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| Image Source: sports.yahoo.com |
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| Image Source: nytimes.com |
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| Image Source: sports.yahoo.com |
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Not a contact sport: MLB's new collision rule
San Francisco Giants’ catcher Buster Posey and his fractured leg might be the cause of discussion about MLB’s new collision rule. During a game against the Miami Marlins in 2011, Posey collided with Marlins outfielder Scott Cousins that had him clutching the ground in pain afterward. He was then carried out of the field with one foot unable to touch the ground.
It was announced recently that the MLB will be posing new rules about “malicious collisions” specifically when a player makes a run for the home plate and hits the catcher. This new rule though does not remove collisions but puts a limit to it. Catchers are no longer allowed to block the plate if they don’t have the ball, and runners will be called if they are seen to deviate from their path to hit a catcher. If a runner violates, he will be out, even if the catcher didn’t get the ball.
When asked to give comments about the new rule Posey said, “What I take away from it is, it eliminates the malicious collision, which is a good thing. When I look at it, I don’t see it as being that drastic of a change. I think the hardest part is going to be for the umpires being able to make a judgment call sometimes on when there is a collision on what the intent of the runner was ... It’s a good rule. We shouldn’t be going out to injure the catcher. We should be going out to score the run.”
I’m Matt Sapaula, a sports blogger and writer based in Miami, Fla. I often follow baseball (my favorite), basketball, football, and (paradoxically) winter sports. Outside sports, I work as a statistician. Follow me on Twitter for more sports updates.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
REPOST: Does analysing football through statistics miss the point of the game?
As a statistician, I'm inclined to predicting the outcomes of football matches through numbers. I don't over-analyze empirical evidence, however. I think football is one of those sports where the fleeting momentum of players and spectators largely influence the outcome of the game. Michael Moruzzi of The Guardian also agrees with me. Read his take on football statistics below.
In the early 1970s Monty Python famously parodied philosophy by presenting it as a football match between the intellectual heavyweights of Greece and Germany. Such is the pseudo-intellectual state of modern football that you would be forgiven for thinking the sketch had just been made.
In the aftermath of November's fixture between Tottenham and Manchester United, a remarkable match report appeared on the Squawka website – an organisation that claim to have built their own "scientific player performance scoring algorithm". Their analysis of the game certainly featured some unique conclusions.
The author argued that United won the midfield battle because Phil Jones and Tom Cleverley had successfully completed all of their tackles (three out of three for Jones, two out two for Cleverley). However, anyone who saw the match immediately noticed a fundamental flaw in this analysis: Cleverley was at fault for Spurs' first goal. There wasn't a statistic for "being done by your opponent" so Cleverley completed the game with an unblemished record.
Without context statistics are meaningless. It would be just as enlightening to find out how many goals have been assisted by players with beards, or how often footballers with sleeve tattoos are caught offside.
Interceptions – now part of the football stats lexicon – are another good example. An interception could reflect a player's ability to successfully anticipate the opposition's play, but it could just easily be the result of one player carelessly shanking a pass to an opponent.
Until recently, the main purpose of football stats was to provide content for quiz machines, but the mass of analytical devotees is growing, armed with a copy of Moneyball in one hand and a database in the other, and disputing the deconstructionist methods currently in vogue can leave you looking like a dinosaur.
An increasing reliance on empirical evidence may be the logical conclusion of a sport that has started to take itself too seriously, but football is one of the most fluid team sports there is and trying to codify every aspect is a futile task. Momentum can change in minutes – the crowd respond, the atmosphere changes and everyone is affected, but there is no statistic to explain it.
Analysis has now taken on visual form courtesy of "heat maps", which have recently crept into Match of the Day, giving football's new snake oil a national audience. Bearing slight resemblance to the heat vision scenes in Predator, the concept behind heat maps is to capture the locations of a footballer during a match using colourful splodges.
To date their findings have been less than dramatic: Match of the Day featured one highlighting Pablo Zabaleta's presence on the right flank, which is of course the last place you'd expect to find a right-back.
The most interesting insight was found in a Roberto Soldado heat map that revealed Spurs' £26m striker had spent a significant amount of time inside the centre circle against Manchester City – where he'd had to kick off six times. This amusingly pointless evidence won't have made funny reading for his manager at the time, André Villas-Boas, who happens to be one of the poster boys for the analytical zealots. Football and irony have always made good companions.
Why we need stats and graphics to tell us what we can already see has not been made clear. Did anyone ever watch one of Zinedine Zidane's famous pirouettes and remark that he has a high proportion of completed dribbles? The language is an attempt to make football more scientific when no remedy is required. Arguing about a player's merits used to be about forming opinions based on your own insights, but now anyone can throw in statistics to support their claims. It's a depressing trend focusing on the negatives instead of celebrating the positives.
A flying winger eviscerating a full-back is one of the most thrilling sights in football, but to the army of analysts it's a comprehensive tactical failure to mitigate the opposition's threat on the flanks. These people don't deserve football.
Every goal scored requires at least one defensive failure. If no one failed then every game would end up resembling something similar to Python's 1970s classic; a Mexican stand-off with a motionless football occupying no man's land between them. And no one would bother analysing that.
I'm Matt Sapaula: statistician by profession, sports writer by passion. Check out my blog on WordPress.
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| (Zinedine Zidane maintains his high percentage of completed dribbles. Photograph: Tom Jenkins) Image Source: theguardian.com |
In the early 1970s Monty Python famously parodied philosophy by presenting it as a football match between the intellectual heavyweights of Greece and Germany. Such is the pseudo-intellectual state of modern football that you would be forgiven for thinking the sketch had just been made.
In the aftermath of November's fixture between Tottenham and Manchester United, a remarkable match report appeared on the Squawka website – an organisation that claim to have built their own "scientific player performance scoring algorithm". Their analysis of the game certainly featured some unique conclusions.
The author argued that United won the midfield battle because Phil Jones and Tom Cleverley had successfully completed all of their tackles (three out of three for Jones, two out two for Cleverley). However, anyone who saw the match immediately noticed a fundamental flaw in this analysis: Cleverley was at fault for Spurs' first goal. There wasn't a statistic for "being done by your opponent" so Cleverley completed the game with an unblemished record.
Without context statistics are meaningless. It would be just as enlightening to find out how many goals have been assisted by players with beards, or how often footballers with sleeve tattoos are caught offside.
Interceptions – now part of the football stats lexicon – are another good example. An interception could reflect a player's ability to successfully anticipate the opposition's play, but it could just easily be the result of one player carelessly shanking a pass to an opponent.
Until recently, the main purpose of football stats was to provide content for quiz machines, but the mass of analytical devotees is growing, armed with a copy of Moneyball in one hand and a database in the other, and disputing the deconstructionist methods currently in vogue can leave you looking like a dinosaur.
An increasing reliance on empirical evidence may be the logical conclusion of a sport that has started to take itself too seriously, but football is one of the most fluid team sports there is and trying to codify every aspect is a futile task. Momentum can change in minutes – the crowd respond, the atmosphere changes and everyone is affected, but there is no statistic to explain it.
Analysis has now taken on visual form courtesy of "heat maps", which have recently crept into Match of the Day, giving football's new snake oil a national audience. Bearing slight resemblance to the heat vision scenes in Predator, the concept behind heat maps is to capture the locations of a footballer during a match using colourful splodges.
To date their findings have been less than dramatic: Match of the Day featured one highlighting Pablo Zabaleta's presence on the right flank, which is of course the last place you'd expect to find a right-back.
The most interesting insight was found in a Roberto Soldado heat map that revealed Spurs' £26m striker had spent a significant amount of time inside the centre circle against Manchester City – where he'd had to kick off six times. This amusingly pointless evidence won't have made funny reading for his manager at the time, André Villas-Boas, who happens to be one of the poster boys for the analytical zealots. Football and irony have always made good companions.
Why we need stats and graphics to tell us what we can already see has not been made clear. Did anyone ever watch one of Zinedine Zidane's famous pirouettes and remark that he has a high proportion of completed dribbles? The language is an attempt to make football more scientific when no remedy is required. Arguing about a player's merits used to be about forming opinions based on your own insights, but now anyone can throw in statistics to support their claims. It's a depressing trend focusing on the negatives instead of celebrating the positives.
A flying winger eviscerating a full-back is one of the most thrilling sights in football, but to the army of analysts it's a comprehensive tactical failure to mitigate the opposition's threat on the flanks. These people don't deserve football.
Every goal scored requires at least one defensive failure. If no one failed then every game would end up resembling something similar to Python's 1970s classic; a Mexican stand-off with a motionless football occupying no man's land between them. And no one would bother analysing that.
I'm Matt Sapaula: statistician by profession, sports writer by passion. Check out my blog on WordPress.
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