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
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