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...

Racing data provides a rich source of analysis for quantitative researchers to study multi-entry competitions. This paper first explores statistical modeling to investigate the favorite-longshot betting bias using world-wide horse race data. The result shows that the bias phenomenon is not...

Recent studies have documented the existence of an own-race bias on the part of sports officials. In this paper we explore the implications of these biases on betting markets. We use data from the 1991/92 - 2004/05 NBA regular seasons to show that a betting strategy exploiting own-race biases by...

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...

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...

We propose a Markov chain model of a best-of-7 game playoff series that involves game-to-game dependence on the current status of the series. To create a relatively parsimonious model, we seek to group transition probabilities of the Markov chain into clusters of similar game-winning frequency....

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...

Goal scoring in sports such as hockey and soccer is often modeled as a Poisson process. We work with a Poisson model where the mean goals scored by the home team is the sum of parameters for the home team's offense, the road team's defense, and a home advantage. The mean goals for the road team...

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...

In this paper an expression for the probability of winning a game in a tennis match is derived under the assumption that the outcome of each point is identically and independently distributed. Important properties of the formula are evaluated and presented pictorially. The accuracy of this...