How To Stop Saquon Barkley??
Eagles running back Saquon Barkley is having one of the best rushing seasons in NFL history. He had the 14th most rushing yards per game in NFL history with 125.3 and the 4th most this century, trailing only Adrian Peterson (131.1 in 2012), Derrick Henry (126.7 in 2020), and Chris Johnson (125.4 in 2009).
How can the Chiefs stop Saquon in the Super Bowl? In this analysis I’ll take a look at Barkley’s rushing patterns to see how the Chiefs should plan against him.
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Who Has Better Post-Season Numbers - Brady or Mahomes?
Earlier this season I posted an analysis comparing Manning, Brady, Mahomes, and Rodgers in order to determine the best quarterback of the QBR era. In this post, I'll focus on a postseason comparison between Brady and Mahomes. Which quarterback has had a bigger impact on his team’s success when it matters most?
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What Do the New York Giants Need to Do to Become a Playoff Contender?
The Giants are coming off one of their worst seasons in franchise history, finishing 3-14 and landing the 3rd pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. In this analysis I’ll compare their roster to the NFL’s top 3 regular season teams (Chiefs, Lions, and Eagles) to see which positions they should emphasize in their rebuild in order to make the team a playoff contender.
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Do NFL Teams Run the Ball Too Often on 2nd and Long?
1st down incompletion, 2nd and 10 upcoming— a clear passing situation, right? After all, only the league's elite ball carriers (just nine this season) can consistently gain 10 yards on the ground over two plays to avoid 4th down. So, what's the better strategy here? Two consecutive pass plays, each designed to pick up 10 yards, or a single pass play, aiming for 5-7 yards after a 2nd down run?
In this analysis, I’ll dive into NFL teams' run/pass decision-making on 2nd down and evaluate whether their play-calling aligns with game theory optimal strategies. Has the league cracked the code or if there’s room for improvement?
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Can Volpe Become a Better Base-Stealer?
With Statcast’s new baserunning and basestealing data released to the public, I wanted to take a look at the top base-stealers in 2024. Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe increased his stolen base total from 24 in 2023 to 28 this past season. How does he compare to the top base-stealers in the league, and how can we expect him to improve?
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Man vs. Zone Defense: Which One Is Most Efficient Against Passing Plays?
As the NFL regular season approaches its final week of play, I will take a look at how NFL defenses have performed since 2018 in each of man and zone defense against passing plays. I will use two key metrics—EPA (Expected Points Added) and WPA (Win Probability Added)—to assess team effectiveness.
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Dollar/WAR in the 2024/2025 MLB Free Agency Market
Last offseason, I examined the trend in dollar/WAR (wins above replacement) for free agent signings. In this analysis, I’ll revisit the dollar/WAR figures for this year’s free agency market and dive deeper into the evolving spending patterns.
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How Will Roki Sasaki Fare in the MLB?
23-year-old Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki, a star pitcher for the Chiba Lotte Marines in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), has officially been posted for MLB teams to sign. Sasaki is set to become the most cost-effective elite starting pitcher available this offseason due to his international amateur status. Being under 25, he must sign a rookie deal that pays the MLB minimum for three seasons, followed by three years of arbitration before reaching unrestricted free agency—mirroring Shohei Ohtani’s early MLB trajectory.
Last offseason, Yoshinobu Yamamoto was posted and signed by the Dodgers. As some may recall, I did an analysis back then aiming to predict how Yamamoto would fare in the world’s best baseball league. Using that same logic, but adding Yamamoto’s predicted and actual data to my dataset for the model, how is Sasaki projected to perform in the MLB?
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Who is the Best Quarterback in the QBR era: Manning, Brady, Rodgers, or Mahomes?
Total Quarterback Rating (QBR) data exists dating back to 2006 and is largely considered a better measure of quarterback performance than passer rating because QBR accounts for expected points added (EPA) for all plays a quarterback participates in, including sacks and quarterback runs, rather than focusing solely on passing plays.
In this analysis, I will examine the QBRs of Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Patrick Mahomes for each season since 2006. My goal is to identify the top quarterback of the QBR era by assessing how many times each player secured the QBR title and comparing their rolling-peak QBRs from single-season highs to 16-season averages.
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How Should The Yankees Pitch Against The Dodgers?
A thrilling postseason is approaching its climax—a battle between each league’s juggernaut team. The 27-time champion Yankees are in the World Series for the first time since 2009 and the 7-time champion Dodgers are back in the Fall Classic for the fourth time in the last eight seasons, aiming to secure their first full-season title since 1988. The most common World Series matchup in being renewed for 12th time, the first since 1981 in which the Dodgers beat the Yankees in 6 games. The Yankees have won eight of their eleven World Series meetings, including the first five.
The Dodgers lineup averaged 5.2 runs per game this season (second to only the Diamondbacks). How should the Yankees pitch to them in their attempt at capturing their 28th title?
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Which Batters Swing Least Often and Most Often on First Pitches?
Securing strike one is vital for pitchers, and many hitters prefer to take the first pitch to gauge the pitcher’s release, velocity, and movement. In this analysis, I’ll highlight the 15 batters with the lowest and highest first-pitch swing percentages among all qualified hitters in 2024, and provide tips on how to effectively pitch to them.
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Which Playoff Teams Have the Most Dominant Pitching?
October baseball is in full swing, and the Wild Card round didn’t disappoint! We saw some stunning upsets: the Tigers ousted the Astros, the Royals knocked out the Orioles, the Mets took down the Brewers, and the Padres triumphed over the Braves in the only series in which the home team won. Now, with just eight teams remaining, it's time for my final xwFIP analysis of the season. I'll be crowning the regular season champions among all pitchers and starters, and taking a deep dive into which playoff pitching staffs are best equipped to silence opposing lineups this fall.
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Evaluating Fangraphs Playoff Projections
As the September playoff race heats up, key division battles are emerging: the Yankees are locked in with the Orioles in the AL East, and the Guardians are head-to-head against the Royals in the AL Central. The Wild Card chase is just as exciting, with the Twins and Tigers vying for the final AL spot, while the Padres, Diamondbacks, Mets, and Braves compete in the NL. Meanwhile, the Phillies, Dodgers, and Brewers are jockeying for the top two seeds in the National League, hoping to capture the first round bye.
This post will introduce a Paraball Win Probability Model that assesses a team's chances in matchups against a .500 opponent. I will compare its results with Fangraphs’ Playoff Simulation to identify teams that Fangraphs overvalues or undervalues.
Introducing pWAR and Using It to Predict Who Wins Cy Young
Who will win the AL and NL Cy Young Awards? In this analysis, I’ll introduce a new cumulative win value statistic, Paraball Wins Above Replacement, orpWAR, in order to identify the most deserving candidates.
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Does Changing Your Batspeed Impact Your Offensive Production?
In May this year, Statcast released batspeed data, and I've been eagerly waiting for the sample sizes to grow large enough for a meaningful analysis. Now, three months in, we're ready to dive in. In this post, I’ll be examining the batspeed-tracked swings of Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton.
How do their swing speeds vary depending on the count, and how do these variations impact their performance?
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The Value of LeBron, Durant, and Curry - The US Olympic Trio
The USA men’s basketball team took gold in Paris after an epic comeback win against Serbia in the semifinals and a nail-biter against host France in the final. The team was led by legendary NBA trio of LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Stephen Curry. In this analysis, I’ll take a look at the value that these three superstars have added to their NBA teams over their careers.
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Should Clay Holmes Be the Yankees Closer?
Yankees right-hander Clay Holmes has had a roller-coaster season. After nailing down the save in Sunday’s game against Texas, Holmes has 25 saves and is tied with Josh Hader of the Astros and Robert Suarez of the Padres for 4th in the MLB. Holmes, however, leads MLB with 9 blown saves. The next highest number of blown saves by one of MLB’s top closers is just 4, by the Nationals Kyle Finnegan.
Should Holmes be the Yankees closer? In this analysis, I'll examine Holmes' distribution of runs allowed, compare it to the league average, and assess whether he is well-suited for the closer role.
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What Were The Best Trade Deadline Pitching Acquisitions, According to xwFIP?
Following the recent trade deadline, I’ll take a closer look at the ten best pitching acquisitions of 2024. Which team made the best acquisitions, judging by pitching metric xwFIP? And how does the xwFIP leaderboard stack up for all pitchers this season through July?
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Quantifying Momentum in Major League Baseball
The team that scores first in the MLB wins 69% of the time. That number may feel surprisingly high for a sport that averages just under 4.5 runs per game per team. Why is taking and keeping a lead in baseball so vital?
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Opinion: How Can We Evaluate Base Stealing More Precisely?
Consider this scenario: Two players each have 30 base steals and 5 bases caught stealing. With an 86% success rate, both players appear to be helping their teams significantly by risking taking the extra base. However, 35 attempts is quite a small sample size. The standard deviation of the number of stolen bases in this case is 2.07. So, there’s a 2.5% chance that the base-stealer’s true success rate is actually lower than 74%, in which case the advice to that player would be to steal fewer bases. Essentially, for many players, it can be hard to tell If they should steal more or less, purely based on their stolen bases and caught stealing, since the sample sizes are small.
What if we had a metric that would give us even more confidence in telling the players to steal more frequently?
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