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
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Category: Baseball
ALDS preview: New York Yankees vs. Minnesota Twins
Nothing is certain in this world except death, taxes and plenty of home runs in the ALDS between the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins. Both teams exceeded the magical mark of 300 homers this season, with the Twins claiming
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NL Wild Card game preview
The Cardinals emphatic victory over arch-rivals Chicago Cubs on Sunday night, clinched the NL Central division title to set up a five-game NLDS against the Atlanta Braves, starting on Thursday 3 October. The result means the win-or-go-home NL Wild Card
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AL Wild Card preview
Entering the final weekend of the regular season, we have three teams vying for the two AL Wild Card playoff spots. We even have the possibility of a Game 163. All three divisions are represented, and one of the Oakland
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Who have been the second-half comeback kids?
After the dog days of the offseason, and then the seemingly never-ending schedule of meaningless Spring Training games, the regular season arrived and demanded the complete attention of the baseball world. By the end of April, the following was true…
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Checking the Fundamentals of WAR – Part 2– The Hitter & Pitcher Split
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
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September storylines to follow: Worst team of the century
With four or maybe five of the divisions sewn up, you can be forgiven for thinking that there is not much left to get excited about until the postseason starts. When real, meaningful baseball takes centre stage. The tightest AL
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September storylines to follow: Astros pitchers
Hopefully, you caught the recent Bat Flips and Nerds podcast. The one with the famous four rambling on about subjects as diverse as Bob Carolgees, Heart of Midlothian defenders and Durham Uni’s student newspaper. If you haven’t already listened, you
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Checking the Fundamentals of WAR – Part 1 – A 1000 wins above replacement
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
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Who to support in September if your team has been eliminated
Games matter more in September. They don’t of course. But they also do. As chances to make up deficits grow thinner and the magic numbers trickle down into single digits, the spotlight shines bright on teams on the precipice –
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