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There have been more hitting streaks in Major League Baseball than we would expect. All batting lines of MLB hitters from 1957-2006 were randomly permuted 10,000 times and the number of hitting streaks of each length from 2 to 100 was…
A same-score streak in sports is a sequence of games where the scores are equivalent in all games. The motivating problem arose from college basketball, however due to the difficulty in collecting data, streaks in Major League Baseball…
How often can we expect a Major League Baseball team to score at least 20 runs in a single game? Considered a rare event in baseball, the outcome of scoring at least 20 runs in a game has occurred 224 times during regular season games since…
Can one understand the statistics of wins and losses of baseball teams? Are their consecutive-game winning and losing streaks self-reinforcing or can they be described statistically? We apply the Bradley-Terry model, which incorporates the…
A new model, which uses the frequency of individuals' annual home run totals, is employed to predict future home run totals and records in Major League Baseball. Complete home run frequency data from 1903--2005 is analyzed, resulting in…
We introduce a three-step framework to determine at which pitches Major League batters should swing. Unlike traditional plate discipline metrics, which implicitly assume that all batters should always swing at (resp. take) pitches inside…
Batting average is one of the principle performance measures for an individual baseball player. It is natural to statistically model this as a binomial-variable proportion, with a given (observed) number of qualifying attempts (called…
Ranking sportsmen whose careers took place in different eras is often a contentious issue and the topic of much debate. In this paper we focus on cricket and examine what conclusions may be drawn about the ranking of Test batsmen using data…
Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career…
We show that the great baseball players that started their careers before 1950 are overrepresented among rankings of baseball's all time greatest players. The year 1950 coincides with the decennial US Census that is closest to when Major…
We present a problem to be assigned or done as an in-class activity in an upper-division undergraduate course on computational physics. The problem involves a home run hit by Mickey Mantle on May 22, 1963, which he famously called ``the…
As a dedicated follower of sports statistics and with the MLB season beginning in late March, I set out to predict how many wins each team would accumulate by the end of the 162 game season. The goal was to build a simulation framework…
The existence of "Hot Hands" and "Streaks" in sports and gambling is hotly debated, but there is no uncertainty about the recent batting-average of the New York Times: it is now two-for-two in mangling and misunderstanding elementary…
We have developed a sophisticated statistical model for predicting the hitting performance of Major League baseball players. The Bayesian paradigm provides a principled method for balancing past performance with crucial covariates, such as…
We formulate the head-to-head matchups between Major League Baseball pitchers and batters from 1954 to 2008 as a bipartite network of mutually-antagonistic interactions. We consider both the full network and single-season networks, which…
Numerous statistics have been proposed for the measure of offensive ability in major league baseball. While some of these measures may offer moderate predictive power in certain situations, it is unclear which simple offensive metrics are…
The field of quantitative analytics has transformed the world of sports over the last decade. To date, these analytic approaches are statistical at their core, characterizing what is and what was, while using this information to drive…
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…
The use of statistical modeling in baseball has received substantial attention recently in both the media and academic community. We focus on a relatively under-explored topic: the use of statistical models for the analysis of fielding…
The baseball game is often seen as many contests that are performed between individuals. The duel between the pitcher and the batter, for example, is considered the engine that drives the sport. The pitchers use a variety of strategies to…