A Simple Way to Reduce Bias in Player Evaluation: Be Ignorant!

Season awards time. Not that I am anyone important in baseball and not that my opinions matter, though there is my miniscule contribution to FanGraphs Player of the Year and the Internet Baseball Awards to think about. And so I do. My usual approach had been (1) sort various FanGraphs leaderboards. Then, (2) do this:

CLEVER

Yes, this is a notepad leaned clumsily against the screen to cover up the player names, teams (and win-loss record why not). Why? I have my affections and biases for certain names, so I’m bound to want to come up with reasons to rate those guys higher. I’m also bound to neglect players I don’t see very often, and trick myself into thinking their seasons weren’t as good as they look. If I can’t see the names, I can go on pure statistical evaluation and put one over on my cognitive biases.

But yeah, clumsy. So I wrote up a tool that would do the name hiding in a more graceful way. Behold! The Player Name Hider. This is a fairly simple Greasemonkey script that hides the names of the players and teams on all leaders pages. When installed, I see something more like this:

MORE CLEVER

All the names and teams are hidden after page load. If I want to see one, I just click the text to reveal, as with Zack Greinke and Justin Verlander above. Also note the link tucked just above the leaderboard to reveal all data at once.

Two immediate uses spring to mind:

  1. As mentioned above, it’s handy around seasonal award time. You may be surprised whose statistical profile you uncover. (Rhymes with: Shrill Shoes or Schmadison Schmumgarner.)
  2. Enjoy hours of delightful life-avoiding trivia games! Sort by RBI and guess who led the league, that sort of thing.

Here’s how you get the tool:

  1. Firefox users: install the Greasemonkey browser extension. Chrome users: install the Tampermonkey extension. Safari users: I understand GreaseKit has the same functionality but I have not tested this. IE users: uh, sorry.
  2. The script itself is available here. There, click the “Raw” button to install and confirm the prompt.

That’s it! Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.





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Josh
9 years ago

It’s not working. Im using Chrome