To date, the best thing about the Angels' year has been their City Connect jerseys. Despite having two of the best players in baseball in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, they are 10.5 games out of the Wild Card race, and 20.5 in the division. In an effort to see if their season was truly lost, I set out to find a series of trades that would give them at least a 50% chance of making the postseason according to Satchel, my MLB projections model.
read moreAs everyone knows, the best time to write about modeling the MLB season is during a lockout, so here is the very belated Satchel 2021 season autopsy. There were some great predictions, and some very big misses, but overall, I'd say Satchel held its own. I compare Satchel with the projections published by FanGraphs before the season started since all of the underlying data comes from FanGraphs.
read moreI'll leave the detailed commentary to the professionals, but with opening day just around the corner, here's how my model (henceforth known as Satchel) has the 2021 MLB season playing out.1 For an overview of how the model works, check out my earlier post. I'll also talk about how the model has changed since I first introduced it at the end of this post.
read moreSpring Training is here and that means so are the MLB prediction models! Here is how to build one in just a few hours based on the Bradley-Terry model framework from Analyzing Baseball Data with R.
read moreBlackjack has long been one of the most popular games you’ll find in a casino. Its simplicity makes it an easy option for beginners and the relatively modest house edge appeals to more seasoned gamblers. The game also has a strong history of detailed computational analysis. Ed Thorpe’s classic, Beat the Dealer, has been regarded as the gold standard in blackjack analysis since its publication in 1966. In it, Thorpe uses an IBM 704 to simulate games of blackjack, ultimately determining the best strategy for a player (now known as basic strategy). Inspired by Thorpe (and The Perfect Bet by Adam Kucharski), I set out to create a modern blackjack simulator. The result is Py21.
read moreSince the adoption of Statcast by Major League Baseball, fans have had access to pitch-by-pitch data for every regular season game. These data include pitch velocity and location, the result of the pitch, even who was playing left field at the time. Numerous tools have been built to access these data, most notably Baseball Savant, which provides a relatively straight forward user interface for finding the information you want.
read moreThroughout tax reform season a seemingly endless stream of tables, plots, and charts filled Twitter to show the distributional effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. I particularly liked Jonathan Schwabish’s piece on how he created a graph to make a report by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) more engaging. I decided to recreate his work using Bokeh and the open-source Tax-Calculator.
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