Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com published forecasts of the 2018 mid-term elections, predicting the outcome of races for House, Senate, and Governor. The site also made it easy to download their projection data, and so I’d like to look at their forecasts and see how their models did. Silver made three variants of his model, dubbed “Lite”, “Classic”,… Continue reading Reviewing the FiveThirtyEight 2018 Election Forecasts
Reverse Platoon Splits – Before and After
Tom Tango asked someone to see what players with at least a 30-point wOBA reverse platoon split in their first 2500 plate appearances did for the rest of their careers, and Sean Foreman kindly provided split data from his database. So I hacked together a Perl script to read his data and analyze it. The script lets… Continue reading Reverse Platoon Splits – Before and After
Professional Standings Now Available on RotoValue
RotoValue now also shows professional standings for both MLB and NBA. And, like the fantasy standings pages, you can customize them to any date range you like. So if you want to see how your team has done since a particular date, or over the past month, or since they called up Gleyber Torres or Ronald Acuna,… Continue reading Professional Standings Now Available on RotoValue
One Player, Two Kinds of Stats: Handling Shohei Ohtani
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 both as a pitcher and hitter. Some players have played significantly at the major league… Continue reading One Player, Two Kinds of Stats: Handling Shohei Ohtani
Fighting the Last War
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. If you send more soldiers to a given castle than your opponent, you win it… Continue reading Fighting the Last War
#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
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
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