I don’t have a nice, unified theme for this post, but I was in the mood to write something, so I wrote something. Here’s an aggregation of some cool things I read this week and thoughts prompted therefrom.
Football Luck
Read the post (it’s not long) and then come back.
This is a pretty cool concept from the NFL quantitative operations department and well-executed by Tom Bliss. Luck obviously plays a large role in sports, and football is no exception. There’s more luck inherent to football than these four categories, but these are prime categories to put under the “luck” category (as anyone watching Thursday Night Football’s travesty of an offensive performance can attest) and the outcome aligns well with what one might expect based on priors, film, and other (more broadly) predictive metrics from this season.
If we take Daniel Kahneman’s favorite equation—success equals talent plus luck—and apply it in this case, we see that my beloved New York Giants are about a four-win talent team, which is certainly more accurate than their current six wins. Bill Parcells and his “you are what your record says you are” might disagree, but Parcells was head coach for more teams than the Giants have healthy wide receivers, so we’ll go with Kahneman in this case. The Giants, thankfully, seem to be thinkin fast and building slow.
Gordon Lightfoot, a Twitter Thread
Twitter, long reputed as an unholy cesspit, is somehow being flushed further down the toilet of social media, so it was nice to see a really good thread yesterday:
If you reach nearly to the bottom of the thread, you see this line: “There’s no one size fits all approach. We have to play it by ear and make it up as we go along and it’s probably going to be messy at times.” Things are messy! Twitter is really messy right now! But just because something’s messy doesn’t mean we should give up on it (I’m talking more about life than Twitter here). Difficult, messy things are worth doing if they lead to something greater, especially something more worthwhile for people beyond one’s self. Twitter is difficult and messy and can be extremely problematic at times (like now). But there are some nice things that come out of it, and that’s worth fighting for.
Frederick Douglass Hit Dingers
(Main image supplied to The Lion of Anacostia from the Anacostia Community Museum)
I’m reading Eric Foner’s abridged Reconstruction this week, which I should’ve read in college, but instead focused on primary sources (yeah, let’s say that). Very worth a read. I wrote a paper about the rise of baseball in Reconstruction, and how it was more symptomatic of the period’s struggles and flaws than a successful outpouring of fraternal sportsmanship. One of the most interesting notes I found while researching was that Frederick Douglass’ son Charles, who worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, was the president and second baseman of the city’s Mutual Base Ball Club. Frederick Douglass—a big baseball fan in general and in particular—was elected as an honorary member in 1870, which, frankly, I think, is pretty awesome.
You can read more about Reconstruction baseball in this great piece on the history of Black Washington D.C. baseball from Rhiannon Walker at Andscape here.
Josiah Cohen 
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