The title of this post is, alternatively, "Why Cooper is not Sterling." You get no link help in interpreting the title above.

It might seem like being a major league manager is a cushy job. Your primary job responsibilities are to fill out the lineup card, consume tobacco products/sunflower seeds, argue with grown men, pinch hit for batters, and make pitching changes (in that order, unless you're Tony LaRussa, in which case the last is first). Maybe, if you're feeling ambitious, you'll motivate your players.

But it's got some serious downsides. There's a very real possibility your boss will be less experienced and more idiotic even than you; the pay isn't nearly as good as it was back in your playing days; you'll be the subject of interminable critical newspaper articles.

Finally--and don't forget this one--the job security stinks.

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Life is characterized by uncertainty. Maybe you think it's a bummer; maybe it's what gets you out of bed in the morning. But either way, uncertainty is part of daily life. It's involved in personal relationships, business, and yes, even sport.

It's important to keep in mind that uncertainty is a different concept than risk. The difficulty with uncertainty is that it is substantially harder to figure out how to deal with it, whether by preparing emotionally or attaching a price to it (as when you buy insurance). What does this mean for baseball teams?

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"Oh, great!" you're thinking, "here goes Tommy on another one of his ill-fated mathematical boondoggles."

Well, yeah, but calm down. This one should be relatively painless. There is only a very little bit of math. And a tiny bit of calculus. But PLENTY of errors, I promise. Still with me? Okay, then, let's go.

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It's been a miserable year for the economy. One year ago today, Lehman Brothers Holdings announced it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. After that, the economy fell off a cliff, or it entered a tail-spin, or the excrement hit the fan; I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to select her/his own metaphor. 

I'm as much of an armchair macroeconomist as the next guy, but for a while there it felt like reading Calculated Risk was like gazing into a palantir. But as the policy response started to materialize, economists, politicians, and technocrats began to settle on a plan to employ countercyclical measures to stabilize the economy. What, pray-tell, is a countercyclical measure?

Harvard economist Martin Feldstein explains:

Discretionary fiscal policy provides an alternative way to stimulate the economy when aggregate demand and interest rates are low and when prices are falling or may soon be falling.

Or, to bastardize and paraphrase, when things are down, spend, and when things are up, save. Has baseball learned the wisdom of countercyclical measures? There is ample cause for skepticism.

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There's something admirable about the dedication we Americans have to avoiding ties. We analogize ties to incestuous acts of affection, for Pete's sake. In this country, we obey the laws of winning and losing! 

But ties have this obnoxious quality of being occasionally unavoidable. Even that recently commenced sport with the pigskin (the name escapes me at the moment but I'm sure you've seen it, it seems quite popular) does from time to time countenance a second dash and a third number in the win/loss statistics. So how do we deal with, and avoid, this most unpleasant of competitive outcomes?

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I don't know about you all, but I've been enjoying the phoenix-like rebirth of our regular feature Graph of the Day. Much credit is owed to Justin Bopp and Walter Fulbright, who clearly know their layers from their masks. So I thought this might be a good time to talk about the elements of a good visualization.

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I've written a bit before about the fact that baseball is, first and foremost, a form of entertainment. The benefits we derive from baseball are limited to its entertainment value and anything that might be derivative of that entertainment value (say, for example, players' salaries).

But it wasn't until I came across this particular sublime bit of manic meandering from fellow traveler Carson Cistulli that I got it figured out. You see, folks, we enjoy by categorizing. And the ultimate categorization is the definitive metric, the holy grail with the mass appeal.

We might not be happy until we find it--and we might never find it. 

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As I mentioned yesterday, this year's playoff races do not look like they will be close. Although the Rangers helped their cause significantly last night, they still have less than a one-in-three shot at the playoffs. The next lowest team (predictably, the Red Sox) are at 81.8%.

Entering tonight's games, there's a sizable gulf between the ins and the outs. All this means is that it's a perfect time to look at playoff races, because we can be so dispassionate.

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