#FixTheWin

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 metric for pitchers in the dead-ball era, when starters completed more than half their starts… Continue reading #FixTheWin

Comparing Projected HR leaders to actual

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 projections and see what that history was. That gives me just five years, but it… Continue reading Comparing Projected HR leaders to actual

Count von Count Riddler

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 now has his own twitter feed! For those who don’t recall the character from the… Continue reading Count von Count Riddler

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Categorized as Riddler

Pirate Riddler

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 pirates themselves are ranked in a strict hierarchy, with the Captain at the top, and… Continue reading Pirate Riddler

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Categorized as Riddler

FiveThirtyEight Baseball Division Champs Puzzle

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 in a season. Also assume a “division” (e.g. the “AL East”) containing 5 teams, each… Continue reading FiveThirtyEight Baseball Division Champs Puzzle

Comparing 2014 Projections – ERA and WHIP

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, so what matters is a player’s ERA or WHIP relative to the overall average of that… Continue reading Comparing 2014 Projections – ERA and WHIP

Comparing 2014 Projections – wOBA

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 from that. As in the past, I’m computing root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) for… Continue reading Comparing 2014 Projections – wOBA

RV Current for NBA

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 games are played. This early in the season, the numbers aren’t much different from my… Continue reading RV Current for NBA

Tracking Injuries…

I’ve just rolled out some enhancements to RotoValue’s handling of injury reports. Now in addition to displaying reports, and highlighting the injury on player searches, I’ve added a new field, called Target Return: