On Tuesday, Slate published the article “You Live in Alabama. Here’s How You’re Going to Die.” that contained some interesting maps.  I liked this one the best.  Florida and accidents is the least surprising thing I have ever seen. While this is an interesting map, doing things like this at the state level is not…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: As of yesterday, Buster Posey, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Ryan Howard were each ranked between 90th and 100th in OPS among all MLB baseball players. That threesome is making $58 million in 2014 alone, with a whopping $338 million owed to them by their teams after this season ends. Such a trifecta of seemingly awful contracts…

I like this quote: Legislators in Washington state refuse to live in a world where only the wealthy can afford care from poorly trained health care providers who practice unproven medicine. It’s from the article “Quacking All the Way to the Bank“. Cheers.

My summer goal was to blog more. So here I go. Two posts in two days. No way can I keep that pace up. So I recently had the chance to teach a short course on web scraping and text analysis.  One of my examples scraped data from presidential inaugural speeches.  With this corpus (a…

One day at lunch in high school the following exchange took place: My friend: “Who plays the blind guy on Star Trek?” Me: “It’s LeVar Burton….but you don’t have to take my word for it.” You can make this joke relevant again for another generation by donating to my boy LeVar and bringing back Reading…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: This news is about a month old, but I hadn’t updated it on the blog. I accepted a position as an assistant professor of statistics at Skidmore College. This will be my school year. ? This will be my summer (kind of). ?

Originally posted on Exploring Baseball Data with R: Last time, we learned how to download MLBAM GameDay data using the openWAR package. Specifically, we downloaded data from a single game and created some simple summaries. Most often, we’ll be interested in investigated data from many games. The function getData() will download data over any time…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: Three NHL Game 7’s are scheduled for tonight, so I figured I’d run some Game 7 numbers. For this analysis, I used both numbers via AC Thomas’ nhlscrapr package (provided by Thomas himself), and also penalty data that I collected a few years back, summarized in a paper here, a recent article…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: Momentum does not exist! Yes it does! No it doesn’t! Yes it does! Actually, it both exists and doesn’t exist simultaneously! Perhaps Rocco Mediate sums it up this debate best, saying  “As any athlete knows, momentum is the most unstoppable force in sports. The only way to stop it is if you get in…

With the NBA playoffs now in full swing and 2014 already looking like one of the most entertaining postseasons in recent memory, many basketball fans are focused squarely on the best teams in the league. But for those of us who love the college game, follow teams that didn’t make the playoffs, or simply enjoy…