Leisure

Mascot Taxonomy

Published March 25, 2013 | By Matthias Kullowatz | Posted in Leisure

Two rounds down—well, three if you count those four preliminary games—and some Sweetness and Eliteness yet to come! That’s where we stand in the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and thus we’re in the perfect position to break down team performance by mascot.

I should first point out that mascots can be confusing. A “hoya,” for instance is a tropical plant, but a Georgetown Hoya is a bulldog. The nickname came from the shout “Hoya Saxa!” which basically just means “Our defensive line is like a bunch of rocks.” Loose translations… Anyway, I categorized Hoya into the “Inanimate” group, along with such thing as Billikens, Buckeyes and Hurricanes. My game, my rules.

Let’s make some Amoeba babies!

I first broke mascots down by the various scientific phyla, but it turns out the Banana Slugs are division III and not very good at basketball, so I was stuck with 60 vertebrates.* While the Western Kentucky Hilltopper mascot looks like something from the Protista kingdom or a Kool-Aid commercial, a hilltopper is actually just member of the WKU community that must march up a hill to get to campus, and very much a member of the homo sapiens club.

Moving further down the chain, the scientific classes provided me with the first real distinction between teams. I had seven birds, one reptile, eight inanimate non-organisms, three fantasy creatures and 49 mammals. Better, but more work had to be done. Bring on the scientific familes! There we go; now it’s raining Felidae and Canidae. After combining a few of the smaller familes—like the Badgers, Wolverines, Gophers and Jackrabbits—my editor and I agreed on the following taxonomy:**

It’s not easy being Orange.

Great Apes: Humans and such. It’s okay if they’re orange, and it’s okay if they’re shocking

Puppies: Bulldogs, Great Danes…… Continue reading →

Spicing up Your Bracket

Published March 20, 2013 | By Matthias Kullowatz | Posted in Leisure

If all that math this morning killed your buzz, here are some upset specials to look out for. While a vast majority of matchups favor the higher seed, in larger bracket pools it is actually to your benefit to pick a few upsets here and there. In my morning post, I argued that the larger your pool, the further from consensus you should make your bracket. These following picks come from aggregating the polls and models of Ken Pomeroy, Jeff Sagarin, Nate Silver, and John Ezekowitz.* Do with them what you will.

First Round

Due to a tough group of 8-seeds, Missouri (9) is the only 9-seed that is projected to win with greater than 50% probability, and avoiding the other 9-seeds is probably smart. We’ll talk more about Pitt (8) soon, but here’s the spoiler alert: the Panthers might be the most underrated team in the Tournament. Wichita State (9) is not chopped liver, but it got a bad draw with Pitt.

The best matchup for 10-seeds comes from the East Region where the stat heads agree that Colorado has nearly even odds to “knock off” Illinois (7). The other 7-10 matchups are all projected in the favor of the 7′s with about 60-40 odds. If you’re feeling greedy and want to make an additional 10-seed pick, go with your favorite mascot or something.

The 11-seeds are looking good this year, and the stat heads unanimously give Minnesota the nod over UCLA. That one’s not too hard to figure out even without stats, as UCLA lost its second-leading scorer in the conference semifinals and was probably overrated anyway. Two of the four stat heads like Saint Mary’s (11) over Memphis (6),… Continue reading →

A Different Sort of Bracket Strategery

Published March 20, 2013 | By Matthias Kullowatz | Posted in Leisure

I have two complementary strategies for you to mull over. If you’ve read any of my stuff, you know that I trust data over eyes if I have to choose between to the two. When it comes to the college basketball, I can’t possibly watch even five percent of the games during any season, so I have to go with data. Luckily, data can watch every game, and what data lose in flexibility, they make up for in uniformity and tirelessness. That’s why I tend to look to guys like Ken Pomeroy, Jeff Sagarin, Nate Silver, and John Ezekowitz for guidance in my tournament picks.

“Don’t go with Upset City, Baby! It’s not awesome!”

The first strategy is to trust the good data out there. Of course, if everyone trusted the good data out there, then everyone would tie, and that would be a stupid stand-alone strategy. The second strategy is to find the right balance between a risk-averse bracket and an “Upset City, Baby” bracket.

Later in the afternoon, I’ll summarize some more of that “good data” for this year’s tournament, but for today I just want to focus on the overarching strategy and some examples.

The combination of the two strategies suggests that you should follow the data throughout much of the bracket, but make some risky picks along the way. Harvard Professor, John Ezekowitz, claims that in larger bracket pools, being riskier than simply picking “the chalk” is an optimal strategy. Stealing a phrase from my old college tennis coach, perhaps Ezekowitz is suggesting that you employ “controlled aggression” in your bracket selections. Create an intelligently unique bracket, striking a balance between picking the most-probable winners and picking a unique-enough… Continue reading →

I’ll trade you my 8-seed for your 12!

Published March 19, 2013 | By Matthias Kullowatz | Posted in Leisure

Now that the brackets are out, rabid sports fans and the clueless alike turn their attention to the 2013 NCAA Tournament. Before I get into a few bracket strategies tomorrow, I wanted to talk about a strange phenomenon that I think most people don’t realize: the tournament format is unfair. I’m not referring to the selection committee botching the seeding—obviously it does—but there is actually a fundamental flaw in the design of the NCAA Tournament.

I think it’s fair to assume two things. One, that the tournament’s goal is to reward better teams with higher seeds because, in theory, higher seeding gives those teams a better chance to make a deep run. Two, that while every team wants to win the tournament, there are still marginal benefits to making it even one round further. For instance, making the Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight can give a team like the 1999 Gonzaga Bulldogs the recruiting power it needs to con players into consciously choosing to spend five years in Spokane.

The current bracket system definitely gives higher seeds the advantage in the first round, where the best seed gets to play the worst, the second-best plays the second-worst, and so on. But the second round is where things get screwed up in the current format. Let’s use Oregon’s draw as an example.

Husky fans may have been elated to find out that the Ducks only got a 12-seed in this year’s Madness. However, those same fans may not be happy to hear that it was actually to Oregon’s advantage. I did some napkin work and calculated Oregon’s chances of making the Sweet Sixteen at something between 14% and 20%. But had they been an 8 or 9-seed, those chances would have dropped to something below 7… Continue reading →

Mariners trade Kelley to Yankees for A Guy

Published February 13, 2013 | By Andrew Richards | Posted in Leisure

This is not Chone Figgins

If I were to tell you that Shawn Kelley has only pitched 128 career innings you may not believe me. Kelley has been on the Mariners roster since 2009, a longer tenure than any other current Mariners reliever. In his time on the team he proved to be a cheap and decent, if not great, middle relief pitcher. Kelley’s strikeout-to-walk ratio for his career is over 3:1, his career SO/9 is 8.58, and his career xFIP of 4.23, while not outstanding, is certainly solid enough to justify the $950,000 he is being paid next season.

However, Eric Wedge has never been a fan of Kelley, and as such he has been kind of an odd man out in regards to bullpen usage over the last two seasons. Tom Wilhelmson and Charlie Furbush were clearly better than Kelley last season, and that put him in competition with guys like Josh Kinney, Lucas Luetge, Stephen Pryor, and Carter Capps for lower-leverage relief pitching opportunities. While Kelley was arguably better peripherally than his competition last season, it also happened to be his age 28 season. This will be Kelley’s age 29 season, Capps and Pryor are entering their age 22 and 23 seasons respectively. The Mariners have high expectations for those two, and as such Kelley would not have been higher than fifth on the Mariners relief pitching depth chart heading into the 2013 season. Despite Kelley’s tenure on the roster and his relative value for the price of his contract, the Mariners decided he was an unnecessary commodity to hold on to, and as a result DFA’d him to make room for Kelly Shoppach on the 40-man roster.

The Yankees, needing relief pitching depth, saw a better-than-replacement level relief pitcher that they could… Continue reading →