Sports

I rejoined SABR a couple of years ago and focused my volunteer work on fact-checking articles for the Games Project. These accounts of past MLB games are notable in some context of the author’s choice. They could be historically impactful, meaningful within a player’s career, highlighted by a rare event, or any other such factors that make an otherwise mundane day in baseball history something worth remembering. Last month I decided to try writing one of these articles. I trawled through the archives of Minnesota Twins history for interesting seasons and landed on an early game in 2009 that defined the year for Jason Kubel. ...

Some of the fine folks I met last fall through a casual baseball league expressed interest in playing fantasy baseball this season. Most of us had never played it or hadn’t played in years—my first and only time was sophomore year of high school. It turns out that making and running a league with good-natured people and without money on the line is straightforward and made even easier with a smartphone. ...

Last month, I finished going through Nathan Braun’s Coding with Baseball, a book I purchased around four years ago. If you’re at all interested in baseball statistics and want to build a quick foundation for exploring them, I highly recommend the book. It doesn’t hold your hand—it’s not a reference text, and you’ll need documentation for pandas, seaborn, and scikitlearn for the exercises—but it’s an excellent, concise overview that teaches exactly what you need with a straightforward style and relevant examples. It encouraged me to set up the Lahman Baseball Database on my computer and led me down a few rabbit holes, one of which I’ll explain here. ...

Given a thoroughly disappointing end to the Twins’ 2024 season, I wanted to look back to interesting (and hopefully excellent) Twins performances throughout my lifetime. As I often do, I started at Stathead and began exploring. Here are two batches of unimportant tidbits. ...

Sports offer excellent metaphors that are used for general success in life precisely because they exist to be entertaining microcosms of life itself. Individuals or teams vie in a competitive landscape typically officiated by imperfect referees. Preparation is allowed, but on-field performance is all anyone remembers. Sports reflect real life in numerous ways, and each sport brings its own flair to the conversation. Golf of any variety is a wonderful mix of planning, tactics, and execution. It’s about discrete decisions, managing each shot based on given strengths and the likelihood of success. I became overwhelmed each time I tried untangling these metaphors. It was too much. Let me instead focus on one mindset adjustment I first jokingly heard in a disc golf YouTube video, but which I found impactful: The woods are mostly air. Aim for the gaps. ...

A short post during a hectic time. I’ve officially visited all MLB stadiums within a reasonable distance of the Pacific Ocean: Petco Park (San Diego), Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles), Angel Stadium (Anaheim), Oracle Park (San Francisco), Oakland Coliseum (Oakland), and T-Mobile Park (Seattle). The next two closest to the west coast are Chase Field in Phoenix and Coors Field in Denver. On my way to San Diego this weekend, I stopped in Anaheim to see the Los Angeles Angels play the New York Mets. It was a toasty experience in 90º heat, but I found the stadium beautiful and the game itself was good. Going to a stadium surrounded entirely by parking lots is weird—I’ve grown used to Oracle Park and Target Field in Minneapolis, both nicely nestled within their cities—but the setup was nice. It feels good to check it off the list. ...

Going into the MLB All-Star Break, the Boston Red Sox have a respectable 53–42 record, good for third in the AL East. However, their 24–25 record at home is surprisingly poor. I had to investigate what could cause that. Spoiler: I’m left with more questions than answers. ...

I made two more charts in the past week that are worth a brief discussion. The first looks at injuries by team, and the other considers team winning percentage at home or on the road. ...

I went to Modesto this past Friday to watch my first Single-A baseball game between the local Modesto Nuts of the Seattle Mariners organization and the San Jose Giants, creatively named after their parent organization, the San Francisco Giants. The environment reminded me of a mid-season high school football game, complete with inexpensive food vendors, large groups from local church and youth sports organizations, and season ticket holders who maintain conversations from several rows away. There are angry dads, town heroes, and four-dollar hot dogs. I adored it. ...

You may have seen any number of scatter plots on the internet that show data comparisons among players or teams in a given league. These are part of my daily experience on the /r/baseball community, and I finally decided to scratch my statistical presentation itch by making my own. This post isn’t to cover what statistics to compare, just the process I’ve settled on for now to turn a table of comparisons into precisely-designed charts suitable for sharing on the internet. ...