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Even though having more possession does not necessarily lead to winning, teams like Manchester City, Liverpool, and Leeds United notably have tried to recover the ball quickly after they lost it over the past few years. Nowadays, some of…
There is a long standing debate over how to objectively compare the career achievements of professional athletes from different historical eras. Developing an objective approach will be of particular importance over the next decade as Major…
In this paper, we examine team ball sports to investigate how the likelihood of weaker teams winning against stronger ones, referred to as underdog achievement, is influenced by inherent randomness factors that affect match outcomes in such…
In the high-stakes world of baseball, every nuance of a pitcher's mechanics holds the key to maximizing performance and minimizing runs. Traditional analysis methods often rely on pre-recorded offline numerical data, hindering their…
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…
We show that there is a constant C such that for any $b<\frac{n}{\ln{n}}-\frac{Cn}{(\ln{n})^{3/2}}$, Maker wins the Maker-Breaker Hamilton cycle game in $n+\frac{Cn}{\sqrt{\ln{n}}}$ steps.
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…
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 study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We consider two-person sports where each rally is initiated by a \emph{server}, the other player (the \emph{receiver}) becoming the server when he/she wins a rally. Historically, these sports used a scoring based on the \emph{side-out…
Streaks of success have always fascinated people and a lot of research has been conducted to identify whether the "hot hand" effect is real. While sports have provided an appropriate platform for studying this phenomenon, the majority of…
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 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…
A random walk-like model is considered to discuss statistical aspects of tournaments. The model is applied to soccer leagues with emphasis on the scores. This competitive system was computationally simulated and the results are compared…
Even professional baseball players occasionally find it difficult to gracefully approach seemingly routine pop-ups. This paper describes a set of towering pop-ups with trajectories that exhibit cusps and loops near the apex. For a normal…
Badges are commonly used in online platforms as incentives for promoting contributions. It is widely accepted that badges "steer" people's behavior toward increasing their rate of contributions before obtaining the badge. This paper…
In Major League Baseball, strategy and planning are major factors in determining the outcome of a game. Previous studies have aided this by building machine learning models for predicting the winning team of any given game. We extend this…
This short note is intended as a "Letter to the Editor" Perspective in order that it serves as a contribution, in view of reaching the physics community caring about rare events and scaling laws and unexpected findings, on a domain of wide…
In baseball, every play on the field is quantitatively evaluated and has an effect on individual and team strategies. The weighted on base average (wOBA) is well known as a measure of an batter's hitting contribution. However, this measure…