Not a Penn State fan but looking for single blades of grass is an extremely lame use of replay.

AVG+ on Fangraphs compares a player’s batting average to the league Judge's .330 is 35 percent above average, exactly the same as Nomar Garciaparra .372 in 2000 (when the average was .270), Rod Carew .350 in 1973 (avg .257), and Babe Ruth .393 in 1923 (avg .284) www.fangraphs.com/leaders/majo...

Aaron Judge is hitting .330 while the MLB batting average is .246 (which is 3 points higher than last year but still 8th-lowest in the Live Ball Era since 1920) We still need to recalibrate how impressive this is, considering the era of pitching that we're in…

Manuscript published in journal's online queue today, manuscript received an R&R today, manuscript submitted today. How Friday should be.

Ohtani with a 50-50 season last year. Acuna 40-70 the year before. Everyone with a 30-30 season this year, even Juan Soto. I guess 80-80 is the only thing that separates you from the pack now...

Meant to tag @statsinthewild.bsky.social here

Another multivariate change point paper from Mena Whalen, Greg Matthew’s and I now live at Journal of Applied Statistics. Fun little application of the method for identifying eras in baseball history. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The Dodgers are hiring statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/25/t...

Students, applications are now open for the 2026 Sarah Langs Women in Baseball Analytics Scholarship to attend the upcoming SABR analytics Conference in Arizona and more: sabr.org/latest/apply... @slangsonsports.bsky.social

Big data bowl is up!! Two types of competitions this year: The prediction track is more of your classic Kaggle prediction competition. Similar to the March madness Kaggle comp, NFL will use the actual game data from this season and the best prediction wins www.kaggle.com/c/nfl-big-da...

The thing I find most interesting about the video is how quickly the vibrations are damped, despite being "free" (i.e., no hands).

We need @pobguy.bsky.social on the case!

To follow my other post: there have been 9 previous instances of a 60 HR season. 5 of those *did not* win MVP, and one only did so by the tiniest of margins (Maris; and was probably the wrong choice!). But dumper size may not have been accounted for in those previous votes so we shall see!

In 1999, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit 65 and 63 HR and finished 5th and 9th in MVP voting, respectively. This was the 1st of 2 times Sosa hit 60 and didn’t win MVP. But he did win the other time, the same year McGwire set the record at 70. Just thought y’all should know.

Nobody has ever hit 54+ HR and had a SLG below .600 This year we might see 2 guys do it

New paper now live at Journal of Sports Economics from me and Mena Whalen (Loyola Chicago) using multivariate changepoint analysis to identify structural changes in North American league competitive balance. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Everyone loves competitive balance until everyone is 80-78 in the final week and fans are disappointed that all the playoff teams are mid

I just want an office where I am not in danger of asbestos and regular carbon monoxide poisoning scares, no regular jackhammering in concrete above my office, has air conditioning, and doesn’t smell like rotting garbage and gasoline. I know that sounds like a lot of demands but it’s really not…

Love to walk round trip across campus to return to my office where there is no A/C in the building and then have to walk across campus again to go teach…

Hospitals are truly shameless scumbags. Way overcharged our insurance for NICU stay last year. Insurance recently made them pay back the negotiated price difference. Last week hospital sent us the bill for the $26,000+ difference they had to pay back to the insurance company.

The Miami Marlins are hiring statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/17/t...

Yes, please check out the paper! But there's also a whole chapter in the (free) online book on multiplicative interactions, with a subsection on "triple" interactions. marginaleffects.com/chapters/int...

As I currently deal with interpreting some triple interacted things in some regressions, perhaps this can fix my broken brain...

You're very welcome @vincentab.bsky.social P.S. Check out our preprint on an alternative to staring at coefficients: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

Time for a paper plug: We find that, going the other direction, pitchers tend to perform better on the mound after batting and particularly when they had successful at bats. (most likely a "staying warm" effect; but some evidence for adrenaline boost after success) academic.oup.com/oep/article/...

12 single spaced pages into this reviewer comment and response document with no end in sight yet, and man, I just don't know if I have the fortitude to bother resubmitting this paper...

Your regular reminder that, whatever problems they may have, there are exactly <zero> societal institutions that are <more> protective of disagreement & debate & viewpoint diversity than universities.

As it happens, this month is also the 18 year birthday of when I started learning R (in a class where I also met my wife). I am so old that the R-based classes I took in grad school had exactly zero ggplot content…

Do you really work for a university if payroll hasn't massively screwed up something about your pay at least once or twice a year?

Call for papers: NAASE Graduate Student Paper Award. Email submissions to [email protected]. Submissions due October 1.

We have a Senior Sports Data Scientist role open on the ESPN Analytics team! www.disneycareers.com/en/job/-/-/3...

BREAKING: Judge Cobb *blocks* Trump's removal of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board. ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show...

Heckman regularly embarrasses himself as an NCAA witness while simultaneously disparaging friends/colleagues. An important figure w/contributions we should respect. But we all would benefit from someone we trust telling us we’re well past our prime. I guess $2,300/hr makes that hard to swallow.

Cal Ripken Jr has missed 3,765 consecutive games

So I have figured out why this is the case and it's kinda wild and now I will never not use margins again with an interaction term in my regressions...

Jacob DeGrom is 25th in pitcher fWAR from 2021-2025 in only 61 GS. Among pitchers ranked 1 through 24, Max Scherzer has the fewest GS with 102.

Take out 2 rough 1st games where he went 1-for-8 and K'ed 5 times (hey, everyone needs adjustment!), Konnor Griffin is slashing .359/.458/.615/1.074 with 4 SB and a 10.4%/14.6% BB/K rate in 10 AA games. This year he's .330/.413/.525 w/19 HR and 64 SB overall. He did not turn 19 until April 24👀👀👀

Same

Since the start of July, Juan Soto has more SB than HR. A person from 2024 might think “oh no! A big power outage!” Except he has the 5th most HR in MLB (tied w/Shohei Ohtani) since the start of July.

Oh good, a super strong positive regression coefficient estimate that, as it turns out, is actually associated with a small negative marginal effect. A first for me. Consider my brain fried for the day...

Any Stata folks out there know an easy way to exp(log(DV)) in margins so that marginsplot then puts the effect differences back on the raw scale (instead of ln(DV))? Obviously I can do this manually and plot that result with some other basic plot function but that seems very cumbersome!

And it all happened *after* they lost Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, and Ken Griffey Jr., who played together for years alongside Edgar Martinez…baseball makes no sense

Apple just blatantly advertising its AI for cheating in a dorm room setting in national commercials now? What exactly are we as faculty supposed to do at this point?

Decided to have some fun with what the kids are calling “vintage” these days. 🤯 @sabrbbcards.bsky.social

Apparently this is a real neighborhood being built by a developer here in Austin (outskirts). Hope every house comes with a good bottle.

All-Time Career ERA leaders as a SP since the start of the Live Ball Era (1920), minimum 250 IP: 3) Jacob DeGrom 2.55 2) Clayton Kershaw 2.52 1) Paul Skenes 2.02

To be more clear: Diamond owns the top 3 MiLB attendance increasers (2 of them were a move - which is consistent with placing teams in markets with more demand) and 4 of the top 7. They own half of the largest 10 decreases in attendance. Just blaming this on PE without evidence is a road to nowhere

MiLB attendance declined slightly. Could be bad. Could be neutral. Even reasons this could be net good (!!!). Worth thinking about all the parts here. Specifically: concentration can be a problem, but who do MiLB teams compete with? (Hint: it's probably not other MiLB teams)

I see we are writing "Guy is Getting Old" about someone who is more than half a dozen years younger than me...😭

This is peak insanity for the sports betting stuff. Robinhood is basically adding sports bets directly into your investment account if you want I guess? www.espn.com/college-foot...