Related papers: Evaluating plate discipline in Major League Baseba…
Systemic and idiosyncratic patterns in pitching mechanics of 24 top starting pitchers in Major League Baseball (MLB) are extracted and discovered from PITCHf/x database. These evolving patterns across different pitchers or seasons are…
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…
Change of direction is a key element of player movement in American football, yet there remains a lack of objective approaches for in-game performance evaluation of this athletic trait. Using tracking data, we propose a Bayesian…
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…
New measurements are presented of the lift on a spinning baseball. The experiment utilizes a pitching machine to project the baseball horizontally; a high-speed motion capture system to measure the initial velocity and angular velocity and…
How much can a pitcher's body reveal about the upcoming pitch? We study this question at scale by classifying eight pitch types from monocular 3D pose sequences, without access to ball-flight data. Our pipeline chains a diffusion-based 3D…
We propose the nuclear norm penalty as an alternative to the ridge penalty for regularized multinomial regression. This convex relaxation of reduced-rank multinomial regression has the advantage of leveraging underlying structure among the…
In the domain of Sport Analytics, Global Positioning Systems devices are intensively used as they permit to retrieve players' movements. Team sports' managers and coaches are interested on the relation between players' patterns of movements…
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…
Nowadays, it becomes a common practice to capture some data of sports games with devices such as GPS sensors and cameras and then use the data to perform various analyses on sports games, including tactics discovery, similar game retrieval,…
As 3-point shooting in the NBA continues to increase, the importance of perimeter defense has never been greater. Perimeter defenders are often evaluated by their ability to tightly contest shots, but how exactly does contesting a jump shot…
In baseball, a scouting report profiles a player's characteristics and traits, usually intended for use in player valuation. This work presents a first-of-its-kind dataset of almost 10,000 scouting reports for minor league, international,…
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…
The productive career of a professional athlete is limited compared to the normal human lifespan. Most professional athletes have retired by age 40. The early retirement age is due to a combination of age-related performance and life…
In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the home team bunting in extra innings of Major League Baseball games when the game is tied in the bottom of the inning. Using methods rooted in causal inference, we show that teams choose…
Injuries are a major cost in sports. Teams spend millions of dollars every year on players who are hurt and unable to play, resulting in lost games, decreased fan interest and additional wages for replacement players. Modern convolutional…
Although machine learning (ML)-based performance outcome prediction is an important topic in contemporary sports science, one important issue is the limited understanding of the cross-individual generalizability of ML models in sports…
A new methodological framework suitable for era-adjusting baseball statistics is developed in this article. Within this methodological framework specific models are motivated. We call these models Full House Models. Full House Models work…
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…
An ensemble inference mechanism is proposed on the Angry Birds domain. It is based on an efficient tree structure for encoding and representing game screenshots, where it exploits its enhanced modeling capability. This has the advantage to…