Possibly stupid softball question

For the last few years I've been on softball teams made up partially of novice softball players---usually foreign student who have never played softball before. At least for their first year, they typically only reach base on errors. Along with these newer players there are usually a few really good players who almost never get out as well as a number of ok players who hit safely somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the time.
The question I have is what is the optimum lineup for such a situation? The rules in the league are that everyone at the game gets to bat. The two approaches I see most often are stacking the front of the order and interspersing the good players among the bad. I don't really have a feel for which works better, so I'm throwing the question out to anyone who may know "the answer" or at least have an idea. I'm wondering if the answer changes depending on the relative numbers of each set of player or if the final answer is that batting order doesn't matter at all.

Manny is Manny

There was an article in the Onion about Manny Ramirez that tipped the scales to me posting about him. Check out this article in the New Yorker which includes such quotes as:

When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’"

And...

After the third such incident, Duquette ventured down into the locker room. “I said, ‘Manny, let me ask you something. I was just wondering why you get back in the batter’s box after ball four.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’"

There's been a lot of talk about Manny's real value. No one contests that he's a great hitter, but his issues playing defense are also well-known. An article in the nyt (registration required) claimed that his defense made him a merely average player. Turns out, the metric was seriously flawed, as it was designed such that Manny was responsible for catching walls that hit twenty feet up the Green Monster (see post 27 - though the importance of that is still in some dispute).

All this being said, Manny signed a huge, long-term contract in 2000, and I think the most exceptional thing is that for every one of those years he's performed exactly as expected the day the contract was signed. Crazy motherfucker and all.

Identity Theft MySpace Style

To make a long story short, a random guy named Joe Anthony started a myspace page about Barack Obama. Initially he and Obama worked together to update the site but when the campaign decided it wanted total control, Anthony asked them for $39,000 in return. Obama's campaign decided to have MySpace intervene instead, and took control of the name (Joe Anthony got the 160,000 friends though). It's really interesting how politics is changing these days with the advent of myspace, youtube and blogging popularity. It reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons in which Lisa starts the Red Dress Press after Mr. Burnes buys all the mass-media outlets :-)

A similar thing happened to my brother, jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. A fan started a MySpace page about Kurt and was responding to people's messages as if he was Kurt. Eventually MySpace intervened there too, and transferred control of the site to Kurt's management team.

When are we really dead?

This is a really interesting article about what happens when a human's heart stops beating. It seems our cells don't really die when the oxygen is cut off, but rather when oxygen is restored to a previously starved cell. This motivates a much different approach to resuscitation than is typically used involving a slow and controlled restoration of oxygen supply and a lowering of the body temperature.

NBA Refereeing Bias

An article in the New York Times about a academic paper written by Justin Wolfers (Wharton School of Business, UPenn) claims that there is a statistically significant bias in foul calls based on the race of the referee and the player. The actual paper has yet to be published, so it's impossible to say if they study was done correctly but experts who have read it (see NYT article) claim that it was. We can't really say until we see the actual paper, and nor can anyone else. That's why the response people have had to the article is so amazing. Here are a few:

Charles Barkley, NBA hall-of-fame player: "There are more black players so obviously there will be more fouls on black players" This is a popular sentiment which I've heard three times in the last 2 hrs on ESPN. Do they really think this Penn Professor hasn't though of this, an accounted for it? I guess it's possbile, but according to the three experts the NYT consulted he did, along with a bunch of other effects that these guys haven't thought of.

Kiki Vandeweghe, NBA analyst for ESPN: [Paraphrasing] "The refs get the majority of the calls right. If this were happening, we would have noticed" He also was not the only person to make this argument, and what a horrible argument it is. The entire point of doing statistical analysis is that "noticing" small statistical effects is really hard. Also, a huge fraction of the calls in basketball could go either way so in this case even "getting it right" is subjective.

Mark Cuban, Owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks: "We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others." Exactly! Thank you Mr. Cuban. The study is either done well, or it isn't. If it's done well, it either shows a statistically significant effect, or it doesn't. That's all there is to it.

The NBA: [paraphrasing] "We have better data that we claim does not corroborate your results, but we won't let you see it so you'll just have to trust us that what you are saying isn't true" I'll take less detailed data and peer-reviewed analysis (which this isn't yet but will be, mind you) over the best data and secret analysis any day.

Greylisting

A few days ago I discovered one of the coolest pieces of technology that I have seen in a long time. It is a powerful technique for dealing with spam e-mail, called greylisting. The basic principle has to do with how an RFC-compliant mailserver is supposed to respond to SMTP error codes. If an e-mail cannot be delivered due to a temporary condition on the receiving mailserver, the receiver can send a "temporary error; try again later" message to the sender, and the sender is supposed to respond when "later" actually arrives.

Greylisting servers employ this simple technique to great effect. When an e-mail arrives at a greylisting mailserver, it records some basic details about the e-mail, then sends an error message back to the sender saying that the destination address isn't available. "But try again in 5 minutes, okay?" Of course, most spam mailservers don't stick around for this kind of nonsense; they just go on to the next addresses they have in their list. But a normal, RFC-compliant mailserver will try again in five minutes, and at that point the graylisting server will let the e-mail through. The result? A nearly total elimination of spam e-mails.

Users of the postfix mailserver can use a project called postgrey. I installed postgrey a few days ago. Since I installed it, I haven't gotten a single spam e-mail. Go postgrey!

Alas, this great technology does have some negative effects, too. I am sad to say that I no longer hear from my harem of Russian girlfriends. However, since the flow of "male enhancement" drugs has also stopped, it's probably all for the best.

Seriously though, there are a few mailservers out there that aren't RFC-compliant when it comes to this behavior, so it is possible that one of your friends will suddenly get bounced e-mails from you with strange 45x errors. It is pretty unlikely though; the vast majority of mailservers in use are good about handling these errors properly.

I'm a female

So I've been reading this blog since it's inception and have been enjoying it thoroughly. Thank you to all you contributors have have made each day a little less boring and a little more enlightening.

But I've been rather intimidated to actually post anything myself in fear of sounding "dumb".

Now I'm inspired...by none other than gender identity. I read this article a few days ago and found it truly fascinating. If you know me, you know that I'm very interested in the concepts of race and culture. I also sometimes find myself interested in the concept of gender. I'm beginning to think the common trend between these issues (and education, my field of work) is that of self-identity and human development.

Just for fun, I'll add a funny story to that....The Spanish teacher at my school found out last week that one of her students, Courtney, is a girl. Courtney, being a non-Spanish name, did not clue her in, and the student had short hair and always dressed in baggy t-shirts and jeans, so the teacher always referred to Courtney as a boy. School started in September. I wonder if Courtney would be offended if she knew...