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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…
The use of statistical modeling in baseball has received substantial attention recently in both the media and academic community. We focus on a relatively under-explored topic: the use of statistical models for the analysis of fielding…
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…
Predicting batting averages for specific batters against specific pitchers is a challenging problem in baseball. Previous methods for estimating batting averages in these matchups have used regression models that can incorporate the…
It has been noted that in many professional sports leagues a good predictor of a team's won-loss percentage is Bill James' Pythagorean Formula RSobs^c / (RSobs^c + RAobs^c), where RSobs (resp. RAobs) is the observed average number of runs…
The statistics of records for a time series generated by a continuous time random walk is studied, and found to be independent of the details of the jump length distribution, as long as the latter is continuous and symmetric. However, the…
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…
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…
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,…
The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on the so-called home advantage phenomenon date back to the 70's and every since has…
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…
From 2020 to 2023, Major League Baseball changed rules affecting team composition, player positioning, and game time. Understanding the effects of these rules is crucial for leagues, teams, players, and other relevant parties to assess…
In most popular sports leagues, like the MLB, NBA, and NFL, none of the commonly used statistics take into account the strengths of the opponents a player faces. One of the main reasons for this is the conventional belief that a player's…
Among the sports fans beliefs about "hot hands" and "winning streaks" are widely spread, while the scientific debate about these effects is still ongoing. Recently in a paper by P. Ferreira [Physica A 500: 92-96] detrended fluctuation…
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…
We investigate the statistics of records in a random sequence $\{x_B(0)=0,x_B(1),\cdots, x_B(n)=x_B(0)=0\}$ of $n$ time steps. The sequence $x_B(k)$'s represents the position at step $k$ of a random walk `bridge' of $n$ steps that starts…
We study statistics of records in a sequence of random variables. These identical and independently distributed variables are drawn from the parent distribution rho. The running record equals the maximum of all elements in the sequence up…
In numerous instances, the generalized exponential distribution can be used as an alternative to the most widely used non-regular family of distributions: Weibull, gamma, lognormal with three-parameters when analyzing lifetime or any skewed…
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…
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.…