Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – May 22nd, 2018

Football: Football Perspective finds Starting Running Backs Aren’t Being Used As Receivers More Often, Passing Declined More In 2017 Than Any Year Since 1977 and publishes Adjusting Passer Rating for Era: Updated 2017 Career Ratings.

College Football: Football Study Hall on West Virginia and market inefficiencies in modern recruiting.

Baseball: FanGraphs declares Mike Trout Is Now an Average Hall of Famer. Baseball Prospectus’ Baseball Therapy: How To Beat The Shift. FanGraphs believes The Rays Have Innovated Again. Tom Tango on How to measure the speed of a pitch, with little precision, by counting frames. Bill James asks So Who Is a Superstar? Beyond the Box Score’s early look at walk rate changes. Baseball Prospectus Feature: The Siren Song of Statcast’s “Expected” Metrics (For Pitchers). Alex Vigderman’s interesting piece on The Hardest-Hitting Minor Leaguers According to Synthetic Statcast. SportTechie writes Throw BP, Know SQL: The Modern Baseball Coach’s Job Description.

Basketball: FiveThirtyEight finds The NBA Playoffs Are Finally Getting Faster. Fancy Stats writes that If the Rockets are going to get back into this Warriors series, they must play faster and Kyrie Irving’s absence isn’t hurting the Celtics. It’s crushing LeBron’s Cavaliers. Threes and Layups’ Are Past Games in a Playoff Series Predictive of the Next Game? Nylon Calculus: New funding aims to expand ShotTracker experience for teams and fans.

Hockey: Hockey Graphs examines NHL Scoring Trends, 2007-08 to 2017-18: Is the League Getting More Competitive? FiveThirtyEight attempts to answer Is The Vegas Golden Knights’ Run As Amazing As Leicester City’s?

Soccer: How StatsBomb Data Helps Measure Counter-Pressing. American Soccer Analysis breaks down Peter Vermes’ System and His Favorite SON. StatsBomb’s The Dual Life of Expected Goals (Part 1) and (Part 2).

Tennis: Heavy Topspin’s New Match Charting Project Excel Template. Stephanie Kovalchik details Alexander Zverev’s Evolution on Clay.

Your moment of R: FC rStats Tutorial: Layered Histograms to show Passing Origins with Women’s Football Data.

Check out these Pythons: Samira Kumar blog post on Creating Game Animation And Convex Hull In Bokeh. Savvas Tjortjoglou’s blog post on measuring uncertainty in the NFL using Python and the Bayesian bootstrap.

General: FiveThirtyEight on How Shoddy Statistics Found A Home In Sports Research.

Conferences: The Fields Sports Analytics Workshop May 24th and 25th in Toronto.