Point Estimates

 

MLB Team Replay Performance

statistics
r
mlb
probability
MLB’s allowed teams to challenge calls for several years now. Thanks to Baseball Savant, we can see info on every call made as well. Scraping the data isn’t particularly…
Oct 28, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Ohtani and Hypothesis Testing

statistics
r
mlb
probability
I was listening to Joe Posnanski’s podcast the other day, and one of his guest made an offhand comment about Ohtani not hitting well the day after he pitches. I generally…
Oct 28, 2025
Mark Jurries II
 

Aces and Postseason Rotation Timing

statistics
r
mlb
probability
The Tigers lost game five of the ALDS Friday night after 15 innings of both teams politely refusing to get any hits. Tarik Skubal was again masterful, going 6 innings with…
Oct 13, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Batting Halves and Regression

statistics
r
mlb
probability
The Tigers started the first half* of 2025 strong with a .325 team wOBA, only to see that drop to .309 in the second half. We can look at which batters changed, but we need…
Oct 6, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Postseason Odds

statistics
r
mlb
probability
It’s postseason time. The wild-card series are done, and four teams have had their hopes dashed already. Somebody once described the MLB postseason as deciding who wins a…
Oct 3, 2025
Mark Jurries II

2025 MLB Season Retrospective

statistics
r
mlb
The 2025 MLB regular season has ended. Alas, the Tigers went from 15.5 games up to scratching out a wild card win, with a hugely disappointing second half. The final…
Sep 29, 2025
Mark Jurries II
 

Terms of Regression

statistics
r
probability
Linear regression is one of the single most powerful tools any analyst can wield. That power comes with a whole lot of assumptions you’ll need to be careful of, not only in…
Sep 22, 2025
Mark Jurries II

SHAP Values and XGBoost

statistics
r
machine learning
Finding out what variables drive an outcome is one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of being a data analyst. Given a large dataset, you could spend hours combing…
Sep 15, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Monte Carlo Raffle Draws

statistics
r
probability
I was at a raffle drawing this past weekend with pretty low expectations. Typically, when I enter these things, I go home empty handed. Still, it was all for a good cause…
Aug 29, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Run Scoring and Switching Leagues

statistics
r
baseball
The DH was introduced into the American League in 1973. This meant that, instead of pitchers flailing away trying to hit, a higher quality slugger would be taking their…
Aug 26, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Tiger Hitter Consistency

statistics
r
baseball
One of my favorite things at Fangraphs are their rolling stat charts. Want to know the ups and downs of Pete Crow-Armstrong’s year? Just load up the 15-day rolling wOBA chart…
Aug 5, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Winning Teams and Losing Streaks

statistics
r
baseball
The Tigers are having a good season - they’re 60-43 with 97% odds of reaching the postseason. But they’ve had a rough stretch - they’re current 1-9 in their last 10 games…
Jul 24, 2025
Mark Jurries II

AL Central Projections

statistics
r
baseball
We’re at the halfway point of the MLB season, with most teams having played 81 games. This is as good a time as any to evaluate the AL Central and see the odds of the Tigers…
Jun 27, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Home Run Types

statistics
r
baseball
As of start of day Monday, June 23, there were 2,574 home runs hit in the 2025 MLB season. Some are line drives, some are moonshots. Some players always manage to just get…
Jun 24, 2025
Mark Jurries II
 

Pirates and Expected Wins

statistics
r
baseball
The Tigers-Pirates game on Wednesday got rained out, resulting in a doubleheader yesterday. Tarik Skubal was scheduled to pitch Wednesday, while Paul Skenes was scheduled to…
Jun 20, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Linear Models and Race Performance

statistics
r
I ran a 5K this past weekend, finishing in 24:17:43 with a 7:49 pace. It was a flat course with 471 runners total participating. My time was considerably faster than I…
Jun 16, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Team wRC+ Balance

statistics
r
baseball
We’re almost 60 games into the MLB season. A lot can happen in 60 games that may not happen in the next 100, but it still gives us a fairly decent sample. One of the fun*…
May 31, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Checking Out Attack Angle

statistics
r
baseball
This week, Baseball Savant released new swing metrics, showing how steep player’s swings are and how often they swing at the ideal angle (5 to 20 degrees). Since Savant…
May 23, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Who Wrote Hebrews? Using Models to Guess

statistics
r
text mining
I ran across an article a while back that used machine learning to estimate who wrote several of The Federalist Papers, since that author was unknown. It occurred to me that…
May 6, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Polling Table Makeover

statistics
r
data viz
I came across a table from Gallup showing polling on the economy. It was a well designed table, but it made its job - showing change between time period - more cumbersome…
Apr 23, 2025
Mark Jurries II

Text Mining Wodehoude

statistics
r
Text mining is one of those fields that can be hit or miss. Sometimes, it’s an extraordinarily useful way to get insight from a large amount of data, such as Tweets or…
Apr 7, 2025
Mark Jurries II

When to Dig - xMRs and Saving Your Sanity

statistics
r
In you’ve been in analytics for a while - or even worked with regular reports - you’ve been asked why a certain number moved by x percent last month. So you sit down and you…
Feb 6, 2025
Mark Jurries II
 

Hank Aaron and Consistent Hitting

statistics
r
baseball
I’ve been reading Howard Bryant’s biography of Hank Aaron, and there were several mentions of Aaron being one of the most consistent hitters in the game. While you only need…
Jan 18, 2025
Mark Jurries II
 

Double Trouble

statistics
r
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…
May 13, 2024
Mark Jurries II

Hot Starts and Expectations

statistics
r
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…
Apr 1, 2024
Mark Jurries II

Errors in Satisfaction

statistics
r
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…
Feb 22, 2024
Mark Jurries II

Improving the Premier League Simulator

statistics
r
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…
Jan 11, 2024
Mark Jurries II
 

We Have the 538 Simulator at Home

statistics
r
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…
Dec 29, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Shohei vs The Babe

statistics
r
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…
Dec 15, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Analyzing Supreme Court Arguments

statistics
r
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…
Oct 12, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Can City Win Them All?

statistics
r
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…
Sep 26, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Analyzing Time Series Trends

statistics
r
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…
Sep 19, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Forecasting Multiple Metrics with Fable

statistics
r
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…
Jul 11, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Haaland Goal Forecast Evalution

statistics
r
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…
May 31, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Pitch Clock Impact on Batters

statistics
r
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…
May 4, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Building a Premier League Champion Simulator

statistics
r
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…
Apr 28, 2023
Mark Jurries II

What Are the Odds of a Long Win Streak?

statistics
r
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.…
Apr 18, 2023
Mark Jurries II
 

What if MLB Allowed Ties?

statistics
r
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…
Apr 5, 2023
Mark Jurries II

How Predictive is Opening Day?

statistics
r
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…
Mar 30, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Measuring Data Spread - Adventures in Standard Deviations

statistics
r
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…
Feb 6, 2023
Mark Jurries II

Finding Meaning in Averages

statistics
r
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…
Jan 30, 2023
Mark Jurries II
 

Upset Wins in the Beautiful Game

statistics
r
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…
Jan 5, 2023
Mark Jurries II
 

MLB Stint Duration Over Time

statistics
r
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…
Dec 7, 2022
Mark Jurries II
 

Haaland Goal Forecast Update

statistics
r
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…
Nov 14, 2022
Mark Jurries II

Politcal Mail Flyer Breakdown

statistics
r
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…
Nov 4, 2022
Mark Jurries II
 

Premier League Team Talent Spread

statistics
r
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…
Oct 31, 2022
Mark Jurries II
 

Forecasting the MLB Postseason

probability
r
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…
Oct 5, 2022
Mark Jurries II

Simming Mike Trout - Adventures in Categorical Bootstrapping

probability
r
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…
Sep 23, 2022
Mark Jurries II

Simulating Data, Or How Many Goals Will Haaland Get?

probability
r
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…
Sep 2, 2022
Mark Jurries II
 

Players vs Teams

probability
soccer
baseball
r
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 …
Aug 25, 2022
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…
Mar 26, 2022
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.…
Jan 15, 2022
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…
Jan 4, 2022
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…
Dec 16, 2021
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…
Nov 29, 2021
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…
Nov 22, 2021
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…
Nov 15, 2021
Mark Jurries II
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