Deus Ex and the illusion of choice

Deus Ex: Human Revolutions is a great game.

Stealth and straight-forward violence are both viable options throughout the vast majority of the game, with good tradeoffs for both strategies; the levels are well-designed, at times intuitive and occasionally very difficult. Patience and planning are rewarded, the inventory and skill systems work well, with none of the skills feeling overpowered or—except perhaps for hacking—totally necessary. The atmosphere is good, the characters both realistic and consistent, and the environments can be quite beautiful. The only thing anyone seems to have a problem with are the boss fights.

Defense and the concept of diminishing returns

In basketball, though it isn’t discussed particularly often (or wasn’t until talents were taken to south beach) there are diminishing returns on offense skill. There are a limited number of minutes and shots per team, and while more good offensive players will tend to increase the general efficiency of their teammates, there is a theoretical limit to how much each additional offensive upgrade will make the team better.[1]

The same is true in hockey and football, though probably to a lesser extent in the hockey than in basketball. In baseball, nine players have to hit (whereas in the extreme basketball case, a Wilt/AI/Kobe/Carmelo can shoot the ball 90% of time while his team watches for a quarter or more), so, while you will see some diminishing returns if you hit an amazing hitter ninth in the order, the fact that the ninth player is generating fewer outs will actually improve the total offensive output (a team with nine .400 OBP guys will get 2-3 more baserunners and trips to the plate per game than a team with nine .300 OBP hitters, which gives them a better chance to score more runs).[2] In hockey, I would assume it would take much longer to see diminishing returns since so there are so many more players involved. If you have three A+ centers, while the other team has only one, you will have a distinct advantage because every team has to play at least three centers in every game.

A quick thought: parallels between esports and physical ones

I’ve watched a lot of esports in the last week or so, mostly focusing on the Gamescom League of Legends tournament (in which CLG beat out TSM in the finals match). Like any sport, the matches are streamed live with commentary, and (unlike most sports) the full replays can be found online after the fact.[1] The matches that I’ve watched—especially in comparison the baseball that dominates my current sports-watching time—left me with some interesting conclusions, mostly about technology.

First, camera angles, instant replay/slow-motion, and HD are really the greatest things ever. You cannot stress enough how much of a difference there is between an HD hockey game and one that is poorly broadcast. In the same vein, I’ve generally been opting for non-HD streaming (due to a mediocre internet connection) which generally works fine. Problems generally arise, however, in situations when there’s a lot of “clutter”—think about a pile of bodies in the corner in hockey—in which details, especially with the fast pace of the game, become nearly impossible for me (or, frequently, the announcers) to make out. HD would probably help for those moments, and slow-motion replays of team fights would be incredible.

As you camera angles, watching League is somewhat like watching a football game where you have one overhead camera that moves; it doesn’t matter how good the cameraperson is (and I found that the ones at Gamescom were generally very good), you’re going to end up missing a fair amount of the action regardless. I suppose a better analogy would be a soccer game in which there were three balls for the first half of the game: as long as you can only focus on one ball, you’re going to miss some incredible action in other parts of the field. Again, an instant replay feature would be great, especially if there was a slow-motion aspect, though doing that in a game like League—which doesn’t pause until it ends—would be difficult.

Second, announcers can add to the game or they can be distracting and misleading. I would say that this is a major problem in baseball—though that is just an opinion—and stems mostly from the fact that there is so much time between pitches, and so many strikeouts, and so many walks, that play-by-play has really been replaced by color commenting, which is generally much less interesting. At Gamescom, the announcers were interesting and injected information about strategy while the game was going on, like a good pair of hockey play-by-play callers. Watching with the sound off would taken away from the experience.

Third, and I think this is true across the board in sports, watching League is simply not going to be interesting without a background knowledge of what is going on. The finals match at Gamescom included some truly excellent uses of flash, a nice turret dive or two, a couple very good ganks, interesting banning strategy, and exemplary last-hitting and dragon coordination. Of course, if you don’t know what any of that means, you’re going to find the game much less interesting, in part because you won’t appreciate the level of difficulty involved (for this reason, I found watching a Rumble much less interesting than watching a Nidalee or Cho’Gath. I have never played Rumble, have no idea what his abilities do, and wasn’t really entranced by his positioning strategies). This is why I don’t particularly enjoy football: I simply don’t understand pro offensive packages or defensive strategies, and so while I can enjoy a nice pass or a particularly inspiring run, most of the game is much less interesting.[2]

And finally, tournament League, like most other professional sports, appears to be played and watched primarily by men. I think there’s a point here, but I don’t really know what it is.

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[1] Actually, like many sports, tournament-style League has a five or ten or twenty second delay, depending on who you talk to. This is to prevent “ghosting”—basically, you don’t want a guy in the audience to shout “lookout, he’s behind the door” and actually prevent the person from going through the door.

[2] I’m also the only person I know who gets excited about good defensive positioning on hockey plays. 

Concussions and NHL Discipline

I think there are two different types of unwritten rules in sports. There are the rules that players follow, which I assume begins with something like: “don’t throw your teammate under a bus.” Then there are the rules that we, as watchers and commentators, have, which start with something along the lines of “players should play hard” and “players should care about rivalries” and includes “players should be approachable and likeable but also tough and, when appropriate, cruel.”

As is often pointed out, the rules we want players to follow aren’t always the unwritten rules that they do follow (cut to a patented Bill Simmons joke about Johnny Damon nodding in the corner). But I think there’s one that both players and fans tend to agree on: players shouldn’t be blamed for one injury. There’s a line, of course: players who refuse to play through any pain, players who don’t seem to care so long as they’re receiving their paycheck, players who just want a day off—these players are fair game, according to the unwritten rules, but we’re not allowed to lambaste someone for having a bone broken. We generally assume that they would have liked to avoid that outcome as much as anyone.

This is especially true with what you might call “robber” injuries. You know what I’m talking about—Orr’s knees, Koufax’s elbow, Bo’s hip. These are the most extreme examples, maybe, injuries that quite possibly stole GOAT-level players from us, but there are dozens of others of players who took a freak hit (Neely), who were overworked (Bird), or whose bodies just broke down early (Walton). We don’t blame these players for having to end it too soon; instead, we regret it, and curse the sports gods for their fickle nature, and start muttering to ourselves whenever a baseball player breaks a wrist, a basketball player blows an ACL, or a hockey player gets a concussion.[1]

Expanding baseball's playoffs

Today, Joe Posnanski (who you might suspect I have a lot of respect for, at least when it comes to baseball reporting, and you would be correct) wrote about what seems like an inevitable shift towards more teams in the playoffs. It’s a horn that’s been tooted a lot recently, mostly on ESPN, where Jason Stark and Steve Berthiaume in particular have taken to the idea as if it has no possible downsides. But it has died down recently, as reports surface that there will definitely not be an extra team this year and possibly won’t be next year either. So while the subject was perhaps the main one that I began this blog wanting to cover, it has slipped from my mind of late.[1]

In any case, Posnanski concluded that it probably isn’t as much of a boon as everyone makes it out to be, but that we’ll get used to it. I’d go farther on that first point—probably a lot farther—but Posnanski’s stance seems like the sole voice of reason so far, the one person who questions whether gunning the engine while approaching a curve is really the right course of action (ok… so that analogy was a stretch). In fairness, Jonah Keri at Grantland has expressed reservations in the past (I believe it was in a podcast with Simmons), and GM’s and players—at least according to what Stark reports—are not necessarily as on board than commentators seem to be.

Kindle, iPad, and the cloud

For anyone who has talked to me about it since I got my iPad, the part of it that I find most awesome is the Kindle app. To be honest, I basically got an iPad because I wanted a Kindle + other functions in case I used those too. And Kindle has delivered. They don't have the selection that I would like, and some of the books--especially poetry--are the type of shoddy post-copyright books that make me hate cheap publishers. Still, overall, a great experience, both on the iPad and on the computer (where my notes from the iPad show up automatically as long as I'm connected to the internet on both! Coolest thing ever!).

Which is why I was suspicious recently when Amazon announced the "cloud" reader. The cloud reader, which runs in Chrome and Safari instead of as an app, and which can be used offline, is clearly meant to replace the iPad app (and possibly the computer program as well). I've test-driven it a little, and it is clearly very well produced (i.e. Amazon has been wanting to get out of the iTunes app store for awhile). I'm as anti-iTunes as anyone, and really would hate that I cannot get third party applications if I used my iPad for anything but as an e-reader, so I generally support Amazon finding a go-round of Apple's annoying lack of flash and arm-and-a-leg cuts off the top through the app store. But so far, the cloud reader just doesn't have the features of the dedicated program: in Chrome, highlighting and copying text with the mouse does not work, which makes note-taking tedious at best (the bookmark system has never worked well without dedicated/set pages); nor do the pages "flip" or even scroll. Instead, one block of text replaces another, which is, at least to me, quite disconcerting.

Hopefully all these things will be resolved, especially if Amazon intends to discontinue service for the pc/mac Kindle application. I'm happy to fight the war against closed computing systems too, so long as the open ones are high-quality. One could also hope that they'll come around on at least a set page option, because, well, the more options the better.

Video games and free to play

Free to play video games haven’t been around for a long time; the genre began with “indie” massively multiplayer games. Typically browser-based, cartoonish, and lacking in serious graphical “punch,” these games would allow anyone to join and play; but if you wanted to get the coolest items, face the most intense bad guys, or just advance more quickly, you had to spend cash. I have absolutely no idea how well these games did for their creators. I’d guess the better ones did decently, but no major developers (read: the kind with stockholders) jumped onto the idea—there were online games that were free to play, but most of these you still had to purchase a physical disk for, and none of them had in-game systems that funneled cash to developers.

In retrospect, free to play looks like the type of innovation that would lead to massive success. Executives couldn’t see how the model would work, and, to be fair, there needs to be a very careful balancing act between making micro-purchases “worthwhile” to consumers and not alienating those players who don’t want to spend the money. However, making a game free to download, install, and play solves the major problem of the computer gaming in the last decade, piracy, and vastly expands the potential audience for a game.[1]

The question has always been whether that expanded base was going to generate enough money to justify not having every person pay $30-50 upfront. So far, the answer has been a resounding yes—so long, of course, as the game in question is a quality product. The most prominent free to play game, League of Legends, probably the best current DotA successor, recently announced that it was going to hold a tournament with a final cash prize of one million dollars. Two months ago, Valve (who are, incidentally, currently developing DotA 2) made their incredibly successful Team Fortress 2 free to download and play.

Both of these games are only playable online. And so far, both have combined massive player bases with affordable and attractive purchasables, which seems to be a formula for success. The question is whether other games can mimic this success. Could a monolith like WoW, with its focus on status symbols that have been gained through hours days weeks of tireless farming succeed if those symbols could be purchased? The model will never work for single-player games, but could we perhaps see more “episodic” games appear, in which players pay small entry fees to play short or small games that have frequent content updates?

Another question is how such games will succeed once the market it more crowded. Currently, LoL and TF2 offer the best (and cheapest) their genre has to offer. But LoL’s most well-known competitor, Heroes of Newerth, recently went free to play, and while Valve will not discuss their pricing plans for DotA 2, a free to play system would make sense, given their already established ability to distribute and promote through Steam. When compared to a games with traditional pricing structures like WoW or Call of Duty, we really don’t have any idea how LoL’s players translate into money for Riot (though I’m sure Riot has this information); likely only a small percentage of players make purchases—and it is unclear whether those players will switch (depriving Riot of their fund source) if a game of similar type and quality were released. What I’m questioning here is whether, without the initial buy-in required in a traditional purchasing structure, games will be able to pay for their development in a market in which players have options. Frankly, as of yet, we just don’t know.

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[1] It is telling, I think, that the most monolithic of game producers—EA Games, and their divisions, including EA Sports—are the ones who have fought the losing battle with piracy the hardest. As early as five years ago, EA Sports used piracy as an excuse for not putting effort into porting their products from the consoles to the PC (I bet any psychologist or marketing exec could tell you that this is not the right strategy). In contrast, companies that either satisfy their fan bases (see Bethesda, BioWare) or have serious disadvantages to piracy built in to the game structure (Blizzard and the inability to play multiplayer-oriented games offline) have seemed to be much more successful at combating a problem. 

Random thought: Free Steve Nash

Watching Steve Nash--the symbol of all that is good and holy in a basketball offense--play with Vince Carter on the Suns was possibly the worst part of last year's wonderful basketball season. (Other contenders: Z-Bo not making the finals, and thus not forcing announcers of nationally televised games to uncomfortably discuss the fact that he needed to appear in a court that month, not just on one; the 24-stretch where every mention of basketball on a sports show required showing Rondo's injury; the realization that Tim Duncan can no longer single-handedly defend two good big men by himself; Steve Nash not making the playoffs.)

The one thing we can hope for is that the least alike pairing in the NBA (Nash works hard, passes first, rises to the moment, and once played with one eye swollen shut; Carter doesn't, doesn't, doesn't, and falls down if you blow on him) will be split up once Suns ownership realizes that this team isn't going anywhere. Ideally, they would trade Nash to a contender, but I would settle for somehow getting rid of Vince Carter, so that I was at least able to root for an underdog team with likable players and a good work ethic. 

A quick thought: underappreciated players

A friend and I were having a conversation about the most underappreciated players of our time. I threw out Scott Rolen, first, which I still think is a pretty solid answer. Except in certain circles on the internet, Rolen, who ranks as one of the best third baseman of all time, is rarely ever mentioned in the discussion for the Hall of Fame. Other names you could add to the list would Jim Edmunds, Adrian Beltre, and Andruw Jones (thought Jones is an interesting case, because it is arguable that his “underappreciated” nature stems from his rapid decline and feeling that there was always something that he left on the field).

A trend might be immediately apparent: all of these guys were exceptional defenders (you could also add Mike Cameron to the list, though he’s not quite on the same level as the others). They were also all players who were typically overshadowed throughout their primes by more famous teammates and/or played on some very bad teams.

I don’t have the familiarity with non-legends from before the last decade, but I would guess that the same type of player would have been even more unappreciated: without modern stat-heads (or defensive metrics), someone like Scott Rolen wouldn’t achieve even the same amount of acclaim that he has now.

One name in particular popped into my head: Dom DiMaggio. The youngest brother of Joe (he of the hit streak), played on the same teams as Ted Williams (which were not, incidentally, great, World Series-winning teams), missed time due to World War II, had a relatively short career, and was a defensive wizard before there were Gold Gloves (let alone defensive metrics) to take account of such things. He set an AL record for putouts and chances by a center fielder (chances would indicate range, though not particularly accurately) that lasted 30 years, and was a seven-time all-star in 13 seasons. In the modern game, a team would have taken a floater on him after he was released three games into the season in 1953, and we would have some sort of fielding data for the guy. He didn’t make the Hall, of course, and is certainly not even close to a household name. I don’t know if he’s the most underappreciated player ever, but you have to imagine that someone like him is.

A (not actually very quick) thought: WAR and positional adustments

Every year, there are a few players whose defensive problems or injuries lead to discussions about when they’ll need to move to another position. This year, there’s been talk about moving Joe Mauer, Buster Posey, and Matt Kemp, just to name the most famous. With all of these discussions comes the inevitable mention about how much less valuable the player would be at their new position. With Mauer and Posey, this reasoning is obvious: both are considered to be good “gamecallers” and Mauer, at least, has a reputation for being a very good defensive catcher in other respects. Those skills would be useless at first base.

With Kemp, I’m less convinced. Despite the Gold Glove, Kemp has a reputation as a poor centerfielder. By Fangraphs, he has been poor this year, though his -6.5 fielding runs has nothing on the -25.7 that he recorded last year. Given his defense, one might suppose that Kemp would be more valuable at a corner position, especially since the Dodger regularly roll out Tony Gwynn Jr. in left. At least according to a traditional understanding, Gwynn’s plus fielding numbers would be much better used in center. And while the Dodgers might not gain even a win or two in what is already a lost season, switching their two outfielders would probably improve their team. Kemp, as such, might have more value in left to the Dodgers in left than he does in center.

So far, though, Kemp’s case seems like a semi-unique one, which can be expressed by saying that when a player’s defense improvement from a switch outweighs the change in replacement value, he will have more value at the second position. Or: (d2-d1)+(rv2-rv1) = net gain (assuming that the position change does not impact the offense that the player provides).

But I think that positional part of replacement value is misleading in other situations as well. Right now, for example, Lance Berkman and Albert Pujols have played almost the same number of games (105 to 107) and have almost the same fWAR (3.7 to 3.8). For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that the teammates have been identical offensively and on the basepaths. Just for example, let’s say that, in a whole season, they will both create exactly fifty runs offensively and be neutral runners. Continuing our imaginary world, we’ll assume that the positional difference between RF and 1B is 10 runs this season, and that Pujols is about 5 runs better defensively than Berkman when both are playing first and 10 runs better when Berkman is playing RF. Here’s how WAR would determine their value, assuming that each plays a full season:

	Bat	Running	Fielding	Replacement	Positional	RAR	WAR
Imaginary Pujols	50	0	5	24	-15	64	6.3
Imaginary Berkman	50	0	-5	24	-5	64	6.3

WAR is, of course, a theoretical measure. But we would, nevertheless, assume that either of these players getting injured (as both have been this season) would deprive the club of the same amount of value. This is not true. Let’s assume Berkman goes down for sixteen games. He’s replaced by Allen Craig, who’s hitting pretty well right now. We’ll say Craig is the same defensively  in RF and on the bases, and give him about three runs generated in those sixteen games from his bat. Now say Pujols gets hurt for the same time. Berkman fills in at first and Craig plays RF instead of Berkman. Our comparison for the two results looks like this:

	Bat	Running	Fielding	Replacement	Positional	Runs Lost
Without Pujols	-2	0	-.5	0	0	-2.5
Without Berkman	-2	0	0	0	0	-2

Now, there’s not a huge difference there. But there is one, because both are essentially replaced by the same player offensively, but the replacement situation for theoretical Pujols is worse defensively over that 1/10 of a season.

It may be clearer to say it this way: real replacement/positional value is team-dependent. Team-dependency, of course, is kryptonite to anyone in the sabermetrics community; rbis and runs are terrible way to judge true talent level, and thus true value. What I’m saying is that WAR, as currently constructed isn’t judging true value added either. This may be obvious to some, and the distinction I’m about to introduce may seem trivial; but the “positional” part of WAR is valuable not on the field but in the general manager’s office. Troy Tulowitzki and Dustin Pedroia are extremely good players to build a team around right now (and who, as of today, lead their leagues in WAR) because they are terrific all-around players who play key defensive positions. But another terrific player—let’s pick on Derek Jeter since I’m a Red Sox fan—would likely have created more value over the last decade at a different position than shortstop, because what he contributed on the field (in terms of better defense) would have been better, regardless of whether the Yankees could have more easily found a replacement shortstop or centerfielder.

To estimate the true value that a player added to a team over their replacement, we would have to use their specific replacement, something based on their team and thus un-related to their skill level. But when we estimate that same value with WAR, we do essentially the same thing, only with a less specific measurement: a theoretical replacement level adjusted to how well other players at that position are playing. To put it another way: Jeter’s skills had nothing to do with the those of the other shortstops between 1997-2003. Judging him on the fact that (most) of his prime coincided with the “Golden Age of Shortstops,” a historical circumstance, is just as “inaccurate” as judging him based on the historical circumstance of who he came to bat in front of or the park he played in.[1]

To sum up, a middle-of-the-order hitting shortstop or second baseman is (or should be) like candy for general managers. Having a good hitter who can also play a prime defensive position allows you to have a better offense overall because normally you expect to have not very good hitters at those positions. However, that expectation doesn’t mean that said player creates more value on the field than your first baseman who couldn’t dream of playing short. That determination requires adding up the various things the player brings to the field and maybe some bonus points because short ends up having a greater defensive impact than first. Determining which player is a better one to sign—i.e., which one you can replace more easily—is an entirely different question. Maybe there’s no one who hits like your first baseman does, and maybe every short stop in the league has hit free agency at the same time.

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[1] A side note: had Albert Pujols or Jeff Bagwell come along in say, 1977, the relative position scarcity at first base would have made them seem even more impressive than they seem today. But the fact that there were a lot of great-hitting first basemen—for various reasons—in the last couple decades lessens that impact.

Barry Bonds and the Hall of Fame 2: Young Barry

Steroids, in theory, can help an athlete in three ways:

First, they apparently aid in recovery and in maintaining health, boosting performance by allowing an athlete to spend more time on the field. In this sense, steroids are like cortisone shots (which is, in fact, a steroid) or Tylenol with the significant addition of being illegal. This is their least objectionable facet: nearly everyone of likes the idea of having the best players on the field, and a “fix” for Koufax’s elbow, Mantle’s knees, or Nomar’s wrist is something that most baseball fans would approve of.

The problem lies in the line between a “fix” and something that benefits a player. The second benefit of steroids is that they both allow players to add muscle mass more easily and to maintain facets of their athletic performance for a longer period of time. (I would guess that steroids do not benefit flexibility, coordination, or speed, but their ability to allegedly remove nagging injuries would likely do so, as anyone who has tried to run on a wonky ankle would know.) In this sense, steroids are just the poorly regarded cousin of modern medicine more generally: Mays and Aaron didn’t have the supplements, or the advances in nutrition, or the knowledge of training regimens that we have today. All of these things allow players to become “better” than a player who doesn’t use them. In basketball, advances in medicine, equipment, and nutrition have allowed KG, Kobe, and Nash to continue playing beyond the point where would have expected them to break down.

The difference between these advances is that steroids are, again, illegal. This creates three issues when comparing steroids to other advances. First, there is the moral issue involved. Theoretically, barring a player from the Hall wouldn’t be that dissimilar from banning a player for using a spitball or because he, say, whipped his kids or was violent towards his wife. Second, and more important, at least from my view, is the issue of access. Because steroids are / were illegal and expensive, only already semi-established players with the correct connections could afford and access them, giving a certain class of players concrete advantages over their competitors. Of course, this advantage is not the same as that held by whites over blacks before 1946, but that’s a slightly different issue. Third, and stemming from the limited access issue, is that most advances in sports medicine and preparation “raise all boats,” as it were: because everyone has access to the same technology, hitters and pitchers and fielders will all get better relatively equally, allowing us to compare all players from different eras because the baseline hitter in 2011, while likely better than the baseline hitter in 1946, is at the same level relative to the pitchers of 2011 as the hitter of 1946 was to the pitchers of 1946.[1]

Finally, steroids, according to some, allow players to go play above their “true” talent level. Following this idea, Barry Bond and Mark McGwire were both totally incapable of hitting over 70 home runs “legally,” even if they were totally healthy and had trained like mad in order to do so. I find this idea suspicious for a couple reasons: first, muscles are muscles. Steroids might help them develop, but they won’t replace a player’s legs with those of a cheetah or his arms with springs and steel cables. Second, I’m not sure what “true talent level” means: is Willie May’s true talent level the .345/.411/.667 that he hit in 1954, or is it his .302/.384/.557 career line? Had he hit like he did in 1954 in 1971, we would probably say that he was “over-performing” for age 40. But I’m not sure that, had Mays hit .370/.450./.700 in 1955 that we could say the same; while those numbers would have been his best ever, they wouldn’t have been so far out of line with expectations to be considered to be an “over-performance” of his peak.

Barry Bonds and the Hall of Fame

It had to begin with Barry Bonds.

It had to begin with Barry Bonds for two reasons: first, it had to begin with Bonds because this blog is named after Barry Bonds.

More importantly, it had to begin with Barry Bonds because my first solid memories of caring about baseball are of Barry Bonds in 2002. Not 2001, when he hit 73 home runs, but the 2002 postseason, when pitchers refused to pitch to him, when Bonds and Jason Schmidt carried the team into the World Series. My father and grandfather were New York Giant fans, and I abandoned my then-liked Red Sox for my first baseball love: Bonds and the 2002 Giants team.

So it had begin with Barry Bonds. I think I can safely say that right now the most divisive thing about Bonds is his Hall of Fame candidacy. And, in the spirit of a man defined by hyperbole, it isn’t a stretch to say that Bonds’ candidacy will be the most divisive ever.

The subject has been written about before, and likely will be written about again, by better baseball minds than mine. It will likely be written about by better scouts, by better number crunchers, and by those with a better sense of the history of the sport. Nevertheless, I had to begin with Barry Bonds, so, at this particular moment, it makes sense to begin with his Hall of Fame candidacy.