Existing paired comparison models used for ranking football teams primarily focus on either wins and losses or points scored (either via each team's total or a margin of victory). While reasonable, each approach fails to produce satisfactory rankings in frequently arising situations due to its...

We present a quantitative analysis of throwing ability for major league outfielders and catchers. We use detailed game event data to tabulate success and failure events in outfielder and catcher throwing opportunities. We attribute a run contribution to each success or failure which is tabulated...

Comprehensive rankings of football teams have become an important, and occasionally controversial, feature of many football codes. The rationale behind these systems needs to be understood. The historical evolution of the current eight codes is briefly traced from just two: association football...

We analyze the number of games played in a seven-game playoff series under various home-away sequences. In doing so, we employ a simple Bernoulli model of home-field advantage in which the outcome of each game in the series depends only on whether it is played at home or away with respect to a...

We provide a response to Beech's review of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport in this journal. Specifically we are responding to three misinterpretations and/or misstatements in the book review. At the end of each section we explain the process in which we reach...

The aim of the present study was to present the playing characteristics of the teams in complex I and to attempt to determine which of these characteristics led to victory and to the final ranking of the teams. The subjects were 38 Olympic Volleyball men's games. In every game, teams were...

Major League Baseball's geographic line-up essentially was constant between 1903 and 1953, when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee and the new publicly financed stadium built on their behalf. Other MLB teams moved prior to the 1954, 1955, 1958, 1961, 1968, 1970, 1972, and 2005 seasons. In...

This article describes a new strategy for objectively quantifying the performance exhibited by each and every team as derived from that years games. When applied to the last sixteen seasons of division I-A college football, one can readily observe a strong correlation between the final rankings...

David Hilbert was a mathematician who in 1900 delivered the most influential speech in the history of mathematics (Hilbert 1902). He outlined 23 major problems to be studied in the next century, while outlining a philosophy for how mathematics should be studied. In the 2000 edition of Baseball...