links for 2010-04-30: Response to Jobs missive against Flash; Another view on VMforce; Indians most hated team?

• The parallel world of Apple: Where open is not always open - Correctly points out the similarity in Apple's lack of openness particularly around iTunes.
  
• Steve Jobs on Flash: Correcting the Lies - Pokes holes in many of Steve's points, but (if you have a lot of time) read the comments and see holes poked in his hole poking.  It is entertaining, but he goes a bit far I think.
  
• Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife - Clearly points out the hypocrisy regarding use of Cocoa, H264 being as if not more proprietary than Flash, and iTunes locking users in more than Flash.  How is Apple "open" one might ask?
  
• Though Miffed, Media Companies See Silver Lining In Apple-Adobe Tiff - Rather than pout about it, media companies are looking for ways to make a buck.  Too bad the record and movie industry has fought technology when they could have embraced it and been innovative.
  
• VMforce - Another Cloud Computing Solution for Java - Asks how they get to claim they are the first enterprise Java Cloud when other vendors have been supporting Java in the Cloud for some time.
  
• Report says Indians most hated team - The natural response would have been that everyone hates the "Evil Empire", but no, it is the Indians and the Yankees are only the 5th most hated.

Are the Red Sox and Yankees Slow? Let's look at the data

There has been a bit of hubbub about the pace of play in Yankees and Red Sox games after umpire Joe West call their slow play embarrassing.  Their first 3 games of the year were longish at 3:46, 3:48, and 3:21 but justifications for it include lots of hitting to the importance of the games to being national TV games with longer commercial breaks.

Rather than just throw various arguments around, lets go to the data to take a look at what it tells us.  The length of a game should be roughly determined by the number of innings, number of pitches, number of in inning pitching changes, and duration of the commercial breaks.  With that in mind, I looked at the three Yankess vs Red Sox games and then all the American League games played on 4/9 to compare them.

All the data is in a Google Docs spreadsheet, and includes the game time, innings, pitches, in inning pitching changes, and commercial length based on if it is a national TV game or not.  Using these stats I calculate the average time per pitch, which all things being equal should be pretty consistent from game to game.

Date	Game	Time per Pitch
4/6	Yankees / Red Sox	0:35
4/9	Yankees / Rays	0:33
4/4	Yankees / Red Sox	0:32
4/9	Red Sox / Royals	0:31
4/7	Yankees / Red Sox	0:31
4/9	Blue Jays / Orioles	0:30
4/9	Twins / White Sox	0:28
4/9	Athletics / Angels	0:28
4/9	Indians / Tigers	0:27
4/9	Mariners / Rangers	0:26

Now, admittedly it is a small sample size, but it seems pretty clear that there is something common about the 5 slowest games from the selected games.  Given that I've factored in a bunch of stuff, why is this?  It is likely caused by visits to the mound by the manager (which are limited) or fellow players (which aren't) and batters stepping out between pitches, and that is what Joe West was complaining about.

Is it the end of the world if some games are a few seconds per pitch slower than others?  In the grand scheme of things, probably not, but MLB has decided to try to speed things up and from the data above, it appears Joe West singling out the Yankees and Red Sox as the biggest offenders could very well be true.