Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: baseball

  • The Problem with Renaming

    The Problem with Renaming

    If you caught my talk in Seattle last week, I talked about names, versions, and SVN.

    Jeff Atwood: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

    One of the things I touched on with names was their problematic nature. And believe me, I know about that. You see, I’m a Cleveland Indians fan.

    And yes, I think the name (and the logo) are racist.

    You can’t rename things, but you can rebrand

    When I said this, I meant that you can’t rename a plugin slug. Yoast SEO will forever have the URL of wordpress-seo because we do not have a way to rename the slug and properly redirect everyone. We just don’t. And even if we did, the old URL would need to remain in perpetuity in order for everyone who upgraded super late to still get the new code.

    Names are really important. Your name is (often) your brand, and your brand is how people know you and how to find you. When you consider a name like the Cleveland Indians, today we can see the problems with it. Racism. But in 1914, we were a little simpler, a little more naive…. A little stupider. Okay a lot stupider.

    The problems that Cleveland faces with renaming are related to the problems you would face in renaming your product.

    Rebranding has a cost, and it could be everything

    The crux of all issues with renaming is that if people don’t like the new name, or can’t find you because of it, they will walk away. If you’re a small company with a few sales, and people can’t find your name anymore, you could go bankrupt. For Cleveland, it would be worse. If the baseball team went belly up, it would translate to thousands of people going out of work.

    This is not to say the renaming or rebranding isn’t important. Cleveland’s reasons are obvious. Yours may be less so. You may be asked to rebrand to prevent a potential legal issue. Or you may decide that Mailpoet is a better name than Wysija Newsletters. But the rebranding can come at a cost.

    Losing history can loose users

    In baseball, one of the rationales for not renaming a team is the team history. A team is known by it’s name and its mascot (and logo). The logos of most team are fairly mutable over time, you can see the growth and development when you look at it historically. There’s a reason most redesigns are actually not dramatic, but careful and planned. That can not be said of the names, which rarely (if ever) change unless a team moves.

    The same goes for your name. If Cleveland renames their baseball team to, say, the Lancers or the Blues, how do you handle the change? You have to make sure everyone knows (this is easier for baseball than the rest of us) and you have to make sure they know why.

    Warner Bros' 'we were racist' disclaimer

    When a similar warning was put up before Tom & Jerry cartoons, the Internet lost their shit. Go figure. And yet that’s the problem here. People react in unpredictable ways to being told “A thing you liked and empathized with is bad” because they think it means they were bad. Generally no, they weren’t.

    That’s a much bigger issue for baseball than for your code though. Unless you decided to name your theme Mien Kampf, or decided to present your plugin as ‘The Final Solution.’ That’s because a name is not isolated. You are not isolated. You live in a world where the implications and uses of a word and a logo can have far reaching effects. People who, for whatever reason, connect with your plugin name can feel left out when you rebrand.

    No matter how deep your pockets are, you will pay

    Thankfully you are way luckier than baseball (or football, hello). You have the opportunity to know the world you’re in. Today we are more aware of the implications of our words, but also we now listen to other cultures and viewpoints about how our words and actions are perceived.

    The cost of renaming yourself is high, but the ultimate question is not to ask how much the cost is of the renaming. The question is which cost is higher: The loss that stems from renaming, or the loss that stems from defending a name. If you’re being sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement over a name, and yes it happens, it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. What matters is you’re probably going to lose.

    If you’re baseball, you generally have a lot more money than the average joe. You might be able to win a lawsuit. But your reputation will be tarnished, and that too will impact your bottom line.

    If you know what to do and you don’t do it, there you bloody well are, aren’t you.

    — Lord Buckley

  • Hot Hands And Playoffs

    Hot Hands And Playoffs

    Today I’m wandering off topic into a world of baseball and statistics.

    My family have been Cleveland Indians fans since they came to the United States and settled in the city. My grandmother was an accountant, my father a mathematician, and I a web developer who works on software used by 26% of the Internet. Give or take. I’m also a third (and probably final) generation Clevelander. Yes, I root for my home team.

    October of 2016 marked the first time since 2007 that Cleveland was in the American League Championship Series (ALCS). In the intervening years, my family had all migrated to iPhones and iMessage, allowing us to converse in real time across two continents, two countries, four time-zones, and five cities.

    My father, the mathematician and risk analyst, kept a close watch on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight project, especially the MLB Predictions, as Mr. Silver has been quite spot on for things for a while, understanding the implications of probability and chance.

    On October 18th, FiveThirtyEight gave Cleveland a 53% chance of winning the ALCS game 4, a 94% chance of making the World Series, and a 38% chance of winning it all for the first time since 1948. The time Cleveland won before that? 1920. Not quite Cubs level of history, but it’s been a long enough time than my grandmother Taffy never got to see them win a third time (she was born July 7, 1920).

    The game on the 17th was nothing short of incredible. The starting pitcher was yanked after 2 outs because his cut pinky was dripping blood. There are, you see, a bevy of incredible rules about what pitchers can and cannot wear. More than the normal player. And we’re talking about a sport than demands all players use a glove that has colors only within a PANTONE® color set lighter than the current 14-series. These guys are nuts. And one of the rules is no bandages on the pitchers’ hands.

    a pitcher’s person cannot include any unessential or distracting thing (including jewelry, adhesive tape, or a batting glove), especially on his arm, wrist, hand, or fingers.

    Bauer’s 11 stitches in his pinky split and was incredibly nasty, so he was replaced. Cleveland used seven pitchers, pretty much their entire relief bullpen, to get through the game. My family began to argue the intelligence of the move. Instead of using the rookie Merritt to start game 4, possible win-it-all game, Manager Terry Francona decided to start his ‘ace,’ Kluber.

    To understand this, you have to start with the odd fact that Cleveland is down three of their best pitchers to injuries. This is including Drone Boy Bauer. Such a situation is rare for the playoffs, if not unheard of. That means they are more reliant than ever on their bullpen, so using every single pitcher possible on Monday meant they would all be a little tired on Tuesday. And Kluber would be starting 3 days rest when a pitcher normally gets 4 or 5.

    Clearly Francona was banking on the team not needing to use the bullpen much on Game 4, but why would he make that decision knowing that the odds of winning on Tuesday were insanely low. As my dad said:

    Winning 7 games straight is an outlier. They won 6 in a row twice, of course the 14 streak, 4 games three times. I’m betting they will lose the next two in Toronto.

    Then he started emailing us all homework.

    Before we get to the math, let’s look at the baseball logic. The reason you would play Bauer is that the odds are Cleveland will lose on the 18th, and a good manager would know that and bet on it, like my father. Teams winning 7 games in a row is crazy. It’s rare. It’s risky. By playing Kluber, an experienced pitcher, you solve two problems. First, Merritt is a rookie. Him losing will have a deep psychological impact on the young guy. Kluber can take a hit and keep going. Second, it means if Cleveland does win, Kluber will be well rested for the World Series. If Game 4 is lost, Merritt will pitch the safer Game 5.

    The psychology of math is exactly why no one would discount the Cleveland Indians winning seven games in a row in the post season, however.

    […] what Terry is seeing is momentum, the intangible. You gotta measure the odds with numbers, but making good decisions goes beyond the odds … beyond just the odds. Like CoCo’s diving catch.

    This is where the homework comes into play. Nine papers about hot streaks later, I came to the conclusion I had always felt had to be true. There is no such thing as a winning streak. They are nothing more than standard deviations from the mean. Models of the math have told us that there is only one event in baseball that has happened outside of the frequency of said models. Everything, the longest runs of losses and wins, are exactly as they should be and happen as often as they ought.

    Except for one: Joe DiMaggio. Joltin’ Joe’s 56–game hitting streak in 1941 doesn’t make any sense. As we read in Streak of Streaks by Jay Gould, in order to make it mathematically probably to have a run of 50 games with a hit, we should have had four batters with a lifetime average of .400, and 52 with .350 or higher over 1000 games. Instead, three players have achieved a batting average over .350 and not one has managed .400 lifetime.

    You’re thinking “But Ty Cobb!” right now, and guess what? His lifetime is .367, followed by Hornsby at .358, and Shoeless Joe Jackson brings up the rear at .356 for his short career.

    DiMaggio’s streak does not make sense.

    Most MLB records we consider to be unbreakable are only that way due to changes in the way the game is played. Pitchers no longer play complete games on the regular, nor do they start 60+ games a season. The weirdness of DiMaggio is that his numbers are off the charts for that year, and actually the entirety of MLB history.

    The Hot Hand: A New Approach to an Old “Fallacy”. Notice the quotes? The theory behind the Sloan paper is that the Hot Hand (or streak) is a fallacy because we’ve always been working under bad assumptions. To whit:

    However, prior research hinges on the assumption that player shot selection is random, independent of player-perceived hot or coldness. Said differently, it assumes that players will take the same types of shots, with the same level of defensive coverage, regardless of whether they have just made or missed three shots in a row. We find this assumption difficult to believe – if players have been shooting well, it seems logical that they would begin to attempt more difficult shots and opposing defenses would begin to cover them more tightly. This would potentially counteract the Hot Hand effect.

    To make this more obvious to the conversation at hand, basketball is not baseball and men are not potatoes. Baseball is a rarity in sports. The defense has control of the ball and, barring injury, everyone who plays will have an at-bat (designated hitter rules aside). Basketball has no promise that everyone who plays will have a chance to shoot a basket, or even touch a ball. Baseball hitting streaks come down to one person versus a hundred. The batter versus every pitcher they face. Provided they’re not walked, the batter remains in control of their destiny.

    All of this is quite fanciful. There are hundreds of articles, like Phil Birnbaum’s quest for evidence of the Hot Hand effect and Tangotiger’s Sabremetric blog on the impact of the Zone on streaks. The best we can say is ‘Streaks exist, but generally they do so within the expected norm of percentages.’

    None of this considers the psychological impact of a streak. The longer a streak goes on, the more stress and nerves are put on a player. At the same time, the more ease is given a player, as the expectation of winning becomes a short-term norm.

    Per FiveThirtyEight, the Cleveland Indians had a 53% chance of winning Game 4 of the ALCS on October 18, 2016. The Epstein family gave it much less of a chance. We were right.