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I hate the Giants. Let this be known. What i was hoping to find was another reason to support my claim that their WS win in 2010 was a complete fluke.  So when digging through the game logs for the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I couldn’t let this one go. The conclusion draw here by this author that Randy Johnson was “the best pitcher of all time” was not something I could allow to slip through the cracks. Johnson was awesome. Incredible to watch. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

My intuition tells me that objects traveling through the air would meet more resistance when there is more moisture in the air. It turns out that my intuition is wrong. It still doesn’t make sense to me but apparently humid … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Below is a chart of the top 20 offensive players based on FanGraphs WAR for the 2011 season.  The various features and their corresponding metric are clear in the image. I’ve also included the leader and last place for each … Continue reading → [Read more...]

While reading this article over at Fangraphs I was inspired to ask myself “what would Matt Kemp have to do between now and then end of his career to be seriously considered for the Hall of Fame?”.  This question comes … Continue reading → [Read more...]

B*tchin’ six dimensional 6-cube. The rainbow colours and glass panes really help this visualisation.  Examples of 6-dimensional things If it’s hard to envision 6 dimensions, consider this: the possible tunings of a guitar constitute a 6-dimensio... [Read more...]

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PROS ARE NOT GETTING BETTER AT FREE THROWS Rick Larrick recently told Decision Science News that baseball players have been getting better over the years in a couple ways. First, home runs and strikeouts have increased. The careless or clueless reader might note that this is curious, for from the ... [Read more...]

MLB Gameday stores its game data in XML format, with the players denoted in ID numbers. To find out who is who, the codes are stored in pitchers.xml or batters.xml of each game. My DownloadPitchFX.R script can download the ID numbers, but it doesn’t look to ... [Read more...]

After downloading some pitch f/x data using my R script, we can finally have some fun. But because the pitch f/x data is very elaborate, R can easily get overwhelmed by copying the dataset back and forth in memory, as you manipulate the data. So the natural progression ... [Read more...]

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Update x6 (Jul 27): so I guess people want pitch counts. The data @ MLB seems to only give the pitch count of the end result and the strikes/balls/outs of the particular pitch. Of course you can combine them to get the pitch count. Stupid WordPress comments strip out necessary ... [Read more...]

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In baseball, what are the chances the winner will win again against the same opponent the very next day? [Read more...]

In order to honor the last day of the 2009 MLB regular season (excepting the Twins/Tigers tiebreaker Tuesday night), I was reading a book that combines a few of my favorite thing: statistics, R, and baseball. The book, by Joseph Adler, is called Baseball Hacks, and I highly recommend it ... [Read more...]