Although tactical decisions made by managers during a match of team sports are very important, there have been few quantitative analyses which include the effect of interaction between both teams' decisions, because of the complexity of the problem where one team's decision will affect the other...

This paper examines the factors that determine the rate of errors called in major league baseball, and changes in the error rate over time. We find that (1) the rate of errors depends on the quality of play and characteristics of the field, but that (2) these do not fully explain variations in...

Previous studies have attempted to model goal scoring in sports such as ice hockey as simple Poisson processes. Others (Thomas, 2006) have shown that events within the game of ice hockey are better modelled as a Semi-Markov process determined by puck possession and location. I demonstrate that a...

In papers on basketball, it is standard practice to treat the home-court advantage in terms of percentages or point differences at the end of the game. This practice leaves out of account how the advantage develops during the game, when it accumulates most strongly, its course and the in-course...

Position play is a key feature of carom billiards: on easy shots, players can manage to score while ensuring that the next position will be favorable. The difficulty of a shot therefore depends on the previous shot; e.g., an easy shot generally follows an easy shot. We introduce a Markov process...

In a recent communication, Van Damme et al (1) presented a statistical analysis of the performance of world-ranked decathletes, and made inferences about the ability of these athletes to respond uniformly to the demands of the ten events in the decathlon. Their argument was based on an...

The passing premium puzzle is the existence of a balance between the number of passing and running plays, even though there is a greater expected return in passing plays. The puzzle is documented using both historical trends of aggregate numbers and play by play data from the 2005 NFL season.

All sports have components of randomness that cause the "best" individual or team not to win every game. According to many spectators this uncertainty is part of the charm when following a competition or a match. Have different sports more or less of this unpredictability? We suggest here a...

This paper combines an estimated expected run value equation with a probability model on the outcome of batted balls to isolate the game within a game. Using linear regression we were then able to determine the percentage of the outcome of an at bat that is controlled by a pitcher and the...

This paper first presents a brief review of potential rating tools and methods for predicting success in the NCAA basketball tournament, including those methods (such as the Ratings Percentage Index, or RPI) that receive a great deal of weight in selecting and seeding teams for the tournament....