Ryan's Repository of Random Reflections

With the recent high offensive production in the mlb, many people have amassed large streaks in the Beat the Streak contest.  The current leader has a streak of 41 games, which he got by picking exclusively red sox players.  Many other people have streaks in the high 30s, and I have a streak of 19 myself right now.  It seems like a lot more people have been getting longer streaks this year.  Some of this is probably due to the fact that more batters are getting hits this year than they have in the past, but it is probably also due to MLB.com's new pick selection system, which makes it easier than ever to make high quality picks using whatever strategy you want.  I would not be surprised if this is the year somebody wins.  If that's the case, this could be one of my last blog posts on this topic.     In this blog post, I am going to evaluate my current pick selection strategy  by testing it on data from 2015.  My data consists of a list ...

In this blog post, I will introduce an idea I recently came up with to predict the most likely players to get a hit in a given game based on situational factors such as opposing starter, opposing team, ballpark, and so on. I have not written much in this blog on this topic, although I did some work on this topic last fall which you can find here . In that work, I had the chance to explore a bunch of ideas that I had, but ultimately had to back up a few steps and rethink my approach. I think the ideas are still valid, and will continue refine them as time permits. A few weeks ago, I came up with a new approach that is completely different from my other approaches so far, and I will share it in the rest of this post. Defining the Problem Before we dive into the math, let's talk about what exactly we are trying to do. The end goal is to pick the player who is most likely to get a hit on a given day based on factors associated to the games for that day. Some of these facto...

This semester in my mathematics capstone course, students had the chance to develop mathematical models to describe real world research problems.  I took this as an opportunity to research and develop probabilistic models that can be used to predict the outcome distribution of a baseball at bat.  My hope was that I could apply my findings from this research project to my side project of Beat the Streak.  I learned a lot about mathematical modeling in this class, and explored a variety of techniques for making predictions about baseball at bats.  At the end of the class, we wrote a report that introduces the models we came up with, and compares the quality of the predictions they produce.  I have made this report available here .