JotCast | Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat - 2/3/20

Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat - 2/3/20

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Dan Szymborski

2:45

Do I get to start with my money? I'd pay someone to Pythonate it as I go.

Adam

2:45

How many years of World Series matchups could you rattle off from memory, before you got one wrong or blanked?

Dan Szymborski

2:45

OK, doing this now

2:46

OK, one of you stop me when I get one wrong

cool

1

Nats/STros

Red Sox Dodgers

Astros Dodgers

2:47

Indians Cubs

Royals Mets

Giants Royals

Red Sox Cards

Giants Tigers

Cardinals Rangers

Giants Rangers

uhhh

Phillies Rays?

no, there's a Yankees Phillies in there

I can't remember if the Rays or Yankees year was first now

Price

2:48

wrong. yankees phillies in 09, not rays

Dan Szymborski

2:48

Bah, guessed wrong.

TP

2:48

Tell us a story about the origins of ZiPS. Is there a ZiPS 101 we could read?

Dan Szymborski

2:48

I've done the story so many times on the radio/print that I can recite it almost identical wording!

2:49

Back in the mid-late 90s, Chris Dial and I used to talk about how we could make a very basic projection system that would perform as well as anything floating around at the time.

Kind of what Tango did later with marcel

But we never did it because of laziness

But I was blogging for BTF and I liked DMB projection disks, so I decided to revisit, with something more complicated

Nobody at the time was really using DIPS stuff in projections so I wanted to incorporate some of Voros's research

2:50

which is why I wanted it to rhyme with DIPS

2:51

I started out with SIPS but I thought it sounded like a hipster juice box restaurant and ZIPS sounded like a shitty shoe for five year olds, so I went with ZiPs because I liked CHiPs as a kid. But I accidentally wrote it as ZiPS the first time and Jay picked it up in his blog at the time so I just left it at that

2:52

Jay was writing at Futility Infielder at the time.

2:53

And was upsettingly moustacheless.

Oil of Zolay

2:54

Thanks for inspiring my new chat name.

Morbo

2:54

DONT BELIEVE HIM! DAN IS LYING! ZIPS really started when Dan was bitten by a non-radioactive spider and had to spend 2 months in bed due to necrosis of his left abdominal muscle and had nothing better to do than feed Excel 6000 player seasons of data and what popped out the other end. FYI the s secretly stands for spider

Adam

2:54

Who was your favorite baseball player when you were 5 years old?

Dan Szymborski

2:55

Cal Ripken

Kevin

2:55

Follow-up: Managerial decisions outside the prevue of ZIPS: Is that because the modeling would be too difficult to actualize, because the variance is so small, because you would lack relevant information without extensive organization interviews/modeling, all the above?

Dan Szymborski

2:55

I think there's too much noise

Sox Fan

2:55

Do you do any other kind of projection systems besides baseball? I think the stuff 538 does in terms of modeling is fascinating since they cross over the spectrum so much

Dan Szymborski

2:55

I actually have quite advanced NFL/NBA stuff that is still in very very extensive testing

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