Russell Eassom

Umpires are more biased than I thought

October 18, 2019 Russell Eassom Analytics, Baseball

In the midst of its Postseason, and probably unbeknownst to most of its fans, MLB has taken its next steps in using an automated ball-strike system or “Robo Umps” as I like to call them. This was first tested in

Chasing Probabilities and The Postseason Crapshoot

October 10, 2019 Russell Eassom Baseball

The end of the regular season is the time of the season when I check the playoff odds every day, to see how much they have changed. As I have said with WAR in my previous pieces, these are values

Checking the Fundamentals of WAR – Part 2– The Hitter & Pitcher Split

September 16, 2019 Russell Eassom Baseball

In the first piece, here, I discussed checking the replacement level for WAR. This was re-blogged by Tom Tango and led to a discussion with him and Mitchel Lichtman, one of the other co-authors of The Book (a seminal sabermetric

Checking the Fundamentals of WAR – Part 1 – A 1000 wins above replacement

September 5, 2019 Russell Eassom Analytics, Baseball

My day job is in the world of data science and in it I build evaluation and prediction models. All of these models are built on certain assumptions that I hold to be true and although I update the models

Rookie Renaissance

August 23, 2019 Russell Eassom Baseball

Right now, wherever you look in the MLB media landscape you will see someone talking about the current crop of rookies. Most, if not all of these articles will be talking about how amazing these guys are and some are

His Name is Gio and the Ball flies from his hand

August 20, 2019 Russell Eassom Baseball

One of the things I find to be missing from MLB compared to European sports, and even the KBO & NPB, is the lack of chants about the players coming from the stands. The word play involved in these chants

Don’t Bring Me Down – Using Elo Ratings to help determine fan satisfaction.

August 13, 2019 Russell Eassom Analytics, Baseball

Off the back of the trade deadline I have been wondering what is best for fans, a team that wins a singular World Series championship and is bad for 20+ years or a team that is close most of the

The Worst Called Strike of the First Half

August 1, 2019 Russell Eassom Analytics, Baseball

As I mentioned in my first piece of this series, I miss the semi-season articles that Jeff Sullivan used to do for FanGraphs on the worst called balls and strikes. In the last piece we looked at called balls and

The Worst Called Ball of the First Half

July 31, 2019 Russell Eassom Analytics, Baseball, Pinch Hitting

We are a few weeks beyond the half point of the season and on the weekend I went in search for one of my favourite articles of each season. But after a few minutes of searching I realised that it

The Called First Pitch Strike – Why?

July 30, 2019 Russell Eassom Baseball

I have a few bugbears when I watch a game of Major League Baseball, I feel most of these are derived from the fact that I have never been taught how to play the game or faced something being thrown