Recently I purchased the book Moneyball . There has been a lot of buzz about this book among baseball fans this year. I will read it as soon as I have finished Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” Today, as I was reading the blog, Marginal Revolution written by GMU Economics Professor Tyler Cowen (whose office is just down the hall from mine) and Alex Tabarrok (whose office is across the hall from mine), I noticed that Cowen had something interesting to say about Moneyball. Cowen writes that “Moneyball, which pretends to be about baseball but is in fact a profound meditation on behavioral economics, management science, and how hard it is to measure value. An obvious question: if it is so hard to measure the performance of first basemen, when there is a slew of publicly available statistics, how about the rest of the economy?” Check out Marginal Revolution for other interesting insights.

I love October because it’s time for the baseball playoffs. Tim Kurkjian on ESPN makes the standard argument about the Yankees–that their bullpen is suspect. He writes:

How reliable is the Yankee bullpen?
It is more flawed than any time during this eight-year run by the Bombers. Mariano Rivera, the best closer in postseason history, is again at his best. His cutter has been unhittable recently. Getting to him is the problem. Jeff Nelson hasn’t been his usual dominant self. The left-handers (Chris Hammond, Gabe White) are not Mike Stanton in his prime. It’s no longer a six-inning game when you play the Yankees. So, they need to get more from their rotation, which includes two 40-year-olds, Roger Clemens and David Wells. Look for Jose Contreras to play a major role somehow in this postseason. His stuff is marvelous; he can start, he can pitch in relief, and maybe he can be the bridge to Rivera.

But is the Yankee’s bullpen really a problem now? Their bullpen struggled early in the year and into the middle of the season, but they have been pretty good in the second half of August and all of September. The bullpen lost 4 games and the other 5 games the Yankees lost in September were lost by the starters. The bullpen’s ERA in games where the bullpen got the loss was only 3.07! If you throw out 2 earn runs attributed to Jeff Weaver (who likely will not pitch in the postseason), the bullpen’s ERA in those games is a mere 1.84!

If you look at games in August, the Yankees lost 12 games in August. Only 5 of the losses, however, are attributable to the bullpen and 2 of them are blown saves by Mariano (and these were Mariano’s losses during the season). Furthermore, after August 13th, the Yankees lost of total of 14 games, but the bullpen only got the loss in 4 of them. It would take more time than I have to fully analyze the numbers, but at first blush, the Yankees got their bullpen woes taken care of and they should be tougher than people expect going into the post season.

Here’s my first post. I finally decided to get serious about getting Movable Type to work. It took me a couple hours, but it works. The time isn’t correct, but I’m working on it.

Glimpses into the mind of a leftist is always interesting. Here’s a real treat, “The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus” by that erudite among erudites, Al Franken. I won’t dignify the lame arguments in the cartoon with a rebuttal–you are smart enough to do that for yourself.