CHANCE Highlights
Baseball, Graphics Play Major Role in
Newest Issue
Mike Larson, CHANCE Editor
T
he two themes of CHANCE 22(2) are base- role can statisticians/biostatisti-
ball and graphics. Mark Glickman’s Here’s cians play in design, modeling,
to Your Health column, Jonathan Berkowitz’s and validation?
Goodness of Wit Test puzzle column, and a couple In his Goodness of Wit Test
of letters to the editor complete the issue. column, Berkowitz gives us a
For the baseball lover, there are three articles. For bar-type cryptic puzzle with one
statisticians in general, issues of defining measures of additional solving requirement.
performance, selecting a comparison group, adjust- Last, but not least, two read-
ing for confounders, and modeling also appear in ers submitted letters. Susan
these articles. Jim Albert compares the career trajec- Aref comments on Stephanie
tories of pitchers. The rate at which pitchers allow Land’s article (21[4]), “‘We All
hits and walks, adjusted for the pool of pitches and Survived’ and Other Failings of
number of batters, is modeled using piecewise qua- Risk Perception,” and confirms
dratic functions. Flexible, multilevel modeling is that it is, indeed, safer to be born
used to create individual trajectories that adjust for now than in the past. Ray Stefani
important factors and allow nuanced comparisons discusses efforts to reproduce
across pitchers. results from tables discussed in
Did drugs play a role in Roger Clemens’ later articles, also in 21(4), by Brian Clauser and Stephen
career performance? Brian Schmotzer, Pat Kilgo, Stigler. The details presented here could be of use
and Jeff Switchenko estimate the effect of perfor- to instructors and others working to understand and
mance-enhancing drugs on offensive production in explain the tables.
baseball. The outcome measure is runs created per In other news, CHANCE, working through the
27 outs. Information about drug use comes from ASA, conducted a survey of lapsed subscribers.
the “Mitchell Report.” To address sensitivity to Approval for the survey was obtained from the ASA’s
the statistical model, several models are estimated Survey Review Committee. An email message with a
and contrasted. link to a web survey was sent to individuals who had
Finally, Don Chance takes a look at Joe let their subscription to CHANCE expire in the last
DiMaggio’s 1941 56-game hitting streak. Adjusting few years. The purpose of the survey was to learn
for hit opportunities and making other assumptions, something about why people stopped subscribing
does DiMaggio have the highest probability of ever and what they liked or disliked about CHANCE.
having such a streak? Forty-four former subscribers responded.
The three winners of the Will Burtin graphics According to them, the technical level is about right
contest (announced in 21(4) are Mark Nicolich, and the amount and quality of graphics is accept-
Dibyojyoti Haldar, and Brian Schmotzer. Their able, although there appears to be some room for
graphs and biographies begin on Page 43. Howard improvement. Topics with the high response were
Wainer’s Visual Revelations column presents sev- current events, education, environment, and health/
eral additional graphs and examines the lessons medical. Other topics of strong interest were clinical
learned through the contest. We wish to thank the trials, economics, government, graphics, legal issues,
64 entrants to the contest for their efforts. Based and surveys. One respondent added the following
on the positive response to the contest, we plan to comment: “I want to see interesting applications.
conduct a similar one in the near future. The area doesn’t matter.”
In Glickman’s Here’s to Your Health column, In summary, we interpret the results of the sur-
Xiaofei Wang, Herbert Pang, and Todd Schwartz vey to support the mission of CHANCE: provide
study cancer biomarkers: What are they? How are accessible and interesting articles on diverse topics in
they used for prediction and classification? What which probability and statistics play critical roles. n
JUNE 2009 AmstAt News 23
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