From December 15-17, 2018, I attended the Joint Mathematical Meeting at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. There, I presented a talk on my current baseball research. This research tries to identify the ten greatest professional sports teams of all-time from the four Major Leagues (MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL). My talk was …
Here are some of the winning and losing teams with regard to new signings for 2015. Everything could change for any team that signs the biggest pitching fish still available, Max Scherzer. The talk is the team that signs him to a contract can expect to pay close to $30 million per year. Clearly, this …
I don’t often write about a sport other from baseball. But, I have to write about a football game that I call a game made for TV or for the movies. The game was last night’s game between Alabama and Georgia. The leading characters were Alabama’s two quarterbacks. The starting quarterback Tua, this year’s leading …
A Whac-A-Mole game consists of a cabinet with five holes in its top and a large mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game starts the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is …
For the fifth consecutive year, I attended the Joint Mathematical Meeting of the Mathematics Association of America (the MAA) and the American Mathematical Society (the AMS). This year the meeting was in San Diego from January 7 through January 10. This meeting is the most important meeting for both these organizations. At this joint meeting, …
On October 2, 2017, I presented a talk to faculty and senior math majors at Sacred Heart University. The title of my talk was “Undergraduate College Students Can Do Original Math Research.” The senior math majors were from their Senior Seminar Course where each student, as a final requirement, must write a paper on a …
This man is 6-ft-7 in tall weighing 282 pounds and plays professionally for a NY team. Is he a power forward for the NY Knicks? Is he a tight end for the NY Giants? The answer is no to each of these questions. He is the starting right fielder for the NY Yankees and his …
Monday, May 15, 2017 marks the 76th anniversary of the beginning of Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game hitting streak, which ran from May 15 to July 16, 1941. The streak ended On July 17 when he went 0-for-3 against the Indians, with third baseman Ken Keltner making two outstanding plays to stop the streak. In Chapter …
The book “Moneyball” chronicles how Billy Beane used certain batting statistics to build the low budget Oakland Athletics into a contender in the early 2000s. With the help of Paul Depodesta he showed that on-base percentage (OBP) was much more valuable for run production than batting average. Concentrating on a player’s OBP and ability to …
Read what my student Greg considers the biggest surprise in the MLB for 2017 is so far. Every year there are storylines between teams and players, and surprises that come out of the league. The biggest surprise so far in 2017 has been one in the name of Eric Thames. Thames is a 30-year-old left-handed …