Idiots Write About Sports

Why did the Red Sox lose two games in Oakland this week?

Easy: they were sleepy due to the fundamental disadvantage East Coast teams have when they play night games in the Pacific Time Zone! Get the Sabermetricians on this one, stat!

Update: The reaction to the piece was so vociferous that he’s pulled it down. Which I sort of understand. To summarize, Jake renounced Baseball because it’s unfair. Coming from a Red Sox fan, I can understand that — seeing the Yankees spend money like they’re an entire boat full of drunken sailors can’t make you feel good when you’re a perrennial number two.

But his argument that the Sox lost because of a fundamental unfairness that we’ll call the “sleepy factor” is what got me.

Essentially, he looked at five years of regular-season games between east and west teams and found:

East Coast teams against West Coast teams at West Coast ballparks blow their lead 18% of the time.

East Coast teams against West Coast teams at East Coast ballparks blow their lead 12% of the time.

West Coast teams against East Coast teams at West Coast ballparks blow their lead 8% of the time.

West Coast teams against East Coast teams at East Coast ballparks blow their lead 14% of the time.

His solution was to move start times so as not to unfairly impact east coast teams. And more importantly, “vary up the divisions,” which I don’t really follow, since that would make things less fair, given that divisions tend to be organized along north-south (time zone) lines.

Now, my problem with Jake’s numbers is that they’re specious. And using fake stats to “prove” a dubious point enrages me.

But what I’m now interested in is a _real_ analysis of the effects of jet lag on teams. You’d have to take into account the number of days the teams have been in their new time zones, for adaptation’s sake. You’d have to take into account the performance of teams when they’re playing in neutral settings, so you can offset their average performance from their “sleepy” performance. You’d have to consider if Jake’s definition of a “jet lag” game is really logical, since one might argue that truly sleepy teams will be sleepy as hitters as well as as pitchers — but his current research only takes into account games in which the sleepy team went ahead and then was caught in late innings.

And his “shocking” (now removed) evidence seems to not actually mean anything — especially since he didn’t try to count what happens when teams of like time zones play one another, to try and make sure that all those East Coast blowings were done by the Devil Rays and Orioles at the hands of the A’s, Mariners, and Angels.

I’m not actually saying that there’s no truth to the idea that there may be some effect in a team recently removed from its time zone playing poorly — although I’m dubious that it would be anything measurable — but what I am saying is that Jake hadn’t even remotely proved it. He just concocted some numbers and then proposed that divisions be randomized. (Wouldn’t that be even more unfair, since the Red Sox would have to play less than 100% of their divisional match-ups in their home time zone?)

In any event, a tempest in a teapot, but boy, misuse of staticstics drives me up a tree.