Something about randomization or something

December 12th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

So people were linking this NYT Freakonomics blog post yesterday stating the case for sports teams to use randomization to figure out which strategies work best. Seemed cool. Seemed interesting. And, I mean, the guy that wrote it is a professor at Yale. (Yale! Wow!) It makes some sense; the arguement here is certainly not without merit. It also dips into that whole argument that football teams should always go for it on fourth down, which seems absurd but is backed up by a considerable amount of data and anlysis.

But then I read this graph and I think my head spun:

They could even have a randomized trial of randomization — they could randomly assign the pitches for half the at-bats to be called in the traditional way (by the coach or the catcher) and the other half could be called by a random strategy established in advance. It would be a double-blind study, because neither the pitcher nor the hitter would need to know which system called the pitch.

Oh, OK: a double-blind, randomized trial of randomization utilizing random strategy with random players? Sounds like Ozzie Guillen’s coaching strategy. (Grumble, grumble.)