2015 Toronto Blue Jays’ Hitters: A PITCHf/x Preview

Written by: Doug Duffy

With the Blue Jays flying north and spring training squarely in the rear-view mirror, Torontonians can leave behind their masochistic winter ritual, watching the Maples Leafs, in favor of their spring ritual, asking “Is the dome open yet?”. Incidentally, in the year 2015, there’s a twitter account for that. Along with the arrival of Opening Day has come the annual barrage of previews, some more quantitative than others. My personal favorite was the series of previews published on Grantland for each of baseball’s divisions, nicely melding projection systems, depth charts and win projections with more qualitative subjects like strengths/weaknesses and storylines. I, however, chose to take the opportunity to dig into the Pitch f/x database for the first time to see what it can tell us about the 2015 Blue Jays hitters, especially the new arrivals. Hopefully, I’ll get around to performing something similar for the pitching side of things soon.

Read more 2015 Toronto Blue Jays’ Hitters: A PITCHf/x Preview

Using Projection Models for 2015 Fantasy Baseball Drafts

Written by: Doug Duffy

If you’ve ever participated in a fantasy draft of any kind, you’re familiar with the concept of projections. Projections, they’re (almost) as simple as they sound. What do you project a given player to accomplish based on his past accomplishments? Projections are not restricted to the realm of fantasy sports however; teams utilize projections as well, to assist them in player valuation. In this post I’ll explain how you can use projections for player valuation for your own fantasy baseball league, using a model based either on Standing Points Gained above replacement, or Fantasy Points above replacement, depending upon the scoring system of the league [1]. In addition, I’ll be posting the R code used to perform the models, as well as Draft Cheat Sheets containing relevant draft info from many of the sources we searched.

5x5Roto10TeamDraftsheet

5x5Roto12TeamDraftsheet

Points10TeamDraftsheet

Points12TeamDraftsheet

Special Request (AL-only 4×4 10 Team no R or K) : 4x4ALonly10Team

Update (3/21/2015) : The projection database and draftsheets have all been updated, and the R code used to calculate TOTspgAR and FPtsAR has been posted. Enjoy.

Read more Using Projection Models for 2015 Fantasy Baseball Drafts

Introduction to Analytics in… Baseball

Written by: Kurtis Judd

Whether you’re simply interested in following home run races, or using programming languages to predict next year’s MVP, it’s hard to argue that baseball isn’t a statistics driven sport. Every event in the game is so discrete, that it’s a statistician’s dream of clean, easy to work with data.

Read more Introduction to Analytics in… Baseball