Box Scores – web 1.0? Thats’s the case according to this recent Fortune Magazine article.

The replacement is the Winning Probabilty Added graph or WPA. From the Kansas City Star:

The concept of WPA has been around for almost 40 years. But the stat caught fire on the Web after the publication of last year’s The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball by sabermetricians Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin. The WE values currently in vogue were established in that book.

David Appelman, owner and Web master of FanGraphs.com, seized upon the WPA framework and incorporated it into his site, where you can find WPA statistics for every player, every team and every game. And you can look at these (and a lot more) both in numerical format or on easy-to-read graphs.

“What’s great about WPA,” Appelman said, “is that after the game you can quantify a player’s contribution to the win or loss.

Check out FanGraphs for more examples of WPA charts and how they might be used to improve your winning percentages.

A new season of baseball is upon us and in it’s honor I’ve rounded up a list of some nice sites to help you to win more of your baseball wagers.

• Sportscapperisland.com offers 5 reasons to bet on baseball. From my experience #3 is right on the money:
  

  3. Out of all sports, baseball is probably the most well known for streaks. With each team playing five or six days a week, there are many more streaks to be predicted. Riding a hot team or fading (betting against) a slumping one at the right time can be a gold mine.

• Professor Bukiet of eGrandSlam.com presents his 2007 MLB Season Predictions. 110 wins for the Yankees? As a Red Sox fan, all I can say is I’m glad these games are played on the field and not on paper.
• Baseball-Reference.com offers a ton of baseball statistics for your analyzing enjoyment. The site has a clean design and is fairly responsive with not too many ads. I give it a thumbs up.
• A bit off-topic, but cool nonetheless, Liveboard looks like a neat little gadget for baseball fans. It basically is a wireless device that displays realtime baseball scores with LED lights in a device that looks like a baseball scoreboard. Although it’s a bit pricey at $299.00, at least they aren’t charging subscription fees.

Good luck with your baseball bets – I hope you all have a winning season. Go Red Sox and go Padres!

News.com has an interesting article about the IBM “Many Eyes” project. Basically, it’s a way that anyone can upload data and create visualizations of the data using various templates created by the folks at IBM. The templates include simple items such as bar graphs and pie charts as well as more complex constructs such as global maps and tag clouds. As you can see from the quote above, they are actively looking for sports statistics freaks to start using the service and so I thought I’d give it a try. I uploaded some simple NBA player data I got from Sportsinteractive.com and created the chart below (make sure to click on it to get the full idea).

Apparently there is a way to link different datasets together though I didn’t get that far. Anyway, it seems like a reasonably cool service. Here are some queries of the various visualizations that may be of interest:

MLB
NBA
(Sorry no good NFL or NHL data as of yet.)

If you find any cool sports visualizations or create some of your own, please post them in the comments section here – I’d love to check them out!

Dr. Mike Orkin is a Managing Scientist at Exponent, a publicly traded scientific consulting company headquartered in Menlo Park. Mike has numerous research publications in game theory and probability theory and has written data mining and simulation software. He is a nationally known authority on odds and gambling games and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows to discuss gambling and odds, including CNN, NBC’s Dateline and ABC’s World News Tonight.

ABSTRACT Certain gambling games, such as roulette and craps, are games of pure chance: In repeated play, luck disappears, and the persistent gambler will go broke. Other gambling activities, such as betting on sports or the stock market, may involve an element of skill. One way to measure this is to compare the results of a gambling strategy with chance: A skillful strategy should produce long-run results that are better than would be achieved by someone who is just guessing. One can also compare a gambler’s losses with chance to see if the gambler is doing worse than chance would allow. I will discuss two recent projects that illustrate these concepts:

• Automated data mining software discovers that the Baltimore Ravens are 17-3 versus the point spread when they lost their previous game and their opponents played their previous game on the road. Do situations like this give clever gamblers an edge or are such strong win-loss records merely random flukes?

• A gambler loses $30 million betting at an online casino. Is it possible to lose this much just by chance or is the gambler being cheated? Or maybe the gambler is part of a money laundering scheme.