On August 29, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year old black male, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a 28-year old white male police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri, after an altercation stemming from a pedestrian stop relative to a recent robbery in the vicinity. The shooting, mixed with contradictory testimony from several onlookers, ignited civil unrest with focus…
Only a few days delayed due to an impromptu trip to Ottawa and a swing through Sacramento to catch the Kings upend the Minnesota Timberwolves 106-103 last night, my pre-season predictions are finally available for your viewing pleasure. In this edition, we take a look at the rosters on opening day and compute their expected…
With the playoffs starting tomorrow, we take a look at the probabilities of each team winning the world series. But first, let’s take a look at the postseason: The playoffs begin tomorrow with the Baltimore Orioles (89-73) traveling to the Toronto Blue Jays (89-73) with a one game playoff in the Wild Card “series.” The…
After another 92 games this past week, we watched the Cubs and Rangers continue to scorch the competition, the Red Sox finally catch the Blue Jays for first in the A.L. East, the Dodgers maintain pace for a lead in the N.L. West, and the Tigers surge to put a little separation on the Royals…
Recently overheard in an airport, “I am a really smart kid. I scored a 27 on my ACT, which is near perfect. But my grades were pretty bad, because I didn’t apply myself well enough. Think of me as an A student who got C’s.” It’s the common thing I heard as a faculty member…
As of the morning of August 28th, the Atlanta Braves were 27 games out of first place in the National League East, while only 20.5 games back of the National League Wild Card. While, we do not see an asterisk next to their name, indicating elimination from the playoffs, we are interested in identifying the…
In our fifth to last installment of making the playoffs, we begin to shift gears and take serious looks at the races for the MLB playoffs over the final month of the season. As of the morning of August 28th, each team has approximately 33 games remaining. Technically, the Twins, Braves, Brewers, and Reds have been effectively…
In this edition, we will merely post the current standings on the morning of August 28th and give the probabilities of making the playoffs. This weekend, we will start measuring teams’ chances of making the playoffs and progressively dissect elimination probabilities. For this week, we start by taking a look at the Minnesota Twins, Atlanta Braves,…
Another week closer to playoffs baseball and we witnessed a few surges in the standings; both good and bad. After picking up a series win on the road in San Francisco, the Baltimore Orioles came back home to find themselves in a rocky 1-4 run against the Boston Red Sox and Houston Astros; all teams…
In a quick teaser, we tallied all votes taken during the 114th United States Congress and built a score to show how frequently parties tend to vote along their own party lines. For a member of the House of Representatives, the score is merely the number votes with their own party members divided by the number…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 