Category Archives: Sports

FAKING TO THIRD BASE AND TRYING A PICKOFF AT FIRST WILL BE A BALK.

FAKING TO THIRD BASE AND TRYING A PICKOFF AT FIRST WILL BE A BALK. Nick sent me the news that if the union consents, it will be a balk if, with runners on at first base and third base, the … Continue reading

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THE HALL OF FAME VOTING.

THE HALL OF FAME VOTING. I posted here just before the announcement of the results of this year’s voting for the baseball Hall of Fame. I noted there (link here) that one veteran sportswriter (Murray Chass) was so strongly opposed … Continue reading

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BRANCH RICKEY, PIONEERING SABERMETRICIAN.

BRANCH RICKEY, PIONEERING SABERMETRICIAN. Branch Rickey is best remembered for being instrumental in Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color line in baseball. This article by William Juliano recalls that Branch Rickey pioneered the use of statistics in baseball. Juliano links to … Continue reading

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SABERMETRICS 50 YEARS AGO.

SABERMETRICS FIFTY YEARS AGO. We had a lot of discussion, for example, here, about whether Miguel Cabrera or Mike Trout should be the American League Most Valuable Player for 2012 (Cabrera won). The debate turned on the application of Moneyball … Continue reading

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HOW TO RIG STATISTICAL EXPERIMENTS.

HOW TO RIG STATISTICAL EXPERIMENTS. Christopher Shea had an article in the December Atlantic about a psychologist who showed how psychologists can (and some do) rig the results of their experiments to make them publishable. Uri Simonsohn, with three colleagues, … Continue reading

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SHOWING A KNUCKLEBALL KNUCKLING.

SHOWING A BASEBALL KNUCKLING. Nick sent me this animated gif of R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball. (As I understand it, the gif (graphics interchange format) operates as a series of images.) Notice how this particular pitch starts out to Dickey’s right and … Continue reading

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NATE SILVER HAS BECOME A VERB.

NATE SILVER HAS BECOME A VERB. Nick and I used to look at Nate Silver’s PECOTA projections in Baseball Prospectus when we were making decisions about fantasy baseball players. Now, here is an article by Stephen Galloway in the Hollywood … Continue reading

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LEFTY GOMEZ’S CHRISTMAS TREE STORY.

LEFTY GOMEZ’S CHRISTMAS TREE STORY. I posted here about our family’s struggles with putting our Christmas tree, including how we discovered that Christmas trees shrink, and I posted here about LEFTY, the biography of Lefty Gomez by Vernona Gomez and … Continue reading

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BRONKO NAGURSKI REVISITED.

BRONKO NAGURSKI REVISITED. I am alerted when another website links to one of my posts. The Medium Happy blog recently linked to this post about the great football player Bronko Nagurski. I was pleased to see that this blog is … Continue reading

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PRECISE DATA FOR A SINGLE PITCH.

PRECISE DATA FOR A SINGLE PITCH. Alan Nathan’s analysis of the physics of a single pitch and line drive builds on an amazing amount of data that is now available for baseball games. Nathan knows that on the pitch that … Continue reading

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