Lessons from Sports Statistics

Abstract The author reviews and comments on his work in sports statistics, illustrating with problems of estimation in baseball's World Series and with a model for the distribution of the number of runs in a baseball half inning. Data on collegiate football scores have instructive distributions that indicate more about the strengths of the teams playing than their absolute values would suggest. A robust analysis of professional football scores led to widespread publicity with the help of professional newswriters. Professional golf players on the regular tour are so close in skill that a few rounds do little to distinguish their abilities. A simple model for golf scoring is “base +X” where the base is a small score for a round rarely achieved, such as 64, and X is a Poisson distribution with mean about 8. In basketball, football, and hockey the leader at the beginning of the final period wins about 80% of the time, and in baseball the leader at the end of seven full innings wins 95% of the time. Empirical ...