Harvard Sports Analysis Collective

Tampa Bay won their 18 game season series with Boston, 10 games to 8 (and took the AL East pennant by those 2 games, exactly).  Past wins decide titles, but in comparison to runs scored, how much should past won/lost records be counted when making predictions?   Bill James’ “Pythagorean” formula (also implemented in ESPN’s “Cool […]

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Each year, immediately after the draft, a variety of media sources publish their draft grades. Basically, these grades tell the readers if the team did a good job at picking the players that were conventionally popular (because if a team picked a player that they liked, but nobody else did, that would be immediately […]

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Before examining some specific arguments offered by BBWAA members, I would like to make a general comment. Writers tend to rely on MVP Award balloting, Cy Young Award balloting, and Gold Glove balloting when weighing the merits of a particular candidate. I am not sure if this is due to laziness or arrogance.
BBWAA members, after […]

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Better Park Factor Estimates
We’ve always known that there was something wrong with ESPN’s MLB park factor estimates. For example, we couldn’t believe that ESPN listed Oakland’s park factor as 1.357 in 2001, 0.703 in 2002, and 0.515 in 2003, despite there having been no alterations to McAfee Coliseum in this century. How can a […]

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It seems that ESPN might want to screen its in interns a little more thoroughly. It turns out that the park factor data they calculated for the 2001-2003 seasons is just blatantly wrong, even after using their own formula for calculating the results.
In each years from 2001 to 2003, ESPN’s calculated Park Factors had […]

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