Bill James Interview

In a Hey Bill e-mail today, someone found this in The New Historical Abstract, which came out in 2001 (he's talking about Palmeiro's Gold Glove): "If the United States were to use a system like this to elect the President, the absolutely certain result would be that, within a few elections, someone like David Duke, Donald Trump, or Warren Beatty would be elected President...an unconstrained plurality vote gives an opening to someone or something who has a strong appeal to a limited number of people."

be careful what you extemporize theoretically on.

Some research on another venerable bit of old-school wisdom/myth (take your pick): the "stopper.:

http://www.billjamesonline.com/stoppers/

Haven't read this yet, but there's a piece by Rob Neyer up on James's site: "Should Sportswriters Write About Politics?" I take it from the intro that Neyer was let go by whoever was housing his blog (I've forgotten already).

http://www.billjamesonline.com/should_sportswriters_write_about_politics/

i could google but wasn't it fox? i follow neyer on twitter and he seems relatively liberal, so that could make sense

A lot of stuff on the election and polling:

http://buffalonews.com/2016/11/09/bill-james-fears-civil-war-says-time-overhaul-polling-methods/

Yeah, it's the polling that's the problem. (Admit to willfully misreading the headline.)

The two ideas are joined together in the URL, not in the piece. He's talking about why he thinks the polling was so off from a data-guy's viewpoint--not that it had anything to do with the result. I don't know anything about polling models, but I found his remedy interesting (also fits with the way he approaches baseball stats, which is basically not to decide x and y are irrelevant and discard them):

Pollsters say there is a right method, but there is not. Pollsters say you call people on the phone so you know who you're talking to. You know whether they're likely to vote or not. You know whether they voted last time. You know whether they're registered Republican or Democrat because you have the voter list.

Junk it. It doesn't work. Deal with people you don't know. Use 25 different models. Go to a shopping mall and set up a booth where you hand out candy bars to anybody who'll fill out a poll for you. Walk down the street and stop every seventh person you see and ask. Put up buckets with pictures of Trump and Hillary and ask random people to drop a quarter in one or the other and count them up. Do it a hundred different ways and see if you can figure out 900 more. Then you get a broader understanding rather than a narrow understanding.