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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...and the rest
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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Rookie Renaissance
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
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His Name is Gio and the Ball flies from his hand
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
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Don’t Bring Me Down – Using Elo Ratings to help determine fan satisfaction.
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
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The Worst Called Strike of the First Half
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
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The Worst Called Ball of the First Half
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
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