Draft Pairing Tournament Format

Worst-vs-first pairing structures for playoffs are designed to reward teams for doing well in the regular season. Sometimes this backfires. A better system would be a 'pairing draft' in which teams choose their first-round playoff opponents in order of regular season ranking.

Give me a few minutes to convince you.

Baseball-to-Cricket translation guide

If sports were species of animals, baseball and cricket would be consider closely related, at least as close as English rules rugby is to American football. Having said that, it's been hard to find fellow fans of both sports. So, in the hopes of increasing the number of crossover fans, I've prepared the following 'translation guide' to explain one sport in terms of the other as closely as possible.

I read this: Visualizing Baseball

What Tim Swartz teaches statistics in sports, he does so through case studies. He will take a paper such as one about the optimal times in which to substitute players in soccer and use that as a platform to demonstrate analysis of soccer data. Visualizing Baseball by Jim Albert is a collection of nine case studies most of which would be excellent for a course like Tim Swartz's.

This is a book written by a statistician for the stats enthusiast about baseball. I say stats enthusiast and not statistician because little to no stats experience is required to understand the book. Likewise little expertise about baseball is assumed, and key concepts are explained clearly but dryly.