The Backwards K — Baseball Strikeout Looking

The backwards K is normally used to denote a called third strike in a strikeout. It’s typically written on a scorecard. I’ve been looking for the backwards K so I can denote the strikeout looking on Twitter, and I finally found it: ꓘ (for unsupported browsers — Chrome) The easiest way to use this character […]

MLB — Pace of Play [Working Post]

This post is a work in progress. The data concerning the pace of play is rather messy and this project is rather large compare to what I normally tackle. For that reason I’m going start this post and update it as a ‘working post’. Please feel free to contact me if anyone has any input: […]

2014 ALWCG Twitter Graphs

The Royals and A’s had quite the entertaining 12-inning game Tuesday night. These are a few graphs I made from Twitter data. Yellow is Oakland; blue is Kansas City. The proportions of tweets between teams might be off, but I would venture to guess the Royals had much more social media activity than the A’s. […]

Do MLB Playoff Odds Work?

One of the more fan-accessible advanced stats are playoff odds [technically postseason probabilities]. Playoff odds range from 0% – 100% telling the fan the probability that a certain team will reach the MLB postseason. These are determined by creating a Monte Carlo simulation which runs the baseball season thousands of times [FanGraph runs theirs 10,000 […]

MLB — Run Distribution Per Game & Per Inning — Negative Binomial

This is an extension of an earlier post I wrote about the runs per inning distribution. In this post I use the negative binomial distribution to better model the how MLB teams score runs in an inning or in a game. I wrote a primer on the math of the different distributions mentioned in the […]

Pirates 2014 — Bullpen

All the graphs are pulled from this Fangraphs leaderboard. The Pirates bullpen has a been a source of problems and criticisms for the Pirates this year. At the beginning of 2014, the bullpen had almost the same personnel as the 2013 season. Bullpens can vary wildly from year to year, and the Pirates relievers pitched […]

MLB — Bases Loaded. No Outs. No Runs.

Bases loaded, no outs is one of the most tenuous points of a close baseball game. If you are rooting for the team at the plate, you feel confident your team will score here. Anything else, would be a huge disappointment. If you are rooting for the fielding team and your pitcher gets out of […]

Moving Average Time Series — Baseball

Usually I use stats to describe baseball, but this post is going to use baseball to illustrate stats. There’ll be some math. If that scares you, you’ve been duly warned. Also I have collected the SAS output for each model for technical reference. A time series is data that has been collected at a regular […]

MLB — Poisson Distribution To Model Runs Scored Per Inning

I have recently written a much more mathematically involved post using the negative binomial and wrote up a discrete probability distribution primer. These are a more complete treatment of the the topic. However, this post is a good overview of the basics. My friend sparked my recent interest in Poisson distributions by mentioning how rare […]

Predicting Baseball Wins with WAR

This is a lot of debate about the usefulness of the comprehensive baseball statistic, WAR — Wins Above Replacement. I don’t think that WAR is the end all statistic, but it is a useful tool. Why? Because it can describe relatively accurately how a player contributes to a team. It also can help fans understand […]

Runners in Scoring Position [RISP]

  These graphs were constructed with data from retrosheet.org.  If you like baseball data, I suggest you go there.  Also any individual player stats must have at least 100 season at bats to appear on the graph/analysis. Last year a lot of emphasis was placed on how bad the Pirates were offensively, specifically with runners […]

2013 MLB Wins Visualized

    Want to know where all the wins in MLB came from last year?  This chart tells you all 2431 (30 teams x 82 wins + 1 Gm163) wins came from last season.  The chart is fully interactive.  I do advise using a large screen since the chart is so large. This is called […]