Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – July 31st, 2018
Football: Football Perspective says Julio Jones Is Great At Everything But Catching Short Touchdowns and looks at Which Leading Receivers Were The Most Effective in 2017. Football Outsiders’ 4-part study on players lined up in the slot vs. wide in the 2017 season: Wide Receivers, Quarterbacks, RBs and TEs. Vincent Verhei identifies the Best/Worst Red Zone Pass Offenses Since 1986. Pro Football Focus’ Eric Eager and Cris Collinsworth discuss the value of certain positions using wins above replacement.
Baseball: FanGraphs asks Is Pitch-Framing Cheating?. Bill James lists The Ten Best Players from Each Decade Not in the Hall of Fame. FanGraphs finds The Divide Between the Best and Worst Is Growing. FiveThirtyEight with a piece on How MLB’s Tankathon Is Skewing The Trade Market. Bill James post on Good Years and Flat Tires. The Hardball Times article on Building a Robot Umpire with Deep Learning Video Analysis. Tom Tango looks to answer What does it mean when the observed values diverge from “expected”? FiveThirtyEight’s Cheat Sheet To Take To The Ballpark To Decide When To Leave.
Basketball: Nylon Calculus’ (updated) math of transition defense. FiveThirtyEight: Oh, You Won Your Ring On A Superteam? Big Deal. Nylon Calculus on Game theory and the deep 3. Nylon Calculus writes that Real Plus-Minus is a little less real when players change teams. Nylon Calculus examines Predicting 3-point efficiency for incoming rookies.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis on MLS Television Blackouts: When Emotion and Data Collide. StatsBomb goes Inside League One: Using Data to Look At Players.
Hockey: Judy Cohen blog post on The 2016-17 BU PP: Passes (and shots) vs. the PK.
Your moment of R: Ron Yurko publishes the R code to make the run-gap figure in their nflWAR paper.
Conferences: Joint Statistical Meetings 2018 July 28th to August 2nd in Vancouver. The Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports August 3rd in Vancouver. Abstracts, speakers, topics and titles for the Saberseminar August 4th-5th in Boston.