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Tell It To Your Analyst: The Raging Genius Of Earl Weaver
The first and obvious thing about Earl Weaver, for me, was that he was terrifying. I lived about seven blocks from Memorial Stadium, depending on how you walked it, and Junior Orioles packages were cheap, so my parents took my older brother and me to games all the time, from our youngest days. This ...
NFL 2012: Which Teams Actually Had Injuries, And Which Teams Just Lied?
Football injuries are random but inevitable. Every year, some teams will spend the season in an MRI machine, and others will end up pretty much unharmed (outside of thousands of micro-concussions). Just as predictably, some coaches will try to obfuscate their team's health to screw with their oppone...
H, Y, and Z Are Your Money Letters: How To Beat Scrabble's Flawed Points System, Using Google-Powered Math
This week the director of research at Google, a fellow named Peter Norvig, published on his blog the results of a fascinating deep-dive into the English language. If you're at all interested in letter frequency or word frequency, you owe it to yourself to at least skim Norvig's post. Essentially the...
![A Vote For Roger Clemens Was A Vote For Barry Bonds: The Politics Of The Hall Of Fame Ballot, By The Numbers [UPDATE]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/18azwl896gdgujpg.jpg)
A Vote For Roger Clemens Was A Vote For Barry Bonds: The Politics Of The Hall Of Fame Ballot, By The Numbers [UPDATE]
Hall of fame ballots follow their own own internal logic. For instance, regardless of how they feel about steroids, almost all voters agree with both or neither of the following statements:...
Alex Smith Has A Good Shot At Setting An NFL Passing Record This Season
It's been more than a month since Colin Kaepernick became the man in San Francisco. The Niners were 6-2, and Alex Smith's numbers were sparkling—not just for his supposed game-manager image, but up there with anyone in the league. And then Smith took a couple of hard hits in the first half of a game...
Do Foreign Footballers Really Dive More?
This Regressing entry is brought to you by our clever friends at the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective. Today: how Premier League diving might be a cultural phenomenon....
In Yet Another Case Of Metrics Confusion, Hakeem Nicks Claims Stats Are Useful For Impressing Girls
Hakeem Nicks's production has fallen in recent games, partly due to a left knee injury. A reporter asked him whether he was concerned about the drop-off, and he answered in a way that briefly sent the sports analytics world into a fit of eye-rolling and furiously composing Nate-Silver-meme jokes: "S...
Nate Silver's Braying Idiot Detractors Show That Being Ignorant About Politics Is Like Being Ignorant About Sports
In case you haven't been hanging around the benighted corners of the political internet lately, there's an idiotic backlash afoot against Nate Silver, the proprietor of the FiveThirtyEight blog who made his name as one of the sharpest baseball analysts around....
Did Mike Trout Lose The Gold Glove Because His Corner Outfielders Were Too Good?
The Gold Gloves were handed out this week, and without Derek Jeter as a finalist, we were prepared for a controversy-free awards. We were wrong. Mike Trout, the statistical darling who’s totally going to lose the MVP to Miguel Cabrera, couldn’t even get named his league’s best center fielder, losing...
The Giants Sure Use A Lot Of Sabermetrics For An Anti-Sabermetric Team
The Giants' World Series title is the latest point of retreat for the desperate sportswriter still looking to slam the use of statistics in baseball. In today's San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce Jenkins insists that this championship team got there through hard work, gristle, faces, eyes, shoulders, k...
Cranky Columnist Writes Anti-Stats Column That Reads Like Parody Of Anti-Stats Columns
Chaz Scoggins has been around. The longtime Lowell Sun writer has served as the Red Sox's official scorer for 34 years. He's been a SABR member for nearly as long. He even served as president of the BBWAA. But his hidden talent appears to be master satirist. How else to explain his weekend column, w...
Even If Icing The Kicker Doesn't Work, It's Better Than Never Icing The Kicker
Mike Tomlin iced the kicker twice last night, but with an unfortunate twist: First, he called a timeout on his own kicker, Shaun Suisham, who proceeded to miss a 54-yarder. Then he stopped the Titans' Rob Bironas just as he was about to attempt the game-winning 40-yarder. Bironas waited two minutes ...
Ben Roethlisberger Was Just Awarded A Touchdown, So You Might Want To Check Your Fantasy League
This play, in the second quarter of Pittsburgh's win over the Eagles on Sunday, was ruled on the field as a lateral from Ben Roethlisberger to Rashard Mendenhall, who scampered 13 yards for the score. So it went down in the books a rushing touchdown for Mendenhall, and that was that. Until yesterday...
When Good Statistics Go Bad: The Case Against The Case Against R.A. Dickey
R.A. Dickey, objectively speaking, is the greatest human being in history. His knuckleball destroys cities and he climbed a huge fucking mountain. But should he win the Cy Young Award?...
Just How Tight Is The AL Playoff Race?
With three weeks to go in the season, over half of baseball is still in the race. Seventeen teams are within five games of a playoff spot. You might think that's mostly due to the new second wild card, and that's the case in the NL. With all three division leaders comfortable and the Braves safe at...
NFL Teams Can't Stop Scoring. When Will They Stop Running And Punting?
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