Point Estimates

Double Trouble

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baseball

The Tiger’s Spencer Torkelson is off to a rough start this year. He’s hitting .224/.294/.333 with a wRC+ of 81 - that is, he’s 19% worse than league average. For a top…

Mark Jurries II

Hot Starts and Expectations

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baseball

The MLB season is underway, and so far my Tigers are undefeated, having swept the White Sox 3-0. One can reasonably ask what this does to expectations for the season. To…

Mark Jurries II

Errors in Satisfaction

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I came across an article on American life satisfaction yesterday. The trend analysis was fine, but the local news story version of it decided to take it a step further and…

Mark Jurries II

Improving the Premier League Simulator

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soccer

I recently built a quick from-scratch Premier League season simulator. For the game simulator, I simply took the Squad’s average goals in the season and fed that into a…

Mark Jurries II

We Have the 538 Simulator at Home

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soccer

One of my weekly check-ins during the last Premier League season was the 538 Predictions page. Seeing the odds of where each team would finish up after each matchweek was…

Mark Jurries II

Shohei vs The Babe

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baseball

Shohei Ohtani just signed with the Dodgers for $700 million over 10 years. With deferred money, the present value is only $46 million a year (great writeup at Fangraphs with…

Mark Jurries II

Analyzing Supreme Court Arguments

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text mining

I was listening to the Advisory Opinions podcast when they mentioned some stats available at Empirical SCOTUS around word counts for the current Supreme Court session. While…

Mark Jurries II

Can City Win Them All?

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soccer

Man City beat Nottingham Forest 2-0 on Saturday to go up to 6 wins in 6 games this season. The most a Premier League team’s ever started with is 9, so we already have a…

Mark Jurries II

Analyzing Time Series Trends

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baseball

We all deal with time series every day*. Whether it’s sales, conversion rates, if we’re skipping desert like we said we would, or any other of the things we keep track of…

Mark Jurries II

Forecasting Multiple Metrics with Fable

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Forecasting is a fairly common request when working with data. Typically, a single macro-level forecast is not enough, as we also want to see the expected contributions from…

Mark Jurries II

Haaland Goal Forecast Evalution

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soccer

Last fall, I put together an algorithm to forecast how many goals to expect from Erling Haaland in the Premier League 2022-23 season. The median then was 41, with 90% of…

Mark Jurries II

Pitch Clock Impact on Batters

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baseball

MLB’s new pitch clock has sped games up considerably this year, dropping the average length of the game by almost half an hour. One can’t help but wonder how this is…

Mark Jurries II

Building a Premier League Champion Simulator

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soccer

City beat Arsenal 4-1 this week, bringing them to within 2 points of the top with 7 games to go compared to Arsenal’s 5. This gave me the itch to simulate the rest of the…

Mark Jurries II

What Are the Odds of a Long Win Streak?

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baseball

The Rays recently won 13 games in a row, which astonishingly is only half the length of the longest win streak in baseball history, which belongs to the 1916 Giants with 26.…

Mark Jurries II

What if MLB Allowed Ties?

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baseball

We hate ties in baseball. There were almost riots in 2002 when the All Star game ended in a tie. There has to be a winner, and if that means playing 26 innings to get one…

Mark Jurries II

How Predictive is Opening Day?

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baseball

It’s Opening Day in America, the start of another MLB season. We’ve had a month of Spring Training, but now’s the time when the real games start. We love the first game, but…

Mark Jurries II

Measuring Data Spread - Adventures in Standard Deviations

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intro to stats

We may know the average (mean or median) of a data set, but we know that there will be points above and below average, and it’s nice to know just how spread out they are. We…

Mark Jurries II

Finding Meaning in Averages

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intro to stats

We’re all familiar with averages. Whether we’re discussing average spend per order or average height, it’s something we use all the time. And with good reason - it’s a great…

Mark Jurries II

Upset Wins in the Beautiful Game

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soccer

We all love a good underdog win. Be it the Orioles beating the Yankees*, the Lions beating whoever they’re playing that week, or Croatia beating Brazil, we love it when the…

Mark Jurries II

MLB Stint Duration Over Time

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baseball

It’s currently the offseason for MLB, which means a lot of players changing teams, either through free agency or trade. It sometimes feels like players spend less time with…

Mark Jurries II

Haaland Goal Forecast Update

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soccer

With the Premier League not playing any more games until the end of the year due to the World Cup, it seems a natural space to check in on our forecasts of how many goals…

Mark Jurries II

Politcal Mail Flyer Breakdown

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I was getting sick of receiving political flyers in the mail, but wanted to know how bad it was. So I saved all flyers I received from 10/1/22 - 11/4/22* and segmented by…

Mark Jurries II

Premier League Team Talent Spread

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soccer

One of the interesting things about the Premier League compared to something like MLB is that the bottom three teams get relegated every year, which means that each season…

Mark Jurries II

Forecasting the MLB Postseason

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baseball

The MLB postseason is upon us, and we all want to make our best guess who will win it all. We could just go to Fangraph’s Playoff Odds and see who they’re picking - and…

Mark Jurries II

Simming Mike Trout - Adventures in Categorical Bootstrapping

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baseball

Mike Trout will go down in the history books as one of the top players in the game. He currently ranks 35th on Fangraph’s career WAR leaderboard, and he’s still got more…

Mark Jurries II

Simulating Data, Or How Many Goals Will Haaland Get?

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soccer

Erling Haaland is off to a fantastic start this year, with 9 goals in only 5 games. If we assumed that he would keep this pace up, then an average of 1.8 goals per game…

Mark Jurries II

Players vs Teams

probability

soccer

baseball

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Sports can provide some interesting numbers. With the advent of both high-speed camera tracking and big data availability, getting information that provides insight into what …

Mark Jurries II

Forecasting is Hard, Especially the Future

probability

We hear probabilities in forecasts all the time: “There’s a 10% chance of rain”, “your favorite team has a 40% chance of winning tonight”, etc. But what does that actually me…

Mark Jurries II

Total Denomination

probability

Imagine you’ve just sent flyers for an event. You wanted to know if people were more likely to respond if you used blue instead of black, so you sent copies in both colors.…

Mark Jurries II

Context is King

probability

Let’s suppose for a moment you don’t know anything about baseball. Perhaps you don’t, which will make this thought exercise even easier. Now suppose I tell you that in a…

Mark Jurries II

Casual Causality, or a Study of Studies

probability

One of the most interesting questions we can ask is “does x cause y?”. If we know what causes something, we can avoid it (we know that fire ignites gas, so we don’t light a…

Mark Jurries II

Heil Hydra? What are the odds they’re in charge?

probability

You’ve just received word from a friend that Hydra has secretly taken over the government for its own nefarious reasons. There’s only one source for this info, though, and…

Mark Jurries II

Pitching Wins Playoffs, Unless it Doesn’t.

probability

Every year, we hear that pitching wins the MLB postseason. This is often said by ex-pitchers so we expect some bias, but even so there’s some merit. After all, teams get to…

Mark Jurries II

Sample Size and Percentages: What to Expect

probability

People are really good at comparing numbers. If you have 1,000 apples and I have 10, you can tell me pretty quickly that you have 990 more apples than I do. You can also put…

Mark Jurries II