Sunday, March 22, 2009

New cricket stats analysis blog

While I'm being lazy and not doing any real updates (I am getting closer to writing all the readme files etc. for my database), you can get your stats fix from this blog, which has been around for a few months and is generally very good. It is likely that some of the new ideas will need to be improved over time, but they are very valuable first step, especially on declaration stategies (on this, Elliot Tonkes has done some academic work on this, but I don't know if it's been published) and wins above replacement for ODI's.

Do check it out.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Batted ball speed

Hey look, I have this thing called a blog, maybe I should update it.

I should update my profile – I'm no longer a student (sort of, my Masters thesis is under assessment), having got out of my PhD and started a 9-5 job, which is in geostatistics, if anyone is wondering.

I've been very slack with cricket stats lately, with work and chess taking up more of my time. Anyway, this is a long and interesting discussion about a baseball hitting a baseball bat. The very counter-intuitive result is that the batted ball speed doesn't depend on the grip, as long as the ball hits the "meat" of the bat. The same is true for cricket (this page gives a few physicsy aspects of cricket). All that matters for batted ball speed is the speed of the bat at impact.

On a different topic, I have been thinking about putting my cricket database online. It wouldn't be pretty, and any professional coders out there may be horrified at my code, but there are enough of you out there with good ideas that I think it would be worthwhile. In the long term, I would like there to be a cricket equivalent of Retrosheet, which now has over 50 years' worth of play-by-play data for Major League Baseball.

I'm sort of thinking out loud on this at the moment. My database uses CricketArchive player and match ID's, so if they changed their numbering system (which they did a few years ago), that'd screw things up. I might exchange emails with them and see what comes out of it.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this.

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