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Baseball is a game of strategic decisions including bullpen usage, pinch-hitting and intentional walks. Managers must adjust their strategies based on the changing state of the game in order to give their team the best chance of winning. In…
It's not unreasonable to think that in-game sporting performance can be affected partly by what takes place off the court. We can't observe what happens between games directly. Instead, we proxy for the possibility of athletes partying by…
What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given \$25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
The standard mathematical approach to fourth-down decision making in American football is to make the decision that maximizes estimated win probability. Win probability estimates arise from machine learning models fit from historical data.…
This study evaluates the effectiveness of the two-for-one strategy in basketball by applying a causal inference framework to play-by-play data from the 2018-19 and 2021-22 National Basketball Association regular seasons. Incorporating…
Implicit biases occur automatically and unintentionally and are particularly present when we have to make split second decisions. One such situations appears in refereeing, where referees have to make an instantaneous decision on a…
Recent measurement technologies enable us to analyze baseball at higher levels. There are, however, still many unclear points around the pitching strategy. The two elements make it difficult to measure the effect of pitching strategy.…
This manuscript is a statistical investigation into the 2017 Major League Baseball scandal involving the Houston Astros, the World Series championship winner that same year. The Astros were alleged to have stolen their opponents' pitching…
We investigated the performance of the collective intelligence of NFL fans predicting the outcome of games as realized through the Vegas betting lines. Using data from 2560 games (all post-expansion, regular- and post-season games from…
In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
For a balanced cardcounting system we study the random variable of the true count after a number of cards are removed from the remaining deck and we prove a close formula for its standard deviation. As expected, the formula shows that the…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
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…