Publications by Millsy
Does a Proclamation of Increased Workout Load Matter?
I forgot to link this up, but I have a new article (joint with our editor) over at Fantasy Ball Junkie. I run an extremely crude model to see if players who were mentioned in the media as having lost weight, gained muscle, gained speed, got eye surgery would see better performance than expected (by a simple projection system) in the c...
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Fun with R: Clustering and MDS
I’ve seen K-means clustering, PCA, etc. done some over at Beyond the Boxscore and Baseball Analysts (and the now defunct Statspeak), but I thought I’d just check out some clustering on the young fantasy season using the traditional 5×5 categories with some visualizations. I use a Multidimensional Scaling approach to visualize the...
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Testing Out my Pitch F/X Data
I recently got all the Pitch F/X data downloaded from Gameday, and have been fiddling around. I certainly don’t have the physics knowledge to really talk about the movement at this point, and I’m still acquainting myself with the data format and what everything is telling me. But I figured I’d test out some plots of Johnny Cueto...
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Trading for Speed in H2H Fantasy Leagues
As a followup to my last article at FBJ, I took a look at the distributions of weekly totals for Stolen Bases to gauge win expectancies in the SB category in H2H fantasy baseball formats. The study is again pretty simple, as I just subtract one hypothetical player and add another to each team in one of my more competitive public ESPN 10-team Rot...
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Marking Your Graphics
Over at The Book Blog, Tango has a post about standardizing Pitch F/X graphs to be catcher/batter/umpire view. While I don’t think this should necessarily be the case for all Pitch F/X graphics, it brings up another issue that I’ve had with some graphics that I see online: they’re often not marked with labels or legends.There are some fant...
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New Fantasy Ball Junkie Article
I have a new post up over at Fantasy Ball Junkie looking at the value of closers in H2H leagues from here on out. I simply simulated in the same way as the Stolen Bases and Home Runs articles from before. Saves are an interesting bunch, and it really depends on the dispersion of closers in your league. It also depends a large amount on the siz...
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Update
I tried using my own little palette with more traditional looking heatmap colors (red and pink are the densest, blue and green are less so, yellow in the middle, etc.). I also included the actual points, but would recommend it for more than a single game or two worth of pitches. I provide the code to create this same plot (just reme...
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IIATMS Guest Contribution
After my recent posts fiddling around with heat maps for pitch location, Jason at It’s About the Money, Stupid contacted me to ask if I would contribute some location maps for Yankee pitchers. Obviously, I couldn’t pass up the chance to contribute to an ESPN-affiliated blog.Despite being an Orioles fan, I actually do link IIATMS ...
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Rethinking ‘loess’ for Binomial-Response Pitch F/X Strike Zone Maps
So after a long hiatus, I’m back for today. I’ve been crazy busy with a number of different things–including getting engaged and helping plan out wedding dates and things of that sort–and unfortunately have not kept up here on this blog (or on Fantasy Ball Junkie, though we’re waiting for the Fantasy Baseball Preseason to s...
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Interesting Posts at Rational Past Time Related to My Previous Strike Zone Map Post
J-Doug at Rational Pastime has some cool posts looking at umpire strike zones at his site (and cross-posted at Beyond the Boxscore). I was curious about this issue as well with some work I’ve been doing here in the office (which I’ll refrain from talking about at this point).Anyway, J-Doug looks at the strike zone size of RHB and...
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