With the 10th overall pick in yesterday's NBA draft, the LA Lakers selected Andrew Bynum, a 17-year-old high school player.

I found his personal website, thanks to Dan The Man. [Edit: Apparently he's taken down his website.]

Some of my favorite parts of his profile:

Question: Have you ever... in the last 24 hours... did something u regret?
His answer: kissed sumones gurl

Q: Are you a moron?
A: sumtimez

Q: What do you want to be when you Grow Up?
A: NBA BALLA/ENTRAPENOUR

Q: Do you want to go to College?
A: OF COURSE

The quote of the day comes from TNT analyst Charles Barkley during the 2001 NBA Draft. The Spurs had just drafted Tony Parker in the first round.

"I don't know that much about him, but they got him in the first round, so he must be a good player."

Great analysis, Charles.

(This was stolen from the Sports Guy.)

Apparently, I messed up our impersonation of Mount Rushmore... I should be looking at the camera rather than off to the side.

Thanks Allen, for today's picture:



Anyone want to write a caption for this?

Both of my roommates will be out of town this weekend.

Allen begins his week-long vacation in Costa Rica on Friday while Basile is in Vegas for the weekend.

Meanwhile, I'll probably be home alone in an empty apartment, checking on my fantasy baseball teams. Haha...

The 2 best-selling TV show DVDs in history:

1) Chappelle's Show, Season 1
2) Family Guy, Seasons 1 & 2

I learned this while reading an article about the upcoming Family Guy DVD movie coming out in late September.

After Robert Horry jumped from 10 feet away to make this unbelievable dunk, this is what Slum Dave said:

"If Robert Horry makes the game-winning shot tonight, I'm gonna punch myself in the face."

15 minutes later, I was able to say that I've seen someone punch himself in the face...

Last time, I wrote about the weak correlation between ERA and a pitcher's W-L record. To illustrate this further, I decided to compare this correlation with some other correlations.

IP/GS is innings per start, K/GS is strikeouts per start, and WHIP is baserunners per inning.

Correlations With ERA
Group	Winning %	IP/GS	K/GS	WHIP
All Pitchers	-0.36	-0.62	-0.60	0.81
3.50+ ERA	-0.13	-0.51	-0.32	0.67

Relative to these other stats, winning percentage has a weak correlation with ERA.

Here's another table, similar to the one in my previous post.

ERA	Winning %	IP/GS	K/GS	WHIP
0.00 - 3.00	0.627	6.8	7.4	1.05
3.00 - 3.50	0.640	6.6	5.1	1.20
3.50 - 4.00	0.528	6.4	4.9	1.29
4.00 - 4.50	0.555	6.4	4.1	1.35
4.50 - 5.00	0.511	6.2	3.8	1.40
5.00 - 5.50	0.495	5.8	3.7	1.49
5.50+	0.500	5.8	4.0	1.56

Look at the trends. IP/GS, K/GS, and WHIP all have consistent increases or decreases when compared to ERA (except for the last K/GS row). Winning percentage clearly doesn't.

How well does a pitcher’s W-L record indicate his value?

It’s obvious to most people that it doesn’t do a very good job at all, but I decided to look at some data to support that claim.

To do this, I looked at the 76 pitchers who had 30 or more starts in 2004. I compared their W-L record to their ERA. While ERA is not the best indicator of a pitcher’s ability, it does have the advantage of being well-known and understood.

The correlation coefficient for these pitchers was -0.36, which means that when a pitcher’s ERA goes down, his winning percentage can be expected to increase at a moderate rate.

But by breaking these pitchers into bins, I noticed that the data trends are really inconsistent. In particular, look at the winning percentages below.

ERA	# Pitchers	AVG(W)	AVG(L)	Winning %
0.00 - 3.00	6	15.7	9.3	0.627
3.00 - 3.50	10	14.6	8.2	0.640
3.50 - 4.00	11	12.0	10.8	0.528
4.00 - 4.50	18	13.0	10.4	0.555
4.50 - 5.00	18	11.8	11.3	0.511
5.00 - 5.50	7	11.8	12.1	0.495
5.50+	6	11.9	12.0	0.500

The winning percentages trend downward, but it goes up, down, up, down, down, and then up. Not exactly a smooth line.

Looking at this table further, W-L record seems to do a good job of differentiating between a pitcher who has an ERA above 3.50 and another with an ERA below 3.50. But it does very little to distinguish between a pitcher with a 3.50 ERA and one with a 5.50 ERA.

In fact, if we remove the first 2 bins (great pitchers) and just look at the 60 pitchers with an ERA above 3.50, the correlation coefficient shrinks in magnitude to -0.13, which is clearly weak.

All of which says that a pitcher’s teammates (offense and bullpen) have a tremendous influence on his W-L record. But everyone except John Kruk already knows this...

My favorite fantasy baseball statistical categories:

1) OBP- A hitter’s ability to get on base is the most important skill he has.
2) WHIP- Guess what? This is a reasonable approximation for opponents’ OBP.
3) HR- Chicks dig the long ball, and so does everyone else. Power is the second most important skill for a hitter to have.
4) K- The ability to strike batters out is a very important skill for a pitcher to possess.
5) SLG- While OBP tells us how often a hitter reaches base, SLG tells us his ability to drive runners home.

5 common fantasy baseball statistical categories that I could do without:

1) W- A pitcher does not control how good his team’s offense or bullpen is.
2) RBI- Vinny Castilla led the league in RBI last year. What does that tell us? That he hit cleanup on the Colorado Rockies.
3) R- A player's ability to score runs is not only affected by his teammates after him in the lineup, but also by the ones before him. (If they get on first base often, a player can get on base and potentially score runs just by hitting into force outs.)
4) SV- Danny Graves was on a record-setting pace for saves last year. This year? He was cut from his team.
5) ERA- As much as people seem to like ERA, it has plenty of problems. The fact that a homerun can sometimes be an unearned run is just ridiculous. I wish opponents' SLG could be used in Yahoo leagues. It’d be a better complement to opponents' OBP (WHIP).

And while I'm doing some wishful thinking, it'd be great if Yahoo had Net Steals (SB - 2*CS) as a category.

Congratulations to Stephen and Mannam on their engagement.

Stephen's trick to avoid having your girlfriend think you're proposing to her:
Wear a sweatshirt and shorts!
She'll never think you'd propose to her in that outfit...

Friday's pitching line from Zack Greinke:
4.1 IP
11 ER
17 baserunners allowed
9 XBH allowed
22.85 ERA
3.92 WHIP

In 29 plate appearances, the Diamondbacks hit .556/ .586/ 1.148 (AVG/OBP/SLG) off Greinke.

Aside #1: In 2 plate appearances, Greinke hit .500/ .500/ 2.000 as he got his first major league hit with a 5th inning homerun.

Anyway, Greinke probably had a 99.9% chance of getting tagged with the loss. Since he plays for the 2005 Kansas City Royals, it was probably closer to 99.99%.

But believe it or not, the Royals came back from an 8th inning, 11-3 deficit. They tied the game in the 9th, but they're still the Royals, so they lost 12-11 on a walk-off homerun served up by Royal closer Mike MacDougal.

Aside #2: If this subconsciously seems familiar to you, here's why:

The Oakland A's had a 20 game winning streak in 2002. During their 20th consecutive win, the Royals trailed the A's 11-0, only to come back and tie the game in the 9th.

The Royals lost 12-11 on a walk-off homerun served up by Royal closer Jason Grimsley.

Weird, huh?

There's this new British guy at our company. Everytime we have a meeting with him, we joke around and say we need a translator.

One time, we were talking about characteristics. For short, we call these "chars", pronounced CARES. (Since that's what the first syllable of characteristic sounds like.)

At the very end of the hour-long meeting, he asked, "Excuse me, what are CARES?" When we said that's our abbreviation for characteristics, he was enlightened.

Apparently in Britain they pronounce it CHARS (as in char-broiled).

Makes sense, but whenever I hear him talk, I can't help but think about the British version of The Office.

How much information does Allen Han need to identify a movie?

A screenshot?
A sentence of dialogue?
One song of the soundtrack?

Apparently he doesn't even need any of that.

We were flipping through channels the other day, and noticed TBS was playing the very start of a movie. As the introductory movie studio logo showed up, Basile and I asked Allen which movie it was.

Within a few seconds, he correctly stated the correct movie title, Blue Crush.

This despite the fact that the screen was still showing the movie studio logo.
And that there was no dialogue.
And that the first song of the soundtrack had been playing for all of 5 seconds.

Amazing.

(And no, he didn't just watch the movie or otherwise know it would be playing.)

Alright, time for a normal picture:

Here's the Eastbay Thursday small group.
Back row, from left to right: Basile, Dentist Dave, me, Joann, Ben, and Allen.
Front row: Jane Kang, her sister Susanna, Eun-Sook, Connie, Jamie, and Sarah.



Pulled this off Allen's new picture site, which has lots of updated photos.

Christina, Allen, Georgia Dave, and Basile prepare for an intense competition to see who has the highest vertical leap. Ready... set...



...go!



Apparently, there was glue on the bottom of Christina, Allen, and Georgia Dave's shoes. Basile is the clear champion, despite wearing flip-flops to the competition.

I had a staring contest with Dentist Dave the other day. Now I'm not very good...


...but this is what I was going up against.