Related papers: Evaluating Throwing Ability in Baseball
I present a simple and transparent standard for career greatness in baseball: any major league player with H > 2500 or HR > 350 or K > 2800 or W > 240 makes my Hall of Fame Cut. Rate statistics are avoided due to small sample issues and to…
From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…
Evaluating offensive linemen and pass rushers at the player level is difficult because observable outcomes are sparse, opponent-dependent, and strongly shaped by surrounding context. Using 2021 regular-season Hudl tracking data, we…
In the National Basketball Association (NBA), teams must make choices about which players to acquire, how much to pay them, and other decisions that are fundamentally dependent on player effectiveness. Thus, there is great interest in…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
"The chance to win given a certain move" is an easily obtainable quantity from data and often quoted in gaming statistics. It is also the fundamental quantity that reinforcement learning AI bases on. Unfortunately, this conditional…
Baseball consists of two teams alternating between batting and fielding while competing to score runs through sequential pitching events. Recent advances in tracking technology have enabled all Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs to record…
Runs Batted IN (RBI) records the number of runs a hitter directly drives in during their plate appearances and reflects a batter's ability to convert opportunities into scoring. Because producing runs determines game outcomes, RBI has long…
We revisit a foundational question in golf analytics: how important are the core components of performance--driving, approach play, and putting--in explaining success on the PGA Tour? Building on Mark Broadie's strokes gained analyses, we…
Quarterback performance can be difficult to rank, and much effort has been spent in creating new rating systems. However, the input statistics for such ratings are subject to randomness and factors outside the quarterback's control. To…
Given a monocular video of a soccer match, this paper presents a computational model to estimate the most feasible pass at any given time. The method leverages offensive player's orientation (plus their location) and opponents' spatial…
How much can a pitcher's body reveal about the upcoming pitch? We study this question at scale by classifying eight pitch types from monocular 3D pose sequences, without access to ball-flight data. Our pipeline chains a diffusion-based 3D…
We study a stochastic process that mimics single-game elimination tournaments. In our model, the outcome of each match is stochastic: the weaker player wins with upset probability q<=1/2, and the stronger player wins with probability 1-q.…
Using high-resolution player tracking data made available by the National Football League (NFL) for their 2019 Big Data Bowl competition, we introduce the Expected Hypothetical Completion Probability (EHCP), a objective framework for…
We determine the optimal angle of release in shot put. The simplest model - mostly used in textbooks - gives a value of $45^\circ$, while measurements of top athletes cluster around $37 - 38^\circ$. Including simply the height of the…
With the NBA's adoption of in-game limb tracking in 2023, Sony's Hawk-Eye system now captures high-resolution, 3D poses of players and the ball 60 times per second. Linking these data to key events opens a new era in NBA analytics. Here, we…
In this study, the stochastic properties of player and team ball possession times in professional football matches are examined. Data analysis shows that player possession time follows a gamma distribution and the player count of a team…
There is a widespread notion in cricketing world that with increasing pace the performance of a bowler improves. Additionally, many commentators believe lower order batters to be more vulnerable to pace. The present study puts these two…
Every shot in basketball has an opportunity cost; one player's shot eliminates all potential opportunities from their teammates for that play. For this reason, player-shot efficiency should ultimately be considered relative to the lineup.…
Predicting performance outcomes has the potential to transform training approaches, inform coaching strategies, and deepen our understanding of the factors that contribute to athletic success. Traditional non-automated data analysis in…