Related papers: The hardest-hit home run?
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…
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…
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…
In baseball games, the coefficient of restitution of baseballs strongly affects the flying distance of batted balls, which determines the home-run probability. In Japan, the range of the coefficient of restitution of official baseballs has…
In Major League Baseball, every ballpark is different, with different dimensions and climates. These differences make some ballparks more conducive to hitting home runs than others. Several factors conspire to make estimation of these…
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…
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…
We show that the great baseball players that started their careers before 1950 are overrepresented among rankings of baseball's all time greatest players. The year 1950 coincides with the decennial US Census that is closest to when Major…
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…
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…
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…
Motivated by a problem posed by Aldous, our goal is to find the maximal-entropy win-martingale: In a sports game between two teams, the chance the home team wins is initially $x_0 \in (0,1)$ and finally 0 or 1. As an idealization we take a…
I present a simple and transparent standard for career greatness in baseball: any major league player with H > 2500 or HR > 350 or K > 2800 or W > 240 makes my Hall of Fame Cut. Rate statistics are avoided due to small sample issues and to…
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…
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…
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…
We present an algorithm for learning the intrinsic value of a batted ball in baseball. This work addresses the fundamental problem of separating the value of a batted ball at contact from factors such as the defense, weather, and ballpark…
In this paper we study the NP-Hard problem of maximizing the distance over an intersection of balls to a given point. We expand the results found in \cite{funcos1}, where the authors characterize the farthest in an intersection of balls…
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…
Ball lightning is a very rarely observed phenomenon that makes it extremely difficult to characterize scientifically. Eye-witness accounts of ball lightning that describe many features in common have been variously recorded for centuries.…