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I live in Greater Boston, but I’ve been a Yankees fan my whole life. The season is getting started and I have a new baby, so I’ve been listening to every episode of my favorite baseball podcast, Talkin’ Yanks . Hosts Jomboy and Jake spend a lot of time discussing, critiquing, and guessing Yankees batting orders. It’s a fun topic, but my intuition is that the batting order isn’t that important.…
I’ve been getting into radio again. Phil and I pulled out our old handheld Baofeng radios and tried to reach each other from our houses. He wrote up a post on this too. The radios we have are dual-band, meaning they can transmit and recieve on the 70 cm UHF band and the 2m VHF band. By the way, we both have ARRL Technicians licenses, which are required to transmit in these bands. We live about a…
In this post I’ll build a simple catcher framing metric I’m calling Expected Strike Difference. The approach is similar to some other recent posts of mine like this one . Using pybaseball Statcast data I’ll train a classifier to predict whether a pitch will be called a ball or a strike based on the location where it crosses the plate, the count, handedness of the hitter. Then I’ll go through every…
I’m trying to summit all of the 4000 foot peaks in the White Mountains. Here’s how far I’ve gotten:
In this post, I’m going to outline a simple baseball team fielding metric I thought of. I’m calling it Expected Outs Difference or EOD. Here’s the plan: Obtain a data set of balls put in play Train a supervised model to predict whether a given ball will become and out based on exit velocity, launch angle, and spray angle Evaluate a team’s defense by running the model against each ball they faced…
Below is some simple code for building a run expectancy table based on Statcast data. A run expectancy table gives the average number of runs scored after each base/out state. For example, with runners on 1st and 2nd and one out, the table gives the average number of runs that scored. import pandas as pd from pybaseball import statcast def run_expectancy ( start_date : str , end_date : str ) -> pd…
If you’re a baseball fan, you’ll probably have come across a stat called FIP or Fielding Independent Pitching . As I understand it, FIP was designed by Tom Tango to track a pitcher’s peformance in a way that doesn’t depend on fielders or on which balls happen to fall between them or get caught. Because it removes these factors that are outside of a pitcher’s control, FIP is also said to me more…
We’ve made a lot of progress since my first marble machine post ! Your browser does not support the video tag. Major Changes Here’s an overview of the main changes we made since my last post. Smaller, Better Marbles Most obviously, we’ve switched from 3/8” stainless steel balls to 6mm ABS beads. I was skeptical at first, but I now see that this is better for a number of reasons. Why was I…
My dad turned 70 this year, so Matt and I decided to make him an old man rocking chair. This project was an adventure. We wasted a lot of perfectly good cherry by repeatedly messing up and/or changing our design. Still, I’m proud of how it came out: Our inspiration was a beautiful rocking chair we found online: Our starting design closely followed the Masaya chair. We planned to copy most of the…
I’ve always sort of wanted to make a marble-based machine. I’ve been following the progress of Wintergatan/Martin Molin’s Marble Machine X for some time. It’s a follow-up to the original and more well-known Marble Machine of YouTube. You should probably just leave that video running and let it be the background music while you read this post. This time around, Martin’s documented his progress with…