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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…
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…
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…
In the game of cricket, the result of coin toss is assumed to be one of the determinants of match outcome. The decision to bat first after winning the toss is often taken to make the best use of superior pitch conditions and set a big…
In 2024, Major League Baseball released new bat tracking data, reporting swing-by-swing bat speed and swing length measured at the point of contact. While exciting, the data present challenges for their interpretation. The timing of the…
Player performance prediction is a serious problem in every sport since it brings valuable future information for managers to make important decisions. In baseball industries, there already existed variable prediction systems and many types…
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 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…
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…
We introduce a novel anytime Batched Thompson sampling policy for multi-armed bandits where the agent observes the rewards of her actions and adjusts her policy only at the end of a small number of batches. We show that this policy…
Thompson sampling and other Bayesian sequential decision-making algorithms are among the most popular approaches to tackle explore/exploit trade-offs in (contextual) bandits. The choice of prior in these algorithms offers flexibility to…
A Bayesian Survival Analysis method is motivated and developed for analysing sequences of scores made by a batsman in test or first class cricket. In particular, we expect the presence of an effect whereby the distribution of scores has…
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…
We present a tractable framework for detecting changes in performance metrics and apply these methods to Major League Baseball (MLB) batting and pitching data from the 2023 and 2024 seasons. We propose a changepoint detection algorithm that…
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…
Closed-loop performance of sequential decision making algorithms, such as model predictive control, depends strongly on the choice of controller parameters. Bayesian optimization allows learning of parameters from closed-loop experiments,…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
Cricketing knowledge tells us batting is more difficult early in a player's innings but becomes easier as a player familiarizes themselves with the conditions. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian survival analysis method to predict the…
In the sport of cricket, player batting ability is traditionally measured using the batting average. However, the batting average fails to measure both short-term changes in ability that occur during an innings, and long-term changes that…