Related papers: Same-Score Streaks: A Case Study in Probability Mo…
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…
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…
We present evidence, based on play-by-play data from all 6087 games from the 2006/07--2009/10 seasons of the National Basketball Association (NBA), that basketball scoring is well described by a weakly-biased continuous-time random walk.…
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…
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…
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…
Many popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the…
We examine Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak and look at its likelihood, using a number of simple models. And it turns out that, contrary to many people's expectations, an extreme streak, while unlikely in any given year, is not…
In the four major North American professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), the primary purpose of the regular season is to determine which teams most deserve to advance to the playoffs. Interestingly, while the…
Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different sports. Using a comprehensive data set of…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
Scoring in a basketball game is a process highly dynamic and non-linear type. The level of NBA teams improve each season. They incorporate to their rosters the best players in the world. These and other mechanisms, make the scoring in the…
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…
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…
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…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
This paper applies existing and new approaches to study trends in the performance of elite athletes over time. We study both track and field scores of men and women athletes on a yearly basis from 2001 to 2019, revealing several trends and…
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…