A consistently reliable rule of baseball is that the closer your runners are to home plate, the better chance you have of scoring in a given inning. But what if this isnât always true? Bear with me on this one.
Sabermetrics godfather and occasional Joe Paterno apologist Bill James has spent the past many years as something of a paradox. You can be confident that heâs smart at something, but a great deal of what he says and does flies in the face of that knowledge.
Join me on a short journey through some neat NBA stats from the 2016-17 regular season.
Are you seated? Are you prepared to hear the rawest, truest sabermetrics take of all time from Blue Jays scout Steve Springer?
When Coachella opens its gates at the Empire Polo Club today, it sounds the bugle for Festival Season, now a live-music summer staple from coast to coast. At the time of the first Coachella in 1999, its multi-day, multi-stage format was a novelty to anyone who hadnât trekked out to a Woodstock anniversary or jam-bandâŚ
NHL.com's new stats page is live, complete with "enhanced stats."
Charles Barkley said some really dumb stuff about basketball analytics on Tuesday night, and so Keith Olbermann dedicated a segment of his show to calling Chuck an idiot many, many times.
Over at FiveThirtyEight, Reuben Fischer-Baum has put together an interactive graph of every NFL team's cumulative point differential over its history. (The grabbed image above is not interactive. Stop trying to interact with it.)
LeBron James thought he had himself a 32-10-12 triple-double in last night's win against the Pelicans, but he did not! As it turns out, he was credited with an assist that he didn't deserve because the official scorer fucked up.
From Skidmore College statistics professor Michael Lopez comes the handy chart you see above, plotting the 2014 win totals of all 30 MLB teams against preseason predictions from Vegas and what Lopez calls his "Statsheads Prediction."
Tyler Dellow offers up a rare but well-deserved fisking of Steve Simmons's latest anti-stats garbage pile. Read it not just to laugh at Simmons, but for useful answers to dumb questions from the luddites in your life.
This morning on Grantland, Kirk Goldsberry introduced the stat Expected Possession Value Added (EPVA), which he developed with some colleagues as part of a Sloan Conference paper. EPVA still needs some work, but it may represent an enormous development in NBA analysis. Here's why.
The box score from last night's Creighton-Villanova gameâa game that ended with Creighton upsetting the No. 4 team in the country behind 21 made three-pointersâlooks like a fluke. No team is supposed to heave 35 three-pointers in 40 minutes, let alone connect on 60 percent of them, right? Wrong. The Creighton BluejaysâŚ
Did you know that Curt Schilling led the league in complete games from 1992-2001? That Tim Raines led the league in hits from 1981-87? That Fred McGriff led the league in home runs from 1987-95? All great stats to argue for your favorite player's HOF admission, made possible by the magic of cherrypicked, arbitraryâŚ
There is something impossibly satisfying about watching a team come out of a timeout and run an ornately designed play that springs someone for a wide-open look or an easy layup. A gorgeous play there, a nonsense turnover here, the very best reputations might be well won over years, but overall, our sense of whichâŚ
Over the last five games, David Ortiz has hit .733/.750/1.267. This would be a crazy line for any stretch of the season, much less the fucking World Series, and it's brought his career line in the Fall Classic up to .465/.556/.814, which is good enoughâthe best of any hitter with at least 50 plate appearancesâto backâŚ
Maybe gawking at the convergence of unlikely comebacks and predictable collapses will get old someday, but by god, that day isn't today. So let's look at how the Cowboys went from a 99 percent chance of winning to a Matt Stafford impromptu Marino in less than 90 seconds.
How unlikely was Tom Brady's game-winning pass to Kenbrell Thompkins? Unlikely enough to make this Win Probability chart for the Saints look like it got stabbed in the heart with a spear.
On September 17, 1977, Carleton College and St. Olaf College played the Liter Bowl, the first NCAA-sanctioned game to use metric measurements, and probably the dorkiest piece of football ever put together.
Once Demaryius Thomas crossed the line to gain at the Dallas 14 yard line with 1:50 to play, the Dallas defense should have intentionally allowed the TD. With 2 timeouts and 1:40+ to play, they would have had a better chance of winning than allowing Denver to choke the life out of them and kick an easy FG for the win.
