On Two-Point Conversion Attempts, Should NFL Teams Run or Pass More?
There have been 2319 two-point conversion attempts over the past 26 NFL seasons (including playoffs), equating to about one two-point attempt in every three games. What is the optimal run/pass distribution in these situations?
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What Do the New York Giants Need to Do to Become a Playoff Contender?
The Giants are coming off one of their worst seasons in franchise history, finishing 3-14 and landing the 3rd pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. In this analysis I’ll compare their roster to the NFL’s top 3 regular season teams (Chiefs, Lions, and Eagles) to see which positions they should emphasize in their rebuild in order to make the team a playoff contender.
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How Should The Yankees Pitch Against The Dodgers?
A thrilling postseason is approaching its climax—a battle between each league’s juggernaut team. The 27-time champion Yankees are in the World Series for the first time since 2009 and the 7-time champion Dodgers are back in the Fall Classic for the fourth time in the last eight seasons, aiming to secure their first full-season title since 1988. The most common World Series matchup in being renewed for 12th time, the first since 1981 in which the Dodgers beat the Yankees in 6 games. The Yankees have won eight of their eleven World Series meetings, including the first five.
The Dodgers lineup averaged 5.2 runs per game this season (second to only the Diamondbacks). How should the Yankees pitch to them in their attempt at capturing their 28th title?
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Evaluating Fangraphs Playoff Projections
As the September playoff race heats up, key division battles are emerging: the Yankees are locked in with the Orioles in the AL East, and the Guardians are head-to-head against the Royals in the AL Central. The Wild Card chase is just as exciting, with the Twins and Tigers vying for the final AL spot, while the Padres, Diamondbacks, Mets, and Braves compete in the NL. Meanwhile, the Phillies, Dodgers, and Brewers are jockeying for the top two seeds in the National League, hoping to capture the first round bye.
This post will introduce a Paraball Win Probability Model that assesses a team's chances in matchups against a .500 opponent. I will compare its results with Fangraphs’ Playoff Simulation to identify teams that Fangraphs overvalues or undervalues.
Introducing pWAR and Using It to Predict Who Wins Cy Young
Who will win the AL and NL Cy Young Awards? In this analysis, I’ll introduce a new cumulative win value statistic, Paraball Wins Above Replacement, orpWAR, in order to identify the most deserving candidates.
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Does Changing Your Batspeed Impact Your Offensive Production?
In May this year, Statcast released batspeed data, and I've been eagerly waiting for the sample sizes to grow large enough for a meaningful analysis. Now, three months in, we're ready to dive in. In this post, I’ll be examining the batspeed-tracked swings of Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton.
How do their swing speeds vary depending on the count, and how do these variations impact their performance?
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The Value of LeBron, Durant, and Curry - The US Olympic Trio
The USA men’s basketball team took gold in Paris after an epic comeback win against Serbia in the semifinals and a nail-biter against host France in the final. The team was led by legendary NBA trio of LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Stephen Curry. In this analysis, I’ll take a look at the value that these three superstars have added to their NBA teams over their careers.
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Should Clay Holmes Be the Yankees Closer?
Yankees right-hander Clay Holmes has had a roller-coaster season. After nailing down the save in Sunday’s game against Texas, Holmes has 25 saves and is tied with Josh Hader of the Astros and Robert Suarez of the Padres for 4th in the MLB. Holmes, however, leads MLB with 9 blown saves. The next highest number of blown saves by one of MLB’s top closers is just 4, by the Nationals Kyle Finnegan.
Should Holmes be the Yankees closer? In this analysis, I'll examine Holmes' distribution of runs allowed, compare it to the league average, and assess whether he is well-suited for the closer role.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Adam Hunger
Quantifying Momentum in Major League Baseball
The team that scores first in the MLB wins 69% of the time. That number may feel surprisingly high for a sport that averages just under 4.5 runs per game per team. Why is taking and keeping a lead in baseball so vital?
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Opinion: How Can We Evaluate Base Stealing More Precisely?
Consider this scenario: Two players each have 30 base steals and 5 bases caught stealing. With an 86% success rate, both players appear to be helping their teams significantly by risking taking the extra base. However, 35 attempts is quite a small sample size. The standard deviation of the number of stolen bases in this case is 2.07. So, there’s a 2.5% chance that the base-stealer’s true success rate is actually lower than 74%, in which case the advice to that player would be to steal fewer bases. Essentially, for many players, it can be hard to tell If they should steal more or less, purely based on their stolen bases and caught stealing, since the sample sizes are small.
What if we had a metric that would give us even more confidence in telling the players to steal more frequently?
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Should You Use a One-Handed Backhand?
22-year old Italian Lorenzo Musetti had a dream semi-final run in this year’s Wimbledon. Musetti survived a five setter in the second round and knocked off 13-seed Taylor Fritz in five sets in the quarter-final before falling to 24-time grand slam champion Novak Djokovic in straight sets. The young Italian has modeled his game, like many tennis players of his generation, off of the great Roger Federer, copying the Swiss legend’s serve motion to a tee and adopting a one-handed backhand. Musetti is projected to jump from 25th to 16th in the ATP rankings after his Wimbledon run.
In this analysis, I will take a look at the number of one-handed backhands in the ATP top 20 for each of the last 20 years. Is one of tennis’ most beautiful shots actually leading to positive results on the court?
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali
The Second Best Starter in Baseball is a Converted Reliever
Garrett Crochet pitched 72 games and 73 innings as a reliever from 2020 to 2023, missing the entire 2022 season recovering from Tommy John surgery. The White Sox, desperate for starting pitching, saw something they liked in Crochet and gave him a chance to start in 2024. Crochet has not disappointed, ranking 2nd among starting pitchers in xwFIP through June. If traded later this month, he can quickly retool Chicago’s farm system.
At the end of April, Crochet ranked 6th among starters with a 2.98 xwFIP, despite a 6.37 ERA and a 4.20 FIP. At the end of May, Crochet’s ranking was up to 3rd among all pitchers and 1st among starters with a 2.02 xwFIP, despite an ERA of 3.49 and a FIP of 3.00. Now, through June, Crochet is 2nd among starters and 6th among all pitchers with a 2.71 xwFIP, and his ERA and FIP have dropped to 3.02 and 2.47, respectively.
Photo Credit: John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune
Is Yankee Stadium a Lefty-Friendly Ballpark?
Yankee Stadium is well known for the short porch in right field. In fact, the right field in Yankee Stadium is closer to home plate than in any other ballpark, extending from right-center field to the short porch near the right field foul pole.
Can we quantify the advantage of being left-handed in Yankees Stadium? To find out, I’ll take a look at the relative performance of both right-handed and left-handed batters and pitchers in Yankee Stadium (YS) and compare those numbers to the league as a whole.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
Why Are Intentional Walks Excluded from wOBA?
wOBA both ignores intentional walks (IBBs) and values hit-by-pitches (HBPs) higher than unintentional walks (uBBs). I’ve frequently had this discussion with my friend and former colleague Rob DeLuca: Can one of our most advanced and run-correlated offensive metrics be improved?
In this analysis, I’ll take a look at all the uBBs, IBBs, and HBPs in 2015-2016, a time when Statcast was separately marking IBBs on a pitch-by-pitch basis, and compare the change in run value for each stat category.
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How Should NBA Coaches Use Their Challenges?
For the 2023-24 NBA season, the league adopted a new policy allowing coaches a second challenge if their first challenge results in a successful overturn. NBA coaches successfully challenge out-of-bounds calls at a 77.7% clip; they successfully challenge foul calls at a 53% rate, and on average, they are successful with 59.5% of their challenges.
But what is the optimal challenge strategy for an NBA coach?
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Why Do Lefty Batters Hit into Fewer Double Plays?
Over the last 9+ seasons, MLB pitchers have been able to induce about 1.5 double plays per game—0.75 for each team. Double plays enable pitchers to both get out of major jams and keep their pitch counts manageable.
In this analysis, I’ll examine the difference in the propensity to ground into double plays for righty batters and lefty batters and determine what this could mean for in-game strategy.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig
The Pitchers with the Best xwFIP: April Edition
This past offseason, I introduced the pitching metric xwFIP in a series of three posts. xwFIP is an advanced fielding independent pitching metric that not only takes into account walks, hit batsmen, strikeouts, and homeruns, but also the xwOBA on batted balls. The metric takes into account nearly 100% of plate appearances in its calculation. Moreoever, I have showcased that it has greater predictive power than each of ERA, wOBA, FIP, xFIP, xwOBA, and SIERA in predicting future run prevention performance of a pitcher.
This season, I’ll be posting the xwFIP leaderboard each month so we can see the starters and relievers that are most likely to have continued success, along with the pitchers who have been lucky and unlucky so far.
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