Greg Maddux won his 350th career game over the weekend. I don’t know why people aren’t making more of a big deal about it. Only eight other pitchers have done this. Six of them pitched their last game before 1931, long before live balls, modern bullpens, and five-man rotations. Heck, John McCain wasn’t even alive [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Baseball'
Again With the Not Understanding Baseball
Look: If people want to challenge the premise of comparing baseball to teachers in New York, fine. But if you’re going to make the argument on baseball terms, then have your facts in order. First there was this, then Leo Casey says:
It now appears that “Billyball,” as its advocates called Beane’s statistical approach, doesn’t have [...]
Other Than That, Spot-On
Mike Klonsky takes issue with my recent baseball / education comparison:
But Carey equates Bloomberg’s N.Y. testing mania with 1990’s Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane’s supposed reliance on statistics (“crunching numbers without prejudice”) to pilot his team to the World Series. What a stretch! No team has better individual player stats than the current Yankee team [...]
Don’t Be Questioning My Bill James-itude
Calling my Daily News editorial on the NYC value-added controversy “outlandish and mathematically inept,” Steve Koss says:
True baseball aficionados — those familiar with the work of Bill James, for example — also understand that these now-famous analytical models are almost exclusively multivariate regression models. In other words, baseball general managers like Billy Beane use mathematical [...]
education, baseball, tomato, tomahto
Those who couldn’t get enough of my extended baseball metaphor vis a vis the recent NYC teacher evaluation contretemps can read a new version in the New York Daily News here.
Clemens, Cheater
Since today seems to be non-education-related blog post day, let’s just roll with that a little longer and discuss the fact that Roger Clemens apparently began using steroids in 1998.
If true, Clemens deserves all the scorn currently being heaped on Barry Bonds. They both did exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time in [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.