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It is well known that athletic and physical condition is affected by age. Plotting an individual athlete's performance against age creates a graph commonly called the player's aging curve. Despite the obvious interest to coaches and…
In the sport of cricket, variations in a player's batting ability can usually be measured on one of two scales. Short-term changes in ability that are observed during a single innings, and long-term changes that are witnessed between…
As a baseball game progresses, batters appear to perform better the more times they face a particular pitcher. The apparent drop-off in pitcher performance from one time through the order to the next, known as the Time Through the Order…
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…
It is often said that a sign of a great player is that he makes the players around him better. The player may or may not score much himself, but his teammates perform better when he plays. One way a hockey player can improve his or her…
The demand for global university league tables has been high over the past two decades. However, significant criticism of their methodologies is accumulating without being addressed. I revisit global university league tables by normalizing…
This project aims to assess the performance of various regression models in predicting the performance of hockey players. The measure of performance is chosen to be points scored (sum of goals scored and assists made) by individual players…
Success in sports is a complex phenomenon that has only garnered limited research attention. In particular, we lack a deep scientific understanding of success in sports like tennis and the factors that contribute to it. Here, we study the…
While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
In [14], Gueant, Lasry and Lions considered the model problem ``What time does meeting start?'' as a prototype for a general class of optimization problems with a continuum of players, called Mean Field Games problems. In this paper we…
Major League Baseball (MLB) recently limited pitchers to three pickoff attempts, creating a cat-and-mouse game between pitcher and runner. Each failed attempt adds pressure on the pitcher to avoid using another, and the runner can intensify…
Inspired by the Games held in ancient Greece, modern Olympics represent the world's largest pageant of athletic skill and competitive spirit. Performances of athletes at the Olympic Games mirror, since 1896, human potentialities in sports,…
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…
In the sports of soccer, hockey and basketball the most commonly used statistics for player performance assessment are divided into two categories: offensive statistics and defensive statistics. However, qualitative assessments of…
Statistical graphics and data visualization have long histories, but their modern forms began only in the early 1800s. Between roughly 1850 and 1900 ($\pm10$), an explosive growth occurred in both the general use of graphic methods and the…
Experience is an important asset in almost any professional activity. In basketball, there is believed to be a positive association between coaching experience and effective use of team timeouts. Here, we analyze both the extent to which a…
Basketball is often referred to as "a game of runs." We investigate the appropriateness of this claim using data from the full NBA 2016-17 season, comparing actual longest runs of scoring events to what long run theory predicts under the…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
Throughout the analytical revolution that has occurred in the NBA, the development of specific metrics and formulas has given teams, coaches, and players a new way to see the game. However - the question arises - how can we verify any…