Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – February 12th, 2019
Football: Football Perspective’s 2018 Era-Adjusted Passer Ratings.
College Football: Football Study Hall looks at Coaching overachievers and underachievers.
Baseball: FanGraphs finishes its series on fixing MLB’s Salary Arbitration System: Introducing Restricted Free Agency. FiveThirtyEight’s Travis Sawchik weighs in on How To Save MLB Free Agency. Baseball Prospectus’ Flu-Like Symptoms: Why PECOTA Hates Your Favorite Team (2019). Tom Tango on How much Random Variation there is in a Multinomial stat like wOBA (or Linear Weights). Beyond the Box Score believes MLB should consider a lottery in their proposal to change the amateur draft. FiveThirtyEight puts Bryce Harper And Manny Machado On A Bunch Of Different Teams. Driveline Baseball pairs Blast and Hittrax data together to inspect on a swing-by-swing basis.
Basketball: Justin Jacobs’ posts An Example in Kullback-Leibler Divergence. Nylon Calculus: Stephen Curry is inevitable. Nylon Calculus with Predicting playoff position and probability. Ryan Davis created a chrome extension for downloading the tables on stats.nba.com to CSVs. The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective: First to 100 Points Wins?
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s latest podcast.
Hockey: Hockey Graphs publishes An Excerpt from Tape to Space: Redefining Modern Hockey Tactics. BehindTheBenches.com’s Season by season Coach’s Challenge data. FiveThirtyEight says Goodbye, Dead Puck Era. Sean Tierney’s update to the WAR lineup creator allows you to select a “Replacement.Level” player at forward, defense, or goalie.
Soccer: StatsBomb has An Overview of Pass Heights In the Premier League, English Football League and Scottish Premiership. American Soccer Analysis on What it takes to win the Champions League.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin examines Break Point Serve Tendencies on the ATP Tour.
Check out these Pythons: py_ball shows a way to visualize the impact on FG% when a player is the closest defender.
Your moment of R: BaseballWithR’s tutorial on Visualizing the Actual Strike Zone. Luke Benz has version 1.4 of the ncaahoopR package with functions for scraping and plotting shot location data where available. Jake Flancer has updated his NCAA bigballR package. Josh Hermsmeyer’s R code to Test the predictive power of various CFB metrics with career yards per game as the target variable.
Conferences: The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is March 1-2 in Boston. March 8-10 is the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix. The Seattle Hockey Analytics Conference (VanHAC moves south of the border for the year) will be held March 8-10.