Archive for the 'Sports' Category

The Yankees have an 80% chance of making the playoffs. The Indians have a 62.5% chance. And the Red Sox have a 58% chance.

There are sixteen possible outcomes after this weekend’s six games — three between the Yankees and the Red Sox and three between the White Sox and the Indians. You could say there are two possibilities in each of six games, which would be 2*2*2*2*2*2, or 64. But really, we only care about the outcome of each series. There are four possible outcomes of each series, meaning that we take 4*4, or 16. There are sixteen possible outcomes of this weekend. We could go further and talk about possible one game playoffs. Personally, I’m interested in which teams will make the playoffs. Further, I’m interested in what the odds are that each team will make the playoffs.

So what to do? Figure it out in Excel, then use Excel to create a table!

Below I show the sixteen possibilities for what the New York Yankees (NYY)’s, Boston Red Sox (BOS)’s, Chicago White Sox (CHI)’s, and Cleveland Indians (CLE)’s, respective records could be after this weekend. (Apologies for the ugliness.) To the right of those columns, I show what the playoff picture will be Monday morning. The final four columns show the odds, per each Monday morning playoff picture, that each team will make the playoffs. Note that in each scenario, the White Sox have 1 out of 1 odds of making the playoffs, because they have already secured the AL Central title.

About ⅔ of the way down, you’ll see the “nightmare scenario,” where MLB would have the first ever two-tiered one game playoff. Here, I have determined that the Yankees, for example, have a 50% chance of winning the first game. They also have a 50% chance of losing that game, meaning they would play the second game against the Indians, where they again have a 50% chance of winning. 50% * 50% = 25%. The 50% from the first game plus the 25% from the second game equals 75%. (Blah blah blah, etc etc etc.)

The last two rows show first, the odds out of 16 that each team will make the playoffs. The White Sox will make the playoffs 16 out of 16 times, because they have already locked up the AL Central. The final row shows each team’s odds out of 100. Enjoy.

I’m watching tonight’s Arkanas-USC game on Fox Sports Net, and I am aware of two things:

But what I really want to talk about is Matt Leinart’s decision to play his Senior year at USC. Leinart won the Heisman Trophy last year, and had he declared for the NFL draft, he almost certainly would have been the number one pick of the San Francisco 49ers.

But he didn’t. I did a Google search for “matt leinart insurance,” and the first result was an article on Insurance NewsNet titled Premium Players; Insurance Policies Are Becoming Standard For Elite College Athletes.

I was going to summarize the article, but instead I’ll suggest that you read it. The one fact from the article that really surprised me was that insurance policies have becomes something of a norm for “elite draft-eligible college football players.” Something much less surprising but perhaps more intriguing is that such insurance policies have increased in number significantly since Willis McGahee’s horrendous knee injury in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl — unsurprising because it was the final game of an elite college player’s senior year — intriguing because McGahee has seen none of that money, after signing a healthy contract with the Buffalo Bills. (Go Bills.)

The article points out that because of advances in sports medicine over the past twenty or thirty years, these insurance policies may not be worth it, and McGahee is the perfect example. Carson Palmer’s father almost didn’t take out a policy on his son, but Carson asked him to do it.

The NCAA offers injury insurance to athletes likely to be drafted highly — it does so in order to give sports agents one less reason to whisper in the ear of college athletes. It’s called Exceptional Student-Athlete Disability Insurance — ESDI. While I was thinking over this post I planned on saying some sentence like, “What does all this money mean in relation to the question of whether or not college athletes should be paid?” The answer? I don’t know. Maybe the NCAA should guarantee $1 million to every single college student who plays one of the four major sports — if an athlete suffers a career-ending injury while playing in an NCAA-sanctioned event, the NCAA pays up. I don’t expect to see that any time soon, though.

Good day for sports today.

If you’re a fan of Tiger Woods and the New York Yankees.

Today Tiger won the British Open, upping his major victory total to ten. Today I got thinking about how it’s special that I was old enough to appreciate Tiger when he turned pro, and I’ll be around when hes right there to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 major (professional) victories.

I have to think that Nike, American Express, and Buick executives are popping some Cris right now. Especially if they bought into the Tiger will never be the same hype.

I then thought about how I take a genuine interest in Tiger, which is unusual for me because I often scoff at magazines like People or Us because celebrities are just people, and one celebrity is no more important than an everyday person. This got me to thinking about how I occasionally reflect on the absurdity of the media coverage of OJ Simpson’s murder trial. OJ’s just a guy, right?

Then again, I never saw OJ play in the NFL, except for clips, which aren’t the same. I knew OJ because he covered the NFL for NBC. (I wonder if NBC will bring him back for their new Sunday night package.) But I was never in OJ’s corner. I never rooted for him. But if Tiger were in that position? Yeah, I’d root for him.

In other news, Al Leiter returned from the dead today. Last week the Florida Marlins designated him for assignment along with his 3-7 record and 6.64 ERA this season. Yesterday the Yankees acquired Leiter from the Marlins for a player to be named later and cash roughly equivalent to the remainder of Leiter’s pay for this season. (I am borrowing heavily from ESPN.com’s story on the game, here.) Leiter, a former Yankee, made his first start for the Bombers in 16 years and 82 days, breaking Babe Ruth’s record for time between starts. So what does Leiter do? He pitches 6⅓ innings, allows one run, and strikes out a season high eight batters. Crazy.

Oh, and the Yankees pulled to within a half game of the Red Stinx.

Finally, have you noticed that ESPN.com offers many of its articles in paginated view, but gives you the option to click on a single page view? What is the point of the multiple page format? At first I thought it was so pages will load faster over a slow connection, but loading three pages worth of graphics has got to take longer than loading one page worth. I always click the single page view link. Always. ESPN.com should provide users with a cookie to set preference on this.

And as long as I’m on the subject of article format preference cookies … every web site in the world should look at Wired News and emulate the system it uses for font size selection. The single biggest drawback of a high resolution display is that all the fonts get small, and you either squint or sit closer. With sites like Wired News, you can literally sit back and relax.