On Monday night, some of baseball’s best sluggers will compete in the Home Run Derby. One of them is likely to have a more disappointing second half of the season, and someone is then likely to blame the derby. Case in point: At the MLB All-Star break in 2013, Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles […]
In our sports coverage at FiveThirtyEight, we’ve referred several times to regression to the mean. It’s an unromantic truth about outstanding sports performances: They’re usually the product of skill and determination, but also a healthy dose of luck. We might expect the outstanding play to continue because of skill and determination, but the luck is just as likely to turn […]
In our sports coverage at FiveThirtyEight, we’ve referred several times to regression to the mean. It’s an unromantic truth about outstanding sports performances: They’re usually the product of skill and determination, but also a healthy dose of luck. We might expect the outstanding play to continue because of skill and determination, but the luck is just as likely to turn […]
We often hear announcers and commentators say a baseball team is “on pace” to win and lose a certain number of games, by simply applying a team’s current winning percentage over 162 games. Those statements may technically be true, but in a randomness-filled reality, they’re meaningless. Sabermetrics constantly struggles with randomness, an unavoidable fact of […]
We often hear announcers and commentators say a baseball team is “on pace” to win and lose a certain number of games, by simply applying a team’s current winning percentage over 162 games. Those statements may technically be true, but in a randomness-filled reality, they’re meaningless. Sabermetrics constantly struggles with randomness, an unavoidable fact of […]
