Aug

25

Are there market analogies here? Could this conclusion below for the very best batsmen in cricket be suitable for the top performing markets/sectors? The greatest risk is for them to stumble early in a session otherwise it pays to expect further strength.

"The Curse of the Duck":

The conclusion seems to be that there is a very small window in the beginning of a batsman's innings in which there is a greater chance of dismissal than there ordinarily is. This makes sense — batsmen take some time to acclimatise to the game conditions. But this is a small window — once the batsman has scored about three runs, you have the same chance of dismissal whatever the current score. Interestingly, tiredness does not seem to play a part — the exponential distribution holds well out to 250 runs (quite a few hours of batting). It should be remembered that this analysis was completed on the top 34 run scorers of all time (5953 innings) and so represents the best ever batsmen. Lesser batsmen are likely to get low scores, so perhaps this window is slightly wider for them. But if we turn to the greatest of the great, Bradman, the window is essentially one run. His effective average before he had scored was a very mediocre nine runs. After he had scored two runs, this effective average had risen to 69. You had to get Bradman out very early!

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

Seconded.

What fascinates me about cricket is that it is the inverse of baseball. In baseball the really good pitchers are the rarity. Against them even the best hitters can only hope for mediocre performance. At any one time, almost everyone in the major leagues can hit a 90 mph fastball (those few who can't don't last long). So, on the days when a mediocre pitcher or pitchers are unable to control their other pitches, the scores can balloon to lopsided totals that are not seen in even the most thorough drubbings in cricket. The rule for the really good pitchers is the same one Craig has just shared: you have to get to them early. Once a great pitcher has adjusted to the shape of the ballpark's mound and the effects of the day's weather and gotten the first few outs, he will be nearly unhittable.

See Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan

Galen Cawley adds: 

Stefan, agreed, but you can't omit this guy!

More importantly, I found this entire discussion on pitching and the art of deception to be utterly fascinating. The video analysis is eye-opening. It tells you why you know what you know pitching (and hitting)…and makes your knowledge better. It's positively Baconian. Key excerpts:

"What he means by this is that if a hitter swings at what he thinks will be a 90-mph fastball down the middle, he can still accidentally run into either a 96-mph fastball down and away or an 85-mph pitch on the inside — all intersecting the arc of his swing — and make solid contact. Husband believes this happens far more frequently than one might think. Standard baseball strategy says that all a pitcher must do to avoid this dilemma is mix up his pitches — fastballs, sliders, changeups, curveballs. Because they come in at different speeds, the hitter will be confused. Simple, right?

"The problem," said Husband, "is when pitchers pitch backwards."

This means that if a pitcher throws an 86-mph slider high on the inside corner, and follows it with a low-and-away 92-mph fastball, the pitches' EV readings would be exactly the same: 89 mph. And hittable by accident.

[My emphasis: i.e., most pitchers throw to the hitters' bats because they lack command — most retail investors throw money at the markets because they chase the form, and have poor execution to boot!]

There is an imaginary stripe that runs diagonally across the strike zone, from the batter's feet to shoulder level in the opposite batter's box, where a pitch's EV equals its actual speed. Husband calls this the Zero Line. He calculated that for every 6 inches the ball moves closer to the hitter from that line, it picks up 2.75 EV mph; for every 6 inches it moves away, it loses an equivalent amount. This gives strikes thrown at identical speeds on a given horizontal plane about a 6-mph fluctuation in reactionary speed from one end of the strike zone to the other. Add vertical differences into the equation and that spread can easily double, all for pitches that are thrown at the same actual speed.

This idea is far less important on a single-pitch basis than it is when integrated into a sequence. The hitter's perception of the speed of a given pitch is affected by the speed and location of the pitch or pitches that immediately precede it. Roughly speaking, a pitch that follows slower pitches can appear faster, and something slow, when following a faster pitch, appears to be even slower.

"Hitters are like sharks to blood," Husband explained. "When they see two pitches in the same place and at same speed, they begin very quickly to be able to time them, and when they can time them, they attack. But that timing maxes out at about a 6-mph difference in pitch speeds."

I Love the idea of a sequence…how many times has the market changed up on my and put me in an 0-2 count?

Stefan Jovanovich replies: 

Absolutely. The entire art of pitching is to not let the batter get comfortable with where he is looking. "The plate is 7 baseballs wide; until you get to 2 strikes, you look at either the inner 4 or the outer 4." (That is a steal from a MLB hitting coach whose name escapes me right now.) If you let the batter look in the same horizontal box, he can hit the pitch, as Husband says, even if he is looking "in" and the pitch is thrown "out".

My only quibble is to point out that Maddux's performances in the post season were mediocre. By the time the best teams get to the playoffs and especially the World Series they finally get enough rest between games to be really quick with their bats. That is when a pitcher needs to be able to simply throw it past them - as Maddux couldn't. The pitchers who could reach a virtual speed of 95+ - "virtual" because there are left-handed pitchers like Warren Spahn and Madison Bumgarner who used their high leg kick/body turn to hide the ball as they delivered it on the diagonal Husband describes. Their balls came faster than they were thrown.

Of course, there was also a pitcher named Koufax who hid the ball but didn't need to; he was positively unfair. 


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