by rburgh » Mon Oct 10, 2011 6:59 pm
I had the original issue computer game. Some brave soul observed that the player stats were coming amazingly close to the real-life numbers, so he took it upon himself to do a little experiment. He took a scrub from that season, made no changes to the play results on his card with the card editor, but juiced up his stat line.
Lo and behold, the guy started hitting like crazy. Then all hell broke loose.
I guess you could perform the same experiment with the current computer game. I doubt you would get the same result. I'm not going to waste my time trying.
As far as "normalization" goes, we get a lot of posts on the order of, "so-and-so is hitting .145 after 42 games, I hope normalization kicks in." Or "Bonds hit 60 HR in the first 81 games."
But in all of the threads on this board, has anyone EVER posted something on the order of "Bonds had a first half where he pretty much did as expected, but he hit 60 HR in the second half."? Or, "so-and-so had a pretty normal first half of the season, but he hit .175 in the 2nd half."?
I thought not.
Why? Because we don't notice players when they are pretty much doing as we expect. So if Barry DID have a season where he hit 37 HR in the first 81 games and ended with 97, it's likely we wouldn't remember that he hit 60 in the 2nd half.
What is thought about as "normalization" is merely the extreme unlikelihood of a random number that generated 350 random numbers more than a couple of standard deviations away from a normal distribution to then turn around and do the same thing in the same direction with its next 350 random numbers.
I will waste my time performing the following experiment with Barry. I'm going to run 50 seasons where I log his stats at the halfway point and at season's end. I'll report back to you when I'm done. It probably won't happen soon.