Sunday, September 11, 2011

Someone's watching you -- and it might be a good thing...

from ArsTechnicaEthnic biases were found when the authors of an article in the American Economic Review compared baseball games with automated pitch monitoring systems vs those without.
"A black pitcher throwing a nonterminal pitch in the early innings of poorly attended games in a non-QuesTec ballpark gains over 6 percentage points by matching [the umpire's ethnicity] (41.4 versus 35.2 percent called strikes)."
They also found that pitchers would throw in ways that would take advantage of the bias... Hmmm... Who wouldn't?