies would have won the NL Central last year … instead of losing 96 games.

Also, nerds who count pitches made Mark Prior and Kerry Wood weak and lacking in grit, thus destroying their pitching arms. Smoky Joe Wood, Kerry’s great-great-great-grandfather, could throw 1,000 pitches over the course of back-to-back doubleheaders and then dig a well on the back 40 afterwards.

Yes, and they also were so anti-ownership that they favored a strike. They continually excuse the steroids cheaters. Their worship of Billy Beane — whose teams always choke when it counts — has transferred to worship of such retards as the current GM of Toronto and the (blessedly) ex-GM of the Dodgers. They hang on to busts like Hee Seop Choi because their singleminded devotion to OBP does not include observing the holes in certain players’ swings. They come up with bullshit, worse than useless stats like DIPS.

Bill James! Save me from your followers!

Oh, please. The Cubs could never win anything, robonerds or no robonerds.

But let’s count the rings on the green & gold team’s fingers. Meanwhile, here’s a ’82 WS trophy and two extra pennants for the knee-jerk/jerk-off stathead argument that stolen bases automatically = teh suxx0r.

And I totally didn’t know that before robonerds, no baseball people *ever* thought about pitch counts. Thanks for reminding me that it took some fucktard with a spreadsheet living in his mom’s basement to singlehandedly pull baseball out of the stone age.

And speaking of pitchcounts or at least workload studies department, it’s the statheads with their hubristic “I bet those morons never thought of this!” mindset that are the group that currently most advocates a return to the fireman (i.e., godawful heavy workload) model of relief pitcher.

“singleminded devotion to OBP”

Just to pick on one thing, among many. The ‘singleminded devotion’ is to discovering positive player/pitcher qualities that are undervalued in the market. Not to OBP, per se, though until the 21st century the ability to get on base at a high rate was in fact undervalued.

Yes, yes, I know the gospel according to the cult. I’m also familiar with its protean qualities. For instance, when Moneyball came out one was told by the robonerd press that it meant fatfuck softball players were what savvy GMs should look for, as their (forget defense) type was the supposed best at manufacturing runs. Suddenly, statnerds everywhere lambasted their hometown teams for not finding the next *Jeremy* Giambi. Then Beane traded Giambi and since character can’t be considered (it can’t be quantified via spreadsheet) then ‘Moneyball’ suddenly meant that defense mattered (around this time, more complex stats were minted to measure defense), fatfcuk softball players weren’t all that, and the previous definition of Moneyball went down the memory hole. “Moneyball” means for the masses of ten-rate Rob Neyer-wannabes simply “whatever Billy Beane does”. Because he’s the brainiac who exploits inefficiencies. And every GM not of Beane’s kind is a drooling retard. If Beane does something that goes against what was previously taken as Sabermetric Fact, then it’s not that sabermetricians could ever be wrong (are you kidding? it’s just *not possible*) but that St. Billy’s found newer better formulae to rob the till, exploit the morons. Heads, robernerds win; tails traditionalists lose. Wonderful stuff.

Teh Cult has taken a needed reform of baseball analysis and made it a dogma and an industry, fueled as it is by myriads of nerds who are certain they can be better GMs than the stupidheads. It’s all a perfect mess, exacerbated by smarmy assholes who are legion on the ‘net (I am one; I should know) and whose numbers coagulate almost exclusively (here, I’m the exception) on the robonerd side of the argument.

But hey, I’m all ears. I’d love to hear how Sheehan & Co. didn’t argue with such extremism that their position was pro-strike. I wanna hear the objective evidence Chris Fucking Karhl has for calling La Russa a racist. I’d like to be shown how the mass of steroids-lovers aren’t overwhelmingly a bunch of robonerd fuckwits (with correlating glibertarian politics) who would cheer Adolf Hitler if he consistently delivered 1.300 OPS. Tell me again how the whole industry is populated by idiots because they won’t give poor Hee Seop Choi a chance to take a walk. Show me St. Billy of Beane’s *rings*, man! Thrill me with the Cult of Robonerd standard issue excuse that playoffs are crapshoots and that consistent losing during the playoffs is *all luck*. Seriously, I love this stuff, have heard it all before, never get tired of arguing it just as I never tire of arguing with other Cultists of the religious and political varieties. It’s all great fun.

Nevermind all that. What about this?

To open I-880 by 5 a.m. today, Caltrans workers shored the freeway deck, which dropped about 9 inches, with stabilizing beams, repaired the guardrails, straightened the freeway’s girders and repaved the deck with polyester concrete.[emphasis mine]

Polyester. Fashionable!

Heads, robernerds win; tails traditionalists lose. Wonderful stuff. …

Thrill me with the Cult of Robonerd standard issue excuse that playoffs are crapshoots and that consistent losing during the playoffs is *all luck*.

Hang on, I thought celebrating a team’s performance over the long, long baseball season was traditionalist … case in point: “THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!”

I guess the robonerds have gone so far away from traditionalism that their back at square one. Whereas the traditionalists are now the radicals … dude, quit fucking with my head!

I’d like to be shown how the mass of steroids-lovers aren’t overwhelmingly a bunch of robonerd fuckwits (with correlating glibertarian politics) who would cheer Adolf Hitler if he consistently delivered 1.300 OPS.

Or maybe they’re black. As per this ESPN poll which shows 27% of blacks who think Bonds has been treated unfairly think it’s due to his race, whereas just 1% of whites think that.

Weird, how many black people are robonerd glibertarian proto-fascists.

Um…not to jump too far into the firefight or anything, but don’t you maybe think that the reason Billy Beane has to nerd it out to find the players to build a playoff contender, which then gets clobbered in the divisional round every year, is that Oakland doesn’t have much of a payroll? That the reason Billy Beane traded Jason Giambi (for surely you couldn’t have meant Jeremy, who never knocked in more than 70 runs for Oakland) was because Oakland couldn’t afford to pay him? Maybe?

BTW, on Sunday night baseball (Giants-Phils), Joe Morgan said after Randy Winn struck out on a full count with no outs and runners on 2nd and 3rd … that it was better that Winn struck out rather than walked to load the bases … because then Omar Vizquel (batting after Winn) didn’t have to worry about hitting into the double play.

You don’t have to worship St. Billy of Beane to find that a really stupid thing to say.

Wow. Sports and statistical analysis. I’m almost halfway through this thre….zzzzzzzzzzz

Or maybe they’re black. As per this ESPN poll which shows 27% of blacks who think Bonds has been treated unfairly think it’s due to his race, whereas just 1% of whites think that.

Weird, how many black people are robonerd glibertarian proto-fascists.

Sure, sure, go have a gander at all the robonerd message boards — so filled they are with black people — and observe the Bonds dead-enders: the vast majority glibertarian. Seitz, Pinko, Dayn, and even digamma (if he decides to be honest) will vouch for this.

As for the poll, well, Barry has done a good job as race-baiter, even considering that he’s about to destroy the record of that horrible white man, Henry Aaron. Pouty Barry, of course, who grew up rich and unbelievably sheltered, has always skillfully donned a Malcolm X mask when the racist meanies would raise hell as he cheatingly passed in the record books such KKK members as Frank Robinson and Reggie Jackson. Barry was clever enough, devious rotten bastard that he is, to try to frame it all as whitey trying to protect the Babe Ruth man from the black menace, and enough people are fooled.

–Still, it’s not a majority. Which is a triumph for those who give a shit about the sport’s integrity. Sucks, don’t it?

BTW, on Sunday night baseball (Giants-Phils), Joe Morgan said after Randy Winn struck out on a full count with no outs and runners on 2nd and 3rd … that it was better that Winn struck out rather than walked to load the bases … because then Omar Vizquel (batting after Winn) didn’t have to worry about hitting into the double play.

You don’t have to worship St. Billy of Beane to find that a really stupid thing to say.

Yes, it was dumb. So what? Joe Morgan’s value is in his experience and anecdotes, not in his analysis. I’ll grant that there may be a use for some nasal-voiced robonerd retard to remind people of the banalities of strategy and stats viz ‘be patient!’ ‘get on base!’ ‘Jay Johnstone’s OPS, adjusted for park, is .666!’. But the shitcanning of Joe Morgan — which has long been a robonerd aim and way before the site that put that desire into its title — is an example of the GOING FUCKING TOO FAR aspect of the whole movement.

Anyway, I don’t want to fight, it’s just that my fire was stoked by a lot of the robonerd sneereasoning in the post, which I recognise and associate with some real fucking assholes.

DA –

I wanna publicly apologise for being an asshole. It’s your thread. I was wrong to fuck it up by being a dick.

Apology NOT accepted!

Just kidding – dude, these kinda scraps are what make the ‘tubes fun. A little Usenet-ish, but fun.

After watching 50 Greatest Shots on FSN last night, I think the important question is “how the hell did Reggie Miller not foul out every game he played?” He would outright shove defenders away for the open shot.

And I think GS’s Steven Jackson got shafted on fouls last night.

Bob Frantz. Wasn’t he the inspiration for the Ray Barone character in “Everybody Loves Raymond?” Totally self-involved, clueless, dumbass?

My biggest complaint with the hoops study was that it wasn’t based on individual refs & their calls, but composition of the refereeing crews (all honky, mostly honky, mostly Afro-American, all Afro-American).
Who knows what might have been found if they looked at the refs individually?
And what the hell kind of game is it where one player deliberately commits an offensive act against another? So much for sportsmanship & character building. (Haw haw haw!)

M. Bouffant – there was no way to separate the individual refs out of their crews because the NBA keeps stats on fouls called by crew, not by individual.

But i love usenet!!!

exacerbated by smarmy assholes who are legion on the ‘net (I am one; I should know)

HTML Mencken, those are the truest (and, almost, the only true) words you have posted here.

I would describe your philosophy as Intelligent Design for Baseball Morons.