Thursday, December 8, 2011

Not Exactly Moneyball

The recent movie Moneyball illustrates the potential of "playing the numbers" to create a winning season of baseball by putting together a team of players whose individual performance records would predict their likelihood of producing hits and runs. Moreover, the managers were able to establish a dollar cost for every run they needed, according the salaries of the players they hired.

Strikes One and Two

First, there's no money in Kardball (unless you have figured out a way to gamble on it).

Second, no standard notion of individual Kardball player talent has yet been established. For a game that's less than two years old, the value of experience is even hard to recognize ... so far.

Inside Ball

Fortunately, the cards themselves have their own natural tendencies. In any given Kardball scenario, those tendencies should be able to predict, with some statistical regularity, the possible outcomes for each card that a player could choose to pitch or to bat. The managers in Moneyball used a similar logic in creating their starting lineup for each game.

150 Years From Now

For the time being, all we really have are some rough-and-ready theoretical values for pitch strength and hit strength. What we really need is a thorough analysis of decades of Kardball records, as was done by baseball scholar Bill James whose work was referenced in Moneyball. Or in the short term, we could use a doctoral thesis in mathematics to examine the validity of our Kardball intuitions and truisms like "anything can hit a Queen."

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