Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – January 22nd, 2019

Football: Sarah Mallepalle Introduces Next-Gen-Scrapy: a GitHub repository which allows users to scrape all pass chart images and JSON data from Next Gen Stats. Football Perspective on How The Rams Got Here: The Dream Offseason Was 2017, How did the Saints Get Here? Look to The 2017 Offseason, How did the Patriots Get Here? Look to The 2015 Draft and How Did The Chiefs Get Here? Look Outside The First Two Rounds. Football Outsiders’ Conference Championships Quick Reads/DVOA Ratings. Pro Football Reference releases 2018 Approximate Value. The Sports Information Solutions blog says the Rams’ rushing success is much more than Todd Gurley or C.J. Anderson.

College Football: Football Study Hall Revisits the 2005 college football season with advanced box scores.

Baseball: FanGraphs series on fixing MLB’s salary arbitration system: Introduction and The Arbitrators. Baseball Savant rolls out Minor League spray charts back to 2010. FiveThirtyEight says Don’t Worry, MLB, Hitters Are Killing The Shift On Their Own. John Dewan discusses The Hall of Fame Value Standard Part 2. Beyond the Box Score discusses Who has benefited from dropping the sinker. Tom Tango’s Statcast Lab: Are we evaluating plays or players?. The Hardball Times looks at The Next Wave in Performance Enhancement. FiveThirtyEight Built A Polling Model … For The Baseball Hall Of Fame. FanGraphs: MLB Payroll Probably Isn’t Going Back Up in 2019. Beyond the Box Score finds The free agent reliever market is wonky. Walk Like a Sabermetrician examines Run Distribution and W%, 2018. The New York Times makes a case for Bill James as a Baseball Hall of Famer.

Basketball: Justin Jacobs’ provides A Methodology for Qualitatively Comparing Games. Stephen Shea blog post on The 40/60/80 Club. Nylon Calculus ponders When does it pay to stagger your stars’ playing time? FiveThirtyEight writes that Ben Simmons Has Old-School Range. In 2019, That’s A Problem. The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective suggests A Simple Improvement to FiveThirtyEight’s NBA Elo Model.

College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s latest podcast.

Soccer: American Soccer Analysis is Going to WAR for Points Above Replacement in Soccer. StatsBomb wonders if Statistics Explain Kevin-Prince Boateng’s Barcelona Transfer.  StatsBomb on Oussama Idrissi and the Difficulties of Scouting Eredivisie Talent.

Hockey: Hockey Graphs continues its WAR series with History, Philosophy, and Objectives (Part 1), The Process (Part 2) and Replacement Level, Decisions, Results, and Final Remarks (Part 3). RawCharge.com on Empty-calorie scorers: A real thing or an NHL myth?

Tennis: Heavy Topspin takes A Closer Look at Tiebreak Tactics and writes that The Happy Slam is the Speedy Slam.

Your moment of R: Joe Gallagher’s code to Adjust xG per possession. BaseballWithR’s Exploration of Spin Rates.

Check out these Pythons: Travis Petersen gives us Peterman’s Ineptitude: Web Scraping with Pandas Read_HTML.