The study of Park Factors (PF) is essential to the correct evaluation of player performance in Major League Baseball. We have identified two important problems with the commonly used formula which has been popularized by ESPN: it produces variable results due to unbalanced scheduling, and it has...

Recently it was reported that in the NBA as a whole, two thirds of the home advantage which teams enjoy when playing at home is accumulated in the first quarter. Home advantage can also be determined for individual teams, and there is good reason for doing so. For example, the relation of home...

Received wisdom in baseball takes it as a given that it is an advantage have the last turn at bat in a baseball game. This belief is supported, implicitly or explicitly, by an argument that the team on offense benefits by knowing with certainty the number of runs it must score in the final...

`What is the offensive value of Player A?´ Of all the metrics that sabermetricians have developed to attempt to answer that question, OPS (on base percentage plus slugging percentage) has been one of the first for the mainstream media to slowly embrace as an alternative to batting average....

Batting Average (AVG) and On-Base Percentage (OBP) are two of the most commonly cited statistics in baseball. Existing research has demonstrated that for a team, OBP is more closely correlated to runs scored than is AVG, and secondly, for players, OBP is more closely correlated over time than is...

Competition points are awarded in sports tournaments to determine which participants qualify for the playoffs or to identify a champion. We use competition points to measure strength in a prediction model and choose points to maximize prediction accuracy. This allows us to determine the...

The organizers of the 2007 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports proudly introduce an issue of JQAS focused on papers presented at the conference.

The majority of statistical work on college football's Bowl Championship Series (BCS) has involved proposing or categorizing computer ratings of teams. Computer algorithms, a coaches' poll, and a media poll make up the three ratings systems that are currently equally weighted to produce an...

A new 3D motion capture technology is changing Golf instruction and research, bringing us closer than ever to understanding the complex yet coordinated motions involved in a successful Golf swing. This paper highlights a study undertaken by the Golf Advantage School at Pinehurst using this new...

The streaky hitting patterns of all regular baseball players during the 2005 season are explored. Patterns of hits/outs, home runs and strikeouts are considered using different measures of streakiness. An adjustment method is proposed that helps in understanding the size of a streakiness measure...