A baseball team's offensive prowess is a function of two types of abilities: batting and baserunning. While each has been studied extensively in isolation, the effects of their interaction is not well understood. We model offensive output as a scalar function f of an individual player's batting...

We present an analysis of a time-dependent stochastic model of the real-time progress of the difference between the home and the away team's scores in sports contests. The model was originally proposed by Stern (1994) and treats the evolution of the home team lead (or deficit) as a Wiener...

Professional sports leagues are motivated to promote competitive balance in order to maintain fan interest. The National Football League (NFL) has taken several steps to promote competitive balance, most notably free agency and the salary cap, which were instituted prior to the 1994 season....

We investigate the sensitivity of the Colley Matrix (CM) rankings---one of six computer rankings used by the Bowl Championship Series---to (hypothetical) changes in the outcomes of (actual) games. Specifically, we measure the shift in the rankings of the top 25 teams when the win-loss outcome...

We consider the problem of projecting future success of Minor League baseball players at each level of the farm system. Using tree based methods, in particular random forests, we consider which statistics are most correlated with Major League success, how Major League teams use these statistics...

In a recent paper, Fair (2008) utilizes monthly data on on-base percentage plus slugging percentage (OPS) to estimate the expected age profile of batting performance in Major League Baseball (MLB) and finds a peak performance at 27.6 years. However, he notes that a small group of 18 players have...

Route choice through mountainous terrain requires a knowledge of how pace (the reciprocal of speed) varies with gradient of ascent or descent. To model this variation for runners, we analyse record times for 91 uphill and 15 downhill races or race stages. The pace is modelled as a nonlinear...

The importance of sports statistics to professional sports teams is clear and there are exciting new opportunities for statisticians to learn from the new types of data that are collected. The Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports has shown steady growth since its inception in 2005. The new...

This study analyzes how the efficiency of basketball players depends on experience, player’s nationality and team type. Using data for players in the Turkish Basketball League (TBL) from 1997 to 2010, we first show that efficiency of players initially increase with experience, but after a...

Though athletics statistics are abundant, it is a difficult task to quantitatively compare performances from different events of track, field, and road running in a meaningful way. There are several commonly-used methods, but each has its limitations. Some methods, for example, are valid only...