[shadowbox] A Baseball Batter’s Perception of Spin & How it Relates to Hitting Performance One of the most interesting measurements that has come from the “Pitch f/x – Statcast Era” in baseball is pitch spin rate.  While there has been a lot of discussion of how spin influences the flight of the ball, how it…

[shadowbox] Pitch Tunneling & Perceptually Equivalent Pitches Recently I have become fascinated with the topic of pitch tunneling, not only because I am a big baseball fan but because it bears a striking resemble to some of the psychophysical experiments I did during my PhD (and since).  Specifically, one’s designed to measure discrimination thresholds for…

Just wanted to share the abstract for a new paper I am writing up over the summer looking at transfer of training from real to virtual baseball batting. This is a labor of love based on over 10 years of data collection! Gray Frontiers VR Training baseball For those that have access, this was also…

Recommended: Listen to the Podcast Episode that accompanies this analysis Bayes Theorem allows us to predict the probability of a particular event (A) occurring given that we know that another condition (B) has already occurred. There are two basic formulations of the theorem that can be used Example 1: What is the probability that the…

Recommended: Listen to the Podcast Episode that accompanies this analysis Goal: To determine whether there is a decline in batting performance after a “choking” event in baseball relative to pre-event performance. Also, to determine which factors influence this effect. Data sources: http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index Event definition: 9th inning, 1 out, leverage index >= 1.5, batter hits into…

Recommended: Listen to the Podcast Episode that accompanies this analysis Goal: To test the following two hypotheses: (i) a pitcher can overcome having a lower fastball velocity by being more unpredictable in the type of pitches they throw (i.e., high entropy) and (ii) pitching success will be significantly related to entropy Data sources: http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index http://www.brooksbaseball.net/…

Recommended: Listen to the Podcast Episode that accompanies this analysis Goal: To investigate the interactive effect of throwing hand and batting stance on hitting performance using Major League Baseball data from 1992-2015 Data source: http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/ Descriptive Statistics: (values in black are proportions) Key takeaway: The majority of players (62% of lefties and 89% of righties) hit…

For those that enjoyed my episode on the Hot Hand in Sports (Episode 12) and my follow-up interview with Josh Miller that seems to have completely changed our thinking about this (Episode 15C), Josh was kind enough to send me links to some more recent work he and Adam Sanjurjo have done trying to provide…

Was listening to a recent episode of the “This Is You Brain on Sports” podcast co-hosted by John Wertheim from Sports Illustrated and Sam Sommers from Tufts University (Note: if you like my podcast I would recommend checking it out, that is if you are willing to tolerate lots of advertisements for sports gambling sites…

Here are my main reasons: 1. I wanted an outlet to be more creative in research communication When I was younger I used to love creative writing. I even once won a prize for a story I wrote called “The Chicken from Outer Space”. I miss that. When I first started as a scientist I…