Author Archives: Geoff

About Geoff

Dad, hacker, fantasy sports entrepreneur.

One Player, Two Kinds of Stats: Handling Shohei Ohtani

Posted on 21 February, 2018 by Geoff

This year the Angels signed Shohei Ohtani, the young Japanese star who played both as a pitcher and outfielder for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters of the Japanese Pacific League. As in Japan, Ohtani is expected to continue to play extensively … Continue reading →

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Fighting the Last War

Posted on 28 May, 2017 by Geoff

This week’s Riddler at FiveThirtyEight reruns a puzzle initially run back in February. The game is a “war” between two warlords fighting over 10 castles. Each warlord has 100 soldiers, and the 10 castles are worth from 1 to 10 points each. … Continue reading →

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#FixTheWin

Posted on 7 May, 2017 by Geoff

A few years back Brian Kenney introduced the hashtag #KillTheWin, which still lives on. Baseball fans point out egregious cases of a pitcher getting a win in a game despite pitching poorly. While the win might have been a useful … Continue reading →

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Comparing Projected HR leaders to actual

Posted on 2 March, 2017 by Geoff

Tom Tango asked an interesting question on Twitter yesterday: The odds of the projected HR leader actually leading the league is an interesting question. I’ve been doing projections since 2011, so I thought I’d sweep my database for the RotoValue … Continue reading →

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Count von Count Riddler

Posted on 18 September, 2016 by Geoff

I periodically attempt the FiveThirtyEight Riddler, edited by Oliver Roeder. This week he’s actually presenting two, a shorter “Riddler Express”, and a more time consuming “Riddler Classic”. The Sesame Street character Count von Count likes to, well, count, and he … Continue reading →

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Pirate Riddler

Posted on 5 June, 2016 by Geoff

This week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler is a logic puzzle. Assume 10 “Perfectly Rational Pirate Logicians”. The pirates have found 10 gold pieces, and the puzzle is to figure out how they will allocate the loot among themselves. There are several constraints. First, the … Continue reading →

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FiveThirtyEight Baseball Division Champs Puzzle

Posted on 29 May, 2016 by Geoff

Update: I’ve added a link to the Perl progam I used to do these simulations. Oliver Roeder presents a weekly puzzler on FiveThirtyEight, and this week it was a baseball-themed puzzle. Assume a sport (say, “baseball”) in which each team plays 162 games … Continue reading →

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Comparing 2014 Projections – ERA and WHIP

Posted on 14 February, 2015 by Geoff

Yesterday I ran comparisons of several projections systems for an all-inclusive batting statistic, wOBA. Today I’m running the same tests, computing root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE), for two commonly used fantasy statistics, ERA and WHIP. These tests are bias-adjusted, … Continue reading →

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Comparing 2014 Projections – wOBA

Posted on 13 February, 2015 by Geoff

In the past three years I’ve done reviews of baseball projections systems with actual data for those systems for which I could get data. Will Larson maintains a valuable site of projections from many different sources, and most of the sources I’m comparing are … Continue reading →

Posted in Major League Baseball, Projections, Sabermetrics | 2 Comments

RV Current for NBA

Posted on 24 November, 2014 by Geoff

Similar to what I’ve done with baseball, I’m now running new projections daily for NBA players under the name RV Current. These projections add current year data into the model, increasing the weight given to the current season as more … Continue reading →

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