Related papers: A Derivation of the Pythagorean Won-Loss Formula i…
Bill James' Pythagorean formula has for decades done an excellent job estimating a baseball team's winning percentage from very little data: if the average runs scored and allowed are denoted respectively by ${\rm RS}$ and ${\rm RA}$, there…
Bill James invented the Pythagorean expectation in the late 70's to predict a baseball team's winning percentage knowing just their runs scored and allowed. His original formula estimates a winning percentage of ${\rm RS}^2/({\rm RS}^2+{\rm…
We mathematically prove that an existing linear predictor of baseball teams' winning percentages (Jones and Tappin 2005) is simply just a first-order approximation to Bill James' Pythagorean Won-Loss formula and can thus be written in terms…
The Pythagorean Expected Wins Percentage Model was developed by Bill James to estimate a baseball team expected wins percentage over the course of a season. As such, the model can be used to assess how lucky or unfortunate a team was over…
Originally devised for baseball, the Pythagorean Won-Loss formula estimates the percentage of games a team should have won at a particular point in a season. For decades, this formula had no mathematical justification. In 2006, Steven…
The Pythagorean formula is one of the most popular ways to measure the true ability of a team. It is very easy to use, estimating a team's winning percentage from the runs they score and allow. This data is readily available on standings…
We ask if there are alternative contest models that minimize error or information loss from misspecification and outperform the Pythagorean model. This article aims to use simulated data to select the optimal expected win percentage model…
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…
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…
Estimating ballpark effects and team defense in baseball is challenging because batted-ball outcomes are influenced by multiple factors, including contact quality, ballpark environment, defensive performance, and random variation. In this…
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…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
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…
We present evidence, based on play-by-play data from all 6087 games from the 2006/07--2009/10 seasons of the National Basketball Association (NBA), that basketball scoring is well described by a weakly-biased continuous-time random walk.…
The so-called pinball loss for estimating conditional quantiles is a well-known tool in both statistics and machine learning. So far, however, only little work has been done to quantify the efficiency of this tool for nonparametric…
Can one understand the statistics of wins and losses of baseball teams? Are their consecutive-game winning and losing streaks self-reinforcing or can they be described statistically? We apply the Bradley-Terry model, which incorporates the…
As a dedicated follower of sports statistics and with the MLB season beginning in late March, I set out to predict how many wins each team would accumulate by the end of the 162 game season. The goal was to build a simulation framework…
The paper is devoted to dynamic games. We consider a general enough framework, which is not limited to e.g. differential games and could accommodate both discrete and continuous time. Assuming common dynamics, we study two game families…
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…
Runs Batted IN (RBI) records the number of runs a hitter directly drives in during their plate appearances and reflects a batter's ability to convert opportunities into scoring. Because producing runs determines game outcomes, RBI has long…