At the age of 49, Barry Bonds returns to the San Francisco Giants not as an active player but as a 7-day roving instructor for Giants manager Bruce Botchy. He donned a San Francisco Giants uniform for the first time since his last game in 2007. Pictures of him show a slimmed down Barry Bonds. …
In my previous blog I decided to focus on Derek Jeter’s hitting and base-running statistics. I created Table 1 below which I called the Sum of Ranks Table. This table compared Derek Jeter to the 22 Hall of Fame shortstops who played at least 1500 games. The statistics I chose are the regular season career …
We all know when it comes to Derek Jeter, sports people always talk about his intangibles. I decided to focus on his actually hitting and base-running statistics. I decided to compare Jeter’s statistics to the 22 Hall of Fame shortstops who played at least 1000 games. The statistics I chose are the regular season career …
Last week I was in Baltimore, MD, where I was invited to present my new formula at the Joint Mathematical Meeting of the American Math Society and the Mathematics Association of America. As discussed in previous blogs, I developed the following new formula to predict a team’s winning percentage: Winning Percentage = .000683*(RS – RA) …
Before looking at the pitchers most deserving of a ticket to Cooperstown, the news on December 9, 2013, was the Expansion Era Committee of the Hall of Fame elected three retired managers Bobby Cox, Tony La Russa and Joe Torre to the Hall. Up until July, 2010 the Veterans Committee was responsible for considering baseball …
In my July 23, 2013 blog posting, I made my predictions for the post-season. You can read this blog by going to my blog page and clicking on the month of July in the archives. Quoting from that blog I wrote, “These are my playoff predictions for 2013. First, the division winners are for the …
Ichiro Suzuki, from the “Land of the Rising Sun”, provided the sunshine in the first inning of the game with the Blue Jays when he drove an outside knuckleball delivered by R.A. Dickey into left field for his 4000th hit. His 4000 hits represent the sum of his 1278 hits in Japan (1992-2000) for the Orix …
Note: My friend Dr. Stan has graciously invited me to expand on my earlier comment on this blog ( A Call for Amnesty, dated August 6, 2013), and I am pleased to do so. Baseball prides itself on being our national pastime, brightening even the darkest days of the Civil War. It is also a team sport …
The idea for this posting came about after I stumbled upon the “Hall of 100” on the ESPN website. This list was published on December 4, 2012. ESPN summoned sports writers, and on-air personalities to compile a list of the top 100 baseball players of All-Time. They were given a list of more than 300 …
Bill James introduced his formula for predicting a team’s expected winning percentage (Expected W%) for a season. The formula is Expected W% = (Runs Scored)2 / [(Runs Scored)2 + (Runs Allowed)2] and is called the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball. Bill James’s rationale for his theorem was that the number of runs a team scored (RS) compared to the …