Within the last two weeks ESPN and Tim Kurjian (top ESPN sportswriter) have both come out with their top 10 list of the all-time greatest baseball players. In the final chapter of my book “Sandlot Stats: Learning Statistics with Baseball,” I produced my own top 10 list of the greatest all-time hitters in baseball. The …
Barry Bonds played 22 seasons in the Major Leagues with the Pirates and the Giants. He is without a doubt considered one of the greatest players in the history of baseball. He was a seven-time MVP, 14-time All-Star selection, and an eight-time Gold Glove winner. He holds many MLB batting records including most career home …
Sabermetrics is derived from the acronym SABR used for the Society of American Baseball Research. Sabermetrics is the science that uses baseball data to form statistics allowing baseball people to make objective baseball decisions. In the past most general managers just followed what previous general managers did in making crucial decisions. However, as the amount …
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 …
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 …