Introduction

Near the end of the 2012 baseball season, a rather spirited debate sprung up around the selection of the American League MVP. The more traditional baseball minds rallied around Miguel Cabrera and his Triple Crown season, while the statistical analysts backed Mike Trout and his almost-as-good hitting that was accompanied by significantly better defense and baserunning.

This debate was handled rather exhaustively at the time, and was even re-done a year later, albeit less emphatically. My intent is not to revisit the arguments here. I reference them only as context for a quote from Minnesota Twins manager Ron Gardenhire (taken from this article) that I thoroughly enjoyed at the time:

"All I want to tell you is if you're going to for a Triple Crown, and you've got (Cabrera's) numbers, you can SABER all you want to -- those numbers blow your mind."

The quote is notable mostly for the simultaneous misuse and misspelling of SABR, the abbreviation for the Society for American Baseball Research (to be fair to Gardenhire, it was a spoken quote, so the misspelling is likely the writer’s rather than his). Goofiness aside, the quote also provides the theme for the work that will appear in this space.

This will be a blog dedicated to the fusion of sports and mathematics, topics I appreciate independently but particularly enjoy when combined. The primary, though not only, sports that will be addressed will be baseball and men’s tennis. There is, of course, already an enormous amount of baseball analysis available online. I don’t particularly intend to compete with the ongoing cutting-edge research in fielding or Pitch-FX or pitch framing, or to develop yet another WAR system. If there’s any groundbreaking baseball research done here, it will be less because I’ve come up with any brilliant insights than because the topic isn’t weighty enough to command the attention of a real analyst.

On the tennis side, most of what you see will probably be a bit more like what you’d expect from an Internet analyst, if only because there’s less freely-available work of that type associated with tennis (or at least less that I’m aware of). But even in coming up with my own player rankings, I don’t intend to present them as flawless, ironclad, or anything other than (hopefully) interesting. I try to maintain my own awareness of the limitations of this type of work, and will thus strive for a tone more conciliatory than that of the stereotypical strident stathead.

With regard to the math itself, the complexity will vary from addition up to the occasional bit of statistical modeling. I will make an effort to explain the semi-complicated stuff as much as possible and warn in advance when it shows up. And on the topic of advance warnings: People who do this sort of analysis have sometimes been branded with the reputation of trying to ruin other people’s enjoyment of sports. This is the diametric opposite of my intention. I’m looking to enhance the sports experience here, not detract from it; if reading my writing does not serve that purpose for you, then I would encourage you to look elsewhere for work that will do so.

If a collection of writing about mathematical analysis of sports appeals to you, however, then here’s hoping you’ll find this a useful and entertaining source for just that sort of material. With Ron Gardenhire’s stated permission, I hereby welcome you to SABER All I Want To.