SABR 38 Day Two: Steroid Statistics, and Does Cleveland Really Rock?
The first presentation I went to today was the analysis of steroid use in baseball by Jeff Swtichenko of Emory University. Switchenko was one of the under-30 members at last night’s meeting.
Emory’s biostatistics department put together a dense, thorough study of the collective effect of steroid abuse on performance in the “steroid era.”
It’s a very complete study, and seems to account for all factors involved.
The conclusions reached by Switchenko and the Emory team is that the average Runs Created per 27 outs for a player implicated in using steroids is about 10% above the average non-steroid using player.
Impressive study, and fascinating results. I’d love to see more data fed into their study, should it become available.
The audience questions were very thought-provoking, and Switchenko’s answers were throrough and authoritative.
All told, it was an excellent presentation, and the highest-scoring one I’ve yet judged.
— — —
Last night, some of my new friends and I set out to find a bar to grab a beer. After finding the first few closed — in the downtown entertainment district, no less — we walked into a place called the “Hairy Buffalo,” just a block from the ballpark.
After having one beer, and being forced to leave due to an early closing time, we walked down to the 4th Street area, which is supposedly the heart of the downtown scene in Cleveland.
We found everything to be closed. No one was around. There wasn’t even a hot dog vendor on a street corner.
Cleveland is the butt of a lot of jokes, and obviously there’s some seed of truth to the jokes. I was very surprised to see that there’s essentially nothing going on around Public Square in downtown Cleveland just after midnight on a Thursday summer night.
I’ve never been to a large city that was deader than Cleveland at night. Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, San Francisco, Omaha, Denver, Phoenix, Orlando, Albuquerque… all cities I’ve been to that are much more lively than Cleveland.
It’s only a couple nights, of course, but so far Cleveland isn’t impressing me much. Nice people, but the city is kind of… underwhelming.
Now I know what this cartoon is getting at…
