New Issue: Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports

The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports is an online academic journal of sports analysis. The quality of articles, in my opinion, varies, and most of them have a lot of technical statisticky stuff in them that makes parts of them tough sledding. But, in general, they’re very good work and well worth reading.

You ostensibly need a subscription, but the articles can be viewed for free if you give your an e-mail address.

The new issue has five articles:

“Which Ball is the Roundest? - A Suggested Tournament Stability Index” by Torbjörn Lundh. This is more recreational mathematics than sports analysis, discussing the mathematical properties of a particular way to measure competitive balance.

“A Variance Decomposition of Individual Offensive Baseball Performance,” by David Kaplan. This figures how much of a player’s performance comes from his own abilities, and how much of it comes from influences of the team he’s on.

“A Simple and Flexible Rating Method for Predicting Success in the NCAA Basketball Tournament,” by Brady T. West. The author comes up with a regression method to predict how many March Madness wins a team will get -- from zero (losing its first game) to seven (winning the championship).

“Who Controls the Plate? Isolating the Pitcher/Batter Subgame,” by Benjamin Alamar Ph.D., Jeff Ma, Gabriel M. Desjardins, and Lucas Ruprecht. How much of the result of a plate appearance (the “subgame”) is caused by the pitcher’s ability, and how much by the batter’s?

“A Review of ‘The Wages of Wins’” by Roland Beech. A fairly negative review of the recent book by three academic economists.

More details on most of these articles to come.