1. Jeff Miron is blogging again
2. Bob Chitester, the guy behind "Free to Choose," the TV show
3. The shadow price of a home run
4. Not many editors favor triple blind review, or for that matter sextuple blind review
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Do you really need to do a scientific research to know that homerun hitters strike out more?
Reggie Jackson once said to a worried Tony Armas, for a while record holder for stikeouts in a season, when they see your home runs the y wont care about your missed swings.43 homeruns , 185 so
And he does not have a phd.
Yes, those of us who are interested in sabermetric research really do need scientific research on this topic. While it may be obvious that HR hitters strike out more, this paper provides an estimate of the magnitude of that tradeoff.
And who cares if he doesn’t have a PhD? Interesting work is interesting work.
Maybe he has been surpassed, but it is my memory that as of not too long
ago, Babe Ruth was tops in having been struck out the most.
Regarding the journal refereeing process, well, one problem with triple
blind is that the editor might send the paper to one of the authors.
Ooops! At a minimum, one would need some kind of screen for that
particular biasing snafu. Furthermore, well-informed and reasonably
fair editors, will, as I have previously argued on this blog, attempt
to send papers to people with diverse views and approaches. Of course
this will simply not occur at all except by accident with triple blind.
Regarding going all the way to sextupble blind, to some degree we are
heading in that direction anyway. After all, most papers are up on
websites somewhere. Given the lags in publication time in economics
(not as bad in most hard sciences), good papers start getting cited
before they ever get published. One can simply look at aggregate
citation rates in all papers anywhere as a measure, and something
like that happens anyway.
BTW, there are a couple of enormously influential papers that either
never got published, or were published in revised forms long after
their main impact hit. One example is the paper on the BDS statistic,
now a standby in the nonlinear econometrics tool box. It initially
appeared in 1986 as a working paper. Almost immediately it was a hit,
and people starting using the method and citing the paper. It got
bogged down at Econometrica over baloney, and only appeared nearly
a decade later in revised form with an additional author in the
Journal of Applied Econometrics, with having had problems getting
pubbed in the interim because, as more than one editor put it to
the authors, “everybody already knows this result and is using it.”
On the flip side of that Cyril, Ruth also has one of the highest HR rates of any player in baseball history (see comparions below). And while he did strike out a lot, he also retains one of the highest career batting averages of any player at .340. No other power hitter even comes close.
For comparison (at bats per HR):
Mark McGwire: 10.6
Babe Ruth: 11.75 (If you discount his at bats during his first 5 seasons when he was a pitcher, it drops to 11).
Barry Bonds: 13
Manny Ramirez: 14
Ken Griffey Jr: 14.75
Mickey Mantle: 15
Henry Aaron: 16.5
Reggie Jackson: 17.5
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