Daily Archives: March 9, 2006

Breakfast of Champions?

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bbonds5.jpgThis SI.com article contains the excerpts from the new book about Barry Bonds’ alleged steroid use that has received a fair amount of media play this week.
However, as noted in this earlier post, the issue of whether use of steroids allowed Bonds to hit more home runs than he otherwise would have hit is an entirely different issue and not as clear-cut as most folks assume. Art DeVany has written this paper on the subject and here is the abstract:

There has been no change in MLB home run hitting for 45 years, in spite of the new records. Players hit with no more power now than before. Records are the result of chance variations in at bats, home runs per hit, and other factors. The clustering of records is implied by the intermittency of the law of home runs. Home runs follow a stable Paretian distribution with infinite variance. The shape and scale of the distribution have not changed over the years. The stable Paretian law of home runs generalizes the laws of extreme human performance developed by Pareto, Lotka, Price, and Murray. The greatest home run hitters are as rare as great scientists, artists, or composers.

By the way, don’t miss this hilarious DeVany post on taking a meal in a sports bar.

Eliot Spitzer’s next investigation?

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betting.jpgWhile the Lord of Regulation engages in one of his more dubious forms of business regulation, this NY Times article reports on a study that could really get people’s attention as the NCAA Basketball Tournament cranks up next week:

College basketball is a big business today, and betting on it is not merely a sideline for mobsters. It is a national pastime.
One thing about the sport, however, has not really changed since Henry Hill’s day. Of all the major forms of betting ó lotteries, poker, craps, slots, football ó college basketball is almost certainly the easiest to fix.
It is played by young men who don’t usually have a lot of money. With just five players on the court, one person can determine the outcome. And the point-spread system, in which bets are based on the margin of victory rather than wins and losses, allows players to fix a game without losing it.
“There’s every reason to think this is as bad as it gets,” Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
Mr. Wolfers, a blond pony-tailed Australian, calls himself part of a new generation of forensic economists ó researchers who sift through data to look for patterns of cheating that otherwise go unnoticed. . .
You can probably guess where this is going. Mr. Wolfers has collected the results of nearly every college basketball game over the last 16 years. In a surprisingly large number of them, it turns out that heavy favorites just miss covering the spread. He considered a number of other explanations, but he thinks there is only one that can explain the pattern. Point shaving appears to be occurring in about 5 percent of all games with large spreads. . .

Read the entire article. The bottom line — be careful in betting the favorite in games with big point spreads.