I read a baseball book called Year of the Pitcher. The title refers to 1968. I attempted to give
it a review of two stars on Amazon. My headline was not for baseball fans I wrote
If you’re looking for a lot of pages on how Jackie Robinson wrestled with his political loyalties, then this is your book. And if you did not know that African-Americans, including baseball players, suffered from Jim Crow laws in the early 1960s and a good deal of residual prejudice well beyond those years, then you will learn something. If you haven’t read David Halberstam’s book on 1964 then the stories about Bob Gibson’s sensitivity and the Cardinals’ relatively good internal racial relations will be new to you.
But if you are curious about the career years that several pitchers had (in terms of ERA, Luis Tiant and Sam McDowell come to mind) or about how many more fans showed up when Gibson was starting than when other Cardinal pitchers were starting, or about how the new St. Louis ballpark in 1966 affected Cardinal pitching statistics, you won’t find answers here.
As a fan, I found myself going to baseball reference’s page on annual major league pitching statistics (https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/pitch.shtml) to see what made 1968 different. It turns out that home runs per 9 innings were low, but not at an all-time low. Walks per nine innings were at an all-time low. Above all, the batting average on balls in play was the lowest of all time. You get the impression that with the strike zone favoring pitchers, batters had to swing at marginal pitches, making weak contact.
The review was rejected for violating their guidelines. The guidelines include not allowing external references so technically the review violates that guideline.
I have only had two reviews ever rejected. In each case the review was less than three stars. Perhaps this is coincidence, but I wonder whether bad reviews may be filtered more carefully through the guidelines.
Why not remove the web link, and replace it with something like
>>>
As a fan, I found myself going to a baseball reference on annual major league pitching statistics to see what made 1968 different.
<<<
resubmit, and see if it is accepted?
(I know nothing about baseball and have no interest in it, but would be interested to see if this works.)
Agreed. The easiest type of spam filter is to send anything with links to moderation, or to cut it out entirely. Makes lots of Type I / False-Positive errors (and is used or comments on this very site). Easy way to avoid it is to just get rid of the links.
Does seem odd but 1968 does seem like another dimension of weird stats like Carl Yastrzemski earned 10+ WAR hitting .301 with 23 home runs which what a good Leftfielder does most other eras.
Actually most of the ballpark changes of the 1950s and 1960s were pro-pitcher as Sportsman Park was historically a hitters park although it grew in the 1960s as the larger 1960s stadiums, Dodgers, Candlestick, Milwaukee move, Shea, etc.)
The reality of Baseball Reference though is a lot fewer fans call Luis Tiant and Sam McDowell (or a dozen other pitchers) 1968 as career years today because the ease of all the statistics on the internet.
I agree with John de Rivaz and Handle that we should not be surprised that a site with a policy of not supporting external links rejected a post with an external link.
What I find interesting is Kling’s speculation that bad reviews are treated differently. Projecting complex human intentionality on dumb technology seems to be a very common psychological bias we have.
FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENT #31: if user posts a book review with a low rating, run obscure rejection algorithm, but ensure our evil intent is undetectable.
I have successfully posted many 1 and 2 star reviews at Amazon, with snarky comments supporting my ratings. The only reviews of mine that Amazon has rejected have been those with external links (regardless of rating).
Maybe you are more likely to add an external link to your low-star reviews, to “justify” the low rating, and prove you are not rating out of spite.
Reading this reminded me to check the status of my last Amazon review. Not published. It was a 1-star for an obviously defective product that, none-the-less, had a laughable 4.5 star average. I titled the review, in part, “defective.” I included pictures. I am much less inclined to trust Amazon reviews these days.
I didn’t realize Amazon reviews were real. I just assumed they were all written by Chinese bots.
\sarcasm
Given the signal-to-noise ratio of Amazon reviews, writing reviews for anything with more than ~2o reviews is not a wise use of anyone’s time (the aforementioned Chinese bots excluded).
Cheer up. Brad de Long’s Grasping Hand doesn’t pick up my comments which reference the internet, even innoculous YouTube URLS. Weep wail!
Amazon exists to sell books. Thus bad reviews are going to be treated more critically, because anything that makes people less likely to buy books is bad for Amazon’s business.
It’s the same thing with Yelp. The Yelp formula for deciding what reviews are “recommended” (and which are hidden) includes how many negative reviews a reviewer gives. If you write too many negative reviews you will find yourself being filtered out of the “recommended” section on Yelp.
Amazon’s policy might be different, but yes, they are incentivized to reject negative reviews.