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The new Major League Baseball season will soon begin, which means it’s time to look back and update my run scoring trends data visualization application, built using RStudio’s shiny package. You can find the app here: https://monkmanmh.shinyapps.io/MLBrunscoring_shiny/ The github repo for this app ... [Read more...]

The new Major League Baseball season will soon begin, which means it’s time to look back and update my run scoring trends data visualization application, built using RStudio’s shiny package. You can find the app here: https://monkmanmh.shinyapps.io/MLBrunscoring_shiny/ The github repo for this app ... [Read more...]

I had the pleasure of attending the EARL (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) Conference held in Seattle on 2018-11-07, and the honour of being one of the speakers. The EARL conferences occupy a unique niche in the R conference universe, bringin... [Read more...]

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A short post to alert the world that my modest Shiny application, showing Major League Baseball run scoring trends since 1901, has been updated to include the 2016 season. The application can be found here:https://monkmanmh.shinyapps.io/MLBrunscoring_shiny/.In addition to the underlying data, the update removed some of ... [Read more...]

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by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (2015, Wiley)The Sabermetric bookshelf, #4One of the great strengths of R is that there are some robust (and always improving) packages that facilitate great data visualization and tabular summaries. Beyond the capabilities built into the base version of R, packages such as ggplot2 (my favourite), lattice, ... [Read more...]

Or, Retracing my stepsAs I’ve been learning the functionality of Shiny, the web app for R, I have used the helpful tutorials available from the developers at RStudio. At some point, though, one needs to break out and develop one’s own application.  My Shiny app “MLB run scoring ... [Read more...]

Benny Distefano – 1985 Donruss #166 (source: baseball-almanac.com) We are approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of the last time a left-handed throwing catcher appeared behind the plate in a Major League Baseball game; on August 18, 1989 Benny Distefano made his third and final appearance as a catcher for the Pirates. Distefano’s accomplishment was ... [Read more...]

by Max Marchi and Jim Albert (2014, CRC Press)The Sabermetric bookshelf, #3Here we have the perfect book for anyone who stumbles across this blog--the intersection of R and baseball data. The open source statistical programming environment of R is a gr... [Read more...]

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Fair weather fans, redux Or, A little larger small sample On August 11 the Victoria HarbourCats closed out their 2013 West Coast League season with a 4-3 win over the Bellingham Bells. In an earlier post, written mid-way through the season after the 'Cats had played 15 home games, I created a scatter ... [Read more...]

The Victoria HarbourCats are roughly half way through their inaugural season in the West Coast League, and currently lead the league in average attendance.  In a recent conversation with one of the team's staff, he mentioned that after the first game in early June, the fans started to come out ... [Read more...]

or, Is the Seattle Mariners outfield a disaster?The BackstoryEarlier this week (2013-06-10), a blog post by Dave Cameron appeared at USS Mariner under the title “Maybe It's Time For Dustin Ackley To Play Some Outfield”. In the first paragraph, Cameron describes to the Seattle Mariners outfield this season ... [Read more...]

The statistical software R has an ever-expanding array of packages that provide pre-programmed functions and datasets. One such package is named Lahman, bundling the contents of the Lahman database into a quick-and-easy resource for R users. In addition to the data tables, the package resources also contain a variety of ... [Read more...]

Or, How good were the Maddux/Glavine-era Braves?In this on-going series of posts about run scoring in Major League Baseball, for this installment I'll turn the equation around and look at runs allowed.  In order to account for the changing run scoring environments, the runs allowed by individual teams ... [Read more...]

In a previous post, I used R to process data from the Lahman database to calculate index values that compare a team's run production to the league average for that year.  For the purpose of that exercise, I started the sequence at 1947, but for what follows I re-ran the code ... [Read more...]

The more I use it, the more I understand the benefits and value of Github as a code-sharing resource. The gist found here is the R code for my posts on run scoring trends by league (found here, here, and here).  I will continue to use Github for t... [Read more...]