Welcome back to BF&N Ash Day… The MLB offseason is pure torture. Fans long for the return of baseball and the warmer weather that accompanies it. The winter crawls by as we eagerly count down the days until pitchers and
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Tag: Baseball
DFA – Baseball is Boring
In a new section at Bat Flips and Nerds, Dross From Amateurs, we feature posts that don’t quite fit anywhere on the internet. At all. Baseball is boring. That’s what we keep hearing, it’s too long, it’s stagnated, it’s full
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Umpires are more biased than I thought
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
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Chasing Probabilities and The Postseason Crapshoot
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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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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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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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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