Each year, over 1,300 golfers attempt to qualify for the PGA TOUR through Q-School. Using simulation, we estimate the probabilities that Q-School correctly identifies high-skill golfers. We show that players with skill equivalent to the very best on the PGA TOUR would have high probabilities of...

Statisticians have long employed linear regression models in a variety of circumstances, including the analysis of sports data, because of their flexibility, ease of interpretation, and computational tractability. However, advances in computing technology have made it possible to develop and...

Under the rules of NCAA Hockey and USA hockey, when a penalty shot is awarded, the nonoffending team has the choice of taking the penalty shot or having a minor penalty assessed to the offending team. Since the chance of scoring on a penalty shot normally exceeds the chance of scoring during the...

A comprehensive comparative survey is presented, covering official rating systems as published by internationally recognized sports federations. Mind sports and physical sports are both included. As of November 2010, competitions in 159 international sports are organized by sports federations...

We predict the induction of Major League Baseball hitters and pitchers into the National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America. We employ a Random Forest algorithm for binary classification, improving upon past models with a simplistic input approach. Our results...

I started the Journal of Quantitative Sports eight years ago with the hope that it would become an outlet for academics looking to develop a research program in sports statistics. At the time, the field of sports statistics was clearly in its infancy. There were no venues for academics looking...

Our study of win-by-two tie games is motivated by a famous 2010 Wimbledon tennis match whose final set was decided by the improbable score of 70-68. We introduce a trigonometric interpretation of the odds of winning points and games in tennis when serving from deuce. We place this result in the...

In this paper, we explore competition performance in decathlon based on competition, training and personal data. Our data set comprises 3103 competition results from the decathlon world's best performance lists from 1998 to 2009. The aim of our analysis is to estimate latent factors describing...

Past research attempting estimates of the relative impact of hitting, pitching, fielding, and basestealing on team winning percentage in baseball has been marked by a number of problems, mostly in terms of poor choice of performance measures. The current analysis attempts to perform this task...

Numerous statistics have been proposed to measure offensive ability in Major League Baseball. While some of these measures may offer moderate predictive power in certain situations, it is unclear which simple offensive metrics are the most reliable or consistent. We address this issue by using a...